First half of (June) news which we did not write as a dedicated article. Continued to (Part 2)

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Ustream Only Women Pro Wrestling Starts
• Softbank’s Viewn Starts With Server Trouble. Masayoshi Son Tweets They Are Adding 10 Times More Servers
• Viewn Stops, Decupling Servers Failed, Son Tweets
• Gree Moves Up To TSE First Section Next Week [pdf]
• NetRatings Points Out Twitter Usage Passed Over Mixi, Bigger In Japan Than In USA
• Online Designers Competition Service Do-Des
• Yahoo! Japan – Taobao Press Conference was on Ustream
• Rakuten Opens New Technology Research Centre In New York
• Shibuya Karaoke Place Becomes Ustream Studio
• Amazon Japan Thinking Japanese Books On Kindle Earliest In This Year
• Mixi Adds Photo Sharing Function
• Analysis of responses to PM Hatoyama’s resignation tweet.
• iPhone/Windows Mobile NetPrint App Released – You can get printed paper at near Seven Eleven
• Social Weather Information Gathering By Twitter – release
• Softbank Announces To Sell iPhone4
• NHK Develops Camera That Can See Through Obstacles [E]
• i-Mode’s Father Natsuno Thumbs Up On iPhone 4
• Blog TechWave Begins TechWave English
• METI Sets Up “Cool Japan Office” For Exporting Japanese Contents
• HootSuite CEO Said 38% Of Traffic Is From Japan
• Geolocation Game Colopl To Start Open Platform
• “Win a Lawsuit” iPad App
• Fujitsu And Toshiba Talking To Merge Their Cellphone Business To Be Japan #2
• Fujitsu PR denied Nikkei’s report
• Aucfan Opens Chinese Version Of Their Auction Vertical Search – Aucfan China [Chinese]
• Mixi Voice Adds Twitter Integration Feature, Passed 100 million Chirps
• Neo Tamago Kake Gohan Generator
• Gizmodo US Blocks Japanese Readers. Force Redirect To Japanese version.
• Softbank Mobile iPhone App Had Security Problem, CTO Showed Ignorance On Twitter
• Cookpad Doubles Sales And Profit
• New Japanese Twitter Meme “Naruhodo 4ji ja ne-no”(= Yes, it’s 4 o’clock) – automatic tweeting service for it
• Nikkei Shimbun Frontpage Says Amazon’s Cloud and Yahoo! Japan’s Cloud Will Start Soon In Japan
• @yoshiori’s Wedding Party In IT Conference Style – Google App Engine/PayPal/JSON API/etc. – It’s announce
• Twitter Paid J/E Translation Service SekaiNow Launches – via Markezine
• Hatena Starts “Sponsored Bookmarks”, Initially With Oracle And Two Others
• Ustream Senior Evangelist Told How Ustream Is Doing In Japan

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Two male senior students of Tokyo Metropolitan University uploading a series of movies on YouTube under the name of “Dobusu wo Mamoru Kai”(Save The Ugly Girls Club) early this month rapidly called a strong reactions from Japanese society.

June 12th at Tachikawa station, those guys asked ladies few pictures with lying it was for magazine, then unveiled that they were trying to record disappearing “ugly girls”. Of course, the girls protested and demanded to erase the pictures, however, they also record those interaction and uploaded them to YouTube.

By knowing that some raged web users tracked those students personal information and publicized, the movies were withdrawn quickly [J]. But people found that the same group also made another movies such like running fake street donation, secret videoing women on train, under the name of “art” [J]. They told to the university’s inquiry, “We thought we could achieve some expressions by chasing humor happened from unethical behaviour.”

On 24th, the university announced [J, pdf] that those two students are dismissed, a graduate student who assisted video edit is suspended for one month.

[Update 2010-07-08] The university announced [J, pdf] that the associate professor, who was a tutor of those students, resigned under instruction.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Evernote‘s press conference was held in Tokyo on 23rd June, just one day before their second anniversary.

At the conference, Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin, who was visiting Tokyo, announced a lot of new things for their Japanese users.

1. Japan branch

They opened a 100% subsidiary, Evernote Japan. Evernote’s vice president Takeshi Nakajima, who worked in Sony Vaio team before, leads the local team. Japan branch is to hire 5 more employees this year and cooperate with US head office.

2. New feature – Japanese OCR now supported

Evernote now can extract Japanese texts from printed letters and handwriting images.

3. More and More Partnership with Japanese companies

In addition to the current partners like Canon(document scanner integration), Sony(Vaio pre-installed) and Eye-fi(bundled package),

Package ditribution

SourceNext sells a packaged version of Evernote “Starter Pack” on July 2nd.

Internet portal

NEC’s internet service provider Biglobe[J] offers Evernote to their customers on its portal.

Restaurant review web service

Gurunavi[J], one of the largest restaurant review site to add “save to Evernote” path.

Gadget integration

A big stationary maker Pentel[J] will make a new version of their handwrite-recording digital pen Airpen [J] which supports Evernote connection.

Evernote in Japan

Libin mentioned some interesting points on how Evernote is popular and getting attentions in Japan.

• Number of Japanese users is 350,000, which is 1/10 of all users.
• 18% of active users come from Japan, which is the second highest after USA(57%), more than the sum of following 10 countries(Spain, UK, Canada, …).
• Japan has the highest number of local collaborating partners
• Many Evernote books are published in Japanese, whilst no book in USA. – I confirmed at least 5 dedicated books on Amazon Japan. See below (translated book titles are not official but by me).

Pocket You Can+: Evernote

EVERNOTE Basic&Convenient Technique

Pocket You Can+: Practical Evernote

Realize Paperless! How to Utilize Note Service Evernote Is Must For Your Business Both Windows & iPhone Supported

A Textbook for EVERNOTE

via Netafull [J]

See Also:

Event summary on official Japanese blog [J]

Pentel’s release [J]

Tags: Japan, USA by Akky Akimoto
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Japan’s venture capital industry is in a very difficult situation. That’s, in a nutshell, the result of a recent Nikkei survey. According to the paper, investments from the nation’s top 20 VC firms dropped a whopping 40% in fiscal 2009 to $711 million. Compared to 2007, that’s even 50% less.

To be more concrete, the Nikkei says that Japan’s biggest VC firm, SBI Holdings, just invested $300 million last fiscal, down 27% year-on-year. Investments from the number two (JAFCO) and number three (Mizuho Capital) even fell 44% and 43%, respectively.

In a separate survey, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry found out that at $1.1. billion in 2009, total investments of national VCs were the lowest since 1995 (when the ministry began conducting its survey). In fiscal 2006, the number stood at $2.2 billion.

What’s more, IPOs in Japan dropped to just 19 last year – the lowest number in decades. TOKYO AIM, a new equity market for startups and a joint venture between the Tokyo and London Stock Exchange established last year, hasn’t listed a single company yet.

IPOs can be considered a “standard” exit for tech startups in this country and account for up to 90 percent of yearly profits for Japanese VCs – so that’s really bad news for everyone involved. The VCs, for one, seem to increasingly set their sights overseas. According to the Nikkei, the top 20 firms have pumped 40% of their investments last year into foreign markets, up from 30% in 2007.

Here’s a column I wrote about Japan’s VC industry earlier this year for the Journal of The American Chamber of Commerce in Japan; it might be of interest, too.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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It’s about time that South East Asia, home to 600 million people, gets its own web industry event. The Open Web Asia conference, which is going to be held in Kuala Lumpur on July 13-14, is the region’s first of its size: no less than 350 attendees are expected – I myself will be at the conference (as a speaker), too.

Supported by MSC Malaysia Innotech (an initiative from the Malaysian government), the general theme of the event will be “Web Innovation In Asia”.

Some of the topics to be discussed are:

• Overview of the Asian web landscape
• State of the venture capital industry in Asia
• Social media strategies of foreign companies in Asia
• Why millions of Asians access the web through their phones

plus there are a lot of other, non-Asia related topics on the agenda, too.

Here’s the (tentative) schedule for day 1 and 2, and here’s the (pretty impressive) speaker list.

Asiajin is a media partner of the conference, meaning we can offer our readers a 10% discount when you register with our promo code (90691). The regular price is 200 RM ($61).

Hope to see you in Kuala Lumpur!

Tags: Announcement, Japan by Serkan Toto
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