The birth rate keeps lower number in Japan, which causes more elementary and junior high schools to be shut down across the nation.   Especially in the highly populated areas, these ex-school buildings turned to be used for artist’s studios, SOHO for tech entrepreneurs and coffee shops filling the lessee’s stomachs with great meals.

In mid-May, at 3331 Arts Chiyoda[J] which used to be a junior high school in Akihabara and has been renovated, there will be “The Soldering Cafe (Handazuke Cafe) [J]” where people can enjoy  their e-craft kitting and communicate with another companions having the same interest.  In the future, the cafe’s founder and e-kit online retailer Switch Science[J] (frequently witnessed at O’reilly’s Make: events) expects to provide tools like a 3D printer and a laser cutter which are too expensive to be owned by individuals.   It is expected anyone is allowed to use the facility by paying the admission fee for as little as a buck.

The cafe has not yet been opened, but a CCTV camera installed there is already Ustreamed 24 hours a day. (probably for preventing on prowlers and sneak thieves.)

Author’s note:  The Soldering Cafe introduced above can be considered as a place for kit assemblers in Akihabara.  In Tokyo, there’s another place for more general purposes in the stylish district of Shirokane, which is called Tokyo Hackerspace where a number of tech and social events are being held mainly by Western people and multi-lingual Japanese.

Tags: Community, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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As we reported last month, one of only 6 Google presidents Koichiro Tsujino left Google Japan at the end of April.

This leave is confirmed both on the Google’s executive list, on which no more Google Japan president exists, and Tsujino’s tweet [J],

On that tweet, he said that the day (30th April, Sunday) was his last day at Google, thanked to followers and people had made business with him. He also wrote that his twitter account had been opened as an individual so he would keep using it.

Apart from the first Nikkei’s report, there are almost no news talking about this leave and abolishing of Google Japan’s president position. There seem no company release on that. Search on “Google” News gives me no results besides two Google’s release under Tsujino’s name during April [J]. So Google Japan’s removing local president title is not a news at all.

Google Japan’s official blog also does not tell anything. The article on the April 30th is to introduce their improved local movie search. When comparing with US companies, it is true that Japanese presidents silently leave, no last greetings on company website and/or blog. But this is too silent even in Japan.

By the way, on last month, I counted 6 president title holders on the Google’s list, but now there are only 3. Two co-founders and the president of Enterprise Dave Girouard. I guess another disappeared one is Google.org’s president, but cannot remember what was the 6th one.

Anyway, Google’s management seem to become even flatter now.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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One major difference between Japanese bloggers and those elsewhere is that not too few Japanese writers seem to be obsessed with food, filling their blogs with pictures of their dinner, lunch boxes, favorite snacks etc. shot from all angles. Here‘s a Japanese blog that even solely focuses on lunch boxes (and this is just one example).

But the obsession doesn’t stop there. There’s a service called Oishiku Henkan (“Yummy Converter”), which boosts the quality of any picture of a food item you upload before you post it on your blog. And Japan is the only country in the world that has a listed recipe site (Cookpad is currently worth $360 million and is, if you believe Alexa, the country’s No. 47 website).

And Japan got another three food-related web services last month, Rapeko (a Twitter mashup),  FoodLog (a service that keeps track of your eating habits and that just relaunched), and EatNow (a Facebook and mobile app that’s also available in English). Just like Foodspotting or the newly launched Fiddme from the US and Israel, these services all aim at helping users make their “food experience” public online.

Rapeko

The way Rapeko works is pretty simple: Shoot a picture of your lunch and upload it to Twitter via Rapeko for your followers to see and drool about. After the upload, each lunch picture gets its own page on Rapeko that again shows the lunch and pulls all related information from Twitter (mentions, retweets etc.) – see below for an example.

Rapeko is the brain child of func09 (@func09).

FoodLog

FoodLog has four distinct goals: The service wants to serve as a “world map for foods”, a platform for communication about food, a diary that keeps track of what you eat, and an information service for food.

Users can basically upload pictures of anything they eat or drink (from the PC or mobile) and all pictures can be “geo-tagged” to make things a bit more interesting (here‘s the FoodLog world map). Users can get an account to upload pictures, which are then sorted by the time of day. This person, for example, had noodles and tempura for lunch, followed by sushi and other side dishes for dinner.

As the name suggests, FoodLog keeps track of everything the users eat and drink for future reference. The “image processing” part of the service, however, doesn’t work too well. It’s supposed to make it possible to analyze meals shown on a picture and then list up various “nutritional information” automatically.

FoodLog is run by a company called foo.log, a University of Tokyo spin-off. An English version is apparently already in the works.

EatNow

EatNow is available on Facebook, for the iPhone, and for Android. The basic idea is to share what you eat with your friends by uploading pictures of your food and commenting on pictures from others. EatNow lets you browse through pictures from unknown users and keeps track of what you eat, too.

EatNow is offered by FAIS un REVE and Conit.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Serkan Toto
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