Google launched its price comparison service intended to Japanese market today, that collects product description and price updates from an enormous number of e-commerce retailers and allows you to find the cheapest price at a glance.

Google’s new service launch influenced the stock price of Japan’s largest e-commerce price comparison site Kakaku.com[J], it dropped slightly down to 380,000 yen which is lower by 55,000 yen compared to yesterday’s closing price and equal to that recorded in December 2007.

The following chart shows you the daily movement of Kakaku.com’s stock price during the last three months.

(Source: MSN MoneyCentral)

Japanese stock market considers Google Shopping might be a threat for Kakaku.com.  However, is the new service so influential as to press down Kakaku’s stock price?   The followings may be considered as threats for Kakaku.com.

• Unlike Kakaku.com, Google Shopping allows e-commerce sites to update their price listing for free.
• When a consumer makes a search on Google to buy something, Google Shopping search results will be answered prior to other sites’ results, which may cause the decreased induction to Kakaku.com.

However, Google Shopping lacks the following features (in comparison with Kakaku.com)

• No ranking of retailers dealing with the product you’ve specified.
• No specification nor details about the product you’ve specified.
• No other user’s comment/review on the product you’ve specified.
• No category menu

The Japanese love ranking things.   Without it, they can’t make their minds on which product should be purchased from which e-commerce site.

But Google Shopping gives you benefit if you’ve already decided what you would buy.   Because…

• Some of retailers listed on Google Shopping are not participating Kakaku.com.   There’s some cases that Google Shopping show you a list of lower prices than Kakaku.com
• Google Shopping collects price quotes only from e-commerce sites.  No quote of real store’s sticker prices is included in the results, which makes you easier to pick the cheapest one only from the options that you can buy online.

How Google Shopping will affect the Japanese e-commerce industry?

Via: Tech Seven[J]

Tags: Japan, News, Service, Trend by Masaru IKEDA
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Facebook has just released a new export tool to connect itself with Japanese competitor social networking service, Mixi.

The tool on Facebook, named “Facebook to Mixi wo Rinku”(Link Facebook and Mixi), will take you to Mixi API’s approval page.

Which asks the following permissions you allow to the Facebook connector to do on Mixi data,

• get nickname and profile photo on Mixi
• get Mixi friends(Maimiku) and group info
• get Mixi Voice(microblog) status/like/comments of yourself and your friends
• get/delete your Mixi Voice status/like/comments
• get Mixi friends’ update

When finished, your Facebook updates which are shared to all users, will be shared on Mixi side. Here, my test Facebook note is shown on my Mixi Voice,

What this tool do are all within regular Mixi API functionality, so it is possible that Facebook Japan just made it without asking Mixi.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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On October 27th, NTT Communications announced [J] that they would cooperate with Indiana-based ExactTarget to promote their enterprise Twitter client for customer service CoTweet for Japan.

They agreed to proceed developments of Japanese language localization and customization for Japanese companies. NTT Communications will provide technical assist, Japanese marketing, sales and Japanese support for paid Japanese customers.

The one-page Japanese site is in public under the cotweet domain, with an English version CoTweet screenshot and two English YouTube video.

via Asahi.com

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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An Engineer, who recently resigned Yahoo! Japan, the country’s most successful web company, wrote his experiences in his 4 years – as a foreigner in English.

From the article by Jon Keating (@emostar ), he wrote many interesting observations which can be applied to many Japanese establishment companies.

“Creating quarterly goals that must be met creates a culture of procrastination. Instead of making harder to meet goals, people opt to take the conservative route. This makes everything much slower and projects take longer than they should.”

“Paying hourly for overtime encourages laziness and procrastination. All while punishing the workers that are efficient.”

That’s why many Japanese work until the last train.

“Is it really necessary to pay someone to keep track of how much each printer is used, and warn people when the number of pages printed have increased over a monthly basis? I’m not sure you are really saving any money by doing that.”

I remember that Yahoo! Japan removed free water servers from their Roppongi head office (the rent must be pretty expensive) in early 2009.

At that time I noticed the incident because a famous tech blogger (subtly telling he works for Y!J) wrote an article “How to choose a good handy water filter for case your company remove free water from office”, and many other tech bloggers (vaguely implied they work for Y!J) made “Oh! You, too? My company also took away free water server” comments. I was amused to see it, but also sad that the top-level engineers running the nation’s most successful service got such ill treatment.

# this guy already left Y!J so I think it is safe for him to link

“Having everyone try to make bug free software is ambitious (i.e. impossible), but does making quarterly bonuses correspond to the bug count make sense?”

This was corrected by other that it is not by number of bugs but by number of failure on deployed services, but still…

Yahoo! Japan is a typical conservative Japanese company, which means that most employees are Japanese, work in Japanese language. There should not be so many foreign workers and the work style is not so internationalized. If he was a Japanese, he would probably not write these direct words. His this article was translated to Japanese by a blogger Nokuno and got over 1,000 Hatena bookmarks.

According to the database on Yahoo! Finance, the average age of Yahoo! Japan employers is 33.1 yo and the average salary of them 4,981 people is 5.91 million yen, which is 72,000 USD (for all type of jobs, but generally in Japan, engineers’ salary is not so different, even lower than average). That 72,000 USD is by recent strong yen, which rose 50% in last 4 years. It was about $50,000 value and that value stayed same for Japanese, even its dollar value became higher.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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I gave up counting how many Twitter books are published in Japan. There seem to be reaching 500 soon on Amazon Japan [J].

As we already covered before, more than 5 books suggest to learn English by Twitter, of course there are Twitter manga-s.

It looks like that if you include “Twitter” in your book title, the book will sell great, at least publishers think so.

This time, it hits on mothers bearing a baby.

Mama no Tame no Kosodate Twitter Nyumon(Twitter Begining Guide for Mom to nurture) is it.

The publisher’s note tells,

Twitter is a tool to keep murmuring. Often you may not get any responses, but tweeting a bit reduces your stress, organizes your thoughts. The best thing is that you feel being casually connected with people whose minds are close to you, even if the real distances are far.

Twitter saves mothers who tend to be isolated in modern parenting, and destresses them.

The book is on sale for 1,260 yen (US$15).

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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