Asiajin

Nii-hao, Taiwan!

Asiajin co-founder Akky Akimoto is now in Taiwan. On Saturday, he was invited to have a presentation on Japanese social media and tech scenes at Chili Ideas Party, a serial meet-up organized by Taipei-based Chili Consulting[C] who has been serving Taiwan’s tech community. Asiajin co-founder Shunichi Arai and author Masaru IKEDA also visited Taipei to join the event.

More than three dozens of Taiwanese web service entrepreneurs, engineers and business developers came together at Chili’s office to learn what’s happening in the Japanese web industry and the mobile service market.

Inside[C], a Taipei-based and group-edited blog on social media and mobile app developments, has well summarized what we’ve been talking about. We appreciate their rapid work.

• 日本重量級科技部落格Asiajin在台演講速記：日本最新網路發展趨勢
  Japan’s Tech Blog Asiajin Visits Taiwan And Presents On Japanese Internet Trends [C]

You can watch the first ten minutes of the presentation below. (Due to technical difficulties, we have no recorded video for the rest of the presentation. Sorry for your inconvenience.)

The presentation slides that Akky has made and used at the event is available below. Just click on it to flick through. (If the slides are not appeared appropriately, check out this link).

See Also:

• CNET Asia: Akky from Asiajin on the Japanese Tech Scene

Tags: Community, Event Report, Japan, Taiwan by Masaru IKEDA
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A cabinet advisor unveiled recently that Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama would start using Twitter in the beginning of next year to let the people know how the government is working on political issues.   On the Christmas day in prior to his first “REAL” tweet, someone (an ex-theater writer a.k.a. a blogosphere fussbudget) has pretended him to twitter, which gave rise to confusion among the leading party and Japanese politicians using the service.

On 25th at 1pm, someone set up a Twitter account named “nihonwokaeyou” (meaning let’s change Japan), which was not confirmed as an official, put the prime minister’s portrait on the Twitter account profile and twittered, “Very nice to see you, this is Hatoyama.   I’m very pleased to hear your opinion via Twitter.”   He has posted more than ten messages and been followed by more than 10,000 Twitter users.

Many people have asked the cabinet press office if he’s real or not throughout the day, and they were busy dealing with those inquiries.   The press office and Twitter Japan jointly confirmed it as a fake account and prime minister Hatoyama had not yet begun using Twitter.

Dec 27th Update:

Twitter suspended this spoofing account since it was considered as having been used for “strange activity”.

Tags: Community, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Digital Signage Consortium[J] has set up digital signage devices at Akihabara station and on the streets around there, and is helping Japanese Red Cross to campaign blood donation by using the augmented reality technology.

The device enables face recognition, and it can count how many people have seen the screen.   When you stop by in front of the device, it shows your appearance overlapped with the popular Vocaloid character Miku Hatsune’s hair and the Red Cross nurse cap.

In Akihabara, there’s the best-known blood donation facility among geeks, which makes you feel as though you were in a starship.

Tags: Community, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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Yahoo! China[C] shut down its online photo album service last Thursday, and it hit tens of thousands of Chinese people using the service.    The users are blaming and demanding to get their photos back to their hands, Beijing Daily[C] reports.

The service was believed to be provided permanently for free, but it was closed in the beginning of last month.   That means an enormous number of the users have lost their precious memories at that time, they have no back up of the data since Yahoo China announces it as a permanent service.

Yahoo! China has set up an e-mail address for receiving the user’s request to give their photos back, but too many requests seem to cause the delay in responding, which angers the users further.    Lawyer Zhang Zhifeng (张志峰) from Unitalen Attorneys at Law(北京汇佳律师事务所) says, “Yahoo China will have to accept the criticism that they should have reminded the users of the announcement much earlier and more thoroughly.   The company will be responsible for the trouble.”

Via: QQ.com[C]

Tags: China, Community, Company, News by Masaru IKEDA
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The world’s most successful professional golfer Tiger Woods is now facing adultery scandal.   Taiwan’s gossip news media Apple Daily (owned by Hong Kong’s Nextmedia) made 3-D CG videos on his car crash and what might have happened.   Some of the videos were put on YouTube and marked 2 million views in the last ten days.   New York Times praised it as “the new world of Maybe Journalism”, and the other world news media have used the videos on their news commentaries.

Apple Daily set up a CG news production division consisting of several dozen animators/programmers and started news distribution last month.   The division chief says, they started it because the younger generation doesn’t read paper-printed news and its circulation volume is getting smaller day by day.

Tiger Woods crashed a car in the midnight.  His wife smashed a car window and saved him.  But many doubts remained.

Foreign media are in scramble to reproduce Apple Daily’s Action News on their shows.

See Also:

• YouTube Channel: Apple Action News (Hong Kong)

Tags: Community, News, Taiwan by Masaru IKEDA
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