May 21st, the father of Ruby, Yukihiro Matsumoto aka Matz, visited Shanghai to attend RubyConf China 2009, the first large Ruby conference in China.

The conference was an astonishing success. 450 people attended the event. All talks except keynote were given in Chinese.

Matz gave a keynote which reveals design concept and characteristics of the language. Matz emphasized human-friendly attributes of Ruby, as always he does in other conferences.

Richard Huang from Ekohe has described how the design patterns such as Singleton, Observer, Command, Iterator, are implemented in Ruby. And he explained that how are they different from Java implementation.

Robbin Fan of JavaEye [CN] told that his JavaEye website, which is the second biggest developer site in China, is written with Ruby on Rails. He explained many optimizing methods which he learned from the experience of running a popular site. It is a surprise for Chinese attendees that "JavaEye" is running by Ruby on Rails.

In afternoon sessions, Robin Lu pointed out some common mistakes in Ruby/Rails development. A guy from ThoughtWorks gave a talk called 'Ruby/Rails in enterprise development'. A guy from PinPoint told that Chinese government is already using Ruby on Rails in their purchasing system.

Joseph Wang from SAP gave a detailed talk about BlueRuby project. BlueRuby is another Ruby implementation which runs on SAP platform. With BlueRuby, Fortune 500 companies will be able to introduce the power of Ruby to their enterprise systems.

Koz Masumitsu, a Japanese entrepreneur based near Shanghai, introduced a Ruby industry development plan of Shimane prefecture where Matz lives. Shimane is one of the most remote area in Japan, and their local government is serious about Ruby.

Matz was treated like a rock star. Many attendees want to take a photo with him, or want his autograph.

Tags: China, Community, Event Report, Person, Software, Technology by Shunichi Arai
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Ask Dot JP(ask.jp) announced [J] the end of its search engine service in Japan, to restructure their business operation.

On 25th of this month, June 2009, web search, blog search, product search and category search will be closed. They had already closed down their movie and image search last month. The announcement says that some services for enterprises will be kept.

Ask Dot JP, a Japanese counterpart of Ask.com, was established by Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com, a part of IAC) and Japanese company TransCosmos Inc., IT services provider forming conglomerate around the internet (J-Stream, DoubleClick, Fujisan Magazine Service, NetMile, NetRatings, etc.), which is listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange the first section (code 9175). TransCosmos also was known to be involved with TechCrunch Japan until recently.

Japanese search engine market share data on NetRatings/Nielsen newsletter in 2008/10 [J] listed up Yahoo!, Google, MSN/Live, goo, Biglobe, Nifty, Infoseek, Excite and Baidu, but no Ask.jp is there.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Cookpad [JP], Japan's biggest cooking site, announced today that they will be listed to Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers section on July 17th.

CEO, Akimitsu Sano, started the service on 1998. Cookpad is a recipe sharing site with 558,939 registered recipes. The site has 6.8 million unique users and 351 million page views per month.

Cookpad has 676 million yen ($6.76M) revenue, 319 million yen ($3.19M) operating profit, and 176 million yen ($1.76M) after tax profit on FY2009.

Its sales consists of three segments, which are cooperative-marketing, advertisement, and subscription. Revenues of these segments are 399 million yen ($3.99M), 214 million yen ($2.14M) and 62 million yen ($0.62M), respectively.

Akimitsu Sano holds 69.24% shares of the company, and Yoshiteru Akita, a founder of Kakaku.com, holds 23.02%.

See Also:
* Our previous article: Cookpad The Number One Recipe Site
* TechCrunch article: A Recipe Site Goes IPO, In Japan (Cookpad)

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Shunichi Arai
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NTT DoCoMo announced it would introduce a new model cellphone handset[J] featuring a new animation film, EVANGELION: 2.0 YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE[J] which is scheduled to be released at cinemas in late June.

All of 20,000 lots reserved for advance orders were completely sold out as few as in five hours just after DoCoMo had started on June 5th at 10a.m. to receive orders at its store chains located nationwide. But an extremely high popularity caused heavy load to the centralized system processing advance orders, and some users do not seem to have been confirmed to apply, which forced the company to switch processing onto paper form basis.

As of closing advance orders at 3pm on that day, the number of orders exceeded 20,000 reserved lots, which was actually 27,500, NTT DoCoMo negotiated with the film's author[J] to ask for the approval of additional production.

Consumer electronic retail chains have another 10,000 reserved lots, meaning in total, 37,500 lots of Eva-phone will be deployed in Japanese market this summer.

The new film's trailor on YouTube:

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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Japan's biggest cell phone carrier NTT DoCoMo and major publisher Shueisha have teamed up and plan to launch an e-manga delivery service for cell phones in Europe. Dubbed Manga Mode and launched yesterday, the service already lets manga enthusiasts in France choose between about ten different titles.

Certainly the manga with the biggest potential is Dragon Ball, one of the most successful comic series ever made. Other hit manga in the line-up include Death Note and Naruto.

Offered through a subcription model, the titles (which will be translated versions of the Japanese originals) will be priced between $1.50 and $7 monthly. The manga viewing software was developed by Sharp and Tokyo-based Celsys, a pioneer in that field.

DoCoMo says France, where the number of manga lovers is particularly high, is just the beginning and that more countries are targeted for Manga Mode in the near future.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community, Event Report, Japan, New Service, News, Technology, Video by Serkan Toto
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