Mangajet [J] is a new Japanese service which let you make a Japanese manga-comic style illustration with provided characters, background images, baloons with your text.

The generated comic strip can be saved and shared on Twitter.

Following to the Japanese manga standard, text will be written in top-to-bottom direction so Western languages won't fit well, unfortunately.

The service was released as a promotion of a free digital manga material directory Manga Sozai Jiten, which is run by Datacraft.

There is Feel on!, a web service to comicalize your Twitter timeline as well (and that one now supports English).

via INTERNET Watch

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Hulu Japan, actvila, and other existing video content providers are getting competition soon: a total of seven Japanese companies are currently preparing a video-on-demand service for connected TVs that's scheduled to launch on April 2 this year.

Dubbed "Motto TV" [JP, PDF], the service is backed by:

• advertising agency Dentsu
• Nippon Television Network
• TV Asahi
• Tokyo Broadcasting System Television
• TV Tokyo
• Fuji Television Network
• NHK

What's especially interesting here is that not only five commercial TV networks are taking part, but also NHK, Japan's national public broadcasting organization.

NHK alone is ready to contribute a total of about 4,000 shows to the 10,500 programs Motto TV will start off with. Users will need to own compatible TV sets that are expected to go on sale from April.

Motto TV programs can be selected via the remote control, for example anime shows, TV series, or comedy programs. Fees vary, depending on the program itself and the station that's broadcasting it.

Users can browse through the content by selecting different genres, entering key words, or accessing rankings from the menu.

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Serkan Toto
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If you're an Android user, consider yourself a geek, understand Japanese, and need an appropriate home replacement screen on your handset, consider downloading Himasere. The app was released on the Android Market earlier this week by Tokyo-based tech company Ubiquitous Entertainment.

The idea here is to make it as easy as possible to access technology-related news and information (plus a game portal), just by flicking through the following sites from a single app:

• Weekly ASCII - PLUS (tech news)
• Yahoo Japan News - Topics
• Hatena Bookmarks (background on Hatena in English)
• Togetter (the English version of this Twitter curation service is called Chirpstory)
• TechCrunch Japan
• Engadget Japanese
• wise9 (blog specifically aimed at young game devs)
• Gizmodo Japan

If you had enough of reading news, you can flick through to 9leap (background in English), a game portal that lets you choose between 500+ games, which can all be played right from within the app:

Himasere supports Android 2.2 and up and is available for free on the Android Market.

Here is Ubiquitous Entertainment's official promo video for the app:

Tags: Android, Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service by Serkan Toto
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Two popular Japanese bloggers, @taguchi[J] and @fkoji[J], launched new video tutorial site called dotinstall[J], which is aimed at ultra-beginner of programming.

The site currently provides about 300 video tutorials, ranging from HTML basics to Creating Concentration game using Javascript, all of which last just about 3 minutes long.  All the videos are recorded in Japanese (by @taguchi[J]), so it is helpful not only for Japanese who want to study programming but also for non-Japanese programmers who want to study Japanese language as well.

Unlike ShowMeDo, another video tutorial site for programming learners, dotinstall is focused on delivering video tutorials for beginners only.  As myself being a learner of programming as a hobby, dotinstall[J] seems to be very helpful because I can use my spare time, sometime just a few minutes, to watch a video or two.

Current line-ups of videos are HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP/MySQL/jQuery/Twitter Bootstrap, more in variety and number are expected to come. The site is in closed beta but you can apply for invitation.

See Also:

dotinstall Official site[J]

@taguchi's entry about dotinstall[J]

@fkoji's entry about dotinstall[J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Haruo Nakayama
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So far, only YouTube users from Canada, the US and (since October) the UK were able to rent movies, but yesterday, Japan has finally been added to the list, too (the country is the second biggest market for movies in the world).

Youtube users in Japan can initially stream content from a total of five American and local studios onto their PCs and Android phones, namely

• Toei
• Sony Pictures
• Universal
• Warner Bros.
• Bandai Channel (for anime)

On its official blog, YouTube Japan says that the initial line-up consists of a mix between paid and free movies (200 in total), for example Unknown, Red Riding Hood, Take Me Home Tonight, or Sucker Punch.

Paid titles cost either 300 or 400 Yen, depending on how new they are. Movies can be rented from 24 to 72 hours.

The online movie rental space in Japan has seen some movement recently. Apart from established players like Gyao, YouTube Japan's new service competes with newcomer Hulu (which started streaming movies and other content in Japan in September this year) or Nico Nico Douga (which started doing the same in cooperation with Warner Bros. a few days ago).

Tags: Android, Japan, New Service, Video by Serkan Toto
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