Continued from (Part 2). Last part of January news which we did not write as a dedicated article.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Akihabara Free-Of-Vehicle Sunday Held First Time In 2.5 Years Since Serial Killer Incident
• Many Ameblo Celebrity Bloggers Found To Write Their Successful Purchases On Penny Auction Services – More details
• National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan(NCAC) Alerts About Penny Auction Services via Sankei
• Cut Apple Vending Machine [En] – Banana’s one [En]
• Jiji Press Reporter Copies An Article From Kyodo News But Forget Erasing The “(Kyodo)” Credit At The End
• Small Spa Town in Nagano Gets New Visitors By Mimicing A Town In A Game
• Akihabara Hobby PC Assemble Space With Maid Massage
• Microsoft Taiwan collaborate with Japanese illustration SNS pixiv
• Facebook Japanese Active Users Passed 2 Million (on Socialbakers)
• Softbank Introduces Android Market Payment Integration On Their Cellphone Bills – it was the key for Japanese mobile services on feature phone being so profitable. it should affect good on Android, too.
• Toppan, Intel and Bitway to e-book store BookLive!
• KDDI au to start simulcast service of 52 FM radio stations for their smartphone subscribers. – chasing Radiko[En]
• Yahoo! Japan Records Strongest Q3 Sales And Profits Ever
• SoftBank rents iPad in Special school gratis
• URL Shortener Makes An URL In Japanese Phrase “I’ll Kill (your custom subdomain)”
• Takafumi Horie’s Groupon Clone Hangaku Tokyo To Launch Hangaku Bankok For Thai via Horie’s tweet
• Shared – Facebook Hot Entries Ranking – It counts most shared URLs from Japanese Facebook users.
• Rakuten Recipe Aims To Take Over The Top From Cookpad By The End Of 2011 – “That would be bad news for cookpad.”(@Serkan)
• Tenga Gift Service
• prime minister’s blog had an English version – it was not much announced to Japanese.
• Smart.fm To Be Changed Back To iKnow!. they are changing to a 100% paid service from march 31
• “Let it Sleep”—The smartphone application that can tape somniloquy
• Google Japan Defends Google Maps Showing Hanged Underware Against A Japanese Suer
• Google Translate Hates Facebook
• [Groupon issue] Flash Magazine Reports Groupon Japan Sales Increased Overlimit Coupons Without Shops’ Permission
• KDDI Releases CMs Critisize Softbank – 1, 2, 3
• Research: 79% Of Japanese Facebook Users (who are already using it) Use Real Name. 18% Think Facebook Will Be Widely Used In Japan
• Shiseido Runs J/E Bilingual Makeup Streaming Program For Asia via Markezine
• AR Fishing Toy Virtual-Masters-Real
• AmebaPigg Users broke through 6M, Virtual currency supply is about 600 million yen scale during month.
• Anime Usavich Car And Twitter Campaign Around Japan
• The China’s Imitation Gundam Statue Comes Back To Be Original – Kotaku covered[En]
• Japanese Version Of Baidu Library Blamed As Piracy – Nobuyuki Idei(ex-Sony CEO) Tweets He Would Discuss Baidu Library Copyright Issue At Board Meeting
• RecoCheck – Recruit Enters Geo Location Service via TechCrunch Japan
• SoftBank made SMS with Egypt free.
• Japan Ground Self Defense Force Enters Simple Game Competition, Both On PC And Mobile via Slashdot Japan
• “The Social Network” Movie ranked 3rd In 3rd Week
• Digital Garage Invests in US Mobile social network Path
• Nobot partners with Smaato
• Luna Luna Passed 2 Million Paid Members, Added French/German/Chinese/Korean Versions – Asiajin’s cover on Luna Luna
• Facebook Japanese Official Page Ranking
• Kids Comic Magazine (Weekly Sunday) Website Sets Interactive Nipple Hitting Button For Application Form – hard hitting takes you to an application form

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
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Clwit[J], a Tokyo-based company developing social web services and Internet security countermeasures, announced it would start an e-commerce platform using Ustream in April.   It allows you to integrate your website with Ustream and Twitter by just adding a line of iframe tag.

Mr. Yasuhiro Kunimine, the representative director of Clwit says, in their beta test, they confirmed adding the feature to classic e-commerce websites had gained their conversion rate by 10%-15% in average and 28% in the best case.   The service is provided on a revenue-sharing model, and no initial fee is required to apply.

Clwit has agreed with Ustream Asia, and you can choose an option of using the ad-free version of Ustream for the informercial video streaming.  Mr. Tomotaka Nakagawa, the representative director of Ustream Asia, says, “This is the first e-commerce platform where consumers can buy something after learning it via social media interaction.   I hope it will be a new business model using Ustream.”

The company expects to engage 1,000 corporate users by April, 2012.

Via: Venture Now [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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It was January 14th when Domino Pizza Japan started three weeks customers-involved web campaign “Ikemen Domino 25 Contest“.

The word “Ikemen” is a Japanese slang which means a good-looking man, believed to be generated about 10 years ago from “Iketeru”(cool) + “Men”(Japanese ‘face’ and English ‘man/men’). The contest is asking visitors to vote their favorite good-looking guy from 25 Domino Pizza delivery boys.

“Vote and encourage the one, whom you think Domino Pizza will be even more delicious, if he cook and deliver to you!” was the catch.

Soon after the launch, 2-channel users found that there was a guy who seem a little bit unique, the entry No. 15,

The right photo is his mufti. His favorite pizza is quatro giant.

2-channellers commented, “He must be the nicest guy.”, “I feel a sense of affinity only with him.”, “It is easy to imagine his eating pizza.”, “I sense pizza on him.”, etc.

# “Pizza”(precisely “Piza” in Japanese) is also a 2-channel jargon that describes a chubby person.

Worse thing was, the vote script did not have any protection against duplicate submission. Quickly he collected about one million votes from 2-channel supporters.

Days later, another guy, No. 11 got a million votes in one night. Then those net people started rumoring that the all campaign was set up and Domino Pizza already made a new commercial film with the No. 11 guy, though an official twitter account denied it.

Then, the official announced the cancellation of the whole contest due to “a flaw on voting system”.

The similar mass voting happened in November on a popular character contest over soccer anime Inazuma Eleven [J]. Net users voted sub characters to occupy top 5. [J] The organizing anime maker had offered to make new illustrations for top 3 characters as prizes for fans. In this case, after the contest ends, the organizer announced to expand the prizes for all of the top 10 characters, including non-rigged popular characters under 6th rank, which chagrined some upvoters [J].

In 2001, 2-channellers did the same thing against Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”. At online vote, a Japanese talent Masashi Tashiro was put up at the top until insiders noticed.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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