Asiajin

Yesterday KDDI, one of Japan’s many telecommunications powerhouses, held a press conference in Tokyo to present the so-called “au BOX” to the general public for the first time. “au” is KDDI’s cell phone brand and the reason why the company can call itself Japan’s second biggest cell phone carrier.

Based on the Motorola VIP1830 IP, the au BOX is an integrated set top box that is supposed to bridge the gap between three different pieces of hardware: TV sets, PCs and mobile phones. Users are able to enjoy music and video material downloaded via their TVs on their au mobile phones. The main selling point: There is no PC needed. In fact KDDI stated that its main target group is PC-averse Japanese people aged between 10 and 39.

Subscribers can browse the web on their TV sets as well as on their handsets with Opera Devices 9. In addition to playing music CDs (or music downloaded from the web), the au BOX also doubles as a DVD player. Music CDs can be ripped and transferred to mobile phones afterwards (or some of Sony’s Walkman models) via USB.

The Linux-based au BOX features 1 GB of memory (200 MB for music), stereo speakers, a LAN interface, 2 USB ports, an AV connection etc.  KDDI said they will showcase the device at next week’s CEATEC exhibition.

The box will be made available on November 1st. Pricing: 315 Yen (3 USD / 2 Euros) per month for subscribers of au or the so-called “Hikari one TV service” (a video-on-demand service). Users can access au’s own “mora for LISMO” service to download music and the “LISMO Video Store” to save themselves the trip to the next video rental store. All fees can be paid via the cell phone bill using au’s “matomete au shiharai” (all-in-one payment) system.

This seems to be a pretty cool example for tech convergence, but too bad it’s Japan-only.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service, Technology by Serkan Toto
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We Asiajin weblog is built on WordPress, open source blog system on PHP/MySQL. Today I attended the WordPress event WordCamp Tokyo 2008, the first ever WordCamp held in Japan.

On a half day conference at Digital Hollywood Shibuya, to over 60 attendees 10 speakers made development/customization presentations,

• WordPress history
• case study in high school
• useful Firefox functions/add-ons for WordPress blogging
• Lightbulb moments with WordPress
• CSS based customizable theme Sandbox
• Contact Form 7 plugin author’s talk (Asiajin uses this plugin and I recommend it to anyone needs decent multi-byte compliant/internationalized contact form)
• script manipulation of WordPress articles by XML-RPC
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 with WordPress
• WordPress plugin Ktai Style for Japanese cellphones (a lot of knowledge about how to make cellphone pages for Japanese are inside)
• Plugin internationalization how to

Michael Pick from Automattic came from Sapporo to talk about Automattic and WordPress relation, current statistics of users and developers, good customization samples, etc.

I was not aware that Automattic has their people in Japan. I talked with Michael and became to know that Automattic staffs are working remotely from all over the world, which is cool.

Unlikely US market, In Japan Automattic(WordPress) and Six Apart(Movable Type/LiveJournal/Vox)’s rivalry is not a balanced match.

Historically, early stage weblog enthusiasts did great localization jobs on Movable Type (also supported by good business decisions). Although there had been many other competitors blog systems both imported and domestic, Movable Type became synonymous with blog application in Japan.

Many of blog hosting portals use TypePad (e.g. Nifty Cocolog, NTT-Com), Six Apart earns much from Japanese customers so their Japanese subsidiary holds many staffs including development teams in Tokyo.

So I can say that the most blogging country in the world is heavily produced by Six Apart products. WordPress is also well localized to Japanese now and gaining popularity, but not strong as them. Probably that is the reason the first WordCamp Tokyo took time in comparison with other big cities in the world.

There are many blog reports in Japanese by presenters and attendees. If you want to check them, links are available on my other blog here.

See Also:

WordCamp Tokyo 2008 | blog.detlog.org

Tags: Community, Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Blogger technohippy has released paiTouch, the third generation of his series of Oppai (Boob) Simulators, now for the iPhone.

Using the app, you can freely touch a virtual boob on the iPhone’s Safari browser.

For the software to be used on the iPhone, technohippy’s application was ported from Flash technology to JavaScript. The application also depends on the Dynamics Engine of the ActionScript Physics Engine (APE) ported to Javascript by blogger flashrod.

The first generation software worked as a Google Gadget allowing it to be added to your iGoogle page and/or your blog.

The second generation of the Boob Simulator worked with a webcam to create an augmented reality in which you could interact with the virtual boob. You can watch the demo movie here.

The algorithm for the physical model is explained here and the Flash source code is available here for future evolution.

The full Flash application with a bunch of customizable parameters is here. Luckily, the full version comes with all of the key instructions in English. Enjoy!

Tags: Japan, Joke, Software by Akky Akimoto
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Japanese people who want a (window-)shopping experience don’t really need brick and mortar businesses, at least not in the fashion realm. They can simply access Zozo, a shopping web site that boasts over 1 million registered users (in other words: potential buyers), half of whom are male.

What sets Zozo apart from other shopping portals is that it’s a) designed like a virtual town, b) limited to fashion items, c) geared toward a young audience and d) of gigantic proportions. Instead of going to places such as Harajuku or Shibuya, Japanese shopaholics just choose one of the thousands of items from hundreds of fashion brands Zozo houses in different “buildings” and “stores”: United Arrows, Diesel, Hysteric Glamour, nanouniverse… you name it.

The so-called Zozoresort is divided into seven main parts:

• Zozotown (shopping part, which is split up into different shops, categories, brands etc.)

• Zozonavi (directory of fashion stores in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures)

• Zozowalker (blogging platform)

• Zozo Q&A (section for fashion-related questions and get answers from other users)

• Zozogallery (screensavers and wallpapers for PCs and cell phones)

• Zozoresidence (fashion social network)

• Zozoarigato (short message system that allows to say “Thank you” to a person you like – living anywhere in the world)

Very useful: If you found an item you like in a (print) fashion magazine but are unable to track it down in stores, chances are Zozo will help you. Just go to Zozotown/Fashionmagazine and click on the cover of the corresponding magazine. Zozo will show a selection of products presented in the magazine in grid view (sorted by page numbers), some of which are even displayed in different colors. Needless to say, you can order directly on the site (see screenshot below).

This aspect of Zozo is vaguely similar to the service “Nekore” provides.

Tokyo is undoubtedly one of the most important fashion capitals of the world, but Zozo is geared towards the millions of Japanese kids living in the country side who can’t just take the train to the big city to buy clothes. So it’s no wonder just 16.4% of the users live in the Tokyo area. The average age of all users is 27 years.

The company, behind Zozo, Start Today, is based out of Chiba and has 186 employees. It was founded in 1998 by Yusaku Maezawa, who is still CEO (and just 32 years old).

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
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ESPer2008 conference has been held with 100+ attendees in Shinagawa, Tokyo at 14th September 2008.

ESPer is a conference held by alumni of the Mitoh software grant (Exploratory Software Project) (in English). The Mitoh is a grant by Japanese government which is given to individual software developers. There are around thousand Mitoh alumni in Japan and they have strong network.

Unlike other government subsidiesin Japan, Mitoh is only given to individual software developers. Companies like Hitachi or Sony cannot receive the grant. In other words, most of IT subsidies goes into big companies. Amount of each grant varies from 1 million yen to 44 million yen. Foreigners living in Japan also can apply for the grant.

iPhone DJ software IPJ Fujin/Raijin:

Atsushi Hoshino talked about his demo trip to San Francisco. He demoed an iPhone DJ software “IPJ” (in English) in the front of Apple Store San Francisco during WWDC. His guerrilla marketing effort is very funny and new to Japanese software developers.

IPJ has many features which are needed by DJs. Unfortunately IPJ cannot access to a music library of iPhone due to a limitation of iPhone application API. So users must transfer musics separately for IPJ from iTunes.

IPJ will be released soon. Stay tuned.

‘Afrous’ mashup framework:

Shinichi Tomita of Mashmatrix (in English) presented his Afrous mashup framework (in English).

Afrous has three products, Afrous Dashboard, Afrous MashupEditor, Afrous WebScraper. Those products provide cool UI to enable users to create their own information portal site.

Afrous Dashboard for Salesforce (picture above) is an EIP (Enterprise Information Portal) product which works on Salesforce (force.com) platform.

‘Colors’ a rich user interface browser for mobile phones:

Shohei Osawa of Naked Technology (in JP) demonstrated ‘Colors‘ (in JP), a RIA (Rich Internet Application) browser for Japanese mobile phones.

At this moment, Colors has an Java implementation only for Docomo phones. As we reported before, Docomo mobile phones can run Java application.

They have two example applications. A twitter client ‘twittie’, and a flickr client ‘flickkie’. Those applications have quite cool user interface. User interface is written with HTML-like XUI language which is created by Naked Technology.

[Disclosure] An author of this article, Shunichi Arai, has received Mitoh grant twice which are worth more than 10 million yen total.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan, Service, Technology by Shunichi Arai
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