A Tokyo-based conglomerate of PC manufacturing and e-commerce retailing, MCJ(Mouse Computer Japan) announced it would shut down the company's avatar SNS service Cafesta[J] at the end of this month. The service earns 600,000 unique users and 80 million pageviews in a month.

Cafesta was launched by Powered.com (merged to KDDI in 2006), an ISP and a subsidiary of Tokyo Electric Power in 2002. Then its ownership was handed over to a joint venture of Powered.com and Korea's Daum Communications, and last April MCJ purchased the service for obtaining possible users who are likely to use WiMax service that the company intended to start.

But after purchasing the service, MCJ learned it engaged no possible WiMax user but had middle-aged female users who are willing to post their luncheon images everyday.

As for this time's closing, MCJ arranged a campaign program allowing all Cafesta users to switch their memberships to @games[J] which is an avatar-based online game service provided by GCrest, a subsidiary of CyberAgent and SystemPro, and it requires no additional subscription fee.

MCJ used to be requesting each of the users to have a paid subscription or to buy an avatar to earn revenue enough to cover the maintenance cost. However the company has been suffering from decline in its principal business of PC retail sales, and it decided to leave the service that would not contribute to the principal business. MCJ's president Kaoru Uesawa said, ad revenue based web business seemed like a white elephant from the Internet bubble economy.

In similar cases, the illustration SNS Pixiv[J] temporarily interrupted new user sign-up for the lack of infrastructure capability to meet the user's emerging access needs, which made Pixiv users worried if the service continues thereafter. Some of Nico Nico Douga[J] users call themselves for switching their membership states from free to paid subscription in order to get the service owner out from the red ink. Mixi[J] users also had a meet-up to talk about how to bring more profit to the service's provider.

Does it mean ad revenue based social site business breaks up? Should the business model be proposed not by the service provider's employees but by the service users?

Via IT Media News [J]

See Also:

Notice: Cafesta plans to shut down its service and encourage the users to switch their memberships to @games. [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Japan's biggest business publication, The Nikkei, is reporting a major shake-up in Japan's ISP industry. According to the paper, a total of three ISPs in the country, namely NEC Biglobe [JP], Nifty and Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) are in talks to join forces by 2011. Supposedly, a basic agreement is expected to be reached within this week.

The result of the cooperation would be Japan's No. 3 ISP, with a market share of 14.4%. The companies hope to be able to cut equipment-related costs by as much as 20% through the move. Even cross-shareholding appears to be possible. The Nikkei also reports that the three companies want to ask other ISPs to join their initiative.

Systems such as email, data management and billing are to be consolidated, without having end users to change their personal addresses. It's also planned to keep the three different brand names.

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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I have never heard of a site like this before and have massive doubts about every single aspect of it. But Japanese media claim that Homerare Salon, launched in December last year, is a huge success. So what does it do?

Homerare Salon, which roughly translates to "salon in which you will be praised", basically wants you to stop moping. All you need to do is to input your name in the starting page, reveal your sex and occupation and push the red confirmation button (the site is only available in Japanese).

Seconds later the screen turns white and dozens of sentences start floating around, praising you with phrases such as "You are so manly, your voice is sexy, I like your style and similar stuff. Every phrase is in sync (to some extent, at least) with your profile. Click on the heart above each sentence to magnify the phrase (in the screenshot above the sentence in bold says: "Serkan, you are cool."). And that's all you can do and what the site is about: A virtual consolation service.

Homerare Salon is run by Oita-based Kakula, which also offers a blog widget of the service. The company claims the site sees nearly 100,000 hits a day - absolutely unbelievable.

Via Fuji Sankei [JP]

Tags: Japan, Joke, New Service by Serkan Toto
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A shrine located in the Akihabara electric district and was built more than a millennium ago, Kanda-Myojin celebrates its annual biyearly festival in the town, and live streamers are shooting the people who thank the local deity, pray for peace in the town and carry portable shrines on their shoulders.

As of this writing, the festival is under way.   NTT Communications brings its livecast showing many scenes from the eyes of an audience of the festival.

Livecast is available at http://kanda-ch.blog.ocn.ne.jp, and all programs start at every top of the hour.

On the other hand, inspired by Extreme Hanami which was a social event admiring cherry blossoms in Tokyo's hostspots and hosted by Andrew Shuttleworth and Paul Papadimitriou last month, Steven Nagata organizes a walking/sight-seeing/tweeting/livecasting social event called Extreme Matsuri, the event participants are also shooting many scenes around the festival.

Kanda-Matsuri is counted as one of Japan's three biggest shrine festivals.

Tags: Event Report, Japan, Society, Video by Masaru IKEDA
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McDonald's Japan opened a new web campaign for its strategic product quarter pounder, which they desperately wanted to sell even by hiring buyers.

The campaign site is named "Quarter Pounder Wiki", on where there are several keywords are displayed in cloud style. By clicking each keyword, you can see fun contents.

But how can this be "Wiki"? Everything looks professionally made and there are no edit or login buttons. (or nothing so "fast" in its original Hawaiian)

Obviously, they made the same mistake as some Japanese people do. They guessed "Wiki" from Wikipedia means something encyclopaedia-tique. But isn't McDonald's an American company?

via mhatta's blog [J]

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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