Rie Tomimoto(冨本梨恵) is Jibunya 24[J], where she sells her time, does anything her clients ask excluding some exceptions, and blog what she does mostly everyday. She is a 33-year-old ex-web designer, and lives in the west suburban city of Tokyo. Unlike Chen Xiao(陈潇)[C] who does the similar things in Beijing, Rie runs the website not for making her living, but for sharing joys with her friends and other bloggers.

Rie's website is a mash-up of popular web2.0 services including Flickr, Twitter, Google Map and Google Calendar, and it shows you where and what she is doing, and also allows you to check up her availability in coming days if you ask her something.

She hopes her this activity help self-employed people to find more efficient way to use their free times for earning money, who often perplex to their workload deflection and want to equalize it.

See Also:

• Beijing Woman Lets Her Life Be Arranged By Strangers (Wall Street Journal Blog)
• For Sale: One life in China (CNN)
• Girl Sells Her Time On Internet (All China Women's Federation)

Tags: China, Community, Japan, Person, Service by Masaru IKEDA
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1-seg (one-seg) is a mobile terrestrial digital audio/video and data broadcasting service in Japan.   Usually it airs the same programs simultaneously with the land-based TV channels do.

In March, Japan's state-run TV/radio broadcaster NHK started broadcasting the 1-seg programs in weekday's lunch time, specifically designed for office workers having their lunch break.   The programming is now called "1-seg 2(one-seg-two)" since it has a new different program content from that of the land-based TV channels.

In the programming, the live show, called "1-seg lunch box",  starts at noon everyday, and popular bilingual anchorwoman Ayako Kisa[J] introduces useful tips, business manners and the previews of nightly drama series aired on the broadcaster's land-based channel.   It 's also convenient for busy TV drama fans who have missed to check up the previous episodes but want to catch up the story progress, since the live show sometimes digest previous episodes in a few minutes.

Prior to NHK's fore-running service launch, Tokyo MX (Tokyo's local independent TV broadcaster similar to NY1)  also started another "one-seg-two" service, which broadcast two programs at a time by using two segments in a channel.

As a result, the service name "one-seg-two" has double meanings which may confuse consumers.   As Tokyo MX started the service in last June, the company neglected to register its name as the trademark or the servicemark.  Tokyo MX keeps discussing NHK to standardize the name as to stand for a specific feature, but MX's continuous effort has not yet reached a good conclusion.

See also:

• NHK's 1-Seg 2 website[J]
• Guide to Tokyo MX's 1-Seg 2 TV Service [J]

Reference:

"So strange that two different services co-exist with the one same name"[J]
written by Hiroshi Hasegawa, Nikkei New Media
(Free user registration required to read his original story on Nikkei Business Online)

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, Service, Trend by Masaru IKEDA
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LinkThink, a company known by its blog widgets and niche virtual boys dating social network Web-Kare, is bought by a game company AQ Interactive (Tokyo Stock Exchange 2nd section).

AQ Interactive bought 66.8% of LinkThink's stock from its founder by 51,500,000 yen (510,000 USD).

See Also:

AQ Interactive's Release [J, pdf]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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On Wednesday, eBay announced it had agreed to take over Gmarket, a South Korea's e-commerce marketplace.   The company's shareholders, Yahoo U.S. and Korea's Interpark[K] also reportedly agreed to sell their Gmarket shares to eBay.

By merging Gmarket with eBay's Korean local subsidiary called Auction (IAC)[K], e-Bay expects to get ahead and to keep aggressive position in the country's e-commerce market.   IAC is specifically focusing on computer products and electronic devices, and it handled the total brokerage amount for USD2.2B and earned USD161.2M revenue in the last fiscal period.   Gmarket is focusing on selling fashion items, and the company dealed with items for USD3.2B and earned USD 220.8M in the period.

In Tokyo, eBay also re-launched a local site "ebay.co.jp[J]" on April 1st.   In the timeline, nine years ago, eBay entered Japan in partnership with NEC Biglobe[J], Japan's second largest ISP with over 5 million subscribers.   However, in spite of the fifteen-month-efforts to engage more users and to defeat Yahoo Japan's auction site, eBay Japan site was forced to shut down for the lack of revenue.

In late 2007, in association with Tokyo-based conglomerete netprice.com and Yahoo Japan[J] which used to be a rival, eBay launched the website called Seikaimon[J] for encouraging Japanese online shoppers to use eBay.com, by translating item introductions into Japanese and surrogating customs processing for importing items purchased(see Akky's this previous article and Arai's this article for more details).    eBay.co.jp is a new entrance to the website described, and it's not an auction site but provides translated indexes to each items listed on eBay.com, telephone assistance service in Japanese and video webinars for better biding.

See Also:

• eBay to Expand Asian Operations Through Combination with Gmarket, Korea’s Largest Online Marketplace
• Yahoo! Agrees to Tender Its Stake in Gmarket to eBay

Tags: Japan, Korea by Masaru IKEDA
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Japan-based casual clothing retailer First Retailing(its brandname, Uniqlo) started its online sales in Mainland China[C], in tie-up with Taobao[C].   Taobao is China's largest online shopping mall by the e-commerce giant Alibaba, and it engages more than 100 million frantic shoppers in the country.   This is the first independent entry by a Japanese large retailer to China's e-commerce market.   Uniqlo's CEO Tadashi Yanai unveiled the company is aiming to grow its online sales up to 10% of Uniqlo's entire retail business in Mainland China.

Shanghai Transcosmos, a local subsidiary of Japan's large BPO (business process outsourcing) provider, handles all the back-end processes for Uniqlo's new e-commerce site.   Transcoscmos has call center facilities in Beijing and Shanghai, and the two sites have 560 seats for call center representatives.

Tags: China, Japan, News, Service, Trend by Masaru IKEDA
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