Asiajin

On Tuesday, the Tokyo-based Internet conglomerate Netprice.com launched a service specifically focusing on Japanese manufacturer’s wholesale exporting to Mainland China, in partnership with China’s largest B2B platform provider Alibaba.

The service helps the manufacturers to find new China’s local merchandisers / distributors by match-making needs among users on Alibaba’s website(B2B) and  its B2C edition called Taobao[C].   Netprice.com provides export-related assistance for Japanese sellers, including arranging customs processing and international logistics.   Alibaba’s buyers are allowed to purchase an item from a variety of 1,000 products from 100 Japanese sellers as of this writing, and payable with Alibaba’s online payment system Alipay and China’s credit card brand China UnionPay.

Under the influence of food poisoning outbreaks involving Chinese-made frozen dumplings and infant formulas, not only Japanese but also a number of Chinese people are willing to use Japanese consumer products for their health and safety, especially in the wealthy layer living in emerging developed coastal cities like Shanghai.   The tide is running in favor of possible Japanese exporters.

In a year ahead, the two companies expect to involve more 500 Japanese sellers, which will carry more than 10,000 merchandise items targeting Chinese market.

Tags: China, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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Niwango[J], the owner of Japan’s most popular video sharing site “Nico Nico Douga[J]“, released its iPhone/iPod appon Monday. The app is for free and available only at Japanese AppStore.

With 3G or WiFi connectivity, the app allows you to search/play videos and leave your comment on Nico Nico Douga, however it does not cover the livecast category called “Nico Nico Live[J]“.

According to the app’s developer lead Mr. Masahito Mizoguchi, the iPhone/iPod app is developed based on Nico Nico’s mobile edition which has been introduced for NTT DoCoMo / au / Softbank handsets since 2007. Unlike the mobile edition which were developed on Java based technologies, the iPhone/iPod app needs to be coded in Object-C language.  Such a gap of the development environments caused the developer’s suffering in adjusting image quality on the app. Also, it seemed so hard for them to deploy the service’s symbolic feature that overlapped subtitles run on screen in synchronization with video.

Niwango started developing the iPhone/iPod app last November, and it already completed in early March. But the company was forced to take longer time than expected, to make it pass Apple’s approval to put on the AppStore. Niwango doesn’t disclose the reason why it has been delayed, but reportedly it seems to have violated AppStore’s guidelines especially in terms of how Niwango manages the video contents.

via CNET Japan[J]

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community, Company, Japan, Service, Video by Masaru IKEDA
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Asahi Newspaper, the Internet portal company EC Navi[J] and major publishers like Kodansha and Shogakukan jointly launched Thursday an online encyclopedia containing 430,000 words, which is called “Kotobank[J]“.   The service is provided for free, and the joint venture expects to earn USD1M in FY2009 from Overture[J] ads appeared on the result pages of Kotobank.

The revenues from ad sales are shared among the publishers which show appropriate results in response to a user’s request.   The venture expects another publishers and contents holders to join the team in the future, and to increase its content volume up to 200M words in three years.

The participating publishers used to sell their paper-printed news encyclopedia products at bookstores, and annual sales volumes for all such products accounted for 3.5M copies at its peak.   But recently most publishers were forced to stop publishing due to declining in its sales.

Asahi’s project manager said confidently, on behalf of the entire venture,  the new site would be more reliable since its contents were written by intellectuals and experts from various industries and academic societies, in contrast to UGC-based websites such as Wikipedia and popular search engines.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community, Company, Japan, New Service, Service, Technology by Masaru IKEDA
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The world’s largest meteorological company, Weathernews Inc., will launch next Monday its 24/7 live show channel, with its Adobe AIR-based client application, bringing weather updates to your PC desktop every minute.

The new service is named “So LiVE 24[J]” (So-La is similar to So-Ra in Japanese pronunciation, meaning sky), eleven weather girls and meteorologists are alternately appeared on your screen, and they will bring you weather forecast, traffic reports and disaster information on the show.   The show is produced in cooperation with Tokyo’s terrestrial broadcaster Fuji-TV.

The application’s chat function allows you to throw a question to them.  In order to prevent the chat room from spam message posts, it has access control feature enabling to get malicious users out by specifing predefined keywords and their IP addresses.   The service is designed for a maximum of 10,000 users enough to watch the show simultaneously.

When you download the application and install it, seven windows will be popped up on your desktop.   Each of the windows shows you sky pictures taken by and e-mailed from amateur weather reporters, who participate in the company’s membership program and report the latest updates from every corner of the country.

The application has also grid computing technology, and it allows you to let the company use your PC resources for calculating for climate change simulation.

11 Weather Girls for SoLiVE 24 (quoted from Weathernews’ website)

Tags: Company, Japan, New Service, News, Technology by Masaru IKEDA
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As you might hear from the news, the Japanese pop star Tsuyoshi Kusanagi（草彅剛, a.k.a. 초난 강 or Chonan Gang in South Korea）, a member of popular group SMAP[J], was arrested Thursday for public indecency after being found drunk and naked at a park near Roppongi, Tokyo.

On the popular video sharing site Nico Nico Douga[J], some curious onlooking videocast enthusiasts brought live pictures shooting TV crews and showbiz reporters who were at the crime scene for covering the story, and the others showed live images of the police building where Tsuyoshi was detained inside for an investigator’s examination.

Japanese government has used him as a promoter for digital terrestrial TV broadcasting (a.k.a DTV in the U.S.) which replaces analog broadcasting in 2011. They are afraid if his arrest may dampen the widespread use of digital TV sets in Japanese households, which may force them to postpone the transition deadline of Japanese TV industry’s road-map.

A screen-shot above was quoted from Nico Nico Live[J], a livecast category on Nico Nico Douga.

This livecast was performed by an onlooking guy in Thursday’s lunch break, he mimicked Tsuyoshi, took off his clothes and entered a pond in the park where the pop star had been found. An audience watching it expressed pros and cons while they ate lunch at their offices. The park is located next to Tokyo Midtown shopping complex, which was built a few years ago at the ex-site of Japanese Defence Ministry’s Headquarters.

See Also:

• Tsuyoshi’s fan and blogger traveling in Cambodia started a signature-obtaining campaign online[J]: 10,000 signatures expected to be submitted to mass media and Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in the hope that they will show some leniency in his situation, by refraining from removing him from the leading roles.
• An another fan also started running a campaign online[J]: 100,000 signatures expected to be submitted to the prosecutor and Tsuyoshi’s management office, by asking them to dismiss the case.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community, Event Report, Japan, Korea, News, Person, Video by Masaru IKEDA
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