Asiajin

Japanese women are known to feel ashamed even by their sound of peeing listened by other buddies. Portable noise maker Eco Hime (= ecological princess), which saves you when you are in the public bathroom accidentally does not have the built-in noise generator, are now visually improved as well with popular characters.

The characters are, Mickey and Minny, Winny the Poo, Stich, Tinkerbell, Cheshire Cat, Alien, Betty Boop, Elmo, Hello Kitty, Gachapin and Rody. It’s more fun to keep with youself.

These fake noise generator will refrain Japanese ladies from spending averagely 1-2 times of extra flush each time, which becomes 2,000-4,000 litres (500-1,000 gallons) in one month, as they say.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Although it is November, the season of 2009 ranking comes! Yahoo! Japan discloses their annual ranking by what keywords people searched in this year.
As always, all Japanese search engines and portals will follow, but Yahoo! Japan is the No.1 search in Japan, this ranking is one of the best to describe “regular” people’s search behaviour, except the keyword “Yahoo”.

PC search

As you see, most high-ranked keywords just stay the same positions.

Some notable changes

“HelloWork”(government job centre for unemployment) moving up from 20th to 13th may show that more people have bitter time this year.

Boosted web services:

• Kakaku.com(Price comparison service) 12th(from 22nd)
• Amebro(Blog hosting) 14th(-, out of top 50 in 2008)
• Han Game(online game) 15th(21th)
• Cookpad(recipe site) 20th(47th)
• “Zenryaku” for Zenryaku Profile(mobile profile site) 34th(-)
• Google Maps 42nd(-)
• Zozo Town(apparel mall) 46th(-)
• livedoor(portal) 47th(-)

Services Losing positions:

• Wikipedia 26th(19th)
• Gurunabi(restaurant guide) 53rd(35th)
• Rikunabi(job matching) 64th(37th)

None of “Twitter” or “Facebook” appeared on the top 100, yet.

Mobile search

On mobile ranking, 7 of 10 keywords remain from 2008 ranking. 3 bbs sites went away, one of them stopped the service.

As always, erotic words seem to be excluded from the rankings.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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BitWallet, Inc. [J], a company has been running Edy [J] since 2001, will allocate new stocks to a third party at the end of this year, about 3 billion yen of which will be bought by Rakuten.

Rakuten group, centres the giant e-commerce mall Rakuten Ichiba, purchased KC Card, a credit card company in 2005 (renamed to Rakuten KC Credit Card), online bank E-Bank in 2008, Rakuten Securities in 2003.

Edy’s device (boths card and chip in cellphones) have been issued over 50 million, which is bigger than any other digital money service in Japan. 6 out of 7 major convenience stores support Edy. So Edy is successful in terms of how widely to spread among people, but BitWallet has been recording red inc in 9 consecutive fiscal years.

See Also:

Rakuten’s release [J, pdf]

Edy Chief Strategist Interview [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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NEC Electronics and Onryoku Hatsuden developed a prototype [J] of remote control which is powered by the movement of user’s button-push actions.

User actions produce electrical energy, and enable the controller to turn on/off, change volume and switch channels without dry-cell batteries. Both companies are to promote the technology to TV set vendors, to realize it into practical use in 2011.

via Asahi.com [J]

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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