Tinami[J], a fourteen-year-old illustration sharing site for cartoonists and animators, completed the integrations with Ustream and Stickam last week, and it now allows users of the service to broadcast live videos of their drawing processes via the two streaming services and to communicate with their fans.

Furthermore, the site introduced an API[J] for developers who wish to develop mash-up web services or collaboration smartphone apps.   Prior to the introduction, the API is provided to pixViewer[J], an iPhone app for viewing illustrations posted on the services such as Tumbler, PIXA[J] and pixiv[J], those on Tinami became available with the app as well.

As of March 2010, Tinami earns 8.7 million page views per month, engaged 65,000 users and stored 130,000 illustrated items, and it is expecting the API introduction will spur on the movement to invent iPhone, iPad and Xperia[J] (An Android smartphone from Sony Ericsson) apps in collaboration with the site.

The following is a YouTube video introducing pixViewer (for free) as an example using Tinami API.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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Softbank, a Japanese telecom and media company who will take over the next-generation PHS service called XGP[J] from the service’s predecessor Willcom in corporate reorganization proceedings, is reportedly considering to adopt China Mobile‘s TD-LTE standard instead for the service in Japan, several Japanese news sources reported.

If Softbank adopts TD-LTE, Softbank’s subscribers in Japan and China Mobile’s subscribers will be able to use the next-generation high-speed data service both in the two countries.

Some people say, Softbank’s adopting TD-LTE means to stop further development of Japan-made XGP technology.  In order to complete the turnaround, they’ll be forced to persuade Japan’s telecom authority who have issued a radio license for the development.

China Mobile plans test operation of TD-LTE service in three cities in Mainland China in six months from now, and in association with China Mobile, Motorola and Huawei, Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology will also run the test service at the site of Shanghai Expo 2010 which starts this weekend.

Meanwhile, Softbank announced consolidated financial results for the month ended March 31, 2010, and it tells us the company’s operating profit has exceeded for the first time that of KDDI who used to be second ranked in Japanese mobile industry.   The new subscriptions of iPhone and other Smartphones highly contributed to the results, Softbank’s CEO Masayoshi Son says.

See Also:

• TD-LTE: The most powerful weapon in the LTE arsenal against WiMAX (from Fierce Broadband Wireless)
• Another Way To Have Mobile Broadband, It’s Neither WiMax Nor HSDPA

Tags: Cellular Phone, China, Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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The Dominator of Japanese web Yahoo! Japan and DeNA, who runs one of big three Japanese social networking services Mobage Town, just announced to form an united front on PC social gaming. The new service tentatively called “Yahoo! Mobage” will launch late this summer.

According to the release, Yahoo! Mobage will have;

• social game platform has common accounts with Mobage Town
• transplanted games from mobile on Mobage Town
• Yahoo! Wallet payment service

They also will run cross-promotion to their Yahoo! ID/Mobage Town ID users.

Developers will be able to access the development platform early this summer.

Mutual complement of two big companies

If you see by stock value, Yahoo! Japan and DeNA are No.1 and No.3 among Japanese web companies among listed. Even though the number of registered user is ranked 3rd, after social network competitors Mixi and Gree, DeNA has been rapidly increasing their traffic in last half an year after its introduction of open social platform.

Yahoo! Japan did not have Yahoo Application Platform(YAP), which started on US Yahoo.com in 2008. So Yahoo! Japan has been just seeing social application platform wars between three social networking services which was started by Mixi, followed [J] by Mobage Town(DeNA), expecting Gree soon. Yahoo! Japan failed with two social networking services, Yahoo! Days and Yahoo! CU, despite they had the largest account base in Japan with Yahoo! ID.

Mobage Town, on the other hand, did not go well on transplanting their huge success in cellphone social games into PC world since their 2008 attempt.

So, this alliance is kind of those two successful companies admit their weakness.

See Also:

Yahoo! Japan’s release [J]

DeNA’s press release [J, pdf]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Sadakazu Tanigaki (official site) [J], the president of Liberal Democratic Party(LDP), which is a political party who had dominated Japanese politics for half an century since the mid-1950s and got debacle at last national election against Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), started Twitter (@Tanigaki_S), with taking back his former remarks that he would never use Twitter in January. [J]

So far, he tweeted 12 messages in four days, most of which are long, close to 140 limit, with no replies(@). He quickly got about 30,000 followers but only follows 44, most of them are LDP represents.

But one tweet [J] is to thank to suggestions to follow his opponent DPJ’s head prime minister Yukio Hatoyama (@hatoyamayukio, and he followed Hatoyama’s account. @hatoyamayukio has about 540,000 followers, which is ranked 2nd in Japanese only behind everyone’s hero @Gachapin.

As we reported on the beginning of this year, LDP’s head, Japan’s prime minister has been tweeting for 4 months now. We may see tweet-to-tweet debates between two big party leaders soon.

Tags: Japan, Person by Akky Akimoto
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A fishermen’s cooperative[J] in Yokosuka, a Tokyo suburb known for having a U.S. fleet activities, launched a fish and seafood e-commerce site that sells what have been caught in Tokyo Bay in the morning of the day. Fishermen on boats take pictures of their fishing results and put them on the website with retail prices before coming back to their home port.

Fishermen’s benefit: no fish broker nor auction market process is required.
Buyers’ benefit: fish and seafood you’ve ordered on the website before 9am will be delivered to your home within the same day. (It is expected to be delivered within 12 hours from being caught by fishermen to a consumer’s kitchen.)   C.O.D. available.

Fishermen post snapshots and short movies of the morning’s recommendations from boats with their cellphone handsets.

Fuud Corporation[J], a Tokyo’s tech start-up specializing in developing system solutions supporting agricultural and fishery business, assists the cooperative to develop the system.

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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