Google Japan launches a new service “Chrome Music Mixer” [J] to promote Google Chrome browser.

# may only play inside Japan

You may choose four tracks of music video from a lot of prepared sessions, let them play on four YouTube windows.

Step 1: choose the main track from five – telephone talk, steel pans, string quartet, human beatbox and bluesharp

Step 2: choose the rest three tracks from 17 choices from regular instruments like guitar/drums/flute/keyboard/etc. to skateboard, baloons, rice-frying sound.

Step 3: Name it, then play!

Here is my Asiajin mix “Happy Birthday” with human beatbox, baloons, skateboard and fried rice making sound.

Caution: As Google Japan says, it is recommended to play the four-YouTube music with over 20 Mbps bandwidth, Flash Player version 10 on major browsers.

The service is on http://www.morewithgoogle.jp/, which promotes Google services to Japanese users with videos.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The Hyogo police arrested a Nagano guy in September under a charge of running 60 of internet bulletin boards for users to buy and sell illegal drugs online.

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“No Drug” campaign in Japanese online game BelleIsle in 2006

This guy was expected to sell drugs by himself, but he talks that what he sold over the BBS were not drugs but salt and tea.

He gave his BBSs names like “Yakumi BBS”(taste of drug/medicine BBS, the Japanese word “Yaku” can be both good and bad medicines), posted ads like selling “S” and “Kusa”. “S” can be thought as “Speed”(Amphetamine) but he sent salt, “Kusa”(Weed) the buyers had expected cannabis but he sent tea leaves. “S 01 6,000yen” was supposed 0.1 gram of Amphetamine but he sent back 0.1 gram of salt. He confessed that he had earned about 15 million yen (US$178,000) by selling salt and tea. No single claim or damage report are filed yet.

Police expected to arrest him for drug dealing charge, but as there are no fraud victim and he himself did not sell drugs, it may result only in charge of “the providing aid to advertising of commercial handover” for running BBSs, which is the first applied in history.

via Mainichi and Nikkan Sports

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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When in Japan do as the Japanese do. Amazon Japan, one of the most successful foreign web companies in Japan, understands good localization.

At the year end, they run a user vote contest to set the best “bishoujo”(beautiful girl) character among adult PC games.

In Japan, huge number of adult anime PC games are sold every year. It is understandable that many of the consumers want to purchase them secretly, i.e. online. It seems it is big also for Amazon Japan. Their best sellers list show that the price range of the packages is between 7,000 yen to 10,000 yen (US$80-$120).

This time, Amazon Japan picked up 49 girls from those best sellers, and asked to vote for one character.

To Amazon Japan’s credit, the contest page is not shown to all Amazon visitors, so do not think that kids or others see it easily. You need to go down into “Game”-”Adult” first then see the banner to reach the page. And if you try to open any detail page of the games, you will be asked if you are over 18 yo.

This page was took up and buzzed among Japanese web users, because for people it was still surprising and interesting that even Amazon doing such campaign.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Tokyo-based tech start-up Conit launched an in-app purchase platform for the Android apps as well as the iPhone/iPad apps on Friday, in association with Japan’s largest ad agency Dentsu.

The platform is named as Samurai Purchase[J], and allows smartphone app developer to manage all their in-app purchases that are made by users via the Android and the iPhone handsets.  Purchase requests from the apps are transferred to PayPal on both smartphone platforms, furthermore, the Android platform is expected to accept the credit card payment option by the end of next month.    Monthly subscription rates for smartphone app developers start at 126,000 yen for using the Android platform, 136,500 yen for using the iPhone/iPad platform.

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Japan’s second largest cellphone operator KDDI and the world’s largest meteorological company Weathernews jointly announced that they had launched a new weather update service by using Stevenson screens built on about 100 cellphone base stations in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, which is named Soratena after sora (meaning ‘sky’) and antenna.   The service is available only on KDDI’s feature phone and smart phone handsets.

Every station is personificated and has a unique name after its location, and each of them speaks about what’s happening according to the weather conditions as if it were a human.  The installed sensors collect updates of air temperature, air pressure, humidity, rain, ultraviolet strength and sunlight at each location.

This is currently operated in beta and expected to be an official service next April. By then, additional sensor equipments will be installed at another 2,900 base stations nationwide.

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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