JKT48, the Indonesian sister band of ultra-popular Japanese girl group AKB48 (Asiajin), is promoting Rakuten Belanja Online, Rakuten's joint venture with Jakarta-based media powerhouse PT Global Mediacom, on Indonesian TV.

In the 30-second commercial, various members of the group can be seen wearing different clothes and accessories and using gadgets - and apparently all items can be bought on the site.

Rakuten Belanja Online was first announced back in December 2010 and began operations in June 2011.

Here's the JKT48 TV spot:

Tags: Indonesia, Japan, News, Video by Serkan Toto
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Pixiv, the most popular of Japan's many social drawing services, announced [ENG] it hit an amazing four million registered users last Saturday (January 28).

It took the site, which launched on September 10 in 2007, exactly 1,602 days to reach that milestone. That's about 2,500 users per day - not bad at all, especially for a niche site, over such a long period.

Pixiv got its first million users in June 2009, reached 2 million users in May 2010 and hit 3 million users in March 2011. With 4 million users, roughly 4% of Japan's online population have now registered for the service.

Users are generating 2.8 billion page views per month and have submitted a staggering 24.5 million works so far.

You can read more about Pixiv in TechCrunch.com's recent article, on Asiajin, or over on Wikipedia.

Registration in English is possible here.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Hulu Japan, actvila, and other existing video content providers are getting competition soon: a total of seven Japanese companies are currently preparing a video-on-demand service for connected TVs that's scheduled to launch on April 2 this year.

Dubbed "Motto TV" [JP, PDF], the service is backed by:

• advertising agency Dentsu
• Nippon Television Network
• TV Asahi
• Tokyo Broadcasting System Television
• TV Tokyo
• Fuji Television Network
• NHK

What's especially interesting here is that not only five commercial TV networks are taking part, but also NHK, Japan's national public broadcasting organization.

NHK alone is ready to contribute a total of about 4,000 shows to the 10,500 programs Motto TV will start off with. Users will need to own compatible TV sets that are expected to go on sale from April.

Motto TV programs can be selected via the remote control, for example anime shows, TV series, or comedy programs. Fees vary, depending on the program itself and the station that's broadcasting it.

Users can browse through the content by selecting different genres, entering key words, or accessing rankings from the menu.

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Serkan Toto
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As the country's biggest website, Yahoo Japan is constantly rolling out new products like mobile apps, social networking services or games. Some of them fail, and some of them turn out to be successful: Yahoo Box!, the online storage solution Yahoo Japan launched in October, belongs to the latter group.

The company pushed out a blog post, saying that Yahoo Box topped one million users - just three months after release. A very solid number, given how crowded the online storage space is. Just two examples: Naver Japan is offering 30GB for free, while Dropbox is partly localized and already popular in this country, too.

To recap, all Yahoo Japan ID users get 5GB for free, while all Yahoo Japan premium ID holders can use 50GB for free. 1,000GB are priced at 300 Yen (US$3.90) per month for premium members and at 1,000 Yen (US$13) for regular Yahoo Japan users.

According to Yahoo Japan, they have more users for the paid plan (51%) than for the free plan (49%) - this sounds high but is apparently the company factoring all premium members using the service.

Yahoo Box is mainly used for images (65.4%), documents (8.2%), music files (3.4%), and videos (0.7%).

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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If you're an Android user, consider yourself a geek, understand Japanese, and need an appropriate home replacement screen on your handset, consider downloading Himasere. The app was released on the Android Market earlier this week by Tokyo-based tech company Ubiquitous Entertainment.

The idea here is to make it as easy as possible to access technology-related news and information (plus a game portal), just by flicking through the following sites from a single app:

• Weekly ASCII - PLUS (tech news)
• Yahoo Japan News - Topics
• Hatena Bookmarks (background on Hatena in English)
• Togetter (the English version of this Twitter curation service is called Chirpstory)
• TechCrunch Japan
• Engadget Japanese
• wise9 (blog specifically aimed at young game devs)
• Gizmodo Japan

If you had enough of reading news, you can flick through to 9leap (background in English), a game portal that lets you choose between 500+ games, which can all be played right from within the app:

Himasere supports Android 2.2 and up and is available for free on the Android Market.

Here is Ubiquitous Entertainment's official promo video for the app:

Tags: Android, Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service by Serkan Toto
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