Drecom, once was a college-venture star IPO-ed, recently financially helped by Rakuten, announced that they would shut down their job board service "Drecom Job Board" at the end of August, 2009.

Job Board services is not greatly doing in Japanese web, as the top player is going to stop it. Some popular IT bloggers such like 100shiki [J] and Moongift [J] have their own, but seems not big. Joblet by ThePlant, which is bilingual and handles more foreign and foreign-related companies may be an alternative choice, but the concept of "job board" itself seems not so widely known to Japanese.

People seems to prefer agent service both on the web and off-line. I must point out that there are also no counterpart of Craigslist in Japan.

I guess this is because Japanese people culturally tend to avoid negotiation and confrontation between individual-to-individual/company. This will and should be gradually changing to the direction of the world average, but it might take time.

via Drk7jp [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »

Most Japanese, who are younger than 40 years old, would have listened to this program.   "Allnight Nippon[J]", which is aired live every midnight on Nippon Broadcasting System(NBS)[J] and its affiliate AM radio stations nationwide and has 43-year history, now goes to mobile.

One of Japan's oldest private radio broadcaster NBS and ringtone content provider Reco-choku[J] will jointly start the program's time-shifted PPP (pay-per-play) service for cellphone users this coming Wednesday.

The radio program is basically targeting teenagers, and it is not easy for office workers and housewives, who used be the program listeners, to tune in it at midnight.   By adding an alternative option that allows them to listen at anytime, the broadcaster expects to develop another layer of steady listeners.

The service costs USD1.1 (JPY105 incl. consumption tax) for each episode of the program.   Available on cellphones from NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, Softbank and also on Willcom's PHS.

Listening to midnight radio programs used to be a good recreation for a teenager who owns no TV set in the bedroom, but now everyone has his/her own and no longer need to depend on a radio to conceal the loneliness before falling asleep.

The more kinds of media to entertain us there are, the harder legacy media are forced to do something to survive.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
No Comments »

A big web trend from Japan that gained traction in China is now poised to become even bigger: Keitai Shousetsu (cell phone novels). These novels, which are not only being read on cell phones but also written on them, are hugely popular in Japan where they are a multi-million dollar industry.

Tokyo-based Digi-Book Japan (a subsidiary of major publishing company Toppan Printing) has now announced it will distribute cell phone novels written by selected Japanese authors to Chinese cell phones. (China is the world's biggest cell phone market - about 650-700 million Chinese are believed to own one.)

About 100 popular stories, translated into Chinese, will be sold as early as next month. Shanghai-based Shanda Interactive Entertainment, known mainly as online gaming company (and listed at the Nasdaq) will take over distribution in China. Digi-Book and Shanda will split revenues (authors get 10% of the sales price).

This isn't all: Both companies also consider selling Japanese versions of Chinese web novels in Japan, aiming at 600,000 downloads yearly. And if things go well, Digi-Book plans to sell Japanese manga in China, too (as early as this fall).

Cell phone novels became popular in Japan around 2003, with quite a few of them being turned into printed books, feature films and TV series. Although the phenomenon spilled over to Asian countries like China or South Korea, it never gained traction in North America or Europe.

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

Tags: China, Japan, News, Trend by Serkan Toto
No Comments »

A couple of tech-oriented business contests announced the finalists on Friday.

At first, Tokyo-based VC firm ngi Group and online game developer Aeria[J] jointly held the 1st edition of business contest for potential student entrepreneurs, which is titled "I-SHIN" meaning revolution in Japanese. The plan entries were open from last April to last May. The contest's winners are as follows.

Disclaimer: The winners' names were translated in accordance with typical Japanese pronunciation. Each of Chinese characters has usually several kinds of pronunciation. In order to spell their names correctly and to put appropriate prefixes, we will need to contact each of them one by one. Please forgive us your inconvenience if any incorrectly spelled names, and be free to ask us to correct it if you find any.

Award	Winner	Description
Excellent	Basecamp (Mr. Seiji Ueno, Mr. Yasutatsu Takai and Mr. Eiji Takada)	The unit of three guys is running a service called "FormAnalytics", which is aiming at improving the format of mail entry form and order form so that website visitors are willing to fill all fields on it and to submit. The service is currently beta version, and you can use it upon request.
Best (Entertainment Category)	Mobakids[J] (Ms. Yukano Nishijima and Mr. Kentaro Tamura)	Mobakids is a mobile app tech start-up based in Tokyo. Their service is a cartoon posting and sharing website called Mangaroo[J](requiring authentication and authorized beta users only), and it's intend to create a marketplace where professional and amateur cartoonists can sell their works online. The service is currently closed beta version.
Best (Extra Category)	Ageha (Ms. Yuko Kinoshita, Orihime[J] is the name of the brand that the company developed)	Five female students from Keio University graduate school formed a company to provide product planning and market research targeting female potential online shoppers in their 20s and 30s. The company also provides a platform to give customer feedback to apparel manufacturers for improving their products.

ngi group and Aeria will assist the winners to put their services on practical business basis.

There will be the 2nd edition of the contest and its business plan entry is open from July 15th to September 15th, which focuses on a business that may trigger new waves and that uses Mixi app platform.

See Also:

• ngi group's Press Release[J, PDF] on Toyo Keizai News
• Aeria's Press Release[J, PDF]

Secondary, as we reported on Asiajin last January, Cyber Agent and other five Internet companies had jointly a business plan contest called START2009, and the contest's finalists were announced on Friday.

The contest host companies assist and support these finalists in terms of financial aspect as well as business partnerships.

Finalists	Description
30 Minutes[J]	30min. (pronounced as "San-Zero Minutes" in Japanese) develops a location based town guide portal and allows users to see a listing of shops located near where you are. Recently, it releases a newer version of the iPhone app and allows us to receive latest update on the restaurant information with a new feature supported by iPhone OS 3.0. Its restaurant retrieval for lunch is very popular. iPhone app available from here.
Chephilo[J]	Chephilo is a Tokyo-based start-up and strong in basically developing web application services, and recently it invented a new service which distributes information associated with keywords spoken on TV programs. It also provides meta-data distribution service for cross-media marketing.
General Healtecare[J]	General Healthcare provides a variety of information services on the web for medical doctors as well as users who are looking for a plastic surgery or a refractive surgery (LASIK clinic).
Basecamp	The unit of three guys is running a service called "FormAnalytics", which is aiming at improving the format of mail entry form and order form so that website visitors are willing to fill all fields on it and to submit. The service is currently beta version, and you can use it upon request.
JX Press[J]	JX Press develops a cross-media marketing solution, and was chosen as the finalist because of their new business of news contents delivery over the Internet. CEO Katsuhiro Yoneshige is also known as a contributor for a pageview-earning popular news blog Agora which is expected to be considered as Japanese style of the world's first ranked news blog Huffinton Post.

The contest secretariat unveiled the total number of submited plans reached 250, and 18 business plans passed the preliminary selection examination given by the contest organizers. For more details on the companies chosen as the finalists, please visit Cyber Agent Investment's website[J].

See Also:

• Cyber Agent Investment's Press Release [J, PDF]

Via:　KIGYOKA.COM [J] (News Portal on Japanese Entrepreneurship)

Tags: Japan by Masaru IKEDA
No Comments »

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
6 Comments »