Mainland China's 2nd largest social game maker Rekoo[C] launched a flash-based social game on Japan's largest social network service Mixi[J], which earned more than two million users in less than two months since the launch, and it's ranked the 1st in the number of Mixi app users.

The game is called Sunshine Ranch (click here for its Japanese edition requiring log-in to Mixi, or here for its Chinese edition requiring log-in to 51.com), and it allows you to grow crops and livestock virtually in a ranch, and you can share the state of your field of vegetables and flowers with your friends online.   Some users are truly addicted to enjoy it, and it seems they can't help thinking about the game even during business hours.   The key factor to attract the users successfully is several "social" functions on the game.   If you invite someone to the game, you'll get a reward item.   You can water and reap crops your friends have grown, and also add and remove harmful insects on their fields.

You need to wait several hours to harvest crops after sewing seeds, and the time left until harvest will be appeared accompanied with every crop you're growing.  If you missed the chance to reap the field, your friends might have taken them away.

Sunshine Ranch on 51.com (Chinese Edition)

Sunshine Ranch on Mixi (Japanese Edition)

Meanwhile, another China-made social game called Everyone's Farm (click here for its Japanese edition requiring log-in to Mixi, or here for its Chinese edition requiring log-in to renren.com) is also ranked so high, which is currently the third and has engaged 500,000 users.   This is a service of Rakoo[J] (not Rekoo of Sunshine Farm), a flash-based social game portal operated by Mainland China's largest search portal for cellphone handsets Yicha[C].

Kaixin Farm on Renren.com (Chinese Edition)

Everyone's Farm on Mixi (Japanese Edition)

In this last months, Japanese social network service users are so busy to cultivate the fields prepared by Chinese game developers.

Oct. 27th Update:

Sunshine Ranch is being accused of the following points by the users:

1. The game used to be absolutely free, but last week it started providing the users an option to buy virtual fertilizers by paying "REAL" cash with their credit cards.
2. The game uses the credit card processor who is known for being usually adopted by erotic sites.
3. For transferring the credit card number entered by the user to the processor from the game app, they seemed to embed it on a user session that could be seen on a browser's URL window and it could be vulnerable against tapping his/her credit card number. (this vulnerability is already fixed)

Tags: China, Community, Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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You might have heard about that Gmail and iPhone has added Japan originated emoticon, Emoji, set. You may know that Google has been promoting those "letters" into Unicode standard.

Filing those drawings as new letters is, though Chinese letters were made from drawings thousands years ago, not acceptable for all people, some says it is useless in other areas, culturally biased, too childish, violation against Unicode compatibility policy, etc.

But it is true that those Emoji-s are widely used on Japanese cellphones already, and Japanese population and market are not ignorable for those world-class internet companies including Google, Apple and others, it is understandable Google and companies need a standard way of handling those Emoji-s.

3 major Japanese cellphone carriers leaves incompatibility of those Emoji-s deliberately for their customer retention, which Google and others also try to solve by this standardization. This is so good for Japanese web developers because converting Emoji-s among carriers is one of the most hated tasks they have to do here.

Google successfully got agreement at Unicode Consortium after a great struggle, and now they are proceeding to the next level, ISO Working Group (WG2).

On the WG2, Ireland and Germany national bodies suggested an alternative, to make it more universal. They proposed more "universal" emoticons set. (citations to the original set)

On it, they also modified Emoji-s' glyphs to what they thought more common. However, Japanese researchers think that some of emoticons' expressions came from Japanese manga expressions, from which most Japanese can easily understand what emotions they conveys, but hard to guess if you are not familiar manga.

If you are interested in what argument around Emoji, Manga and Japanese culture are happening in Tokyo this week, please take a look at Katsuhiro Ogata's proposal [English and Japanese, side by side].

See Also:

A Proposal to Revise a Part of Emoticons in PDAM 8 [pdf]

絵文字が開いてしまった「パンドラの箱」第5回--絵文字と日本マンガの親密な関係:コラム - CNET Japan">Emoji opened Pandra's box - relation between Emoji-s and Japanese Mangas - CNET Japan [J]

Mojino Namae - Katsuhiro Ogata's blog [J]

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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On the 24-hour Internet video broadcast channel brought to you by the world's largest meteorological information service company Weathernews, a quadlingual weather news show was launched this month, which is aired from 1am to 3am everyday excluding Monday, Japan Time. (Refer to this article for more about the video channel)

Korean weathergirl Lee Jee-youn (李芝妍, 이지욘) and Taiwanese weathergirl YING Chieh (應潔) anchor the show, and they bring us the latest climate trends, weather forecast and what's happening in Asia, every midnight in four languages of Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and English.   Viewers can also participate in the show by posting messages via the chat function of the app designed for watching the channel.

In the edition of Wednesday, October 21st, which marked the highest number of the Orionids we could observe in the last several days, they sent video reporters to four locations including Mt. Fuji, where it would be easier to observe the meteor shower because of no illumination noise, and showed us live video images from there with introducing the wishes viewers were posting.   （In a Japanese superstition, if you make a wish three times with seeing the meteor shower, it comes true.)

Viewers from Asian nations also posted a number of still images of the shower they shot at their places, and they were also introduced with applause on the show.

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Motion Portrait, a tech spin-out of Sony Computer Science Laboratories(CSL) and now a subsidiary of So-Net Entertainment, introduced an iPhone app that allows you to animate your favorite picture and let it blink and speak anything you want, Photo Speak today.   Now it's available at AppStore for JPY350.

The app uses the company's state-of-the-art technology to create a portrait animation with an emotional motion from a still image, and it enables lip-sync with recorded voice.

In order to get the animation, you just need to shoot a picture with an iPhone-embed camera or to choose a picture taken.  After the app complete uploading it to the company's server, it will get a processed animation in several seconds.

The company is planning to enhance the app by adding features that allow you to add a hat or a pair of glasses on the animated result and to share it with your friends.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, Software by Masaru IKEDA
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Tokyo-based start-up Anydoor started a translation service using Twitter on Tuesday. It's named 140 Trans. When you post a tweet having attributes of an original language and a target language of your translation request, the service's participating translators will give you back a translation result on Twitter.

The service can handle 140 character long messages, which is the maximum limit of every tweet defined by Twitter, and now you may post up to three translation requests in a day and choose "translation direction" from/to a variety of 47 languages as of this writing. You can use the service for free, but you may give away reward points to the translator for appreciating his/her work, and he/she will be able to convert the points earned into cash via PayPal.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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