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This year’s Tokyo Marathon is scheduled to be held on March 22nd and marks its 3rd anniversary. The expected number of participating runners continues to increase every year. More than 250,000 people entered this year, but only 35,000 were lucky enough to win the draw to run. That means almost 85% of all the applicants will not be able to run that day.

For those who didn’t get the chance to be a part of this remarkable sporting event, an associated “VIRTUAL” game site has been launched by Otsuka Pharmaceutical, which is famous for manufacturing the Pocari soft drink. Otsuka is one of the sponsors for this year’s “REAL” event.

You may create your own athletic avatar from a selection of 69 faces, 74 bodies and various patterns of sportswear. Your avatar can run the course of the Tokyo Marathon, during which you can enjoy looking at popular sightseeing spots in the city, such as the Tokyo Tower and the Kaminarimon gate. The website has some SNS-related features and allows you to exchange yells with other runners as well.

How about visiting Tokyo and running around the city virtually without paying any travel expenses in this economic situation in which the Japanese Yen is strong compared to other currencies?

No additional software is required as the site is made with Flash.

(Proofread by: Sean O’Hagan)

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community, Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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Yahoo Japan[J] is planning to release its new underground mapping service on Thursday, which shows the details of underground shopping malls in 49 locations nationwide. Yahoo Japan’s map service[J] gets approximately 700 million page-views a month, and the new feature is expected to further increase that number.

Similar to Google Maps Street View, by clicking on the  “Underground Mall” button which appears at the corner of Yahoo Japan Maps only when available, you can see the town’s underground layer and read the name of each shop in the mall.

Restaurants and retail shops are represented by different colors, restrooms and escalators are denoted by appropriate symbols, and each gateway to an underground mall is marked with a specific number.

Yahoo Japan expects the new feature to be helpful for and heavily used by Japanese users, because the country has so many highly developed underground shopping malls, where people prefer to walk through to avoid the rain.

In order to make its services more advanced and attractive, Google is trying to give its Street View service much wider “horizontal” coverage by including previously-excluded narrow streets nationwide (in accordance with the company’s global standards), which has been criticized as infringing on the privacy of residents (see here for example). On the other hand, Yahoo Japan is doing this “vertically”, and the new feature is being introduced as a result of carefully considering Japan’s local characteristic that each city has many underground shopping malls and many city people walk through them every day.

(via 47News[J] by Press Net Japan, a Kyodo News Service Company)

Yahoo Japan Map’s new feature is not unveiled as of the writing of this story, but the example below can be considered a prototype. It was pulled from Yahoo Japan’s test site called “ALPSLAB[J]” and was jointly developed with experts who previously worked for Alps Mapping. (Alps Mapping was famous for its geographic business expertise, but it filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors under the Civil Rehabilitation Law, then was acquired by Yahoo Japan.)

The map shown below is the ordinary type for the same location (Shinjuku Subnade[English, Chinese and Korean]). Red lines show the shape of the underground layer.

（Proofread by: Sean O’Hagan)

Tags: Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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Hello Asiajin readers,

I, Yusuke ANDO (aka yandod), was asked by Asiajin to write about my presentation on PHP developers’ and other software engineers’ salaries and communities at the 40th Monthly PHP Study Meeting Kanto (Tokyo and surrounding area) this month.

I referred to some surveys in my report[J].

Asial Inc. published a survey of Japanese PHP users[J], which is based on a questionnaire from the Japan PHP Conference (PHP is one of the most popular web languages in Japan).

The survey results show a breakdown of the attendees’ salaries.

As can be seen, quite a large portion of PHP engineers get paid under $54,446.

Workport published a newsletter[J], which shows that the number of PHP jobs is high, ranked 4th following Java, C and C++, with a higher demand than other web scripting languages (Perl, Ruby, Python).

The survey also shows average salary by programming language. The list of the top 10 does not include PHP.

Average salary and pay raise, by programming language

The average salary of PHP engineers shown in the first survey is not as high as those using the above 10 languages, which I think many PHP programmers recognize.

There are many PHP community activities such as meetup events almost every week, which generate a lot of fun and enjoyment, but I think these software engineers also have to pursue financial rewards.

A video of my presentation is below.

(proofread by Sean O’Hagan)

Tags: Community, Japan by Yusuke Ando
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On Wednesday, Osaka-based start-up and iPhone developer Feedtailor[J] introduced a new iPhone app (clicking this link will launch iTunes), which allows you to see a map of street crimes in Osaka for the purpose of raising people’s attention and preventing further possible crimes.

Feedtailor’s partner and Osaka-based tech start-up C-LIS[J] also released on Monday its Android app[J] having the same features.

Based on information collected from the local city police, the Osaka Prefectural Police Deparment[J] transmits e-mail alerts to local citizens for crime prevention. By mashing the text alerts with Google Maps, the two cellphone app inventors have succeeded in making it possible to see crimes on the map at a glance.

Japan’s police system is operated by each prefectural government. As for regions other than Osaka, some prefectural police have a different ways to transmit alerts to the local citizens, but others have none. If the national police agency had defined a protocol to transmit alerts and brought the prefectural police nationwide online, we would be able to see crime information for all of Japan.

Osaka is known for its high crime rate, and this must be one of the triggers that the two apps were born in that region.

(Proofread by: Sean O’Hagan)

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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ZENRIN DataCom’s[J] new application is a valiant push toward a genuine GPS car navigation system for the iPhone 3G. It’s currently sitting at No. 4 on the App Store’s Top Paid list and it only(!) costs 1,800 yen (at the time of writing, just under US$20). The application’s name is いつもナビ 地図＋ルート (apologies if this is unintelligible) which translates roughly to “AnyTime Navi: Maps+Routes”. (OS 2.1 or higher required.)

The maps are multi-touch and their data is optimized for the iPhone, while the route data covers almost all of Japan with 400,000 entries (map and route data are ZENRIN’s own).

Functions include route planning, toll road information (toll roads are quite common here), GPS tracking, search (using keyword and/or data types). These functions and others can be gleaned from the following screen shots.

Without voice instructions, the app can’t replace a standard navigation system, and could prove dangerous if constantly monitored by a driver. Using handheld devices while driving is against Japan’s Road Traffic Act.

The iPhone’s SDK does not allow realtime route guidance, but this app gets pretty darn close.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service by Sean OHagan
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