Japanese "social illustration site" Pixiv continues to amaze. The site, which lets users present self-made drawings to other users and offers a number of basic social networking functionalities, now counts a whopping 1.5 million members [JP]. Not bad for a completely domestic site that's only available in Japanese (although  some foreigners exhibit their works on it as well).

Here's how a typical page looks like:

Let's crunch some numbers: The service was established in September 2007. Pixiv's user base stood at 100,000 in March 2008. In June 2009, the site had 1 million members, meaning it added half a million people in about six months. It took 838 days to go from zero to 1.5 million members.

More impressive stats:
Pixiv now racks up 1 billion page views per month (up from 720 million monthly half a year ago). Members post 18,000 drawings per day.

There are more social drawing services in Japan, but no other site can stack up to Pixiv in popularity.

The eponymous, Tokyo-based company has 20 employees.  If you want to know more, Wikipedia offers a great English entry on Pixiv.

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon's company which manages and sells cloud computing services like EC2, S3, CloudFront, etc., is turned out to open its Japanese subsidiary Amazon Data Services Japan at unknown time in 2009, talked by one of their two employees at Japan Amazon EC2 Users Group, a blog Publickey reported [J].

At the users group with 30 attendees, the only name-known employee, Hideki Ojima, a Japan marketing manager, who worked for Adobe Japan as a lead of developers marketing, told that they are seeking employees for several positions to expand.

He also talked that Amazon US recognizes Japanese enterprises need different approaches, that's why the subsidiary was established.

Amazon is said to plan its second Asian data centre in the latter half of this year 2010, following to the first one in Singapore. Ojima did not answer if the second location will be Japan or not.

Tags: Japan, Singapore, USA by Akky Akimoto
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