Twiman by Fumufumu Soft is a twitter decoration service which makes Japanese Manga style cartoon with tweets from yours, your timeline and your lists.

generated page of Asiajin timeline

You need to log in the service by giving permission by Twitter, then the tweets on your timeline embedded into random manga pictures.

It seems to generate picture with all tweets including your friends' protected tweets, and they are only seen by you. To show good ones to others, you may tweet and/or paste it on your blog.

The manga patterns are being added by a manga cartoonist.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), the key station for their nationwide private TV network in Japan, will start broadcasting a new variety show bringing you live reports from all across the globe by using Ustream on every Sunday night in association with Softbank Mobile.

The program is titled "Kakumei (revolution) x TV[J]" and starts on May 30th at 11:30pm Japan Time.  Its correspondents carry cameras and small mobile equipments on their backs, and are sent to the world's hotspots for live video reports.   The reports from eight destinations will be covered in the program every week, and the program's viewers can comment on that via Twitter.

The broadcaster plans to hold a press briefing for the new program at Ustream Shiodome Studio which is located in Softbank's headquarter building tomorrow.   Last week Softbank announced it would take 19.04% stake in Ustream, and the two companies co-launched a local subsidiary called Ustream Asia for accelerating streamcast business in Japan and Asian countries.

Tags: Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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JAXA, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will launch the venus climate orbiter named "Akatsuki" meaning dawn in Japanese this morning.   It will be launched at 6:58:22 a.m. on Friday in J.S.T. or 21:58:22 p.m. on Thursday in U.T.C.    The scene of the orbiter's launch will be streamcast live on several major video networks.

Video source: ANN News on YouTube[J]

Meanwhile, the orbiter will also carry three small plates having the pictures of Japanese vocaloid character Hatsune Miku(see these Asiajin stories for her details) illustrated by her 14,000 fans with a collection of their 260,000 messages sent from all around the world.

Promotion video produced for collecting amateur illustration and signatures:

Tags: Community, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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I know we're a tad late on this, but Japan's No. 1 e-commerce company Rakuten announced earlier this week that all internal meetings will be held in English from now on. To say this is rare move for a Japanese web company (or any kind of company) would be a big understatement.

Rakuten has ramped up its internationalization efforts considerably in the past years, opening offices in a number of Asian countries, Europe, and the US. It made headlines just today with the $250 million acquisition of Buy.com, a California-based shopping portal with a large American and European customer base.

Rakuten said all formal internal meetings will be conducted in English to reflect the company's latest efforts to enter overseas markets more aggressively. Some meetings, for example those on board level, were held in English since January already. But now Japanese will be banned from formal meetings at department and section levels as well.

The company also said that even if all employees present at those meetings are Japanese, using English will still be a must. Rakuten currently employs over 6,000 people worldwide, about 5% of whom are foreigners.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Japan's e-commerce giant Rakuten announced today that it would acquire U.S.-based e-commerce portal Buy.com for USD250M.   Buy.com will be a subsidiary wholly owned by Rakuten next month.

Buy.com has 14 million consumers and more than 1,000 stores in North America.   Rakuten is running e-commerce business in Taiwan[C] and Thailand[TH], and also preparing for launching a joint venture company with Baidu in Mainland China(refer to this Akky's story for more).

Rakuten's CEO Hiroshi Mikitani announced this week that they had switched their official internal language to English, which is aimed at accelerating their globalization.   The company will also set up R&D facilities in Beijing(China), Pune(India's academic city near Mumbai) and New York City in a few months.

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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