Asiajin

Japan’s largest social networking service Mixi is showing KDDI au(No. 2 cellphone carrier)’s new cellphone mail flat-rate plan commercial on its log-in page to 17 million users.

Although Mixi is a membership service, as it is pre-login page, everyone can see it.

KDDI au recently started its fixed rate internet mail plan “Gangan Mail”(gangan is an onomatope expresses going vigorously), which makes users can send and receive unlimited mail, including photo and movie with 1,095 yen (12 USD). Other big players, NTT Docomo and Softbank Mobile quickly responded with similar plans.

KDDI au’s TV commercial film,

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Recently in Tokyo, there was a marriage fraud case that a woman is suspected of having murdered her several boyfriends.   According to several news media, due to the effect of the case, Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten had been planning to launch an online marriage hunting site, but they were forced to push back the release date.

In this recession, young people tend to save money for hanging out with their friends, and now web-based marriage hunting services are much popular among them to find their future fiances.    But in the case, the suspected woman used those online services to find her boyfriends that she may have murdered, Rakuten is now working on redesigning menus and system architecture of the service to avoid possible provoking similar cases.

Incidentally, Rakuten took over Japan’s largest dating agency O-Net[J] in 2007.

(Click to enlarge.)

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Following the company’s stupid iPhone/iPod touch app serial release (like this), Kayac, a funny web app developer based in Tokyo’s suburb, just made something new to make our hard days more cheerful.

Tanimania, it is a breast enhancer that enables to make the breast of you or your girlfriend much sexier than ever – but unfortunately it’s available only on an iPhone screen, not real one.

Just shoot someone’s portrait including a specific part of her (a male’s breast is not recommended), and adjust the image position so that it should be corrected as you expect.   Additionally, the app allows you to put a mole on her face virtually.

Tanimania is available at AppStore for almost USD1.28 (JPY115), and the app’s title comes from Japanese slang “tanima” standing for a sexy woman’s cleavage formed by the breasts.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Company, Japan, Joke, Software by Masaru IKEDA
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Kohmi Hirose, a Japanese pop singer/song writer, who is also known by her joining Twitter this year, made a Twitter (unofficial) song, one of 31 suggested Japanese Twitter accounts, had the first “Twitter Live Concert” in Japan. (I just do not know if there were similar concerts in other countries yet)

The short concert with 4 songs, with about 200 audience who had applied to follow the special twitter account @live1113, only costed 140 yen (1.5 USD, seems to be decided by magic number of Twitter), provided free WiFi access and Ustream livestream, encouraged watchers to tweet.

All MC by Kohmi Hirose was done only on Twitter by using Macintosh set on the stage. She did not speak at all.

See Also:

Twitter account for this event @live1113 [J]

Hashtag #kohmi1113 search on Twitter [J]

Mainichi Shimbun News [J]

Snankei Sports News [J]

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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BCN’s cellphone sales ranking, which once was used to declare iPhone triumph in Japan, showed interesting status these weeks.

Last week, iPhone 3G (8G) sales was ranked at the 3rd, whilst the latest 3GS (32G) ranked at the 4th.

This week 3GS (32GB) takes back the highest position among iPhones ranked by 5th. 3G (8G) is 7th.

# iPhone 3GS are in supply so this is not by lack of 3GS products on shops.

Softbank Mobile, which exclusively sells iPhone in Japan, has been running “iPhone for everybody” campaign since early this year (2009-02-27), which gives iPhone 3G for free if you sign up 2 years contract. The campaign was originally set [J] until the end of May, extended [J] to the end of September, extended again [J] to the end of January 2010.

Softbank Mobile also waives 10 months basic charge for switching users from other carriers. Combined of those aggressive campaigns, they keep the most user-increasing carrier position in October [J].

[update 2009.11.16]

A NTT Docomo seller shows “Buy Docomo, get free iPhone 8G” signboard. Of course you cannot connect the free iPhone to NTT Docomo network, but anyway you need a Japanese cellphone to access Japanese mobile web… so does this make sense??? (photo by cooley)

See Also:

How to get iPhone 3G with $200 in total [J]

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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