Asiajin

The recession, almost no IPOs, structural shortcomings, not enough hot startups to invest in: The Japanese venture capital industry is in a critical situation. The current state of affairs forces companies that have money to pump into promising ventures to go new ways, and one of these is a joint initiative by a total of eleven companies [JP] from Japan’s Internet sector.

Dubbed Social Application Forum (SAF) [JP], the initiative is led by advertising company Adways [JP] and venture capital firm ngi group. The aim is to invest in startups working on social apps that can be distributed worldwide, for example on Facebook. SAF’s official slogan is “From Japan, to the world”.

In other words, the social application bubble just got bigger. The Nikkei is reporting that the investors are ready to start supporting up to 50 different startups working on those apps within this year. The startups will receive marketing and PR support, technical “infrastructure” and money.

According to the Nikkei, the budget for 2010 is 1 billion yen ($11 million). The 11 investors plan to get together once per month to review business plans the startups handed in and choose which ones to support.

The SAF is obviously aimed at finding the Japanese Zynga, but I have my doubts (for a number of reasons) this framework is the best approach to nurture a globally competitive app provider. But Asiajin is more than happy to cover interesting stuff (if there is any) coming out of this initiative in the future even though I believe the apps will land on Mixi and other Japanese sites.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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UPDATE:
Over 3G, make sure to wait 30-60 seconds for the stream data to get cached. After that, you’ll notice a significant jump in picture and audio quality.

Japan has a plethora of TV channels, but the biggest battleship is NHK [JP], the country’s national public broadcasting organization. NHK itself operates a number of different channels, and one of them, NHK World TV, has just released an English app for the iPhone/iPod touch [App Store link].

NHK World is the international broadcasting service of NHK, offers programs in English and is primarily aimed at the overseas market. Their free app enables you to watch NHK World live, meaning you can access the channel’s entire program from anywhere in the world on your iPhone or iPod touch. (There are some exceptions for reasons of copyright.)

Just fire the app up and you can instantly start watching the program. This works even over 3G, even though you (obviously) get better video and sound quality via Wi-Fi (the app’s official description says that up to about 9.5MB of data can be received every 10 minutes via 3G). The app itself is just 2MB and includes a program schedule.

Japan’s large industry is notoriously anti-web, but NHK has been cautiously opening up to the web in recent months. It was the nation’s first major TV network that started putting contents online on an own channel on Youtube (NHKOnline). More recently, the broadcaster also announced it will live-stream events from the upcoming Winter Olympics NHK doesn’t show on TV on a dedicated website.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Serkan Toto
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Quick announcement for a Ustream event that’s going to take place this week:

Tokyo-based Beat Communication, widely regarded as being one of the pioneers in the Japanese social network industry, is organizing a discussion panel (in Japanese) on the development of “social media” in 2010. Beat Communication CEO Ryo Murai asked me to be one of the panelists, and I said yes.

Update:

The recording of the event is now available here.

Here’s the discussion in full:

The discussion will be streamed live on Ustream on January 20 (Wednesday), and here are the details:

Discussion topic:
Social Media Predictions 2010

Date and time:
January 20 (Wednesday), 20.30-21.30 Japanese time

URL:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/socialmediapredictions2010

Specific areas of discussion:
1) How will social networks develop in the future?
2) How will streaming develop in the future?
3) What will happen in the social application space?
4) How will the smart phone industry develop in the future?
5) How will Japanese politics and Internet change in the future?
6) Which social media services will be hot in 2010?

Panelists:
Toshiaki Kanda
Kanda News Network (http://knn.typepad.com/knn/)
Twitter account http://twitter.com/knnkanda

Hideo Yamazaki
Knowledge Management Forum (http://bizplus.nikkei.co.jp/genre/eigyo/rensai/yamazaki.cfm)

Jonny Li
Beat Communication Evangelist
Twitter account http://twitter.com/JonnyLi

Ryo Murai (support)
Beat Communication CEO
Twitter account http://twitter.com/BeatComm

Takashi Obara (translator)
Beat Communication Research Engineer

and myself.

The discussion will be held in Japanese. If you have time this Wednesday evening, please make sure to tune in.

Tags: Announcement, Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
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Here’s a news item of a different kind:

The next Winter Paralympics, basically the Winter Olympics for athletes with physical and visual disabilities, will be held in Vancouver between March 12 to March 21, 2010. Japan is sending a few different teams, and one of them, the cross-country ski team, is now counting on the web to get financial help in order win a medal in Canada.

The team has gained the support of Japan’s leading people search engine Spysee (their English search engine is here). Last year, the site has established a sub-service called “Cheering Spysee” [JP], which is a platform for people who chase a personal “dream” but lack the financial means to make it happen. Other Spysee users can donate directly on the site if they think the goal is worth pursuing.

If you go to Cheering Spysee now, you can see Japan’s cross-country ski team featured prominently in a dedicated campaign. The goal is to get people to donate 1 million yen ($11,000) in order to buy enough ski wax for the games. Everybody can donate directly on the site [JP]. The crowdsourced money collection has already begun, with the campaign ending February 24.

Spysee is also running a campaign on Twitter to “verbally” support the team. Just write an encouraging message to the team and add the hashtag #cheerpara to the tweet (here’s mine). The company plans to collect all of these messages, print them out on a big banner and give it to the athletes before they fly off to Vancouver as a final push.

Japan’s national cross-country ski team has won the gold medal in the Turin Paralympics four years ago, but the athletes, for some reason, have to cover most of the costs themselves.

Tags: Announcement, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Japanese “social illustration site” Pixiv continues to amaze. The site, which lets users present self-made drawings to other users and offers a number of basic social networking functionalities, now counts a whopping 1.5 million members [JP]. Not bad for a completely domestic site that’s only available in Japanese (although  some foreigners exhibit their works on it as well).

Here’s how a typical page looks like:

Let’s crunch some numbers: The service was established in September 2007. Pixiv’s user base stood at 100,000 in March 2008. In June 2009, the site had 1 million members, meaning it added half a million people in about six months. It took 838 days to go from zero to 1.5 million members.

More impressive stats:
Pixiv now racks up 1 billion page views per month (up from 720 million monthly half a year ago). Members post 18,000 drawings per day.

There are more social drawing services in Japan, but no other site can stack up to Pixiv in popularity.

The eponymous, Tokyo-based company has 20 employees.  If you want to know more, Wikipedia offers a great English entry on Pixiv.

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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