Asiajin co-founder Akky Akimoto(@akky), Shunichi Arai(@araipiyo) and author Masaru Ikeda(@masaruikeda) are now staying in Taipei and will have a readers meet-up event on Sunday.

If you're interested in attending it, please subscribe to this Plancast link to keep you update with the latest information. (We'll keep this blog post update as well.)

大きな地図で見る

Venue: Mr. Brown Coffee Shop, National Taipei Univ. of Technology (伯朗咖啡館 台北科大店), Zhongxiao Xingsheng Station(忠孝新生站) of Taipei Metro
http://www.ipeen.com.tw/shop/33236

Time: 2pm, January 10th on Sunday, 2010, Taiwan Standard Time.

(The picture of Taipei 101 shown above is reproduced from Skyscrapers of World under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.)

Tags: Announcement, Taiwan by Masaru IKEDA
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Japan's second largest ad agency Hakuhodo DY Media Partners, Sony CSL's spin-out specializing in developing location detection technology with WiFi signals Koozyt and the country's second-ranked newspaper in its circulation the Asahi Shimbun jointly started a new ad service using the iPhone today.

The new service is named A-Clip, by installing the iPhone app and shooting an image of an paper-printed ad that you're interested in, you can view videos and other extensive information associated with the ad.

The first ever ad enabling this service is placed on the Asahi's morning edition of January 8th, and you don't need to scan any 2-D barcode but just shoot an image of the ad itself. Koozyt's image recognition technology built in the iPhone app will detect which ad you watch, it shows you a video associated with the ad on the iPhone screen.

See Also:

• Hakuhodo's Press Release: Hakuhodo and Koozyt jointly develop a movie ad distribution service associated with newspaper advertising[J, PDF]
• Koozyt's Press Release: Koozyt and Hakuhodo jointly develop a movie ad distribution service associated with newspaper adverising[J]

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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An interview to the president of Yahoo! Japan Masahiro Inoue (photo) by Nikkei Business Magazine with a catchy title "Google? I think none of their services are cool." is getting huge attentions in Japanese web.

To answer the interviewer's comment "By comparing Google's services such like Street View and Book Search, Yahoo! seems not to generate surprising services", Inoue said "Google's those services are nothing impressive for me. There are tons of things you would do if there are no laws and rules. If you abide laws, your options are restricted. You should not do what you are not supposed to do."

He continued, "Those Google's services surprised people are all in gray zone. Advertising on search result was copied from Yahoo!, Street View is kind of peeping, Book Search is violation of copyright law, lots of YouTube traffic are illegally uploaded. You may say that those are cool. But can established company behave like that? In Yahoo! those projects should be stopped by legal section."

Overall, reactions to the article from Japanese blogs, tweets and social bookmarks are negative to the president. Net-savvy people have been loving No.2 search engine Google and its enterprising spirit. Many comments tell that they have never used Yahoo! in several years.

However, majority of Japanese net users never express their opinions on those social media, or never knew what social media is, and visit huge Yahoo! portal every day, click ads and buy things online. National clients also prefer Yahoo! for their ads maybe because Yahoo! Japan is such a conservative company.

Yahoo! Japan goes oversea?

The interviewer Kei Ogasawara also asked if Yahoo! Japan expands to oversea markets.

Inoue answered that Yahoo! brand is licensed for their activities within Japan, and Japanese web market is promising enough to get more.

Interestingly, he revealed that they were suggested to go abroad by US Yahoo! before, which Yahoo! Japan disagreed with and was not realized.

He also talks on their original developed "Interest Match" ads system, and a plan to license it back to US Yahoo! in future.

Tags: Japan, Person by Akky Akimoto
4 Comments »

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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