The Tokyo-based tech venture company Modiphi[J] started a twitter-like micro blog service for enterprise use[J] today.

The company introduced the same series for consumer use[J] last month, which allows you to post a short message and share it with your friends, as well as RSS feeds aggregation and social bookmarking feature. The service is also available for PC and the iPhone app. The enterprise edition allows you to share a message only within your company or your institution as well.

Furthermore, in the beginning of this month, the company announced two former Cybozu engineers had joined the team to accelerate developing this service.

Modiphi is focusing on developing enterprise solutions using RSS feeds and the iPhone interface. The company is a spin-out venture from the VC firm[J] which was founded by the first representative for Oracle Japan in its history.

FYI: The twitter-like service for enterprise use, Yammer won TechCrunch 50's best award last year.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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If you are male, and when you saw see a girl with ultra-mini skirt on TV, have you ever tried to peek from underneath? I had, in my teenage. The rather new technology using webcam is now realizing the boys' dream on a PC game, Tech48 by Teatime.

They combined face-tracking technology, which detects PC users location in front of webcam, with fictional characters in the, ahem, adult anime game. When you move from left to right side of desk, a girl in the game will follow you to give her eyes back on you.

see right if you move right

This kind of eyes/face-tracking usage on games is not really the first challenge. A game like EyeToy:Play on Playstation 2 senses your move and use it as an user input instead of using joypad for years ago.

What Teatime claims that theirs is very innovative and the first time in history is, broader application of the technology. For example, when you let the cam recognize you are crouching, the game shows inside of the girl's skirt.

Demo movie is also available.

The product has not been available yet, however, Teatime calls 100 early monitors.

If you are a regular reader of Asiajin, you might remember Dennou Figure ARis, one of our most popular articles, which also plouds of enabling you to look up in the fictional girl's skirt. Those creators are amazing when they think what people are wanting on computers with latest technology. I must say that the human being's imagination is infinite.

Tags: Japan, Software by Akky Akimoto
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Mobile Design Archive is a new blog where over 400 Japanese cellphone websites screenshot are collected.

Because of historical and security reasons, many mobile websites are not accessible from PCs in Japan, some are blocked by browser IP address, others are referring cellphone unique id. So taking screenshots of mobile sites are not easy as PC websites.

In Japanese web, as on its early stage mobile browsers had many limitations with compact-HTML tags, tiny memory, small screen size and resolution, cellphone websites evolved separately from PC sites. For most companies and services, having two different websites for PC and cellphone were, and are MUST.

Mobile web in Japan is getting more users and page views, making pretty big profit in internet advertisement with great micro-payment platform integrated with cellphone carriers invoice. There are many designing techniques specialized for mobile web. Navigation are also customized for 10 keypads of cellphones.

mobile astrology sites

Mobile web screenshots are sorted out in 35 categories. Each screenshot has a link to the original site (works if the site permits PC access), and QR code for access. It is a good place to get a quick overview of Japanese mobile designs.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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In South Korea, where many crimes and suicide cases have been caused by slanderous messages posted on social websites, the country's telecommunication authority has deployed an act which obligates the Internet user to publish his/her real name when uploading a video or leaving a comment on large social networking sites.

The authority expanded its scope of application on April 1st, YouTube Korea[K] was also added as one of the websites to which the act should be applied.

After discussing with Google World Headquarters, Google Korea[K] refused the authority's request on the grounds that anonymity is essential to guarantee freedom of expression on YouTube, and the company disabled any video uploading and commenting instead.

YouTube's Korean Edition (Top Page)

See Also:

• Korea's FCC: Won't Impose The Administrative Punishment To YouTube [K] - iNews 24
• Korea's YouTube Disabled Video Uploading And Commenting [J] - Kyodo News Service
• We Voluntarily Disables The Uploading Feature When You Set To Korean Mode [K] - YouTube Blog (Korea)

Tags: Community, Korea, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Google Japan announced their apology on their search results for some users were showed garbled texts from 9th evening to 11:30 p.m. for around 6-7 hours on their official blog [J]. The bug affected some Japanese users and some other language users, as they wrote. It also said that it was caused by engineering human error.

I myself had not had such a problem so it might happen not on whole Google Japan's servers but in some clusters.

A blog "Bikkel no Kuuchu Teien"(Hanging Gardens of Bikkel) reported his/her searching results of "cherry blossom".

S/he and some other reported their browsers thought the page as Turkish. The correct results can be gotten now is like this,

The cause was not explained in the official statement so let us search Japanese users reporting. There are many blogs, 2-channel bbs comments and Yahoo! Chiebukuro (Yahoo! Answers Japanese) questions.

According to a Oshiete Goo (Goo's answers), the garbled page header did not have a character encoding meta direction "UTF-8". Some people suggested to set browser encoding manually with UTF-8, which solved the garbles.

Most reports indicated that it happened only with Windows and Internet Explorer. Browser's automatic encoding detection algorithms are different so probably no-encoding worked badly on IE this time for those users.

Many other bloggers reported that their uninstalling Google Toolbar solved the problem, but the official announcement denied that the bug was nothing related with Google Toolbar.

Yahoo! Japan's daily Kyu-Jyosho Word Ranking (Surging Keyword Ranking) on 10th showed "Google Garbled" as 12th rank.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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