Asiajin

Yokoku.in is a very controversial web site made by Yano Satoru of satoru.net.

What is this?

I must made an explanation about the background before introducing the site. 8th June, a mass murder was occurred in Akihabara. One man killed 7 people and injured 10 people. He had written a message in Internet bulletin board before committing the murder. The message was “I’m going to kill people in Akihabara”.

The murder caused a many policy changes in Japan. One of those changes is a no toleration policy for crime warning. Police has been arrested many people who made a crime warning in Internet, which are possibly false. In Japan, crime warning possibly consist a crime such as “business obstraction”, or “intimidation”.

Ministry of Internal Affaiar and Communications announced that they are going to develop a software to detect crime warnings in Internet within a budget of 200 million yen ($2 million). Then, Satoru Yano responded to that announce. He created a crime warning aggregation site ‘yokoku.in’ in few hours.

Yokoku.in crawls the web and collects all articles contain words like ‘murder’, ‘crime warning’, ‘kill’. If Yano founds it can be a serious threat, he will call the police. Then police will arrest them.

33 people were arrested so far. Some of them were arrested by made a clearly humorous crime warning by joking.

Tags: Japan // Add Comment »

Google Japan starts Google Map Street View in Japan.

Now the street view is available in some principal cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, etc. You know, using Street View we can see the 360-degree view of a place.
The following image is the view of Shibuya.

see street view

Almost all of related news refer to the problem of privacy. Google tries to solve this problem by defocusing human faces and car numbers. In addition Google lets users to report the wrong scenes, for example if we can specify an individual person, thus they can always check them.

According to the official blog of Google Earth / Maps team, they starts Street View in Australia at the same time.

By the way, Junya Kondo, Founder & CEO of Hatena, wrote that he found a friend (actually his wife she is) on the Street View. And in 2ch community, they are heating up for watching various scenes, for example the scene of a sweet couple of high school students.

Tags: Japan, New Service // Add Comment »

I Love Maker (English version) is a new Flash based generator for “I ♥ NY” style logo.

You can customize texts, texts-size and mark (heart or others).

For various users, different sizes are provided for typical cellularphone background image size (can be set by using QR Code), Mixi profile image size and three other sizes.

Satoru YANO, the creator, is known his series of web services, including Jimaku.in (English version subtitle.in), comments overlaying video community service (similar to Niconico Douga, slightly later appeared), and recently Yokoku.in, a mashup site which collects sentences including “kill” and related words from several BBS to report police, raising a huge controversy among Japanese internet users.

[Update 2008-08-09] They seem to make the English version of I-love-maker and that links to us!

See Also:

Satoru YANO - Wikipedia [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service // 3 Comments »

Japan’s behemoth social network service Mixi has launched its microblogging service “Mixi Echo” for a limited time.

The page introducing the new twitter-like one-line comment service is featured on the “information from Mixi” section. The guide page,

says that this service is for limited time only until September 1st.

If you turn on the Mixi Echo, it will be shown at the best location at the top of your home page,

The five latest messages from your Mixi friends (known as “mai-miku”) are shown after the input box. You can also click through to the archive pages to see the past messages, 25 messages per page.

The message length limit is 150 letters, which is 10 letters longer than Twitter in roman alphabets. More than double for Japanese letters as Twitter’s limtation is 140 “bytes” instead of “letters”. Long URL is not “tinyurlized”.

# update: Twitter now supports multi-bytes letters count. My mistake.

Mobile site viewing and emoji (special drawing letters set provided by three major cellularphone-carieers) are supported, the same as for other Mixi services.

Mixi has grown along with its blog service. You can limit access to your blog entries to your friends or to friends and friends of friends, but with Mixi Echo your messages can be viewed by anyone who can find your profile page.

Twitter is the most popular microblogging service in Japanese (and worldwide), followed by wassr (English version), which recently became popular among web teckies due to Twitter and Twitter API problems. Microblogging services have only been popular among net savvy people to date, but Mixi and their 14 million users have the potential to bring microblogging to the masses if the service gets a good response during this one month trial.

Tags: Japan, New Service // 12 Comments »

The following list shows an up-to-date list of Japan’s most valuable web companies by market capitalization. It’s interesting to see 6 of them are large-cap (with 2 being very close). But 3 of these companies rather belong to the realm of financial services (the list includes companies, which are not exclusively engaged in Internet-related business).

The data comes from Netindex. Netindex offers an English version, which is not working at the moment.

I included English links whenever possible. No responsibility is taken for the correctness of this information.

1. Yahoo! Japan ($21.9 billion)

2. Softbank ($19.6 billion) - Telecommunications and Web business (top shareholder of Yahoo! Japan)

3. Rakuten ($6.1 billion) - Online shopping mall

4. DeNA ($2.3 billion) - Mobile web business and E-Commerce

5. Matsui ($2.1 billion) - Financial services

6. Monex Group ($1.2 billion) - Financial services (online only)

7. mixi ($980 million) - Social network and online employment services

8. kabu.com ($980 million) - Financial services (online only)

9. CyberAgent ($880 million) - Web media and advertising

10. eAccess ($740 million) - Broadband IP communication services

11. Internet Initiative Japan ($740 million) - Internet connectivity services

12. Kakuku.com ($720 million) - Online price comparison

13. Gourmet Navigator ($520 million) - Online restaurant information

14. ACCESS ($520 million) - Mobile software and web development

15. GMO Internet ($480 million) - Internet infrastructure and media business

16. Opt ($420 million) - Online marketing and advertising

17. ZAPPALLAS ($380 million) - Mobile software and web content development

18. en-japan ($340 million) - Online recruitment

19. Dwango ($330 million) - Web content and systems provider

20. Index Holdings ($325 million) - Mobile web content provider

Tags: Cellular Phone, Company, Event Report, Japan // Add Comment »

Lino, a web based sticky note service competing with Postica, MyStickies and most notably Slingpage (and others) is a rare beast among Japanese web companies: It’s very international.

The Tokyo-based service yesterday announced in the English version of their company blog they not only completely revamped the site by changing the design and making it IE-friendly but also added Chinese as a third language.

I am not able to judge the quality of the Chinese translation, but Lino’s English version is quite OK, albeit not perfect. It’s commendable the site seems to really make an effort for their international users by offering an FAQ, a company blog and a forum (which is hardly frequented at this point) in English.

Users can design Lino stickies themselves and then spread them online to share messages, photos, videos etc. This is possible not only on the web itself but also by email. I think Lino is quite cool and you can even try it without registering.

Via Impress BB Watch

Tags: Japan // Add Comment »

Technorati Japan, established by Digital Garage(DG) in January 2005, is now shared with Technorati, Inc.. DG announced that they sold issued new shares which becomes 30% of the Technorati Japan assigned to Technorati Inc. by 75 million yen (700,000 US dollars).

DG also invests to twitter and is developing twitter Japanese localization.

[Update 2008.08.04] It is pointed out that it was not selling the initial stocks from TR-J to TR-US, but TR-US rather invests on top of current DG’s investment. Corrected.

See Also

Digital Garage’s release [pdf]

Joi Ito’s weblog

via BBWatch

Tags: Japan, News // Add Comment »

Japan’s largest social network Mixi started a specialized user accounts limited for TV-talents/musicians on July 28th 2008.

Mixi has a system limitation on your number of friends “Mai Miku”(My Mixi), 1,000 friends at most, however, with this “official account”, which Mixi ascertains the account is owned by the celebrity herself/himself/themselves (=not fake), that celebrity account can be connected with unlimited number of followers=fans. The account also comes with auto-following-back feature so any fan will be added as a friend with the celebrity with it.

The list of the celebrities has now 12 persons/groups. It is interesting that three of them are American, Japanese-American and Japanese-Indonesian, which foreigners rate is higher than average I think, might be affected that those people already know music promotion have been successful in oversea social networking service, means MySpace.

I think this move is also to chase Cyber Agent/Ameblo’s success (at least on page views) with their celebrities weblog.

Mixi’s Release [J]

via BBWatch

Tags: Japan, News // Add Comment »

Here is a list of where Japanese users usually go on the web when they want to connect with their friends, buy something or get information. I feature “made-in-Japan” sites and software only (well, almost), knowing that i.e. Google, Amazon and Firefox are highly popular in this country as well.

Some of these Japanese sites are also available in English. I linked to the English versions whenever possible and marked them with [ENG].

Note: This list is highly subjective. If you have other ideas, please let us know in the comment section.

I) General web services

What is the Japanese equivalent of Google?
Yahoo! Japan.

Wikipedia?
Wikipedia Japan.

Facebook?
Mixi.

Flickr?
Yahoo! Japan Photos.

Digg?
Minna no Topics (Everyone’s topics).

LinkedIn?
No equivalent.

Twitter?
Twitter Japan.

Youtube?
Nico Nico Douga.

Amazon?
Rakuten.

delicio.us?
Hatena Bookmark. [ENG]

dooyoo (price comparison engine)?
Kakaku.com.

Netflix?
Posren.

Craigslist?
No equivalent.

imdb (Internet Movie Database)?
Nihon Eiga Database (Japan Movie Database).

Wall Street Journal Online?
Nikkei Online. [ENG]

monster.com?
Rikunavi.

Ebay?
Yahoo! Japan Auctions.

Alexa?
Pathtraq.

4chan?
2 channel (the original).

last.fm?
Mixi Music (registration required).

Technorati?
Kizasi.

Second Life?
Meet me.

Yahoo! Answers?
Oshiete!goo and Yahoo! Chiebukuro.

II) Blogs

What is the Japanese equivalent of Techcrunch?
Asiajin. [ENG]….Joke, people!

the Huffington Post?
No equivalent.

tmz.com?
Zakzak.

Boing Boing?
Zaeega.

Gizmodo?
Gizmodo Japan.

III) Web tools and software:

What is the Japanese equivalent of Gmail?
Yahoo! Japan Mail.

Blogger?
FC2.

the iTunes store?
iTunes Japan (Lismo for mobile downloads which accounted for 90% of all music downloads in 2007 in Japan).

BitTorrent?
Winny.

Opera?
Sleipnir [ENG] and Lunascape [ENG].

IV) Web Companies

What is the Japanese equivalent of Federated Media?
Agile Media Network. [ENG]

Sequoia Capital?
NGI Group. [ENG]

Admob?
Cirius. [ENG]

In case you want to know more, please add a comment.

Tags: Japan // 1 Comment »

The once Japanese-only and super-successful video platform Nico Nico Douga goes international. They announced Friday on the company blog that they developed a German and Spanish version of their service (comments and tags are separated from Japanese videos).

German version

Spanish version

The international versions are already online. Nico Nico for people living in Taiwan was launched as early as October 2007.

This is great news for otaku and people interested in Japanese pop culture in Spanish and German speaking countries. Nico Nico didn’t release an English version, however. They didn’t state reasons but Nico Nico available in English would most probably spike up traffic significantly, generating higher server costs.

As a German, I must say the translation into my mother tongue is far from perfect and not professional at all. I hope the Spanish version is better.

Tags: Japan, Video // 6 Comments »