Asiajin

As same as other fields, for point-to-point(P2P) file sharing, there are Japanese counterpart of Kazaa/Limewire/Torrent. Once it was Winny, but after the developer of Winny was prosecuted for making a file sharing application which possibly leads copyrighted material distribution and the development ceased, the open source successor Share took the position of the most popular file sharing platform for Japanese speakers.

Today, on the gigantic bulletin board 2-channel(2chan)’s “Download Ita” [J] (download board), many reports by Share users are observed, their Share process had been accessed more than 20 requests simultaneously from servers on Amazon EC2 cloud, resulted in the process freeze.

On 2 channel, it is said that this flood of access paralyses Share network, many Share clients likely went down.

There are a lot of discussion threads are up on several different boards on 2chan (it is hard to keep those URLs, as 2ch thread stops after 1000 messages and then stored into archive servers, you have to seek the next thread manually), and users are sharing info such like blocking Amazon EC2 IP addresses, applying anti SYN-floot patch, etc. However, as not all file sharing users are computer experts, if this type of flooding access continues it is possible that the Share P2P network will be shrunk.

No attackers nor his/her intention remain unclear yet.

See Also:

Share – Wikipedia [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Another case of Chinese and Japanese web companies shaking hands.

Chinese search engine Baidu is a super-power in its home market and has, as the company’s first regular service outside of China, launched a Japanese version (Baidu.jp) back in 2007.

Expectedly still struggling to gain market share from established players like Google and Yahoo, Baidu’s Tokyo-based subsidiary now plans to set up an infrastructure that helps Japanese small and medium-sized companies to do e-business with counterparts in China.

By the end of this month, Japanese companies will be offered a range of services, i.e. setting up China-friendly-websites or efficient advertising. Chinese customers will be able to pay via credit card or with Alipay, a payment system offered by Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba.

Starting from 1.5 million Yen/USD/Euro (plus commission on product sales), Baidu and a partner company will create a completely translated site and also advise Japanese companies on their advertising strategy on the Chinese web.

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

Tags: China, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Japanese telecom giant NTT and Cerego Japan, an owner of a UGC-based social learning site Smart.fm(previously known as iKnow!), announced both had reached the agreement of the partnership in boosting online education business.   NTT is now considering to set up a new subsidiary focusing on online education business, and will create a number of mash-up services with Goo[J] (a portal site by NTT Resonant[J]) and NTT DoCoMo’s cellphone-based value-added information services by joining forces with Cerego.   Cerego will allocate new shares worth USD3.37M (JPY320M, no announcement made on how much it holds in comparison to the entire shares) to NTT Investment Partners, the investment arm of  NTT Group.

Meanwhile, Cerego started releasing several programs of English-language learning podcasting this week, and every week it will add approximately new 100 episodes especially designed for mastering English for significant purposes such as TOEIC(Test of English for International Communication), travel, business and  preparing for university entry exam.

Tags: Company, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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Last night, before the release of the first Android phone in Japan [J], NTT DoCoMo, Google and HTC Nippon(=Japan) had a “touch and try” event with 70 bloggers at Roppongi Hills.

The new phone HT-03A [J] is based on HTC Magic, with some customization for Japanese market.

Japanese Input Method

Omron’s iWnn is bundled. Wnn has over 20 years history in Japanese input on computers.

Japanese facial emoticons by text (kaomoji) are provided,

but I could not find if it also supports emoticon letters (emoji), which Softbank took time for support by iPhone software update, and Google is suggesting to include them into Unicode standard.

Another interesting feature is a new typing system to find a word by giving only number of letters in the word by using wildcard right-arrow-key. Although it is in Japanese, there is a demo video by HTC,

When you want to type “Insupire-syon”, which is a direct imported word of English “Inspiration”, in regular cellphone 10 key pads, you need to type “1100033366**9999000000033888888000″, 34 keys. Even some Japanese high school students do this blindly under the desk in classroom, it is a lot of push and not desirable for soft keyboard.

On the movie, on HT-03A, you may type first two letters (“11000″), then just press right-arrow-key for the rest of the word, “>>>>>>>”. Then dictionary will show you all candidates which start with “In” and has more 7 letters. In this case, the number of type becomes 12.

When I type the same word on my Window PC Japanese IME (Input-Method-Environment), I need 15 type so this sounds good. As far as the dictionary is good and you are typing words on dictionary.

No Voice Search

Voice Search button seems to be removed on DoCoMo’s Android. If I remember correctly, Android’s voice search only works with English words so providing it may just cause trouble in Japan.

Android Market

According to Google, Android Market on the DoCoMo phone is not filtered by language, so users will see many English applications/descriptions.

At the beginning, paid applications are not shown to users in Japan, to encourage users to download more applications. Google is preparing charging system and when it is ready, paid applications will be on the Market.

At Q&A time, most of questions was for the Android Market, which shows where attending bloggers interests are the most.

No i-mode, i-appli

As always for global-model cellphone, i-mode and i-appli are not available.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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