Asiajin

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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Tokyo-based (and JASDAQ-listed) Index Corp. has decided to shake hands with Chinese retail giant Hualian to launch and run a large virtual shopping mall. Somehow surprisingly, Index, a leading mobile contents provider, will develop the site for China’s fixed web and not the country’s rapidly growing mobile web.

The main idea is to offer an online portal through which Chinese web users can buy products from local and foreign companies that wish to reach Chinese consumers. Index and Hualian announced the portal will be ready sometime next year.

Index says they’ll use the experience they gained from running an electronic points program in Japan for the Chinese site (shoppers will be able to collect points through buying products online or in the real world and redeem those points later for cash and other things).

So nothing really that interesting there. But Index and Hualian have big plans: The yet to be named virtual mall is expected to generate 500 billion yen ($5.37 billion) in sales per year in 2013. This means Index wants the joint venture to double Rakuten’s sales numbers within three years, coming from zero (Japan’s No. 1 virtual mall generated “just” $2.6 billion in sales, mostly in Japan, in fiscal 2008). Call me dubious.

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

Tags: China, Company, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Beijing-based serial entrepreneur Nick Yang (杨宁, see this ChineseSavvy.com article for more about him) got his third start-up Wukong Search (唔箜搜索) [C, mobile] go live in Mainland China.

In prior to the third start-up, he founded the popular web portal ChinaRen[C] for the younger generation in China, and succeeded to sell it to one of China’s best known portal Sohu (搜狐) in 2000.   After that, he launched a mobile content provider KongZhong (空中网) [C] and got it listed at NASDAQ in 2007.

Wukong’s idea was born in the process of developing ChinaRen, but we gave up to launch it and kept concentrating on adding new features to Chinaren including online alumni address book which makes the users easier to communicate with their ex-classmates.    Baidu[C] was still at early stage at that time, and no one knew what Baidu was.   I’ve never mentioned Wukong, this is the first time to talk about it.

Social network services and the Internet search will be two important keys for users to get information they want.   The mobile search service is entering the era of the personalization.  For the time being, Wukong focuses on providing young people with the mobile search, and will launch its PC edition next July.

In the interview with Mr. Yang, he unveiled the company was scheduled to fundraise a lot in the end of this year, but he pushed it back to the beginning of next year to get in time with the service launch.

In competing with other Chinese search services such as Google China[C] and Baidu, he believes Wukong Search will make good results since the mobile search market is still immature in the country.

Via: NetEase, Tech News Section [C]

Tags: China, Company, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Following Google’s Japanese IME (input method editor) newly introduced in the beginning of this month, the Japanese subsidiary of China’s largest website search portal Baidu[C] also introduced a new one for our language, which is named Baidu Type[J] (in beta).

By referring to the Japanese input method which has been adopted for cellphone handsets, Baidu has developed it with aiming at the user’s comfort when keying the Japanese language.   As well as Google IME, Baidu Type also uses a bunch of the Japanese expressions accumulated on the blogosphere to gain the accuracy to convert the user’s pronunciation-based inputs to Japanese words exactly as he/she wants.

See Also:

• Baidu Japan’s Official Blog[J]

Tags: China, Company, Japan, Software by Masaru IKEDA
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On Monday, CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) suspended 699 .cn domain names which seemed to be inappropriately used for porn websites just in four days since they had set up a hot line to receive anonymous reports about the malicious use of domain names.

And then, the authority suspended to accept new .cn domain registration by individuals.  Hereafter, .cn domain name applicants should be corporate entities and they will be requested to attach a photocopy of their company ID certificate to the application.   All .cn domain names in service will be investigated and screened by the authority, and those recognized as being inappropriately used will be removed from the .cn domain database if no correction made in five days after being warned.

In time with the deployment of this new rule, CNNIC punished three domain registrars in Mainland China.   NameRich (名富网) and XinNet[C] (北京新网数码信息技术有限公司) were forfeited the license to deal with .cn domain names.   UNNDC[C] (郑州大煌网络发展有限公司, their website temporarily does not respond as of this writing) in ZhengZhou was ordered to suspend all domain registration services including .cn domain and other TLDs.

Via: NetEase, Tech News Section[C]

Tags: China, Company, News, Trend by Masaru IKEDA
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