Asiajin

Kadokawa Marketing, a subsidiary of this publishing and film-making conglomerate｢J], has introduced a new web video service called “kadoTV“.

Kadokawa’s new service allows its users to collaboratively add synchronized, multilingual subtitles to each anime on the site.   The service is based on video retrieval technology developed by Tokyo University’s graduate tech start-up TeamLab, and allows users to search subtitles using text or audio input, and sort the results based on image similarity.  Videos appearing on the site come from YouTube, NicoNico Douga[J], Ameba Vision[J] and other video sharing sites worldwide.

kadoTV is an experimental service chosen by the Information Grand Voyage Project, which was organized by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to encourage the development of next-generation information retrieval and analysis technologies.

From the service provider’s perspective, Kadokawa expects to determine the potential of what is termed the “subtitle business”,  detect videos uploaded without the content holder’s permission, and identify possible film creators and business opportunities both inside and outside of Japan.

The experimental service is available until the end of February.

kadoTV’s English top page

Tags: Japan, Service, Video by Masaru IKEDA
No Comments »

CodeRepos is a software repository space where many top-level Japanese web programmers contribute and share their source code.

Kazuhiro OOSAWA, aka Yappo, is known well by his privately running Japanese search engine iYappo for more than decade, a famous hacker among Japanese Perl community, also called “Shogun” by some geeks.

On his blog on August 31st 2007, he called for participants for his shared repository server.

The site is run by open source repository tool SubVersion/Git and issue tracking tool trac.

The most active area is Perl (which is very active in Japan), which is used in 576 modules, including Perl core code relevant to multi-bytes text handling. However, the repository also has many projects in 47 programming languages, website sources (such like a community site perl-users.jp) and even poem.

Registration is handled by Osawa manually, by reading applicant’s e-mail, and often their blogs, to see if s/he is really a programmer.

There is only one rough rule that you need to name sub-directory logically when you add a new project.

Basically, everyone can modify any piece of code on the repository, which seems much looser than other English based code repository sites on where projects have its own leader, license, roles and permissions.

Amazingly, this works well and there have been only 2 times system-wide disasters which had been caused not by malicious intention but by operation mistakes, and those were resumed back quickly as some members keep taking whole copy of the repository on their local.

All updates are being reported to an IRC channel (#CodeRepos@freenode), and many geeks are watching it.

The most interesting moment on CodeRepos is, as I heard from users, suddenly a certain project in the system got attention by a single interesting change, and the change reported on the IRC channel attracts a lot of other hackers, causes a lot of editing stream involves them over hours and days to make the project source code totally re-modified and shiny, online hackathon.

Obviously the CodeRepos is getting attentions from Japanese web developers who feels difficulty to play on English-based other repository services, and it has been encouraging novice programmers to open up their code in Japanese geekosphere. I am sure that it is also useful to search talented Japanese web engineers by reading their code, if you are seeking some for hiring but have no connection with Japanese geeks.

See Also:

Poem by mala on CodeRepos [J]

Tags: Community, Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »