When I reported Amazon Japan's Same Day Delivery at the beginning of this month, I thought it would only be possible in a small dense country like Japan. I was wrong. Amazon US announced its same day service on October 15th in the following 7 cities,

• New York City – Order as late as 10 a.m.
• Philadelphia – Order as late as 10 a.m.
• Boston – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.
• Washington D.C. – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.
• Baltimore – Order as late as 10:30 a.m.
• Las Vegas – Order as late as 11 a.m.
• Seattle – Order as late as 1 p.m.

Whereas Amazon Japan seems to provide its deadlines dynamically on each product page, the US service sets clear times city by city.

The price for this option is $5.99, which is close to Amazon Japan's price, at about $5.50.

(proofread by Sean O'Hagan)

Tags: Japan, USA by Akky Akimoto
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As implied by teaser page, Twitter Japan has launched an official Japanese cellphone site http://twtr.jp.

Here is the teaser page changed to a guide page which has both cellphone site URL and QR Code.

The current mobile site http://m.twitter.com/, which is not really usable (it did not work with many of Japanese phone browsers) for Japanese cellphone users, now transferred to this http://twtr.jp, maybe for Japanese users by seeing locale, user agents or IP address (will be cleared soon).

Here is the login page.

And seeing someone's page.

It was not stable when I saw first time an hour before the Tweetup event, but later, I could play around and felt it is well considered against tricky Japanese cellphone specifications and styles. They are things like proper XML/HTML declaration for different carriers, using embedded style for phones which cannot handle external CSS, short cut digit keys assignment in the same manner as Japanese major cellphone sites, effective emoji usage for better recognition, etc.

The official cellphone site has a great advantage against preceding successful mobile twitter Japanese services such like Movatwitter and Movatter, i.e. no API limitation and direct access to the backend database. I did not expect that Digital Garage did this slick UI from the beginning, but this will surely encourage regular cellphone users to join Twitter.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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China's national copyright administration[C] announced the government would ban the market entry of online game services which are operated by non-Chinese service providers.

According to the country's state-run news website Xinhua-Net, the deputy commissioner for the sci-tech department of the administration says, regardless of whether it's an independent entity or a joint venture with a Chinese company, foreign-owned companies will not be allowed to run online game services by themselves, to invest game service providers, and to touch anything surrounding the business including technical support.

They say, the emerging growth of foreign game providers entering the country causes disturbing the social order and scattering unwholesome software titles including violent scenes and indecency.   The administration announced the notice to enforce the stronger inspection of imported online game titles, and it will strengthen censoring game titles made in China as well.

Some Japanese social network services already started their local business in Mainland China (refer to these Asiajin articles [1] [2]), of course they're not game services, but the administration's announcement must influence their future business prospects.   No public announcement from any of them was confirmed so far.

via The Second Times[J]

See Also:

• Xinhua-Net: China's copyright administration bans any form of foreign investment to online games[C]

Tags: China, Company, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Technorati in the US relaunched today, introducing a set of new features and a fresh overall look, and received a 2 million USD cash injection yesterday, but a few hours ago Technorati Japan has announced [JP] it will cease to exist as early as October 23. The move itself isn't too surprising to many people in Japan's web industry, but the speed with which Technorati Japan jumps into the deadpool is (that's Thursday next week).

Technorati Japan is operated by Tokyo-based Digital Garage, a JASDAQ-listed company that also takes care of Twitter's Japanese operations. But unlike Twitter, Technorati Japan is a separate entity that's 70% owned by Digital Garage (there's no "Twitter Japan" as such by the way).

And Digital Garage is in trouble: In fiscal 2009, net sales fell 13% year-on-year. Income only took a turn from red to black because of substantial Kakaku.com stock sales in May this year (180 million USD). Compared to 2008, the value of company assets were reduced by a whopping 25%. But there's also a relation to Technorati in the US: In August last year, Digital Garage issued new shares to Technorati Inc., leading to a 30% ownership by the Americans (which cost them 700,000 USD).

Interesting factoid: Digital Garage itself mentions the word "Twitter" 21 times in its latest financial report (ENG, from August), while the word "Technorati" appears just two times. So even though they wrote they'll try to move Technorati Japan "into different business areas in support of Twitter-focused efforts" (page 15), my guess is they knew what would come and they can now focus on making money with Twitter (no pun intended).

At least the closure of Technorati Japan probably makes another company happy: Technorati's main competitor Kizasi, a Japan-only blog search engine and aggregation service (review), shouldn't be too sad about the news.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Twitvideo, a new video tweeting service working with Twitter, was released on October 5th 2009 by DG Mobile Inc., a subsidiary of Digital Garage Inc., a Japanese Twitter partner which invested in Twitter and has been running Twitter Japan's localization and promotion since January 2008.

Using the site, Japanese twitter users can post and share movies/photos with location information from their PCs or cellphones. As it is a service of a Japanese Twitter partner, and you only need a twitter account (OAuth does not seem to be used), it might directly access twitter's user database.

A screenshot of the mobile version is here,

An iPhone application for Twitvideo is also planned, the release said.

DG Mobile also announces that they are providing paid enterprise account which allows bigger storage, offers customized company page and enables high density movie upload.

Although Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone denied "advertisement on Twitter" plan in near future, Twitter Japanese page has been showing ads for 18 months now, which Twitter US called "some commercial experimentation".

Digital Garage group also tries an official Japanese Twitter guide site Twinavi, Twitter group management service Twicco, which recently announced Twitter List feature may cover, but began November 2008.

Japanese is the first menu translated language for Twitter, which was done by Digital Garage, too. (Last week Twitter called for user generated translation volunteers for another 4 languages.)

(proofread by Sean O'Hagan)

See Also:

DG Mobile's Press Release [J, pdf]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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