Do you know a student in Japan who is under 25 years of age and who can create cool smartphone games? If yes, 9leap, a new program that just launched, might be of interest to you.

9leap is the brain child of Tokyo-based D2 Communications (D2C) – a joint venture between Dentsu and NTT Docomo – and tech company Ubiquitous Entertainment (UEI). The program runs from May to December this year, with the first part lasting from May 1 to August 31 and the second part from September 1 to December 31.

Applicants are supposed to create an original smartphone game (based on JavaScript) and present it to a jury whose members include, for example, legendary game maker Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the CEOs of D2C and UEI etc.

The prizes the successful applicants get include MacBooks, the chance to attend the Game Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco for free (plus there is a number of other bells and whistles).

You can check out details on the 9leap website as well as in this press release (in Japanese).

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Goo, a Japanese web portal run by NTT Resonant, a group company of NTT, announced to terminate their two sub services.

Goo RSS Reader

All variations of Goo’s RSS Readers, web reader [J], Windows application version and Japanese cellphone version will be discontinued [J]. PC and mobile web versions will stop on May 31, 2011. You may keep using the Windows app version, but no support will be provided.

In Japan, Bloglines got popular first as web-based RSS reader, then Livedoor Reader caught tech-savvy people. Later Google Reader is catching up. But as same as in English, RSS reader is not a prime tool for majority in the shade of social media like Twitter.

Goo ClipLife

Goo’s movie sharing service ClipLife [J] is also announced [J] to stop at the end of May.

According to Internet Watch [J], Goo RSS Reader began September 28, 2004, ClipLife started in August 2006.

As well as another big Japanese portal Nifty, those portals needed to have whatever new trending service under their brand, and that made them keep running those less popular web services for years. April 1st, the beginning of Japanese school year, is one good timing to cut them off and reassign their resource to something newer.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Haruchan (Haru=Spring, chan=casual form of san, honorific title) is a popular personified Spring character on public broadcast TV NHK’s prime time weather news program. She was made by anthropomorphizing high pressure system in Spring weather. Here is a sample of the weather report program,

On April 4, this virtual character girl began Twitter [J] @nhk_haruchan, and got over 20,000 followers within 24 hours.

Her first tweet was “Long time no see!”. Then she announced that her web page [J] has been reneded.

NHK featured Haruchan on their other advertising program [J],

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVlaBZTcYlw

As Haruchan only shows up around Spring, there are of course many other characters on the NHK news. For Autumn, there are Akichan(Aki=autumn),

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTmoGEls684

There are also Natsushogun(“Shogun Summer/Heat”) and Fuyushogun(“Shogun Winter”).

NHK’s another popular Twitter account @NHK_PR by NHK Public Relation section, who has 329,000 followers and is beloved by net users by its exceptionally casual and informal styled tweets, said by seeing Haruchan’s pampered, “I should have beaten her… Haruchan”.

See Also:

Japanese Web Community As Person

Kawaii Security – Over 30 Computer Virus Personified In Japanese Security Book

Tags: Japan, Person by Akky Akimoto
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Nifty [J], a Fujitsu-affiliated internet service provider/web portal, announced that they are going to close their podcast portal.

Podcasting Juice [J] by Nifty is one of the popular podcasting portal began in July 2005 in Japan.

The service was announced to be terminated on September 30th 2011. Nifty said that it is difficult to keep the service as the number of users have been decreasing recent years.

On their recent weekly download ranking, the top podcast channel is downloaded by about 48,000 people per week.

There are other podcast portal like Podcast Rank and mixPod, but none of them seem successful.

Yahoo! Japan, Japan’s largest web service, gave up Yahoo! Podcast [J] on April 30th, 2009 (began on May 24th, 2006).

Podcasting is less popular in Japan when comparing with US. Audio book is also unpopular in Japan. That is because car commuters are not majority in Japan, and when you commute on train with cellphone-wired, you prefer to kill time on mobile web services.

There should be also noted that some users who might have been interested in airing podcast moved to other live stream platforms, such like Nico Nico Namahousou and Ustream.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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