Asiajin

This month’s Tokyo2point0 was held at Nishiazabu Super Deluxe with two sessions.

Google: Programming the Cloud

After (very) short talk on marketing pitch of Google Cloud usage, Gregor Hohpe from Google Inc. talked on technical/architectual advantages of Google engineering system and external services.

It is explained that the characteristics of Google’s services are formed by concentrating on getting “roughly correct”, contrary to strict system such like used for money handling system.

Technologies for Google internal

Four technologies support it are drilled down.

• Google File System(GFS)
• Bigtable
• MapReduce
• Sawzall

For Google, Peta Byte (1000 Terabytes) is the common unit to handle. These tools are designed for taking care those massive data processing on thousands of servers.

Google Technologies opened to outside

Google Data API including Calendar API and Google App Engine were explained with sample application demo.

Korean Internet Ventures

Andy Lee, Softbank Media Lab in Korea was connected to the room via Skype Video Chat, introduced three Korean startups by showing their English demo videos.

All of three venture service are related with visual content creating. Drawing, movie and sound things. The used demonstration video are hosted on Tokyo2point0 website.

• Sketchplan (video)
• Kloseup [Korean] (video)
• Storyberry [Korean] (video)

All services are run in Korean so far. Andy said that it is possible some of them will make Japanese localization in future.

Probably because of the internet lag, and the style of presentations by videos, there could not be active discussions between remote Korea and the conference room. But it was a good trial. I hope we will see another improved session with somewhere oversea.

Tags: Event Report, Japan, Korea by Akky Akimoto
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The biggest PHP community conference in Japan, PHP Conference 2008 was held on 21th July2008 (Sea Day, national holiday) at Kamata, Tokyo. There were 500 PHP engineers atendees.

Keynote began with Rui HIROKAWA, Japan PHP users group, who has been contributing a lot for PHP multibyte handling. He talked mainly about the PHP updates on PHP5.3, and future PHP6.

The following sessions in main room were given by big-name companies who heavily use PHP, Gurunabi (Groumet Navigation, the biggest online restaurant guide website), Rakuten (The largest online shopping mall) and Cybozu (No. 1 share groupware package vendor).

Although Rakuten hires Matz, Yukihiro MATSUMOTO, who wrote Ruby, PHP are still used widely in Rakuten, as they said.

Then two popular PHP influencers, halt and Hideyuki SHIMOOKA talked the Japan PHP users group retrospective and how to enhance your information-collecting ability.

The panel discussion, under the masochistic title “What language you must learn after PHP?”, had been getting a lot of attention on the web because of the splendid members,

• Yoshinori TAKESAKO, the Shibuya Perl Mongers leader (after Tatsuhiko MIYAGAWA)
• Masayoshi TAKAHASHI, Japan Ruby Associations, also known by Takahashi Method for presentation
• Atsushi SHIBATA, Python Japan User’s Group
• Yasuo HIGA, The Seasar Foundation, the creator of Java DI Container Seasar
• amachang, Shibuya.js Javascripter

Every single of them is known as the leading engineer in each programming language in Japan.

The last session was, as it has been taking root in programming language conferences in Japan, in “the lightening talk” style with around 10 PHP engineers.

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The following list shows an up-to-date list of Japan’s most valuable web companies by market capitalization. It’s interesting to see 6 of them are large-cap (with 2 being very close). But 3 of these companies rather belong to the realm of financial services (the list includes companies, which are not exclusively engaged in Internet-related business).

The data comes from Netindex. Netindex offers an English version, which is not working at the moment.

I included English links whenever possible. No responsibility is taken for the correctness of this information.

1. Yahoo! Japan ($21.9 billion)

2. Softbank ($19.6 billion) - Telecommunications and Web business (top shareholder of Yahoo! Japan)

3. Rakuten ($6.1 billion) - Online shopping mall

4. DeNA ($2.3 billion) - Mobile web business and E-Commerce

5. Matsui ($2.1 billion) - Financial services

6. Monex Group ($1.2 billion) - Financial services (online only)

7. mixi ($980 million) - Social network and online employment services

8. kabu.com ($980 million) - Financial services (online only)

9. CyberAgent ($880 million) - Web media and advertising

10. eAccess ($740 million) - Broadband IP communication services

11. Internet Initiative Japan ($740 million) - Internet connectivity services

12. Kakuku.com ($720 million) - Online price comparison

13. Gourmet Navigator ($520 million) - Online restaurant information

14. ACCESS ($520 million) - Mobile software and web development

15. GMO Internet ($480 million) - Internet infrastructure and media business

16. Opt ($420 million) - Online marketing and advertising

17. ZAPPALLAS ($380 million) - Mobile software and web content development

18. en-japan ($340 million) - Online recruitment

19. Dwango ($330 million) - Web content and systems provider

20. Index Holdings ($325 million) - Mobile web content provider

Tags: Cellular Phone, Company, Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
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Another month, another Tokyo2point0 event. Nearly 100 people showed up on July 15th at the Super Deluxe, the new venue to listen to two presentations from the Japanese web world.

Goo

My friend Masaki Sawamura from the made-in-Japan portal site Goo delivered the first presentation of the evening. Goo, which is run by IT and web powerhouse NTT Resonant, was launched as early as 1997 (1.5 years before a company called Google began American operations in 1998).

Goo is an acronym for “Gateway of Optics” but Masaki said he doesn’t know what this term actually means. He also introduced the company by saying the company’s favicon is not a copy of Google’s.

The portal gets 7.8 million users per month and ranks 10th in Alexa’s Japan list, “outperforming” big players such as Nico Nico Douga, Amazon Japan or 2chan. Goo boasts over 1 million blogs, 9 million web mail accounts and 3.5 questions asked in the Q&A section “Oshiete Goo”.

Masaki said Goo differentiates itself from other Japanese portals by offering nearly 70 services, such as Kids Goo, a community platform, a proprietary search engine and a site focused on ecological matters.

Goo is Japanese only. Goo Labs however, a dedicated page offering early versions of new idea from NTT Laboratory Group, is thankfully available in English and well worth checking out.

Twitter Japan

Rocky Eda from Digital Garage Incubation’s Strategic Investment and Business Development Division (there is no company or subsidiary called “Twitter Japan”) delivered the second presentation. Digital Garage Incubation Inc. is a subsidiary of Digital Garage, the company that invested in Twitter and introduced a Japanese version in April this year.

Rocky, who is responsible for the Twitter Japan project, said Digital Garage is focused on early stage investments. The company pumps money into services such as fon, Rapture or Technorati and brings them to Japan. Not bad at all. According to Rocky, Twitter seemed interesting because of the high access frequency and broad range of subjects covered by the users.

At the moment, traffic on Twitter from international destinations accounts for 60% of the volume worldwide (USA: 40%). 39% from the international traffic comes from Japan, with Tokyo being the most active “Twitter city” in the world.

Rocky went on saying that Twitter is running ads in Japan to monetize the site and currently collaborates with Japan’s national TV broadcaster NHK.

Watch the video of the presentation, made by Andrew Shuttleworth (the event’s main organizer):

Tags: Event Report, Japan, New Service, Video by Serkan Toto
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On Friday 4th July, Niconico Daikaigi 2008 (Daikaigi = Big meeting) was held by Dwango/Niwango at JCB Hall, Suidoubashi, Tokyo, with 2,000 atendees and over 10,000 users via broadcast.

This biggest event for Niconico Douga had a lot of new services/functions release, with a secret surprize.

Niconico Douga Update

New version code is “Niconico Douga (Summer)” [J].

• Nico-script(user scripting language for movie play handling) enhancement
• new Nicowari-questionnaire function
• Movie player internationalization plan to German and Spanish from July 25th (English is not planned to avoid big traffic surge, as said.)
• New Niconico-Market’s theme song
• H.264 format is now available to non-paid members
• New policy that parody/spoof/mash-up (so-called “MAD”) are removed if original rights-holder demands (which we already reported)

Niconicommunity

Niconicommunity [J] (Niconico + Community) is a new communtiy feature with which premium (paid) member can open a closed group. The group members can upload movies play and comments privately.

Niconicommons

Niconicommons [J] (Niconico + Commons) is a new web service to provide a registration based license declaration for copyright holders, planned to be released in August. Sounds like Creative-Commons but independent, probably different for targetting mainstream Niconico Douga users, who make parody and mash-up videos using Japanese animation, songs, etc. Social Networking Drawing Service “pixiv” will be the first external service who joins this Niconicommons.

Secret Guest: the “Father of the i-mode” joins Dwango

Takeshi NATSUNO, ex-director of NTT Docomo who led the world most successful mobile web network “i-mode”, appeared and was introduced as a new full-time advisor of Drango.

He talked “There are no other globally competitive contents than Niconico Douga. Most Japanese do not recognize that.”, “I am in charge of making it profitable.”, “I could not make i-mode worldwide because of each countries’ regulation around mobile. But the Internet has no such barriers”.

See Also:

Nikkei ITPro report [J]

Thanks for photos by takesako.

Tags: Event Report, Japan, Video by Akky Akimoto
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On Thursday railway operator JR Toukai announced 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.

Via Nikkei Net

Tags: Company, Event Report, New Service, Technology by Serkan Toto
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Celebration of new Firefox 3 launch was held at a hotel in Shinagawa, Tokyo, with over 300 people, Mozilla Japan staff, developers, translators, web designers, engineers, bloggers and others.

Contributors, Mozilla’s new CEO John Lilly, Mozilla Japan chairperson Satoko Takita

Firefox Ice Trophy

Foxkeh!!, Japan made mascot to appeal Japanese internet users

The next Firefox 3.1 (planned late 2008) code name was recently named “Shiretoko” after Japan’s national park in Hokkaido.

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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On Sunday, 15th June, The Happy Web Weekend, the event around microformats/Web Standards event was held in Ochanomizu, Tokyo, with John Allsopp, microformats authority and microformats book author from Australia.

Semantic Microblogging / Masahide KANZAKI

Masahide KANZAKI, who is well-known by his web standards and RDF infomation website The Web KANZAKI, which has been providing useful web tech info from the early web era, gave a presentation around 1. semantic web on microblogging and 2. geolocation and geohash applications.

Lunch break + Panel discussions

Networking lunch time followed by panel discussions with today’s two speakers, John Allsopp and Michael Smith. Satoshi KIKUCHI, the main organizer of the event from Actlink, brought up two hot topics,

Is microformats good for SEO?

The answers by both are the same “yes, but for pursuading your boss.”. SEO is not the essential purpose of microformats, though search engines are favor pages using web standards.

How iPhone changes mobile web?

Both encouraged you to invest/develop web applications for iPhone, instead of using native applications on SDK, to make your applications universal over other mobile devices like Nokia, Google Android.

Basic Microformats / John Allsopp

The main guest John Allsopp explained basic microformats, which adds information on regular HTML without breaking original code, also gives more machine-readable info to other net services like search engine, aggregation service, etc.

He showed several microformats, XFN, hCard, hCalendar, hReview, etc. with sample format, real usage on major websites and helper tools like browser add-on by which you can get those microformats information in visualized.

HTML5 Overview / Michael Smith

Michael Smith from W3C, who works based at Keio Univ., one of three W3C host organizations, spoke on HTML5 status.

He also talked about major browsers’ mobile version status updates, latest/beta web browsers’ cool features should be watched.

Where’s your web at? / John Allsopp

John Allsopp again talked this time on wider variety of web devices and how to deal with them.

When we have more different web devices to access the web, like from cellularphone, game console, car navigation and home appliances, developer/designer need to think about what usability are for them.

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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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):

See also:
Another report on the event by Fumi-san [JP]

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
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I’m impressed by a session called ‘memcached in mixi’ by Masahiro Nagano. He detailedly explained their effort to scale the Japan’s biggest SNS with memcached.

They are using more than 100 dedicated memcached servers for caching. All of machines has 4GB of memory with Pentium 4 or D, which are too weak for database servers now. They use Nagios (with check_tcp command) to check the servers alive or not.

Their most burdened machine processes 15000 request per second (400Mbps), and it’s still properly working with lower load-factor number.

Their load-balancing method is CRC(key) mod number_of_servers, so it’s almost impossible to add a server to memcached cluster because it causes a drastic decline of cache hit percentage. They plan to introduce new ‘consistent hashing’ method.

Mixi is using TokyoTyrant, a fast DBM engine created by Mikio Hirabayashi, to save login data such as last login time.

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Michael Schwern gave a closing key note called ‘Perl Is unDead’. He argued against the perception that people think ‘Perl is dead’. His talk was very vibrant, and woke up my sleepy mind filled up with too much tech talks.

He proposed a solution that Perl users should take their own domains for their projects instead of uploading it to CPAN. Perl user is too much depending to CPAN, the big repository of Perl codes. Activities inside CPAN is virtually invisible from outside of Perl community.

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YAPC::Asia 2008 was successfully held with 524 tickets sold. Almost half of the talks was in English. It’s a rare occassion to meet with world’s top notch engineers in Asia.

I’m not using Perl for 5 years, but I enjoyed YAPC::Asia so much. You shouldn’t miss the event next year!

See Also: (in JP)
* mixi->{engineers_blog}

Tags: Community, Event Report, Japan, Technology by shunichi arai
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