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]
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.
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.
Probably this move must prepare for the market deployment of a brand new Android phone from NTT DoCoMo[J], which is scheduled to start tomorrow, Celsys, a Shinjuku-based developer of e-book online viewer, and Voyager[J], a Shibuya-based e-book and e-magazine publisher, jointly announced today they would release an online publication viewer for Android handsets on the same day.
The viewer app is well-sophisticatedly designed for seeing every frame of every page of the comics so smoothly and for reading novels printed vertically. Voyager has published a number of comic titles and books by themselves, and also released electronic edition of paper-printed magazines and books which have been published by many old-fashioned publishers.
This new app is compatible with their state-of-the-art e-book viewer which has been developed for anti-smartphone handsets, therefore an enormous number of publication titles are standing by for your downloading.
Dentsu, the world's largest ad agency, announced today it would join forces with Yappa, an iPhone/iPod software developer which is strong in developing e-publication online reader, and launch a marketplace dealing with digital periodicals this summer. Twenty publishers will put their thirty magazines on sale at the marketplace called Magastore[J].
