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Mangajet Makes Your Tweet Into A Comic-style Illustration


Mangajet [J] is a new Japanese service which let you make a Japanese manga-comic style illustration with provided characters, background images, baloons with your text.

The generated comic strip can be saved and shared on Twitter.

Following to the Japanese manga standard, text will be written in top-to-bottom direction so Western languages won't fit well, unfortunately.

The service was released as a promotion of a free digital manga material directory Manga Sozai Jiten, which is run by Datacraft.

There is Feel on!, a web service to comicalize your Twitter timeline as well (and that one now supports English).

via INTERNET Watch

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Not Only Tokyo – Twitter Japan Adds 6 More Japanese Cities On Trending Topics


Twitter added more choices of cities on its trending keywords in Japan on February 2. There were only all-Japan and Tokyo rankings before.

6 cities, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Sendai are the new ones.

View Twitter Trends On New Japanese Cities in a full screen map

There are many bigger cities than Sendai, but most of them are satellite cities of the largest ones (Yokohama, Kawasaki, Saitama, Chiba for Tokyo, Kobe for Osaka) so they were probably selected to make geographic balance. Hiroshima, which has slightly more population than Sendai, could have been chosen though.

I am unsure if different cities will make much difference on trends. We will report if there are anything interesting observed.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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e-Money Service Edy Rebrands Itself As Rakuten Edy


BitWallet, who runs one of Japan's most successful e-money service Edy since 2011, who joined the Japan's largest e-mall group Rakuten in January 2010, 2 years ago, announced [J] that the e-money brand Edy will be changed to "Rakuten Edy" from June 1, 2012.

Rakuten did similar renaming on companies they bought, like DLJdirect SFG Securities to Rakuten Securities, Aozora Card to Rakuten Card, E-bank Bank to Rakuten Bank, etc.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Istyle(@cosme) Goes IPO On TSE Mothers



(@cosme's tag line on the logo is "site of everyone's word of mouth")

Istyle [J], who runs Japan's top cosmetic products review site @Cosme, announced [J] on February 3, 2012, that they will be listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers (Tosho Mothers) planned on March 8, 2012.

The company was established in 1999, and its service @Cosme became the leading beauty information service in Japan. 6.2 million monthly visitors exchange makeup products reviews.

Along with electric appliance review Kakaku.com and restaurant review Tabelog, @Cosme is thought as one of the most successful user generated review service in Japan.

As the reviews on @Cosme sometimes highly influences the sales of cosmetic products, there were rumors that some sellers' review manipulation existed. Last month, after the buzz of Tabelog review manipulation news, one third party agent was reported [J] to ask @Cosme users to post positive mark with rewards. IPO must have been prepared before the Tabelog incident for long, so it is unfortunate for them if their IPO price will be affected by this word-of-mouth reputation troubles.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Japan’s Web News Week 5


This week's Japanese Web/IT related news which we did not write as a dedicated article.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

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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