Asiajin

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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Ofcourse, you know about Aaron chair of Harman Miller. However, you probably haven’t heard about Cruise & Atlas from Okamura, a Japanese office furniture maker.

Cruise & Atlas is a set of chair and desk, which is consisting a mutually dependant pair. It has a really futuristic appearance. It looks like a chair from a Sci-fi movie.

The chair ‘Atlas’ has a very unique, low and reclined position. User sits like a Formula-car driver. The chair needs its special desk called ‘Cruise’ to fit with that special position. The desk is consisted with two boards, one is an adjustable inclined keyboard desk, and another is a desk to put displays.

Cruise & Atlas is a really expensive furniture. It costs 370,000 yen ($3,700).

Akky and I are using Cruise & Atlas, and quite satisfied with it. If you have backache or headache, consider having one?

I also recommend Contessa or Baron, great ergonomic chairs from Okamura. Those can be used with a normal desk. Probably it fits better for Asian people than Aaron chair. Also those have more reclined position than Aaron chair, so it may fit well for programming task.

Tags: Japan by shunichi arai
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livedoor announced its popular Cos-Play (Costume Play, dressing up in fictional characters most of which are from Anime/Manga) site’s renewal and English localization today, June 12th 2008.

The site “Cure” was opened in 2001, has been getting 300,000 registered users including 60,000 “Cos-Player”, and now 50 million page views in a month, which is the biggest in Japan.

Cure, even though they have been having Japanese site only, got more than 10% of their users from overseas, and that ratio is still growing. So they decided to internationalize the site aiming for more users from America, Asia and Europe.

Their mobile site ( http://m.curecos.com/ ) has been also remodelled, however, the access to the mobile site is limited to Japanese major carriers, NTT Docomo, KDDI au and Softbank Mobile.

See Also:

Press Release [J]

Tags: Japan, Service by Akky Akimoto
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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).

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
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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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New Javascript library jsmap is released on cognitom.com , which enables a new way of choosing regions from diagram map.

Its Japan version seems welcomed favorably by Japanese web developers, as the Japan’s prefecture selection is always an usability headache.

There are Japanese websites provides region selection by drilling down by links, usually implemented on Flash. But this one can be used more easily, and not many open source library are available.

The US English version is also released. Like Japanese version, USA is divided into regions and able to be selected with map.

From my experience, people only need to put the state you reside, usually. So, state selection in US works easy with the common alphabetical ordered selection box. Making things difficult in Japan is that there are no “dictionary” order or no other clear order everyone agrees (most used order is “north to south”, but it cannot be uniquely defined, still confusing), which leads this jsmap library attractive.

The idea of this user interface is good and there will be many other applicable situations, like for country selection from Asia, Africa, etc.

I assume that Japanese is not the only culture/language which is not satisfied by alphabetical-order-form-selection. This kind of UI neccesity could be overlooked by mainstream user interface libraries most of which emerged from American/Europe countries with latin letters.

Tags: Japan, Technology, library by Akky Akimoto
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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.

Given that Japan has one of the fastest Internet infrastructures in the world, Tsutaya’s move is long overdue. KDDI woke up last year already and since then offers a “DVD Burning Service” (more info in English about that here and here).

Tags: Japan, Service, Technology by Serkan Toto
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I have not seen a lot of crowd pleasers at the Virtual World Expo [ja] I attended last week but Second Coa’s booth was actually a heavily frequented one.

The company did a great job in reconstructing Edo in Second Life. Edo is the old name for Tokyo.

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.

See Also:

ai sp＠ce - Metaverse meets Otaku culture

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
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Cyber Agent, free blogging service Ameba(Ameblo) provider, announced that their holding celebrity blogger Yusuke KAMIJI’s weblog is certified by Guinness World Records as the “MOST UNIQUE USERS ON A PERSONAL BLOG IN 24 HOURS” who is read by the 230,755 unique visitors in one day.

The daily page views is 5-6 million, the highest 13,171,039 PV on April 12th. Also got 56,061 comments on April 17th.

As we explained in this article, blog popularity in Japan is a bit different from other countries. Many TV stars are writing their blog as their promotion, supported by agency and blog service providers, and those blogs are mainstream. They uses their influences on TV to take people to the internet/blog, to sell their name, and (maybe) sell their recommended products/services.

The statistics numbers are explained to be taken on their server-side application analog. So it cannot be a serious stats I think, but may be useful when selling ads on the blogs, so is guinnes records.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Softbank announced that they agreed with Apple to sell the iPhone in Japan.

SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple® to bring the iPhone™ to Japan later this year.

Masayoshi SON, president of Softbank and investor of Yahoo! Japan, Alibaba, etc. attended the conference during Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in the USA. So there has been some ties between them since then. However, Apple shakes hands with No.1 cariers in many countries so there have been long discussions and rumors whether Japan’s No.1, NTT Docomo, or Softbank will win Jobs’ favor. (No.2 player KDDI au uses different cellularphone technology from iPhone.)

According to CNET Japan, NTT Docomo’s public relations made some short comments: “It is regrettable.” and “We are currently reviewing our future options”. They also stated “We are also providing a phone with a touch panel, such as the PRADA Phone by LG”.

[Update] There is also a rumor that Steve Jobs is visiting Japan secretly to make an announcement. We are not able to confirm this yet.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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