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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Tokyo-based publication and human resources company Recruit held a presentation and ceremony event introducing the fifth edition's prize winners of the Mash-up Awards[J] contest last weekend. More than 50 tech companies sponsored the event and their founders and directors served as the juries to evaluate nominees. An applicant for the contest must use one or multiple APIs provided by those companies to develop a brand new mash-up service. 346 entries were reportedly confirmed in the edition.

The picture shown above is courtesy of the contest organizer's Ustream live programming.

The excellent invention prizes go to the following five finalists:

• Social Combat V[J] (developed by MEX) - won the grand prix
  
  
  Media Extension, a group of three web developers working with an ad production company, introduced a social application of duke-out. The app allows you to set your character by picking up parameters from social network services such as Twitter and mixi.

• Cast Oven (developed by 100kw-sgss) - won the juries' special prize
  
  This microwave oven will show you a YouTube video which has an exact length of the time enough to heat a food that you wish to cook. You no longer get bored to wait to cook it up. This work's concept is to put the time for content consumption in niche segments of our daily lives. The Adobe AIR-app picks up the signal of telling you the time length from the microwave and finds an appropriate video from YouTube.

• OpenSocial Dashboard (developed by stomita)
  It is a web application that shows you a variety of OpenSocial gadgets. You can embed this on your blog or website, and you may have multiple dashboards and switch each of them to the other depending on your needs, for instance, for private or on business.
  

• radioooo[J] (developed by mizzusano)
  
  
  This is an Adobe Air-app and works with Twitter and YouTube. The app will find YouTube videos that you and other radioooo users have requested and play them one by one. All users can hear the same sounds and share the same experience at the same time, that is a very similar user experience which we have when listening to the radio. When you like a song playing on it, just press stand! or clap! button on the app, that will transmit a Twitter message with a hash tag which allows the other users to share your feelings such as "stand"-ing or "clap"-ing as though you were at a live house while listening.

• Travatar (developed by 1Pac.Inc.)
  
  
  If you install this app on your iPhone, your avatar in the app will be able to move to someone's iPhone when the two of the iPhone are physically closed each other. The avatar repeatedly keeps moving from someone's iPhone to the other's, and as a result, your avatar can be carried even to outside Japan while you are unaware. Each device of the iPhone does not communicate with the others directly (so, it doesn't use BlueTooth technology), every device transmits its geographical attribute to the server to learn if any other is located nearby.

See Also:

• ASCII dot JP [J]

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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Kaoiro by Ginghami is a classic stationery stamper which does not mark year-month-date but Japanese net emoticons Kaomoji(Facial Ascii Art), matches with your ":-)", "X-D", ";-P", etc.

# Kaomoji is different from Emoji, every single of which is a single letter like "A" and "1" and being suggested to be included in Unicode.

You may dial 7 belts having over 20 letter parts to generate 2,000 different facial expressions.

Only 2,700 yen (US$30) you can use your original kaomoji stamped on your paperwork in office, if your boss don't get mad.

If you want just digital version of those Kaomoji a lot, there are some generators and I recommend Okao Maker as it is the simplest. Your browser should be able to display Unicode font as many Kaomoji contains Japanese and other non-latin characters.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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