Baidu Japan ( http://baidu.jp/ ), a Japanese arm of the Chinese largest search company Baidu, has been unreachable.
SEM Research blog pointed out that the Baidu Japan’s search service was removed and the site only had company profile. Its Japanese service launched in March 2007, and stopped image and video search in July 2013.
We reported that a Japanese web geeks’ icon Naoya Ito’s move on September 1st from Hatena to the No.1 social networking service Gree, but he was not the only one. There are several big names reported to leave and/or enter web/IT companies in Japan around the beginning of September 2010.
Yoshimi Morinaga, a CEO who ran a popular girls avatar fashion site poupee girl, was reported to disappear her name from the executive list on a company website.
On September 1st, some online media reported that 24-year old Hisayo Okada (photo from her blog, left person) takes the CEO position.
Morinaga is reported her resignation Poupee Girl/Cyber Agent group. She said she is planning to start a new web service. Morinaga became the Poupee Girl CEO at her age of 25. CyberAgent is known to assign young employees who only have few years work experience after graduation to head o subsidiaries, which is rare in Japan.
MATSUNOBU Yoshinori, who is known as a top-notch Japanese MySQL expert, who had worked for MySQL but the company was bought by Sun, then by Oracle, left there to Join a social game networking service DeNA.
(photo by okyuu.com)
On his blog, he was also asked by companies in Europe and U.S.A but DeNA valued him very well. He wrote that DeNA is one of the heaviest MySQL user companies around the world so he would keep contributing MySQL community.
Shigeaki Yazaki, an editor of Nikkei BP joins Hatena. On his personal blog, he said that he thinks even Hatena, whose main contents are user-generated, needs editing.
(photo by Nikkei IT Pro)
A tech blogger @namikawa, whose blog on server/cloud topics, declared that he joined CyberAgent as a backend engineer for Ameba service.
Popular journalist/Twitter user @tsuda becomes DeNA’s official recruiter. He started tweeting about Mobage-Town hiring info every day.
A search/language researcher Masato Hagiwara (@mhagiwara) left Baidu Japan. In his case, it is not know if he will work again soon.
Stimulated by social game networks and social services players like Gree, DeNA and Dwango, mobility of human resources in Japanese web industry seems more active recently.
I respect all of their new challenges. Good luck!
Baidu Tieba(“Paste Bar” in English) [Zh] is an ultra popular community service run by the world second largest search engine Baidu [Zh].
The uniqueness of Tieba is that it combined search engine and forum, by guiding search results to related discussion boards. If the searched word did not have a counterpart forum, users are suggested to create one.
On July 27th 2010, Baidu Japan [J] launched the Japanese localized version of Baidu Tieba under Baidu Japan, which entered into the market in 2007.
The new Japanese version has the same subdomain Tieba so that the URL is http://tieba.baidu.jp/ [J]. Interestingly, Baidu expect users pronounce “Tieba” as “te ieba” in Japanese, which means “speaking of (noun)”. The same sounds, different but well explaining the service’s characteristic on where users enjoy association of words.
贴吧(Tieba, Chinese) -> てぃえば(Tieba, Japanese)
Tieba was one of the Baidu’s driving force to thrive in Chinese web. As there are no direct competitors in Japanese web, bringing it may have some possibility to change the game for developing Baidu Japan.