Mixi, a Japanese local social networking service competing against Facebook, announced today [J] that the founder, president and the largest stockholder Kenji Kasahara is to hand over the presidency to Yusuke Asakura.

Asakura, born in 1982, 30 years old, who joined Mixi in October 2011 when Mixi purchased his founding company Naked Technology.

According to Nikkei BP interview in 2010, he entered an Australian jocky school when he was 15, dropped out because of growing too tall, came back to Japan and went to The University of Tokyo with 2-years delay. While still studying, he established Naked Technology with other students. He once left the company at graduation and worked for McKinsey & Company for a few years, then back to Naked Technology in August 2010, became a president 2 months later.

The changes will officially happen at the shareholder meeting on June 25.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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According to IT Media [J], Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs(ACA, Bunka-chou) reportedly expressed at a symposium that they had given up their original public copyright license CLIP, which they researched from 2007 to 2010, and changed to support existing licenses, especially Creative Commons Licenses(CC).

Although that some criticizes ACA spent tax for such a project easily could be expected to fail spreading, basically the net users seemed to welcome the decision. It would have been a nightmare if many contents created in Japan licensed under domestic-only original license, though CC is (of course) not perfect solution for any creatives.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Cookpad Engineers’ Blog announced [J] today that their web-service has migrated to Ruby 2.0.0-p0, the latest version of Ruby.

That Japan’s (and probably the world’s) largest recipe web-service is one of the largest Ruby-based consumer web services. There are some incompatibilities from former versions of Ruby and 2.* series.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Rakuten’s Englishnization has been causing wide repercussions among Japanese business people. Nisshin’s new commercial film “Survive! Globalization” depicts a Japanese company whose head forces his guys to work in English in cynic tone.

# Nisshin’s special site seems to have its own video player and no official uploaded video are on YouTube. There are some that people took from TV.

The Japanese employees wearing a mix of suits and battle armors in the modern era, ought to charge against their new Westerner boss with English greetings.

The last message “Hara ga Hette wa Ikusa ga Deki nu” means “An army marches on its stomach.”

via ITMedia

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Popular restaurant review site Tabelog by Kakaku.com launched English site for New York City on March 28.

US version tabelog has en accent mark on ‘e’, under .us domain. Its design is totally different and in Western-way design.

We’re incredibly excited to announce the official launch of the Tabélog New York website! The new site is live as of March 28th. Here’s an overview of just some of the new features you’ll find:

• Optimized restaurant review format
• User profile with customizable cover photo, introduction, and titles
• Maps to visually show which restaurants you’ve reviewed
• Bookmarks to keep you organized

The launch announcement on its official blog

See Also:

Tabelog, Japan’s Yelp Reportedly Tainted By Undercover Positive Review Agents

Tags: Japan, USA by Akky Akimoto
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