Tokyo-based animation studio FanWorks[J], which is well known for a famous title "Yawaraka Sensha " or "Soft Wartank", tied up with animators and TV broadcasters in Toyama (a Honshu island's prefecture facing the Sea of Japan), and launched a project to promote the prefecture's sightseeing business by creating original animation titles[J/E/F/C/K] which are intended for potential tourists living abroad, in association with Toyama-based animation studios, Berich[J] and P.A. Works[J].

The project is a part of the business boost plans which have been arranged by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and are aiming at cheering local economies.   The production partnership authored several animation titles featuring famous sightseeing spots in the prefecture.

The titles will be broadcast on LNTV[C], a public satellite TV broadcaster in Mainland China's sister city for Toyama, as well as Toyama TV[J].   Furthermore, the title's Internet distribution is also available at YouTube[J], NicoNico Douga[J] and Crunchyroll.   (Crunchyroll videos are accessible only outside Japan due to international licensing limitations.)

All the titles are available with subtitles in English, French, Mandarin Chinese and Korean.

Via Business Makoto[J] and IT Media News[J]

Tags: Company, Japan, News, Society, Trend, Video by Masaru IKEDA
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(Following to the part 1)

5. Livedoor (Asiajin articles)

Tomo Tsubota, Livedoor Blog [J] Business Department, opened and shared their user demographics and billing method.

Livedoor Blog started in 2003 and became black ink in Sep. 2007. 30% of sales come from premium service, which is used by 17% of active users. (60% revenue is from advertising)

The provided billing methods are credit card, payment at convenience store, BitCash [J] (pre-paid e-money), bank transfer and e-money(both Edy [J] and iD [J]). Ratio by sales amount are,

When seeing ratio by generation, 54% of teenagers use convenience store, then 13.2% use BitCash. This is easily explained because they usually do not have credit cards. For users over their 60, 34.1% uses convenience store with less credit card usage, he explained that credit card is not a friendly payment method for elders.

6. Mixi (Asiajin articles)

By Mixi Nengajo, why Mixi went with the new year greeting snail mail project, was told. It was intended to charge users communication.

Mixi is frequently asked "Why do not you to go e-commerce and sell things to its 17 million users?", and Mixi's answer is they try to think users' value first. As Nengajo can effectively use social graph, and encourage communications.

7. Hatena (Asiajin articles)

Hatena's Yuichi Kawasaki told their goods, Hatena Star (virtual applauds), premium version of their social bookmark service, blog book publishing and new kids-users introduced by cooperation with Nintendo DSi (all [J]), with comparing their service with newspaper, Facebook and mobile social network services.

See Also:

Sessions memo of Monetize Hacks #3 by Shiraber [J]

ITmedia News [J]

[Update 2009.07.06] all presentation movie are up on the organizer Kushii's blog

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The BSI-TOYOTA Collaboration Center (BTCC), which was established in 2007 by RIKEN as a collaborative project with Toyota Motor Corporation , Toyota Central R&D Labs, Inc., and Genesis Research Institute, Inc. made a demonstration of their developing wheelchair which you can manoeuvre just by brain wave, i.e. thinking.

The demonstrator showed when he imaged a person walking with his two feet, the wheelchair went straight. When he imaged moving his right hand, it turned right.

This kind of experiment is not the first in history, but this one realizes brain-wave analysis in as little as 125 ms, which makes the wheelchair speed practical for real usage.

The catched commands accuracy rate is 95%, which they told is one of the highest in the world.

As on the diagram below, the system knows which part of brain are active when the person images some defined shape/concept.

Although Toyota seems to be involved a lot, at this point they are not thinking to implement this technology into cars soon, on their comments. It is expected to be applied for nursing care field.

via Science Portal [J]

See Also:

Riken's Press Release

Impress Robot Watch has more details, photos and researcher's comment [J]

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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Pixiv [JP], a Japanese-only "social illustration" network (Asiajin articles), today welcomed its one millionth member. The site boasts a healthy growth rate, as the user base stood at 100,000 in March 2008.

Pixiv claims the site sees 720 million page views monthly and that users submit 15,000 illustrations daily. It's not hard to believe. Look at this pretty impressive Google Trends graph (especially after April 2009):

The idea behind Pixiv is to provide talented amateur artists with a platform to present their drawings to other people. Registered users can rate these drawings, write comments on them, bookmark them etc.  The usual social network features are in place, too: befriending, profiles, messaging etc.

Here is a typical image (click for a larger view):

Premium members pay $6 a month to get a badge on their profile and some other benefits (judging from what I heard, Pixiv also attracts quite a few gaijin who can't talk Japanese but somehow fight their way through the registration process).

Look here for a list of other social drawing services from Japan.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Although the growth is not high as in English, twitter has been beloved by Japanese users even before its localization, and probably approaching to the critical mas. Many twitter related events (some are with Tumblr) have been and will be held recently in Tokyo.

Even though Tokyo is the one of the most dense and active cities for IT/Web community events in the world, a big wave seems to be coming in Japanese web. Last time when I saw this kind of events rush was few years ago on Second Life (Touch Wood!).

# all event pages are in Japanese

6/17
Tumblr/Twitter offline party at Roppongi

6/26
twitter night vol.2 by Toshiaki Kanda (Kanda News Network)

6/30
Workshop - think twitter and politics
Masahiko Shoji, Fumi Yamazaki, Daisuke Tsuda

6/30
Official Event - talk with people from Twitter(USA)

7/17
Twitter and Tumblr - talking geekish communication deeply
(site is not opened yet, will update soon)

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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