Entries Tagged as 'News'

Yahoo! Japan To Close Yahoo! Kukuru, Naver Matome Rip-off


Yahoo! Japan, the largest website in the country, who holds a lot of successful sub-services under its brand, announced today the termination of their Yahoo! Kururu, user-generated summary site.

The service launched September 2011, is often called as “Yahoo!’s Naver Matome”, as the service seemed quite similar to the already-successful info-aggregation site Naver Matome. The word “kukuru” means “to bundle” or “to categorize” in Japanese, which might be chosen to avoid using “matome”(to summalize), whilst another challenger, Japanese net-savvy’ friend Hatena made Hatena Matome.

In October 2011, Yahoo! pushed Yahoo! Kururu items on its search results page, which is used more than Google Search. However, it did not really take off. See Google Trends for Websites. It was too late for Yahoo! to notice Naver Japan’s success.

Last month, Yahoo! Japan started providing ads on Naver Matome as an ad network.

Although the notification box on the site says, “Thank you for your long-term support” cliche, it will be run only 10 months. There was a replacement of executive team in March, which may affect this short-term shutdown.

2-channel Bans 5 Major Summary Sites From Reusing Its Posts


Some 2-channel(2ch.net) users noticed early morning on June 3 that an unpopular notification page on 2-channel was updated with the warning message against 5 notorious 2-channel watcher blogs.

We ban the following URL from using copyrighted materials owned by 2ch, as it is detrimental that those people who damage to third parties and do not apologize. We also forbid the reuse of copyrighted materials on similar sites by those people and related persons.

http://yaraon.blog109.fc2.com/

http://hamusoku.com/

http://blog.esuteru.com/

http://jin115.com/

http://blog.livedoor.jp/insidears/

We may take some actions against forged texts and reuse of our copyrighted materials without reference to ours.

第3者に迷惑をかけ謝罪しない人物に2chの著作物を使われることは、不利益が大きいため、下記のURLにおける2chの著作物の利用を禁止します。
また、本人及び関係者による類似サイトへの著作物の利用も同様に禁止します。

http://yaraon.blog109.fc2.com/

http://hamusoku.com/

http://blog.esuteru.com/

http://jin115.com/

http://blog.livedoor.jp/insidears/

発言の捏造、転載元が明記されていない著作物の利用に関しても、なんらかの措置をとる可能性があります。

http://2ch.net/warn.txt

The names of the summary sites are Yaraon, Hamusoku, Hachima-kikou, Oreteki Game Sokuhou@JIN and Nyu-soku VIP blog.

There are hundreds of 2-channel summary sites, which are posting summarized, emphasized with color and font-size decorated discussions from raw 2-channel threads. These named five are the most successful ones and have millions page views, which are converted to their profit by heavy affiliate advertising around posts.

Recently there are more people who only check those summary sites, instead of going to the original 2-channel, which 2-channel seemed not cared much for years. However, recently there are more critics arose that some summary sites forged their summary, by changing quoted posts for example, and they often became buzzed on Twitter and other social media with noted “on 2-channel”. Sometimes their posts are referred by English blog media.

All of the 5 sites immediately posted on this as their latest news. Some wrote that they would not be able to continue, some just pasted the warning. I guess that they are watching people’s reactions.

There are few other summary sites who gains the same or more traffic than these five, such like Itai News, Alfalfa, etc. People are guessing why 2-channel listed the five now.

I think that banned by 2-channel is not really meaningful, because they tried to hide who owns and manages 2-channel, to avoid responsibilities. So even if any of those summary sites keep copying new threads from 2ch, bringing that to the court means 2-channel has to set who is plaintiff, and that will cause troubles on 2-channel who receives lots of lawsuits and court-orders.

GREE And Dentsu Global Promotion At Airports


Gree, [J] in the opening stage of a business partnership with Dentsu Inc., is starting corporate branding advertisements in airports from this April.

Both companies have announced [J] their comprehensive business partnership towards global enterprise on March 21st.  In this first stage they will start a corporate branding project with airport advertising, and in Japan they are developing this from April 1st at Narita International Airport and Haneda Airport International Terminal.  As for airport advertising, GREE has announced 9 cities (Tokyo, San Francisco, London, Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Dubai) from a global standpoint as being registered. (*Sao Paulo and Dubai are planned to be opened sequentially)

Translation authorized by VSMedia

Dentsu Buys 15% Stake In Tokyo-Based Web Company Kakaku.Com


Tokyo-based Dentsu, one of the biggest advertising agencies in the world, today announced [JP, PDF] it has acquired 15.06% of Kakaku.com, Japan’s largest price comparison site and community (all Kakaku-related articles on Asiajin, my very early review of the site from 2007).

The eponymous company behind the service is currently listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a US$1.6 billion market cap. Culture Convenience Club (CCC) , the operator of the Tsutaya DVD and CD store chain, is the main shareholder.

While the price comparison site is still the core asset (after almost 15 years in business), kakaku.com rolled out a number of other web services in the last few years that now Dentsu has a foot in, i.e. movie portal eiga.com, 4travel, or hotel reservation service yoyaQ.com.

The biggest hit Kakaku.com landed after establishing online price comparison in Japan is tabelog, a wildly popular restaurant guide that is similar to Yelp in the US. Last month, tabelog alone saw 712 million page views (kakaku.com: 877 million).

All sites of the group racked up a combined 1.7 billion page views in the same time frame, coming from 77 million unique users – and this reach is exactly what Dentsu is after.

Kakaku.com’s stats can be accessed here [PDF].

Fakes On Annular Solar Eclipse So Buzzed


Last week, Japanese Twittersphere had much debate on the topic how Twitter and social media are weak against disinformation, as a false news site Kyoko-shimbun was criticized by publishing a fake news with a real politician’s name and photo.

The big astronomical event on May 21 morning gave us lots of moving photos, but it was inevitable to get forged images on social media. These are some from Japan/Japanese which really buzzed.

From past

@ryuki_guilty15 tweeted “his friend” took this, retweeted over 30K times.

which turned out to be the one on National Geographic taken in 2010 Thai.

The same photo buzzed on Reddit, too.

Proposal ring

When @wacamera explained how he composed 3 photos, solar eclipse and his right and left hands on iPhone app Blendar one hour later, the photo already circulated on Twitter.

Someone posted it to TV station as his/her photo then.

Finally, it goes over the language barrier and Twitter official blog introduced it.

NASA’s??? eclipse photo on Facebook

@A4sizeCG posted this illustration on the day before the eclipse, May 20 on Niconico Seiga.

Kevin someone re-posted this illustration on Facebook as “one of the most Spectacular eclipse images ever!”, now shared over 60,000 times with 27,000 likes. This illustration is also being circulated around many websites under non-authors’ names or commented as NASA took it.

This one on Buzzfeed from a Japanese Facebook user is not fake, but this is.