Japanese Facebook Mixi announced [J] today that they are shaking hands with China's huge social networking service Renren [Chinese] and Korea's massive social networking service CyWorld [Korean].

The initial project among the three is to standardize their social application platform, which enables third-party social application providers (SAP, Mixi calls) to run their applications over three social networks. Mixi is also thinking to make common basement for another social APIs.

The release notes that this alliance is talking with other major social networkings in other regions, like Europe and America.

Renren's company Oak Pacific Interactive does not post any news on this alliance yet. Neither does CyWorld company SK Communications [Kr].

Locals versus Facebook?

As seen on the World Map of Social Networks, China, Japan and Korea are few markets where Facebook could not penetrate into.

Facebook in Japan is far behind from major three local networks. However, all those Japanese social networks have a problem that they are hitting the ceiling of Japanese market, and working on oversea projects.

This time's announce does not include much substantial things. And it is unlikely that the alliance can become the single interconnected Asian social networks in future. But those local major players must be feeling pressure by Facebook.

Tags: China, Japan, Korea by Akky Akimoto
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[Update] Registration Begins

We had a first readers meetup in February 2008 in Tokyo.

This year, our readers meetup travelled to Taipei, Shanghai and will be at Singapore this September 25th.

We always wanted to have meetups with our readers but have been concentrating on writing more articles, as there are a lot of English-uncovered interesting Web/IT news in Japan.

But now, we get two new contributors who are good at organizing events in Tokyo. With Kozi Kageyama(@kozi ) and Hiroshi Asaeda( @asaeda )'s help, now I tell that it is high time to held the second Tokyo meetup.

Currently, we only fixed the date, Saturday afternoon, October 9th, somewhere in central Tokyo. We will let you know more detail and how to apply later on Asiajin.

Tags: Announcement, Asiajin Event by Akky Akimoto
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As TechCrunch reported yesterday, video publishing platform Ooyala from the US plans to bolster its activities in Asia after raising a $22 million series D round (the company is now funded with $42 million in total). TechCrunch quotes CEO Fulcher as saying that future markets include places like Japan, Taiwan, China, and Korea.

What's interesting is that some of the fresh money comes from Asian investors, namely Chinese private equity firm CID and Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV) from Japan. While the amount of money CID invested is unknown, The Nikkei is reporting that ITV (which is the investment arm of major trading and Fortune 500 company Itochu) has participated in the new round with $2 million.

In Japan, Ooyala has been cooperating with Osaka-based NTT Smartconnect since January this year and now offers a localized version of its service.

Ooyala is currently being used by 500 companies worldwide, but especially in Japan, it faces stiff competition by its American rival Brightcove. Brightcove Japan already boasts deals with over 100 local companies after it was established in 2008, funded by the world's biggest ad agency Dentsu, major IT outsourcing company transcosmos, and other local firms.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Nico Nico Douga is a popular video sharing service in Japan. Their traffic is second to YouTube, boasts over 18 million registered users, and known by its flowing comments over the movie.

Nico Nico Jikkyo(Jikkyo=live), which we covered a year ago, is a derived service which itself if just a transparent application displays user-generated comments, expected to be superimposed over terrestrial TV on PC. By that, they could circumvent a touchy copyright issue on reusing TV programs, but let thousands users watch and comments synchronously.

This new hardware, Digital Telopper by Entis [J], is developed for Nico Nico Jikkyo user, to enable to watch comments on your home TV without PC. The gadget gets comments information via the internet and compose it with video input signal for digital TV.

Nico Nico Douga cooperates and sells the gadget with discount. The introduction video is on Nico Nico Douga itself.

Entis says that they are planning to provide software development kit to enable to support not only Nico Nico Jikkyo but also any RSS feeds, 2-channel bbs and Twitter comments.

See Also:

Entis release [J]

Tags: Japan, Video by Akky Akimoto
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Twitter is Japan country. Just take these stats: it's estimated that currently around 10 million Japanese are registered and that 16.3% of all web users in this country tweet (considerably more than the 9.8% in the US). 14% of all tweets out there are in Japanese, more than Portuguese (9%) or Spanish (4%).

But what Twitter clients are the Japanese using? According to news site MarkeZine, the web version is top of the list, followed by the official mobile client. But in Japan, Twitter.com is not popular a destination as it is elsewhere (see below for another list).

Here's are the top 20 of Twitter clients used in Japan (quite a lot are homegrown):

TechCrunch just recently blogged a top 10 of clients "worldwide", which showed the same top 2. For comparison, here's that list (from Twitter.com's company blog):

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
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