Mutli-social media client Crowy relaunched with a brand-new user interface and web site today. The new design looks refined and much improved, with a new logo and color scheme.

Crowy is a browser client that supports multiple social media services including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, youRoom, Yammer, and Cybozu Live.

Crowy's New Home Page

Crowy Interface, before Refresh

“It was just a test project”

The lead developer Atsuhiko Kimra gave a presentation at PAX Coworking, a coworking space in Kyodo, Tokyo, explaining the changes and its growth process.

Kimura said Crowy came out as a practice project for a group of engineers, which consists of three developers. They chose a social media client as the subject because he loved the Hootsuite UI but wanted to integrate Yammer and youRoom into the same service. The development started in Summer 2010.

Crowy developer Atsuhiko Kimura, giving a demo

Collaboration Out of Coworking Space

Today’s big refresh happened because of a fortunate encounter this August. Another developer, Yuya Yoshida met designer Yutaka Fujiki at Open Source Cafe Shimokitazawa and became connected. They started collaborating on Crowy together from August, also involving other coworking place participants as beta testers and source of feedback.

Crowy designer Yutaka Fujiki & developer Atsuhiko Kimura

They plan to add full multilingual support soon, although most part of the service is already translated into English, Cantonese and Spanish. They are also fast at incorporating user feedback, improving the service day by day.

Crowy “Black Party” on October 24th

Also coming up is a party to celebrate the refresh on Moday, October 24th. The dress code for Crowy “Black Party” is all-black, and the black-colored food will be served (“Crowy” sounds almost like “black” in Japanese). RSVP for the event on Facebook and catch the latest features and their collaboration story.

See Also:

• PR Times (Press Release) [J]
• Venture Now [J]

Tags: Japan by Naoko McCracken
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The iPhone 4S is coming to Japan: both SoftBank Mobile and new provider KDDI au, the No. 3 and 2 mobile carriers in this country, will start accepting pre-orders from Friday October 7, as shown on Apple Japan’s website.

The iPhone 4S will then become available exactly one week later, on October 14 (as in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK).

According to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, KDDI will offer the phone in 1,200 locations all over the country, including electronics retailers. The company plans to boost this number to 5,000 as early as at the end of next month.

Just like SoftBank, KDDI will offer the iPhone 4S only in brick-and-mortar stores, not online.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Serkan Toto
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