Coincidentally I write up several stories featuring video services using media other than terrestrial TV broadcast system in this Japan's serial holidays season.

Nintendo and the world's largest advertising agency Dentsu started Friday a video broadcast service on a 3D virtual world designed for Nintendo's game platform Wii. The new service is named "Wii no Ma", meaning a living room of Wii, and it is broadcast video programs expecting to be viewed by family audiences, that's why it will have no PG-rated titles.

In contrast to the private broadcasters that need to bring programs which can commit high viewing rate and the sponsor's satisfaction, Nintendo's new service allows to put programs that producers want to present on experimental basis.

The service is entirely free, and the program viewers can comment on what they've watched and send it directly to the producer. After each program is viewed, you will be taken to the chatroom presented by the program sponsor. As of this writing in early May, there's only one program of African elephant's ecosystem, which is sponsored by Seven & i Holdings owning Seven Eleven convenience stores, Ito Yokado supermarkets and Japanese division of Denny's restaurants[J]. After you finish viewing the program, Seven & i will give you a simple yes/no question in the chatroom: "Would you like to go shopping to Seven & i Store?"

Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata emphasized the following points making differences from traditional advertising revenue based media. (link to Mr. Iwata's presentation[J], 24 min 43 sec)

• The service is based on ad revenue business model.
• The service never compete with CGM video sites like YouTube in terms of content volumes in its number and variety.
• The service gives sponsors the opportunity to get opinions directly from those who viewed the program sponsored.

Advertising agencies and large-sized enterprises, which used to sponsor top-rated TV programs, are seeking for a new media allowing them to appeal their products to consumers because...

• Japanese business leaders do not like private broadcasters and their programs. They prefer public broadcaster NHK and TV Tokyo which is a relatively business-oriented private broadcaster owned by Nikkei Business Daily. (Source: J-Cast News[J])
• In the latter half of 2008, the average viewing rate given for NHK exceeded that for private broadcasters, despite NHK is broadcast conservative and anti-entertaining programs. (Source: Naigai Times[J])
• The consumer product manufacturers can no longer describe their products in depth, in such a small unit of spot commercial film which is as short as 15 seconds or 30 seconds.

You're allowed to copy video titles from Wii to a tiny game device DSi, and it makes you possible to watch them even not at home.

The following is a video introduction provided by Nintendo, which tells you how to enjoy the new service. (Narrated in Japanese, 3 min 33 sec)

Paticipating program production studios are East[J], D: Complex[J] and TV Man Union.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan, New Service, Video by Masaru IKEDA
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Japan's Ministry of Affairs and Communications (MIC) calls several projects starting in 2009 as part of the ICT Standard Development Project.

Among the three big categories [J], one of the 11 themes in the "Cyber District" operation is "Cellular phone Lifelog", which targets to draw up the rules for time-space data utilization.

In particular, as proving tests, it is suggested to utilize cellular phone GPS data for pandemic prevention.

According to Asahi.com, which reports more detail than MIC's release, this experiment involves around 2,000 cellphone users both in urban and rural towns. All monitors' location are recorded in database with time information, then, by assuming one of them gets infected with disease, the system is supposed to track down the possible encounters on the same train and bus, then send an e-mail alert to those suspects' cellphone.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Since Tsuyoshi Kusanagi stepped down from the role promoting digital terrestrial TV service (see this for more details), NAB,  the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan, were forced to introduce a new promoter, which is Chide-jika[J], punning the words of digital TV and deer.

In opposition to the deer's activity, users of Japan's largest Internet forum 2 channel[J] together created an anthropomorphic bear character in parody, named Analoguma[J], and a number of geeks following the boom launched sites introducing his profile and fight song all around Japanese blogosphere.

NAB announced it would accuse fan-art reproduction without permission to the prosecutor as violating the original's copyright, which caused an ironic burst in popularity of the deer promoting a new broadcast system and his tough opponent who wants to conserve the current system.

Some people composed a fight song for the bear, containing vocal made by the singing synthesizer Hatsune Miku(pdf), and those were uploaded and introduced on Japan's CGM-based video sharing site "Nico Nico Douga[J]".

The embeded video shown below is quoted from YouTube, since its original stored on Nico Nico Douga is prohibited to be quoted.

The other people launched a parody site having the domain name of "chidejika.jp", which takes you to a set of many fan-art drawings on the illustration SNS pixiv[J].

via IT Media News [J]

See Also:

• Chide-jika Official Website (by NAB) [J]
• Chide-jika Parody Website [J]
• Analoguma Parody Website [J]

Tags: Community, Japan, Joke, News, Trend by Masaru IKEDA
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An unique web startup founded and run by a successful Japanese entrepreneur in Portland, Oregon, declared its end of services this month.

Notice

LUNARR will be discontinuing our Elements and Themes services as of Sunday, May 10th, 2009. You may continue to use both services until that date, at which time your LUNARR Terms of Service will be terminated and content will no longer be accessible.

We would like to sincerely thank you for being a part of the Themes and Elements beta experiments!

Best,
The LUNARR team

LUNARR blog

Lunarr Themes, named "Themes" after their second service Elements launched, started in 2007. The concept of the service is to introduce "back side" to every single page on the internet, on each of the back you may leave memo, start discussions with e-mail. It is a collaboration tool as same as Toru's first product Cybozu groupware with unique flip idea.

Lunarr Elements, which is the other service by Lunarr, is a communication service around user posted images, just launched early January 2009, this year.

Toru Takasuka, who is a legendary software entrepreneur who made an independent enterprise package software company Cybozu by leaving Panasonic/Matsushita around his 30, left his CEO job and sold all his stock in 2005, expatriated himself to Portland with bringing his capital gain.

He told me before that his intention to move to rather small city instead of the Silicon Valley, is to get a good attention without hard competition both for promotion and hiring, which exactly traced his first success in Japan started from Ehime, small town in Shikoku island, then moved to Osaka, then Tokyo.

On his blog [J], he occasionally explained that he would have not made his first child Cybozu be a global company. Even though Cybozu is beating IBM/Lotus and Microsoft in market share in Japan, it is "only in Japan" phenomenon. Instead of using IPO-ed Cybozu, he rather wanted to begin again from scratch with his full of control.

On his announcement on his Japanese blog, Takasuka writes "I am not giving up my way to the global-level startup, global-level service".

Different from many Japanese software companies who hold a small branch with 1-2 persons in valley by doing nothing substantial but so-called "local research", mainly to show their pose of globalization to their Japanese customers, he is the few serious person who has his own strategy and policy.

In USA, he seems to meet a lot of influential people in industry and makes a good network. He also held an English bloggers tour in Tokyo, of course as a part of Lunarr's promotion, but also to help other Japanese local startups linked to influential people in English blogosphere.

It is sad to hear their close but I wish I hear a news on his next service soon.

[disclaimer] Akky Akimoto worked as an engineering director of Cybozu USA under Toru Takasuka, when he was a CEO of Cybozu HQ, San Francisco.

See Also:

Failing to snag users, Lunarr decides to shut down » VentureBeat reports Lunarr's services and interesting promotion history in USA.

Portland local news reports on Toru and Lunarr's journey from their point of view

Lunarr Is Going Dark . . .

Tags: Japan, News, USA by Akky Akimoto
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A web based chat service Lingr announced its closing down at the end of May 2009.

We're sad to announce that Lingr will be shutting down on May 31, 2009.

It's been great pleasure that so many wonderful people have joined and gotten to know each other here at Lingr. We want to give our wholehearted thanks to everyone who gave us compliments, suggestions, and criticism- Lingr couldn't have existed without your feedback.

Lingr Blog: Announcing Goodbye from Lingr

Lingr was developed and run by Infoteria USA, San Mateo based American company, which is a subsidiary of Inforteria Corporation, Tokyo Japan.

Making a real time web chat system over web/http protocol is not as easy as you might expect, especially if you want it to be scaled out. Lingr used latest technologies and software such like COMET, Ruby on Rails, Jetty, etc. for it.

Infoteria, a young enterprise software company specialized in XML based data handling system, is on Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers [Code 3853] since 2007. Infoteria USA is planned to be closed around June.

Kentaro Ejima, who is well known by his successful career as a star engineer of Inforteria, describing himself as a Philosopher, is also a very influential blogger , has been leading the project by moving himself from Tokyo to USA. He has been writing about this challenge on his blog and many Japanese web entrepreneurs and engineers hoped his success in US/English market will be the best practice for Japanese web startup and person going oversea.

On his popular blog [J], Ejima looks back his 4 year struggling in US company, with retrospective assessment including that HR cost was almost doubled in compare with Japan.

Luckily for he himself, he has just got a green card recently, and he tells he stays in USA to do another project, which maybe around iPhone. I wish his every success in his new challenge.

See Also:

Announcement of the service end of Lingr and Rejaw / Kenn's Clairvoyance - CNET Japan [J]

Another bay area resident Japanese Hacker Tatsuhiko Miyagawa made a long interview with Kentaro Ejima / Gihyo.jp [J]

Kentaro Ejima(江島健太郎) search on Google [J]

Tags: Japan, USA by Akky Akimoto
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