As we reported here, Yahoo! Japan is transitioning its search engine platform from what they've originally developed to Google's technology.   In opposition to that move, some news sources reported Japan's largest e-commerce giant Rakuten had requested Japan's fair trade commission to investigate a possible violation of the antitrust act over the Yahoo! Japan - Google tie-up.

Rakuten's opinion which has been submitted to the commission says, if Google's search platform will be deployed on Yahoo Japan,  it may help Google to affect this country's Internet community extremely strongly in terms of controlling search result rank by the dominant company.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Japan emphasized that they would deploy Google's technology to improve the search engine platform, however, search results would be modified by Yahoo Japan themselves, and Yahoo Japan's search advertising will be also provided completely apart from Google's business.

See Also:

• Is Yahoo! Japan Switching To Google Search?
• It’s Official Now. Google Announces Their Search Platform Provided To Yahoo! Japan

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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SeatNext is a Japanese web service for people who attended a gathering to make a seating chart with Twitter icons, developed by a Niigata-based programmer civic [J](@civic).

You may add a Twitter icon one by one, or as a space-separated-list.

Then you layout icons as the attendees seated. You can also add text labels for furniture or others (like "door", "screen").

When you save, the permanent URL will be generated to share with other attendees. The saved chart can be accessed via the URL by anyone. You send the URL to others by e-mail, IM or QR-code to let others see it.

Here is an example seat chart of where Asiajin staff were at Asiajin Meetup Tokyo #2. You may make another chart based on the existing charts. So multiple attendees are able to help each other to remember the missed people, make complete record of meetup.

The service is running on Google App Engine, supports iPhone/iPad. Although the menus and buttons are in Japanese, there are not many boxes/buttons so you may guess them. The author made it English/Japanese bilingual, so it switches menu by your browser language settings. (See the comment. Thanks)

The service was intended for making seating chart, but you may generate other charts which can be drawn with Twitter icons, I think.

via Idea*Idea [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Early part of October news which we did not write as a dedicated article. Continued to (Part 2)

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• ANA Hotel Promotion Flash Makes Your Dream From Your Tweets
• Kaupon Gets 200 Million Yen Invest From Globis Capital Partners
• KDDI au's New Android IS03 Features Lots Of Japanese Standard Features - TV, IC Wallet, Carrier Mail Address, etc.
• Game Producer Hideo Kojima Tweets About His Past Turned Down Idea To Make Floppy Disk Smells Blood In Heat
• Panasonic To Develop Rakuten Online Mall On TV
• Pac-man 30th Anniversary Exibition In Akiba
• U.S. Ambassador to Japan Begins Twitter In Japanese
• Net Scavenger Hunting Players Arrested By Making Groping High School Girl As Prize
• 2-channel Adds 8 New Categories Including Apple/e-Book/Google/Smartphone
• Comipo - Manga Authoring Tool Without Drawing - Patric Macias covered [En]
• NEC's New Desktop PC Senses Your Leave And Turns Off - ecology
• Samsung Galaxy S Docomo Model SC-02B Coming In October - Android 2.2
• Samsung Galaxy Tab For Japan in November
• Synergy Marketing Allocates New Shares To U.S. SalesForce
• New Avatar Social Network Hatena Land Is Also Provided For Nintendo DSi Browser - Later the Hatena Land was suspended, then turned off in two weeks
• Naver Japan Opens Topic Based Microblog Naver Cafe
• SalesForce To Have Tokyo Data Centre In 2011
• iPhone App Making Project On TV Apuri-do(Tao of Apps), twitter
• Yahoo! Japan Internet Creative Awards Nominees
• Docomo President Says They Will Sell SIM-card Only Next Spring
• Univ. of Tokyo And KDDI's Event "What Is Ketai?"
• Yahoo! Mobage Officially Open With 100 Titles via CNET Japan
• Gree Enhances Social Apps To Non-Game - Entertainment, Fortune-telling and Decoration Apps
• [history] Japan's First Google Adwords Was By Stamp Companies
• Mixi Phone Prototype Photo - Having "Nexus One", "Google" logo. The Mixi Phone was a prototype given only to him. Just installing Mixi custom application on Nexus One
• New Incubation Fund Targeting Entrepreneurs Born In 1980's
• Microsoft Japan Runs Internship Program For Unemployed Youth
• Livedoor GLS Loctouch Got 10,000 users. 370,000 spots. 200,000 check-ins since its July 15th open
• Yahoo! Japan's New Data Centre Plan In Fukushima
• Chinese Social Media Chart (by Japanese company)

If you want to know any specific news more, but unable to find them in other English blog/media, please let us know.

Tags: Japan IT Links by Akky Akimoto
1 Comment »

Tokyo-based Internet-enabled consumer electronics developer Cerevo[J] introduced an encoder box for livecasting on Ustream, and it was started on sale last weekend.   The first lot will be shipped in early November.

The new encoder box is named Cerevo Livebox and can be purchased on their website[J] for 50,000 yen each. (It equals to approx. USD610 and includes consumption tax.  S&H charges may apply.)   Cerevo Livebox weighs 117 grams (4.1 oz), gains Internet access via Ethernet connection or WiFi, and has a rechargeable battery with its lifetime of two hours and two pin jacks for s-video & composite video inputs.   You're required to set up a profile for your programming on Cerevo's web-based service control panel called Cerevo Life[J] before you start livecasting.

As for Cerevo's this new product, Ustream Asia CEO Mr. Tomotaka Nakagawa gave them a favorable comment that it was expected to be used in many scenes of daily life, such as broadcasting from live music clubs.

In order to give you an opportunity to find out how the quality is, the company has a Ustream channel bringing you live pictures from Akihabara.  (This channel seems to be in service 24/7, but it's temporarily unavailable as of this writing.)

See Also:

• Giving Characters To Camera Fits Anime Fans’ Taste?
• Cute Girl Duo Gets A Higher Attention Than What They Promote

Tags: Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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QR Code seems getting popularity in West because of smartphone. There are a lot of interesting ad campaigns utilizing QR Code recently in English.

There was also a news that Google's URL shortening service goo.gl supported QR code generation, then Bit.ly followed the trend this week.

Some of you might know that QR Code marketing were often quoted with "only in Japan" for years. And this is one of the unique thing you may reproduce in your language when your people want to know more and more about QR Code.

It is the QR Code Blog. It is not a blog about QR Code, but a blog all written in QR Code.

You know that QR Code can convey URL and/or mail address, but in reality, a QR Code can include about 4,300 roman alphabets, or about 1,800 Japanese characters (size of the code will be big, and error correcting capacity makes the maximum number smaller). So this person embed his article on the code(s) and published as "the world most unreadable blog" he said.

The blog started in September 16th, 2004 with this,

If you scan it (by Android/iPhone app for example), that will give you Japanese text, which tells,

I am trying to build a blog using QR Code. Please enjoy this inconvenient blog both for a writer and readers. It will be good if I can post every day.

Two and a half years later, the blog ceased at the end of 2006. Probably because QR code became too common and the blog could not expect further attention. On the last post, the author wrote long article with 5 QR Codes,

I double translate them from Code to Japanese to English,

Long time no see. How have you been doing? Time flied in 2006. Sorry I did not post since September. I apologize.

I began this blog in September 2004. It was the time when I was finally seeing real usage examples of QR Code. Now two years passed since I set up this blog with the motivation to pass on the wonderfulness of QR Code to many people, the situation around QR Code has changed significantly.

Now QR Code is recognized widely, used on food, magazine, outdoor advertising, name card, etc. Now QR Code reader function on cellphone becomes commonplace. Are you seeing much more QR Code recently?

In last two years, this blog has been taken up on a lot of websites, magazines and TV programs. I can not know how much I could contribute on spreading QR Code to be recognized precisely, but if I made some help, that will be my great pleasure.

http://(Akky: seems his encoding mistake)As seeing QR Code widely prevalent, I think this blog has completed its role. I today declare the end of this blog. I really appreciate you all readers who scanned and decode this blog with your cellphone or so. Thank you so much.

2006-12-31

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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