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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DeNA announced that CyberAgent and they are to established a new joint venture company at the end of April. The company will form an ads network for smartphone since May. CyberAgent will own 51%, DeNA 49%.

DeNA holds 24.48 million social network users on Mobage and Yahoo! Mobage, Cyber Agent has 13 million users on its blog and social portal Ameba. Both companies have been adding their smartphone support on top of their PC/feature phone platforms. They expect to provide 10 billion monthly impressions on their smartphone networks.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is known to like to think big, and the announcement he made today is no exception: Son said that he will donate a total of 10 billion yen ($120 million) of his personal money to the victims of the quake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11.

Son made the promise on a program that was livestreamed on Ustream earlier today (Sunday) Japanese time. He also said he is ready to donate the rest of the compensation he receives from his company - every year, until he retires. SoftBank itself will donate 1 billion yen, in addition to many other things to support the victims of the disaster.

Among Japan's web entrepreneurs, Son is in good company: Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, for example, pledged to personally donate 1 billion yen earlier - but Son was the most generous of them all so far.

Son founded SoftBank in 1981 and is 53 years old. According to Forbes, he is worth $8.1 billion.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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City dwellers are busy every day.   They don't have much time for reading books.   E-books make you possible to enjoy reading without stopping by at bookstores.   Skim reading, speed reading, anything else?

Bukupe[J], named after 'book encyclopedia', just unveiled a book curation service on Friday, which allows you to write abstracts for books you've read and share them with other users online.   If someone purchases any book via your abstracts, Amazon Affiliate rewards will be given to you.   Since next month, you will be also able to profit from pay-per-click ads placed on your abstract pages.

The company organizes a book club twice a month, where a popular book author is invited as a guest reader and presenter.  Their first club is planned to take place in Sangen-jaya, Tokyo next Saturday.

Similar to the service, in 2009, Asiajin co-founder Akky introduced a service for recording and sharing your book reading experiences via Twitter, which is called Yonda4[J] (Japanese) or I'vread (English).

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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