Japanese portal site livedoor announced today that they started a new free hosting service EDGE co. Lab.
Developers/entrepreneurs can get hosted servers from livedoor and run their web service without charge. The conditions are;
- “Powered by EDGE” must be shown somewhere on the page
- livedoor OpenID and (if possible) livedoor Auth API need to be supported on the user application
The site running on the EDGE server may get traffic livedoor portal, which is one of the Japanese portal sites chasing the giant Yahoo! Japan. livedoor portal has some competitive web services like Blog, News, Shitaraba(BBS), Cure(Cosplay social network, Engish/Japanese) and Clip(Social bookmark). The accepted websites also get scalability and server management consultation from livedoor staff.
The service could be a developers’ version of good old Geocities, or Japanese friendly Google Apps Engine, YAP or Ning, with more flexible programming language choice. Sakura Internet and Agilemedia Network is offering similar service Bloglabs from blog and social media point of view, Mashupedia.jp(vector) tried to provide free web app hostings for API/Mashup fans but failed to end this spring. The portal boasting their datacentre and scalability technology joined this field will attract more individual entrepreneurs/developers who has good ideas/apps but need help on resource and promotion.
The service name “EDGE” is the word used in a company name when livedoor was founded, at that time, it was “On The Edge” and renamed it when they bought free internet provider livedoor.
