Asiajin

Nikkei Trendy Net reported [J] that Facebook Head of International Growth Javier Olivan told them Facebook’s Japan branch status and their first goal, specially customized site for Japanese cellphone.

According to the report, Facebook already opened their Tokyo office on February 2nd, which was announced in last fall (our report). The main task of them is to make a Japanese cellphone version of Facebook to chase Japanese social networking services. The number of Japanese Facebook users is about 1 million, whilst the No.1 Mixi holds about 18 million.

The name of the new Japan office head, who “has 10 years of experience in Japan’s largest internet company for decade”, will be public soon. May the “largest internet company” be Yahoo! Japan?

In 2008, I was asked if Facebook comes to Japan, by an English media. the comments were not used so I wrote them on Asiajin. On it I predicted that Facebook wouldn’t understand cellphone importance in Japanese market, which turned out to be wrong.

Thanks for the new link kwmr.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, USA by Akky Akimoto
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Although Amazon Kindle is possible to order from Japan, Kindle and its backend do not support Japanese font well yet. Support for Japanese publishers in Japanese are not prepared, too.

So, most Japanese people who currently own Kindle are gadget fans, English-savvy or for research purpose.

And some people see potential on the device and the platform. There are some self publishers put their Japanese novels as image files. If it has to be image for Japanese, maybe image contents are more familiar. Monochrome image contents popular for Japanese is… yes, manga cartoon.

Ume, a cartoonist unit of OZAWA Takahiro and SEO Asako [J], known by “Dai-Tokyo Toybox series”, experimentally published their short manga “Aozora Finder Rock“, which probably is the first Japanese manga in Japanese for Japanese readers on Kindle Store for $2.99.

It is pity that it costs $4.99 from Japan because of additional $2.00 for international users. If Amazon will start same level support in Japanese market, Kindle could be a good challenger against paid digital manga on Japanese cellphones.

See Also:

A Japanese blogger Hide’s report how he published Japanese novel as image [J]

Ume’s twitter [J]

Ume’s Dai Tokyo Toybox in Japanese on Amazon Japan

Tags: Japan, USA by Akky Akimoto
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China’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba.com seems to have a good sense of humour and doing viral marketing there in the secret Chinese web.

Chinese film creator Hu Ge(胡戈) makes a parody movie of the former US president Bush’s dodging thrown shoes at a press conference in Iraq.

In the movie the president was less patient than Bush and throws back his shoes, then…

English audio, Simplified Chinese subtitled, enjoy,

YouTube seems to blocked in China so this movie should be copied for attendees of the academic conference in Sapporo, Japan.

via Media Pub [J]

Tags: China, Joke, USA by Akky Akimoto
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Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon’s company which manages and sells cloud computing services like EC2, S3, CloudFront, etc., is turned out to open its Japanese subsidiary Amazon Data Services Japan at unknown time in 2009, talked by one of their two employees at Japan Amazon EC2 Users Group, a blog Publickey reported [J].

At the users group with 30 attendees, the only name-known employee, Hideki Ojima, a Japan marketing manager, who worked for Adobe Japan as a lead of developers marketing, told that they are seeking employees for several positions to expand.

He also talked that Amazon US recognizes Japanese enterprises need different approaches, that’s why the subsidiary was established.

Amazon is said to plan its second Asian data centre in the latter half of this year 2010, following to the first one in Singapore. Ojima did not answer if the second location will be Japan or not.

Tags: Japan, Singapore, USA by Akky Akimoto
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Tokyo-based (and listed) web juggernaut CyberAgent’s virtual world Ameba Pigg [JP] has proven to be a veritable success here in Japan since its launch this February. The company says there are now 1.5 million members in the virtual community, with an undisclosed number of those coming from Non-Japanese-speaking countries (the service is Japanese only).

But next spring there will be an English version of Ameba Pigg, on Facebook. This means Cyberagent chose to go a different path this time after launching a stand-alone English version of its other hit virtual community Pu-pe Girl soon after the Japanese original was live.

CyberAgent says they will “Americanize” Ameba Pigg by offering users more possibilities to change the look of their avatars and selling virtual clothing tailored to American users (CyberAgent is said to currently pull in about $1 million in sales of virtual items from Ameba Pigg per month). In addition, the avatars will be able to interact in environments such as the virtual version of Central Park in New York, as opposed to districts like Shibuya in Tokyo, for example, where Japanese users can interact.

Another CyberAgent property, virtual pet game meromero park, was largely left unchanged (design-wise) when it made its way to Taiwan last year (background on Asiajin). Interestingly, the same is true for the English version which was launched on Facebook, too (in August this year). So why CyberAgent now apparently decided to streamline and take the “Japanese feel” away from Ameba Pigg is beyond me, but many Japanese web companies think that’s the way to go to get international users (the final design of the English version hasn’t been shown yet though).

Check out this video to get a taste of the cutesy feel of the Japanese original:

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

Tags: Japan, News, USA by Serkan Toto
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