Groupon Japan, local operator of successful digital coupon company Groupon, which drew cold stares by the new year’s trouble, was one of the fast web companies who started the earthquake victims saving program.

Their “matching gift” donation collected 100 million yen by March 20th, and Groupon Japan added their own 100 million yen on top of it, and they plan to donate it to Japan Red Cross, the page said.

Hiroyuki Nishimura, a founder of 2channel and a thought leader of Japanese anonymous web, on 13th(two days after the earthquake) tweeted to ask if any company running the matching gift donation accept his 10 million yen donation. He donated about the same amount at Niigata earthquake in 2006.

Groupon Japan’s staff @mariroom approached him on Twitter reply. Nishimura then asked if there is a way for him to confirm the donation is really executed from outside. @mariroom said yes, then asked to discuss in private.

What were discussed was not disclosed by both sides, but at the end, Nishimura reported that his offer was rejected by Groupon Japan.

After the rejection, Nishimura asked the same idea to DMM.com, who runs a popular online paid movie service and a competing coupon service. DMM’s president Matsue answered that it is difficult because the DMM’s donation campaign budget is already set, and offered he himself would donate the same amount privately.

Here is the uploaded receipt of the two persons’ donation 20,002,525 yen. The odd price 2,525 yen was by Nishimura, which has the same sound of Nico Nico, a brand name of popular movie sharing service Nico Nico Douga, which he advises.

via News Tokuhou

Tags: Japan, Joke by Akky Akimoto
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Here is some recommended reading, probably of value for just about everybody reading Asiajin: in 2007, Students at Singapore Management University have created a wiki called “Digital Media Across Asia”, which now covers a total of eleven countries (in English), namely:

• Australia
• China
• Hong Kong
• India
• Indonesia
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Taiwan
• Vietnam

On the site, the wiki is being called the “world’s most comprehensive wiki dedicated to digital media throughout Asia”, and I think this could well be true.

The wiki is updated 2-3 times per year (only the students themselves and faculty can edit it), and it’s a great resource for country-specific information on social networks, mobile, search engines, video sharing platforms, etc. etc.

Tags: China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, New Service, Society, Taiwan by Serkan Toto
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Nottotter.jp is a new web service using Twitter account to exchange your writing rights with other Nottotter members for 5 minutes. In other words, registered user on Nottotter can tweet on some other user’s account for 5 minutes.

A Hatena blogger id:hitode909 developed and released [J] this Nottotter, which means “I’ve taken it over.” in Japanese.

The service authorizes users by Twitter OAuth API, and gets delegation to tweet under his/her name. When you take over other users right, your messages are tweeted by that user with hashtag #nottotterJP. When the 5 minutes passes, the service tweets under the user’s account that “@you took over @theuser account”.

The service quickly spread among Japanese Twitter users, over 5,000 people registered to make 12,537 tweets under others’ name before the service was shut down by Twitter official on 23th, two days after the launch. Checking the log tweets showed who took over whose account, so you cannot be really anonymous if you write something really nasty, but such many Japanese Twitter users seemed to enjoy the confusion caused by this intentional changelings.

Here is a sample part of tweets record showed on Nottotter.jp site.

After the API suspension, id:hitode909 posted a reply from Twitter official to his inquiry.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Generally speaking, social profile editors are a dime a dozen. In the last few months, for example, about.me, flavors.me or Follr have cropped up in the US, allowing users to pull information from various social networks together to build a single online identity.

But none of these services have a Japanese UI or integrate Japanese sites, prompting Tokyo-based Clutch to come up with This me, a free service that is supposed to let users create a “cool social profile page in 5 minutes”.

The way it works is pretty similar to the US-based editors mentioned above: just choose a username/personalized URL, select a design, upload pictures, connect with your existing social network profiles and blogs, and you’re done.

This is how the social profile of Clutch CEO Yuji Nakanishi looks (here‘s mine):

What’s interesting here (apart from the Japanese-only UI) is that This me makes it possible to integrate Mixi profiles, something that the US counterparts can’t offer. Clutch says that they plan to integrate GREE profiles in the next months, in addition to YouTube, Flickr and others.

The company expects to have 100,000 users for This me by year-end. It competes with similar local profile editors like Nifty’s aboutme.jp or Iddy.

Via Venture Now

Tags: Japan, New Service by Serkan Toto
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Things haven’t been looking good for many Japanese VC firms lately, but that didn’t stop Tokyo-based e-commerce company EC Navi, which today announced the establishment of a VC arm called EC Navi Ventures.

EC Navi Ventures is set up as a separate company (also based in Tokyo), which is 100% owned by EC Navi. The VC subsidiary is capitalized at 100 million yen and led by Hidenori Nagaoka (who is the CFO of EC Navi proper).

What will EC Navi Ventures do?
The company says that it will invest between one and ten million yen ($12,000 to $120,000) in seed/early stage web and mobile startups in Japan, China and the rest of Asia. Apart from capital, the startups can expect support in other areas, too, for example business development or organization.

EC Navi is sure to be of help in this regard: founded in 1999, EC Navi is one of Japan’s oldest web companies. It already made various investments in startups before establishing EC Navi Ventures (in Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia).

If you’re an Asia-based startup interested in getting in touch with this new VC firm, you can find the contact information here (English).

Via Venture Now

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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