First Server, a subsidiary of Yahoo! Japan, has been having service troubles since around 17:30 June 20.

There are several web services observed to be down, who explained on temporary error pages that their services are down because of the hosting service’s glitch.

According to RBB Today [J], on the servers on 5 services, the uploaded data, configuration data and mail are reportedly lost. The company has been resuming mail data with the cleanly installed OS. The web data is unknown to be able to recovered at this point.

Yahoo! Japan owns two hosting companies, Yahoo! IDC and First Server. First Server joined to the Yahoo! Japan group in 2004 and now it is a 100% subsidiary.

Users screams on Twitter [J] can be read on Twitter summary service Togetter.

Twitter’s long down early morning on 22 affected Twitter-loving Japan (Japanese version of apology [J], however, Twitter’s apology is being perceived as a “good apology” because of the First Server, though it is tough for them to compare hosting service for business and fun service.

[Update] Here is a list of the known companies websites seemed to be using the affected First Server’s servers, made by ICT Headline. [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Japan’s largest online e-commerce mall Rakuten, announced [J] on his twitter account that his new book on how he is letting his company and employees adapt to English.

英語化の話しを本に書きました。ビジネスマンだけでなく、様々な人に読んでもらえたらと思っております。前二冊と同様印税についてはすべて寄付させて頂きます。 [楽天]r10.to/hpeKmH [本] #rbooks twitter.com/hmikitani/stat…

— 三木谷浩史 H. Mikitaniさん (@hmikitani) 6月 7, 2012

“I have written up on how to make things into Engligh. It will be great if not only business persons but also several people read it. Same as my past two books, the royalty will be all donated. (link to Rakuten Books page), (book cover image)”

The Japanese title of the book is “Takaga Eigo!”, which means “It’s not more than English.” or “It’s merely English”, but the book cover also has a word “Englishnization”, which was used when Harvard Business Review featured Rakuten’s challenge (Language and Globalization: “Englishnization” at Rakuten).

The bottom of the cover, there is a text saying, “Global companies talk English. ‘Making English an official language’ will revive Japan. This is the manifesto for success (I) convinced by this past two-years experiment on Rakuten.”

The book is 1,050 yen and written in Japanese, I assume.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Yahoo Japan, the country’s biggest website with 1.6 billion page views per day, will enter a partnership with Cookpad, a popular recipe site, according to a report by business daily The Nikkei.

Much like Yahoo in the US, Yahoo Japan runs a number of vertical services under its portal: one of them, Yahoo Recipe, will be closed by the end of the year, The Nikkei says.

Under the agreement, the “recipe” link will lead to Cookpad.com instead – even though it’s apparently not fixed yet when exactly that will happen. The Nikkei says that Yahoo Japan will also take over part of Cookpad’s ad sales and offer the Yahoo Japan Wallet payment system for paid users of the service (for about US$3.80, those members can bookmark more recipes, have better access to the site on mobile devices, etc.).

According to the report, Yahoo Japan Recipe draws 5 million users per month currently. But it seems the service, which is linked to from the Yahoo Japan homepage, wasn’t successful enough for big Y: Cookpad boasts three times that number currently.

Cookpad, as the first company of its kind, went IPO three years ago. The company was moved to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December last year.

Cookpad’s strongest competitor is Rakuten Recipe, a service offered by e-commerce powerhouse Rakuten.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) announced “DAEDALUS” (Direct Alert Environment for Darknet And Livenet Unified Security) system on June 6.

The system has nationwide distributed surveillance network to watch so-called darknet, a part of the Internet which IP address are not supposed to be used. There are non-ignorable amount of digital packets sent to and originated from the darknet ranges, and many of them seem to be related with invalid activities, such like computer virus transmission.

The red kanji character is “Kei”, means alert, patrol, etc.

The screenshots of the DAEDALUS monitoring system remind a lot of Japanese a system appeared in the popular cyber animation series “Ghost in the Shell”. Many people say that the creator of this system got influenced by the animation film.

You may watch the working demo of DAEDALUS from June 13 to 15 at Interop Tokyo 2012, Makuhari Messe, Chiba.

[Update 2012-06-21]

Videos from Interop Tokyo 2012 are arriving on YouTube.

See Also:

Asiajin » Kinect Driven “Ghost in the Shell” Cyberspace

Mozilla Labs Concept Browsers and Ghost In The Shell » Leadership Network

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Voltage [J] has released “My Forged Wedding,” an English version of “Chikai No Kisu Wa Totsuzen Ni♪” (Suddenly Kiss of Vow) as the second part of the North American romance simulation game “Romance Sims” series, for iPhone and Android.

“My Forged Wedding” is an English Version of “Chikai No Kisu Wa Totsuzen Ni,” the number one ranking most popular romance game among the 175 sites within the “Romance Game” category currently at NTT Docomo’s i-Menu.  It’s the second part continuing from  Part 1 which was released overseas from July of 2011, “Pirates in Love”, [J] for the North American market.  The precursor “Pirates in Love” placed 21st in the App store’s entertainment category, and within the Asian sphere it reached number 1 in the Singapore App store entertainment category.  This time, the story and characters are entirely true to the original, so the complete story can be enjoyed in English.  Gameplay is also the same as the Japanese version.  The prologue in which all characters appear can be played for free, and after that it becomes a single payment for each character download that you select.

© Voltage

Translation authorized by VSMedia

Tags: News, Social game, VSMedia by Chiho Komoriya
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