Japan’s largest cellphone carrier NTT Docomo and The 3rd biggest social network Mobage-Town’s DeNA announced a joint venture worth 1.6 billion yen (17.7 million USD), which will run an User Generated Content site on cellphone since the first half of 2010.

DeNA’s mobile social network Mobage-Town has a user posting sections for novels, music and illustrations, on which 65,000 contents have been submitted so far. Docomo will utilize DeNA’s know-how.

DeNA and Docomo owns 70% and 30% of the new venture respectively.

There was a huge success by the union of the 2nd carrier KDDI au and 3rd (at that time) social network Gree, which pushed up the looser PC social network Gree to revive in mobile and pass over Mobage-Town, though KDDI au only has 6.89%. Now Gree is aiming the first position against Mixi.

See Also:

DeNA Release [J, pdf]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Hatena, Kyoto-based web startup known by their geek users, the most popular social bookmark service Hatena Bookmark, and recent collaboration with Nintendo DS on Ugomemo Hatena (Flipnote Hatena for oversea), announces that they are running closed-beta test of their microblog service Hatena Haiku’s new version Hatena Haiku2 [J] (currently shows error page).

Initially 1,000, currently 3,000 Hatena users have been invited and playing on the Haiku2.

Hatena Haiku is a microblog service which has a handwriting feature on Flash and keyword pages such like hashtag (search results) page give to Twitter users.

According to their release, Haiku2 is,

• invitation based (like Mixi)
• messages are private within your friends by default
• “Imakoko”(I’m here) GPS integration (from cellphone)
• “Tegaki”(handwriting) handwriting Flash (from PC)
• “Room” page where messages gathered by the same theme
• “Bunshin”(alter ego) to have different networks with different users (planned feature)

See Also:

Hatena Haiku [J]

Hatena Haiku2 Official Blog [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Japanese Governmental Gyosei Sasshin Kaigi(Regeneration of Administration Committee) [J] announced that they open “Hatomimi.com (or .jp)” from December 2nd for government workers, and in January 2010 for citizens, to receive opinions/requests/suggestions for cutting waste, absurdity, injustice and unfairness in government offices, to realize more efficient government operations. You may send information not only on the website but also by snail mail.

“Hatomimi” part of the Hatomimi.com is written in hiragana (Japanese alphabet). Although the document says “Hatomimi.com (or .jp)”. As it is still “domestic staffs” only, they do not need the site opened, however, all of Hatomimi.com and Hatomimi.jp domains (both in Japanese hiragana domain* and in romanized letters) seem to be squatted by others already.

I am unsure if this really can be a social driven improvement of transparency and disclosure in government, or leads a police state such like Soviet Russia (or name your favourite totalitarian regime) at worst. One sure thing is that no one involved do not understand the internet and domain system, with ordering logos having Yukio Hatoyama, the prime minister’s illustration.

If they have to purchase the domain from squatter, that must be the first waste to be concerned.

(*) Second level domains are available in Japanese letters, though they are very unpopular. Japanese top level domain(TLD) will be coming with other non-English TLDs soon, which I am sceptical its usefulness.

[Update 2010-01-27] It has been launched.

See Also:

Hatomimi.com release [J, pdf, only readable by Internet Explorer]

Yomiuri [J]

Mainichi [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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