Waseda says it wants to explore the possibilities of conducting cross-cultural research in virtual worlds. Students are also able to access the the private university’s digital archive via Second Life. The virtual campus was designed and constructed by Tokyo-based web company Mobile Factory.
Both the Princeton and the Waseda campus can be visited by anyone.
It was inevitable and actually long overdue:
Mega-popular video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga, Japan’s answer to Youtube, announced it will remove movies and anime clips infringing on copyrights held by various Japanese companies.
Moreover, Nico Nico from now on has to install measures to prevent uploading of copyright infringing content on the site. The three associations also said they don’t want to see so-called “MAD” video on Nico Nico if these user-made video and audio remixes violate copyrights.
On Thursday railway operator JR Toukaiannounced they will offer full Wi-Fi on the N700 Shinkansen bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka. This route is the most important one in Japan.
Travellers will be able to access the web in all seats for the first time in Japan. The Wi-Fi connection is even supposed to work in tunnels. The service will also be available at all stations between Tokyo and Osaka.
JR Toukai says they will install 32 hot spots in the 16 wagons of the N700. The company promises the service will be ready in March next year.
Movie and music rental store operator Geo said yesterday they plan to buy all outstanding shares from Posren (post rental), Livedoor’s online DVD rental service for 560 million Yen ($5.3 million). The deal is supposed to take place July 1st.
Geo tries to close the gap to market leader Tsutaya, which operates Discas for renting DVDs and music CDs online. Another competitor is DMM. Tsutaya announced a new distribution for HD video just a few days ago. Aichi-based Geo’s own service is called Geo Land.
Following Fenrir’s announcement of internationalizing their Sleipnir browser just a few days ago, now Japan-based Lunascape announced today they opened an office in the USA to promote their web browser of the same name more efficiently overseas.
Lunascape, Inc. with a capital stock of 300,000 USD will be located in Silicon Valley. Founder and CEO Hidekazu Kondo will lead the subsidiary. He will continue to direct operations in Japan.
Osaka-based web software company Fenrir announced on their homepage that they officially released the English version 2.7.2 of their Internet browser Sleipnir.
Sleipnir is particularly popular in Japan and according to the press release is localized for users in the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland, South Africa and the UK.
Fenrir says they want to add more languages gradually and hopes to expand their global market share for web browsers by an aggressive internationalization strategy.
The official press release can be found here (in English).
This month’s Tokyo2point0 event drew a huge crowd on Monday this week. Two main factors attracted over 100 people to come to the new venue in Azabu (an event space called SuperDeluxe): a very interesting speaker who came from the USA and the event’s 1st anniversary!
Cloud Computing the Amazon way
Jinesh Varia, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, delivered the presentation of the evening.
Jinesh, who is based out of Seattle, began by dubbing Amazon’s Web Services division (AWS) “the technology arm of Amazon”. He said Amazon began to understand the concept of scaling in 1999 and explained a single product page on amazon.com actually retrieves information from up to 300 different sources on the web.
AWS basically provides three different services:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon SimpleDB for data bases
The main point Jinesh made was that cloud computing enables operators of web sites to structure the development process more efficiently. He acknowledged SaaS shortened development time enormously but went on saying that it provides no differentiated value to businesses. According to Jinesh, SaaS solutions suck up 70% of energy, time and money in the scaling process and only 30% are left for developers to create differentiated value.
Supposedly, Amazon’s way of cloud computing is able to flip this ratio. With the Internet becoming more and more ubiquitous and bandwith constantly getting cheaper, Jinesh said the cloud computing concept will become easier to use, more personalized and cheaper in the future.
The main principles of cloud computing according to the speaker are:
elastic, umlimited capacity
pay when you grow
simple, reliable, fast
Jinesh said cloud computing enables every individual with a laptop and Internet connection to challenge even the biggest web companies. He closed his presentation with a few case studies, demonstrating which web services used AWS (most remarkably www.animoto.com).
You can watch his presentation here (video courtesy of event organizer Andrew Shuttleworth):
What Blockbuster Video is to the USA, Tsutaya is to Japan. The company is currently operating over 1,300 video rental stores in this country and boasts 27 million members.
Now, Tsutaya finally came to realize their future is the web: The company now wants to transform into this country’s Netflix - at least kind of.
And here is how they want to do it:
Tsutaya actually already began on Friday with offering high definition versions of hit US series, such as Lost or Desperate Housewives on “Tsutaya TV”. Japanese users can download the titles by accessing acTVila [JP], an HD video-on-demand service launched by the Japanese government, Sony, Matsushita, Sharp, Hitachi and Toshiba.
This means potential customers must own Internet-ready TV sets which is a clear drawback in my opinion. Netflix customers can view their streams on the PC or can choose to watch their downloads via the Roku set-top box, which is on sale in the USA since last month and costs 100 USD.
Tsutaya plans to expand their current repertoire to 2,000 titles until the end of this year by collaborating with Paramount, Warner, Walt Disney and NBC Universal.
Feature films will be downloadable for a whopping 735 Yen (7 USD, 4.50 Euros) and will be erased after 2 days.
I suggest you just have a look at Second Coa’s dedicated web page. In case you don’t have an account for Second Life, you can watch a video demonstration in English of the project (including more information on monetization, strategy etc.) here.
The first prize is 10 million Yen (approximately $10,000).
Applications will be accepted until September 16th, while the awards show will be conducted on October 19th.
Last year, Yuki Naotori from 7ns won the SUN/RECRUIT award with his Google Maps mash up called ONGMAP (thankfully available in English).
Disclaimer:
Asiajin’s Akky Akimoto will be one of the judges for the event.
PS
Is it me or are industry events like this pretty rare in Japan? I know Yahoo! Japan organized a Web API contest last year (in which Akky also served as a judge), which was never repeated.
