On Wednesday, Tokyo-based tech start-up in media rep service and speech recognition technology development Catalog just released the closed alpha version of the brand new service that enables speech-recognize what is spoken in a movie on the video sharing services such as YouTube and Nico Nico Douga[J].   In this release, the first 1,000 applicants can get access to the service to evaluate its functionality and usability.

The service is named "Moji-Moji TV[J]".   It captures audio in a movie and to result it as a text output, which can be used for subtitles in a movie as well as for describing and tagging the movie itself.   Moji-Moji TV also has a remarkable feature that collects people's names, newly-coined words and slang expressions from the Internet and add them to the dictionary of the service's speech-to-text engine.

Referring to comments to be given by the alpha test users, the company plans to improve and enhance the service for its official release which is scheduled in several months.

Incidentally, Google released a gadget called Election Video Search last summer, which allows you to search through a bunch of YouTube videos for what was spoken, using Google's speech-to-text technology (only for American-English speaking).

Tags: Company, Japan, New Service, Technology by Masaru IKEDA
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A Japanese company A2c Co, Ltd. released a new iPhone application which enables you to take pictures with 5 virtual girls. "Kanojo Camera" ("kanojo" means girlfriend).

You may choose from 5 different girls, each of who has more than 3 costumes, who can also change facial expressions. You can scale, move, rotate the girls to fit with you yourself on the photo.

The application is also sold to English market by $1.99. The English title of the app is "My Girls Camera".

I think this idea is an extension of Purikura photo machines which is still an important socialization tools for Japanese young girls. In decade ago, this western visitor guy enjoyed a Purikura photo with anime character (third from the top, centre column).

via Macotakara.jp [J]

See Also:

Official application site [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Following to Biz Stone's first Tokyo visit for media interviews and Tweetup event, media is reporting a lot about Twitter in Japan now.

Public, and the biggest TV station NHK broadcasts about Twitters three time in two days, each of them are totally made differently.

As a public TV, NHK usually does not show specific company/brand names, for example, on their music program singers even have to change their lyric if it has some brand name (like "coke"), which is the "fairness" they think.

However, on those programs, Twitter is introduced as "Twitter", the brand name of US private company are repeated a lot, which is very rare on NHK. The word "microblog" may not be understandable to main NHK watchers, elders so they did not have another way to take the trend, though.

Ohayou Nippon (= Good morning Japan)

On 16th morning (about 10 hours later the Tweetup Tokyo Fall 09)

What is Twitter?, Tweetup Tokyo, Cellphone site, Cereblities, Obama, train delay tweets, Tweetup Tokyo (again), Biz Stone interview, plan for pseudo cereblity and filtering problematic tweets

News Watch

On 16th evening.

A student user life, his users meetup, What is Twitter?, university class using Twitter, Iran, charity promotion, Tweetup Tokyo, studio comments (Obama, corporate account, crimes and risks. rather negative)

Keizai Wide Vision (keizai = business)

On 17th.

What is Twitter?, Tweetup Tokyo & Biz Stone, Similar to blog but 140 letters limit, Obama, a Twitter-holic's day, a camera shop's Twitter marketing and commentators' discussion (rather critic)

NHK effect

I am seeing more followers, who likely saw those NHK and other media news and interested in joining Twitter.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Mixi [JP], Japan's largest social network (17.4 million members at the end of June), yesterday announced [JP, PDF] they acquired a 20% stake in Pikkle, a Tokyo-based social gaming company that was founded in 2005. What's particularly interesting about this deal is that Pikkle was founded by David "DC" Collier, a veteran in the videogaming sector and a British national.

Mixi bought 385 Pikkle shares and paid 144 million Yen (1.58 million USD/1.06 million Euro), which means Pikkle's valuation currently stands at 7.9 million USD. Not bad for a 7-man start-up.

The money comes from the so-called "Mixi fund" the company started back in April and which is supposed to support Mixi application developers (background on Mixi's application platform). Pikkle is the third company getting money from that fund.

Pikkle's first Mixi app is called Dance Unit [JP] and was started on the platform [Mixi membership required] August 25. Here are some screenshots. I tried the app, it's pretty hard but fun.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Japan's best-known LBS (location-based service) app 30min.[J] (pronounced "san-zero minutes") allocated new shares to Mitsui Ventures (MVC), and Mr. Yohei Nishikubo joined the company as the managing director today.   Mr. Nishikubo is a venture partner of MVC and formerly served as the president of search ad agency and SEO (search engine optimization) consultancy J Listing[J].

30min. provides regional information services for PC, iPhone and Android handsets, and it shows you the listing of restaurants, shopping malls and must-see places located near you, based on a bunch of information collected from the blogosphere.   The company has 830,000 unique PC users, and the accumulated number of downloading the iPhone app marks 110,000.   By using the fund newly raised, the company plans to develop an app for non-smartphone cellphone handsets.

The company fundraised approx. USD275,000, and now its capital net worth is USD330,000.   The company's CEO Motoaki Tanigo[J](@tanigox) says, he wants to gain the software development workforce of the company, and to add new features to the app soon.

In addition to the company's CTO Noriyuki Nonomura[J](@nonomura) who has been solely managing technical stuffs on the service, Mr. Noriyoshi Nambo[J](@nambon), who's well known for having developed an iPhone app that shows you a list of the earthquakes happened in the day[J], also joined the company as a developer lead this month.

Via: CNET Japan[J] and Venture Now[J]

Tags: Cellular Phone, Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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