Asiajin

The largest mobile social network Gree announced [J] that their new GREE Connect (tentative name) platform starting this April 2010.

Mixi Appli, an OpenSocial specification based API was officially introduced [J] on the biggest social network Mixi in August 2009 after a half year closed beta.

Mobage Town by DeNA, the second mobile social network also started [J] their OpenSocial API and game API opened to third party developers in September 2009. As Mobage Town (Gree as well) is the mobile centric service, they implemented Open Social API on the limited Japanese cellphone browsers well.

After the phrase “Mixi Tsukare”(tiresome on Mixi) was said by some long term users and growth slowed, Mixi’s traffic was reported to ride on upstream trend again by their Mixi Appli.

Now, all three competing social network services (none of them has been getting the dominating position if you imagine No.1 is like Facebook in many countries) can tell their developer users that they can make and possibly earn on their platform, instead of learning Facebook platform, which is not predictable to worth supporting in Japanese market at this point. The level of openness and seriousness are different among those big three, but they need to show their fighting pose against Facebook invasion.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Mixi holds “mixi Appli Conference 2009” [JP] to promote their new app service on April 23rd in Shinagawa, Tokyo.

Speakers are:

• Kenji Kasahara, CEO of Mixi Inc.
• Akinori Harada, VP, Mixi Division, of Mixi Inc.
• Koichiro Tsujino, President of Google Japan.
• Makoto Asanuma, VP of Namco Bandai Games Inc.
• Minoru Kimura, Head of Media Technology Labs at Recruit Co., Ltd.
• Jia Shen, CTO and Founder of RockYou, Inc.

Mixi has already disclosed their app service API for companies under the NDA from November 2008.

In early April, they will launch a beta version of Mixi Appli. Also they will release the API for personal developers too.

Tags: Company, Japan, News, Service by Shunichi Arai
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Japanese portal site livedoor announced today that they started a new free hosting service EDGE co. Lab.

Developers/entrepreneurs can get hosted servers from livedoor and run their web service without charge. The conditions are;

• “Powered by EDGE” must be shown somewhere on the page
• livedoor OpenID and (if possible) livedoor Auth API need to be supported on the user application

The site running on the EDGE server may get traffic livedoor portal, which is one of the Japanese portal sites chasing the giant Yahoo! Japan. livedoor portal has some competitive web services like Blog, News, Shitaraba(BBS), Cure(Cosplay social network, Engish/Japanese) and Clip(Social bookmark). The accepted websites also get scalability and server management consultation from livedoor staff.

The service could be a developers’ version of good old Geocities, or Japanese friendly Google Apps Engine, YAP or Ning, with more flexible programming language choice. Sakura Internet and Agilemedia Network is offering similar service Bloglabs from blog and social media point of view, Mashupedia.jp(vector) tried to provide free web app hostings for API/Mashup fans but failed to end this spring. The portal boasting their datacentre and scalability technology joined this field will attract more individual entrepreneurs/developers who has good ideas/apps but need help on resource and promotion.

The service name “EDGE” is the word used in a company name when livedoor was founded, at that time, it was “On The Edge” and renamed it when they bought free internet provider livedoor.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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On Sunday, 19th October, Mashup Awards 4 , Sun Microsystems Japan and Recruit’s [Recruit on Asiajin] web-service mashup development contest award ceremony was held at Recruit headoffice, next to the Tokyo station.

The contest, 4th this time, gathered 44 companies’ web service API from many of Japanese web companies such like Yahoo Japan, Google Japan, Rakuten, Mixi, Kakaku.com, Microsoft, Technorati, Salesforce, CyberAgent, etc. The API provider list is worth checking if you want to get

There were 259 applications filed, and 53 awards including 40 API providers’ awards were given.

The Grand Prix was, Chamap, which integrated browser chat, Google Map and several different shop/restaurant API with cartoon style interface. Chamap was developed by freelance creator Kentaro YAMA. 1 million yen cash award (around 10,000 USD) was also received.

I was invited as one of 4 external contest judges, following last year’s Yahoo! Japan’s API contest.

Besides judging Grand Prix and 4 high awards (from 259. tough work), I was given a chance of giving an award under my name. I chose “Akky Akimoto award” for Mimi-Kaki, English listening comprehension quiz using text-to-speech API.

After-party was crowded with around 300 developers/designers/entrepreneurs with great atmosphere. It is a great chance for startups and individual to promote their ideas and services. I hope to see 5th contest soon again.

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Mixi has released “mixi OpenID” API to public users.

It enables developers to use mixi ID for authentication. Also the API has “my mixi authentication” and “community authentication” features. Developers must follows OpenID Authentication 2.0 standard.

Also it enables mixi users to use their ID on many existing websites which accept OpenID.

“my mixi” is a term which means a friend of a user. This feature enables developers to authenticate that a user is a friend of another user.

Community authentication enables developers to confirm that a user is a member of a community.

Mixi was reluctant to release API because they are anxious for security issues. Finally they started to provide API to users. What’s their next move?

Tags: Japan by Shunichi Arai
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