Another month, another Tokyo2point0 event. Nearly 100 people showed up on July 15th at the Super Deluxe, the new venue to listen to two presentations from the Japanese web world.

Goo

My friend Masaki Sawamura from the made-in-Japan portal site Goo delivered the first presentation of the evening. Goo, which is run by IT and web powerhouse NTT Resonant, was launched as early as 1997 (1.5 years before a company called Google began American operations in 1998).

Goo is an acronym for “Gateway of Optics” but Masaki said he doesn’t know what this term actually means. He also introduced the company by saying the company’s favicon is not a copy of Google’s.

The portal gets 7.8 million users per month and ranks 10th in Alexa’s Japan list, “outperforming” big players such as Nico Nico Douga, Amazon Japan or 2chan. Goo boasts over 1 million blogs, 9 million web mail accounts and 3.5 questions asked in the Q&A section “Oshiete Goo”.

Masaki said Goo differentiates itself from other Japanese portals by offering nearly 70 services, such as Kids Goo, a community platform, a proprietary search engine and a site focused on ecological matters.

Goo is Japanese only. Goo Labs however, a dedicated page offering early versions of new idea from NTT Laboratory Group, is thankfully available in English and well worth checking out.

Twitter Japan

Rocky Eda from Digital Garage Incubation‘s Strategic Investment and Business Development Division (there is no company or subsidiary called “Twitter Japan”) delivered the second presentation. Digital Garage Incubation Inc. is a subsidiary of Digital Garage, the company that invested in Twitter and introduced a Japanese version in April this year.

Rocky, who is responsible for the Twitter Japan project, said Digital Garage is focused on early stage investments. The company pumps money into services such as fon, Rapture or Technorati and brings them to Japan. Not bad at all. According to Rocky, Twitter seemed interesting because of the high access frequency and broad range of subjects covered by the users.

At the moment, traffic on Twitter from international destinations accounts for 60% of the volume worldwide (USA: 40%). 39% from the international traffic comes from Japan, with Tokyo being the most active “Twitter city” in the world.

Rocky went on saying that Twitter is running ads in Japan to monetize the site and currently collaborates with Japan’s national TV broadcaster NHK.

Watch the video of the presentation, made by Andrew Shuttleworth (the event’s main organizer):

Tags: Event Report, Japan, New Service, Video by Serkan Toto
1 Comment »

I recently visited “The Plant”, a Tokyo-based web development company, which was established in 2005 and now serves a number of big-name clients, such as MTV, Otto, NHK or Diesel. The company also runs Asoboo, Japan’s largest international social network (available in English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Spanish).

The Plant’s newest baby is called Joblet (online since September 2007 in English and Japanese versions). Joblet is a job vacancy advertising network aimed at changing the rules of the Japanese online job ad market, which is huge but has has one major flaw: The ads are almost ridiculously overpriced. This is where Joblet comes in.

For companies, placing ads via Joblet is completely free. Once posted, the job description will be distributed to Joblet partner sites which use Joblet widgets, integrate a job board or promote ads via Joblet mailing lists.

The way the service works is that a Joblet widget on a blog or site dealing with web design, for example, will mainly display design-related jobs. Applicants see ads relevant to them and send in their resumes. Companies then can decide if applications are interesting to them and pay a fee when this is the case. Prices are competitive to say the least.

What I liked about Joblet is its transparency. Companies are only paying for qualified applicants and fees are pre-determined. The system also offers real-time feedback: Site owners, companies and applicants have full insight and control over their account. Unlucky applicants even get to know why they were rejected (companies must name reasons), which is quite cool. Bloggers and site owners know how much they earned through Joblet at all times (currently 60% commission for every applicant referred).

While the pricing model is risk-free for companies it may at first appear to be too fair for The Plant itself, which seems to really believe in its system. So far, the concept seems to work though. By now, Joblet ads can be seen on 200 different blogs and sites (i.e. on the BCCJ site, Seek Japan etc.). More than 200 companies have signed up for the service so far. In May, over 1,000 applicants replied to ads posted in the Joblet network, although Joblet is a Japan-only service. A promoter system to further boost Joblet’s position in the Japanese online job ad market is currently in the works, The Plant told me.

Tags: Company, Japan by Serkan Toto
No Comments »

Idolm@ster(Idol-master, abbrev. Aimasu in Japanese) is originally an arcade network game, then became a XBox360 game which is sold only in Japan. You will be a producer of a virtual 3D girl band and train them to be popular singers (kind of “Sim People” with a goal?).

The game itself is not a big seller, as Microsoft XBox sales are so bad in Japan, however, it attracted enthusiastic amateurs and even some professional video composers. They use the game to get material for their movies, modify each video frame, add handwriting animations, cut and slice the material and mix them with Japanese songs (mainly pop music but sometimes you will see deep selections). They set their publishing stage on Niconico Douga. Here “Idolm@ster” MAD movies were born.

“MAD” or “MAD Movie” is a Japanese word which means parody/remix video made from (usually) Japanese animation and songs. It originates from MAD (audio-)tape. It’s not a dictionary word, cannot be an original Japanese, and I could not find what MAD stands for. I know US MAD and MAD.TV but am unsure if there is a relation.

Idolm@ster MAD movies became popular quickly and also supported Niconico Douga’s growth. They are often represented in All-Niconico movie ranking.

Recently, those “producers” gathered their fun movies to make a whole day program called “24 hours Aimasu TV” with all types of real TV program parodies.

So now thousands (literally. Movies tagged for this genre exist over 35,000. I cannot imagine how many creators are involved in this movement in total.) of Aimasu videos are stored and available to watch on Niconico Douga. However, as you know, Niconico Douga requires user registration and the language barrier keep out non-Japanese Internet users away. Niconico Douga allows video embedding to selected blogging platforms, but they are carefully selected one by one, which, I guess, aims at holding traffic under Niwango’s manageable threshold.

Apparently, some of those creator troops want more opportunities to express themselves. So they made a new English blog specialized in introducing Idolm@aster MAD videos for non-Japanese. The iDOLM@STER MAD World Service

See Also:

MAD Movie (Wikipedia)

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
1 Comment »

U.S. media power house News Corp. finally decided to enter the Japanese online advertising market (the world’s second biggest) in September. The Nikkei says they are already on the prowl for possible candidates for acquisition but it’s not yet clear which Japanese online ad agencies might get bought up.

News Corp. has apparently set up an online ad department solely focusing on the Japanese market. The company is not attacking Yahoo and Google directly (by selling search-based ads) but rather wants to become a force in this country’s ad network segment.

According to the Nikkei, the company wants to earn close to one billion USD in the Internet advertising space by 2013. Japan is supposed to contribute 10%.

According to a report [ENG, PDF] from Japan’s biggest advertising company Dentsu, the size of the Japanese online advertising business will balloon to 7 billion USD by 2011.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
1 Comment »

Our iPong article was referred to from all over the globe, and that made us realize how hot a topic the iPhone and its application development is. So, today I introduce another iPhone (non-authorized) app by a Japanese developer, the iPhone Abacus.

Sorry for my ignorance, I do not know to what extent abaci are used worldwide in this modern computer era. In case it is not known in your region, an abacus is a hand calculating assistant tool originated in (I believe) China. In Japan, abacus is called “Soroban”. Its use is still taught to kids nationwide, as it is widely believed it empowers your mental arithmetic skill.

iPhone Abacus reproduces this abacus on the iPhone. With the motion sensor, you can reset the abacus and calculate by moving stones with your fingers over the touch panel. How funny to use the latest computing power to mimick a traditional manual calculation tool.

You can see how to use it here. The developer, Mr. Kako, kindly gave us a permission to show it here. Great implementation.

The application can be downloaded onto your iPhone. The source code is also available (the instruction says you need an unofficial build tool iPhone toolchain).

See also:

Japanese girl doing abacus

Tags: Japan, Software by Akky Akimoto
3 Comments »