We've got a social issue of clandestine school weblog sites on which children slander their classmates by posting anonymous messages. For school teachers are too busy to resolve these issues, education boards of several local authorities tend to outsource website patrol operations to watchdog experts.

Tokyo metropolitan government put its patrol work on public bid in early June, the Tokyo-based human-powered website patrol company PitCrew[J] succeeded to get a USD19 million deal for the two-year patrol operation over clandestine sites regarding 2,200 public schools in the city. PitCrew categorizes harassing message posts in three levels. If the company finds a case requiring urgent measures, it will make a 911 call to avoid possible critical events.

Meanwhile, a Shibuya-based web service start-up, Cybridge[J] is running a website[J] allowing to make it easier for parents to check up clandestine sites, which is called "Ura Site Checker". At clandestine sites, local slang is usually used to call a school and to specify a person, which makes much harder to find the sites with Internet search engines such as Google. Cybridge created a list of the sites in human-power, it is appropriately maintained by the company's employees.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan, New Service, News, Society by Masaru IKEDA
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Mainichi Newspaper, which is considered to have Japan's longest newspaper history, and its English edition, Mainichi Daily News (MDN) set up accounts for Twitter, and started tweeting news developments every minute.

Furthermore, the company put a twitter link button at the bottom of each story on the news portal site, which encourages visitors to quote news headlines and to publish them for their twitter friends.

Mainichi has been distributed news stories and commentaries to MSN Japan[J] until September 2007, which used to be one of Japan's top-ranked portal sites in pageview earning.    But the main news distributor was switched to Sankei Newspaper[J], Mainichi lost a main lead path to its news portal.    Plus, MDN was accused last year since its popular column section had been reporting on some of the wildest and most perverted stories, Mainichi faced the difficulty that a number of advertisers had canceled to put their banner ads on MDN website.

We're interested to see if Mainichi can revive and restore reader's trust by leveraging the world's most popular social media.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan, News, Trend by Masaru IKEDA
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At a flagship shop of Softbank Mobile, Japanese reseller of iPhone, there are people began lining up for tomorrow morning, new iPhone 3GS.

Ketsudan Potaufe, a web unit sends a live reporter girl to there and let her broadcast live report from there on ustream.

The livestream quickly got an attention from Japanese net users. At 8 p.m. (Japan Standard Time, JST), over 1500 viewers was recorded. Searching @PTFLive tag on twitter shows people's chatting on her programme.

It seems that they use a note PC Let's Note with 3G mobile connection service e-mobile.

[Update 1 a.m. (JST)]

There is an overnight iPhone event running in the building for waiting purchasers. But this girl @ksorano seems to be unabled to get power supply from official, Softbank Mobile and chose to broadcast in front of the Softbank Omotesando shop. The viewers is now 1574.

The event ustream can be watched here. Now it shows iPhone app contest but the number of viewers is 346.

Tags: Japan, Video by Akky Akimoto
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Japan's second largest telecommunication company, KDDI introduced today an "augmented reality" cellphone app[J] allowing transillumination of the objects you shoot with a camera embedded on the phone. This new app is now available at the experimental lab menu[J] of the company's website.

With a GPS feature and a built-in 6-axis force sensor, the app will detect where your phone is located and which direction it faces toward. Then the app shows you a picture associated with location and direction parameters obtained, which was previously shot by another person. A sequence of these processes makes you feel as though see the object through a wall in front of you.

In order to introduce interesting user experiences using this technology, the company intends to launch a photo sharing service called "Earth Album", and participating users will be allowed to share pictures to be used for the app's transiluminated images of the objects as though they were.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Company, Japan, New Service, Technology by Masaru IKEDA
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Fumiya Satoh, a manga artist who draws a boy detective story "Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo" which has been sold 80 million copies, who is also a director of culture of the Happiness Realization Party, had a press announcement of her running for coming national election of the house of representative with blotting out herself with her drawing character with voice actress video.

She says (actually wrote scripts read by the voice actress) criticizes her planned opponent, a manga-fan prime minister Taro Aso and his Liberal Democratic Party policy in the video by telling it would be a manga fan and manga author's competition.

Japanese people are known by their tendency to prefer being anonymous, but running national election campaign with manga character is uncommon at all. I have never heard similar case before.

The Happiness Realization Party was formed this year by a buddhism-based new religious organization "Koufuku no Kagaku" (Happy Science), to aim to win the national election, as they say. The party seems to utilize YouTube and other web media for this election.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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