Asiajin

Shoko Nakagawa, aka Shokotan, announced [J] her blog moving to Ameblo [J], CyberAgent blog hosting who boasts over 1,400 celebrity bloggers.

Shokotan’s blog originally began in 2003 at Yaplog, a free blog hosting service popular to girls by cute design selections, when she was just one of them.

After getting popularity by her aggressive frequent posts with photo around 30-50 per days and called “a new blog queen” after Kaori Manabe and blog-retired Chinatsu Wakatsuki, in February 2008, she (by rumour was ordered by agency and reluctantly) moved to another free hosting, Excite Blog with her 10 billion page views. On Excite Blog, paid premium service were introduced. Excite PR denied financial transaction with the talent agency for the move.

This time, according to her staff’s explanation [J], this movement to Ameblo is mainly by Excite stopping its fan-club service which Shokotan had been using, and they are seeking to utilize Ameblo and CyberAgent’s community services such like Pigu.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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A web based chat service Lingr announced its closing down at the end of May 2009.

We’re sad to announce that Lingr will be shutting down on May 31, 2009.

It’s been great pleasure that so many wonderful people have joined and gotten to know each other here at Lingr. We want to give our wholehearted thanks to everyone who gave us compliments, suggestions, and criticism- Lingr couldn’t have existed without your feedback.

Lingr Blog: Announcing Goodbye from Lingr

Lingr was developed and run by Infoteria USA, San Mateo based American company, which is a subsidiary of Inforteria Corporation, Tokyo Japan.

Making a real time web chat system over web/http protocol is not as easy as you might expect, especially if you want it to be scaled out. Lingr used latest technologies and software such like COMET, Ruby on Rails, Jetty, etc. for it.

Infoteria, a young enterprise software company specialized in XML based data handling system, is on Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers [Code 3853] since 2007. Infoteria USA is planned to be closed around June.

Kentaro Ejima, who is well known by his successful career as a star engineer of Inforteria, describing himself as a Philosopher, is also a very influential blogger , has been leading the project by moving himself from Tokyo to USA. He has been writing about this challenge on his blog and many Japanese web entrepreneurs and engineers hoped his success in US/English market will be the best practice for Japanese web startup and person going oversea.

On his popular blog [J], Ejima looks back his 4 year struggling in US company, with retrospective assessment including that HR cost was almost doubled in compare with Japan.

Luckily for he himself, he has just got a green card recently, and he tells he stays in USA to do another project, which maybe around iPhone. I wish his every success in his new challenge.

See Also:

Announcement of the service end of Lingr and Rejaw / Kenn’s Clairvoyance – CNET Japan [J]

Another bay area resident Japanese Hacker Tatsuhiko Miyagawa made a long interview with Kentaro Ejima / Gihyo.jp [J]

Kentaro Ejima(江島健太郎) search on Google [J]

Tags: Japan, USA by Akky Akimoto
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Bounen Kaigi, annual year-end conference considering the record of the year, was held at Yahoo! Japan office again this year. This conference was sponsored by Yahoo! Japan and the event hosts were Gen Taguchi (blog: 100shiki[J]) and Daiya Hashimoto (blog: Jyoho Kogaku Passion for The Future[J]).

This conference consisted of the followings.

• Noticeable Net Services in 2008
• Guest’s topics
• Yahoo! Japan’s 2008 trends by analyzing keywords
• Hosts’ topics
• Zentai Kaigi (everyone’s discussion)

Noticeable Net Services in 2008

This ranking is 10 noticeable net services which Taguchi/Hashimoto picked up from the list collected by their readers.

1. Dropbox
2. Evernote
3. SPYSEE – Vertical search engine of influencers
4. TechTalk.jp – Hub site for technical presentors
5. Language exchange SNS Lang-8 – Multi-lingual social network service for learning foreign lanugages
6. Auto Vocoder Box – Online vocal correction service for bad singers
7. GYOROL – Mobile & PC fishing game
8. rigureto – Miserable story sharing site
9. Shuden.jp – Last train time checking site in mobile
10. Yaruo KenBunRoku – The record of 2ch character “Yaruo”’s diverse challenges

These are not so popular in Japan now, but have a good chance to become big services. Top two services are  not from Japan, therefore this results will motivate Japanese start-ups to make more effort in 2009.

Guest’s topics

Guest was Keiya Mizuno. He is a writer of million-seller book “Yume wo kanaeru zou” ( means an elephant living out dreams). This book is so popular that it was made to TV drama and came to be the most  sold Japanese books in 2008, more than 1.7 million copies, Hashimoto said.

» MIZUNO KEIYA OFFICE Inc.[J]

Yahoo! Japan’s 2008 trends by analyzing keywords

They explained about the trends on the internet in 2008, for example, comparision between mobile and pc user of mixi or analyzing the age brackets of  newly emerging community sites, pixiv, pu-pe girl and so on.

Hosts’ topics

The hosts, Taguchi/Hashimoto, made presentations about their 2008 and new plans for 2009.

» Taguchi’s Report of Bounen Kaigi 2008 // ideaxidea.com[J]

Zentai Kaigi(everyone’s discussion)

This may be most important session, the last was Zentai Kaigi. All participants were grouped up by 6 people and discussed.

Theme was “Thinking up the new big net service in 2009″. They must fill up the following paper.

Using (_______) problem from recession in 2009 as an underhanded way, you work out a new service (_______) for (______) people. This service has a great feature that (_______), so it has very high-level repeat rate. The name of this service is “(________)”.
In addition, the government admires this service and names the year from 2009 to 2015 after it, “(________) economy”.

The winner team’s idea is that NEET check the other house through some monitors in their houses. NEET are people who have no job including part-time and will increase in number because of the recession.

This conference will be also held in 2009. If you spend your year-end vacation in Japan, why don’t you join?

Tags: Community, Event Report, Japan by Wataru Yamaki
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Cyber Agent, free blogging service Ameba(Ameblo) provider, announced that their holding celebrity blogger Yusuke KAMIJI’s weblog is certified by Guinness World Records as the “MOST UNIQUE USERS ON A PERSONAL BLOG IN 24 HOURS” who is read by the 230,755 unique visitors in one day.

The daily page views is 5-6 million, the highest 13,171,039 PV on April 12th. Also got 56,061 comments on April 17th.

As we explained in this article, blog popularity in Japan is a bit different from other countries. Many TV stars are writing their blog as their promotion, supported by agency and blog service providers, and those blogs are mainstream. They uses their influences on TV to take people to the internet/blog, to sell their name, and (maybe) sell their recommended products/services.

The statistics numbers are explained to be taken on their server-side application analog. So it cannot be a serious stats I think, but may be useful when selling ads on the blogs, so is guinnes records.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Toru TAKASUKA, known as a very few Japanese entrepreneur challenging in US internet market by his Lunarr (covered on TechCrunch, Mashable, and a lot more), invites popular bloggers from US for one week Tokyo and Japan web technology meetings trip.

The invited bloggers are:

• Tom Foremski from Sillicon Valley Watcher
• Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read/Write Web
• Kristen Nicole, Mashable
• Bob Walsh 47 Hats / Web Worker Daily

Wow… Just wow.

I am luckily able to attend one of their meeting, because it was held at my workplace Cybozu Labs. There were 4 Japanese entrepreneurs had a chance to make a 10 minutes presentation each to those bloggers.

Utagoe

Tomonari SONODA, CEO of Utagoe, recently moved to San Jose, introduced their new frontend service Channel.is . Their P2P movie broadcasting system and its selling URL under channel.is as a short name of broadcasted movie page. Also, new live video RSS service is being released today.

Ubiquitous Entertainment

Ryo SHIMIZU, CEO of Ubiquitous Entertainment Inc. talked on his making Niconico Douga and iPhone application.

Sargasso

Ken SUZUKI from Sargasso introduced their services, Nota, CShirts.

Hatena

Hatena’s exective Yuichi KAWASAKI talked 3 services, Hatena Haiku (on Asiajin), Hatena Diary and Hatena Bookmark, their successful Japanese services.

Tatsuya KUROSAKA

Consultant Tatsuya KUROSAKA made a short speech around his activities, being a freelance in Japan and web future for long-term, etc.

Cybozu Labs

My Cybozu Labs colleague Kazuho OKU, who developped Xiino browser for Palm, made a jump-in presentation on Japanize/MyLingual, automatic menu translation services supported by user generated data.

Also, Pathtraq, web traffice analysis service was expained. Currently it is targetting Japanese web, and you get good hot news list on it which cannot be searched on traditional search engine (which does not concentrate on “emerging news last hours”).

Some of those services could be mentioned by those bloggers soon, I guess.

[disclaimer] Akky AKIMOTO works 3 days per week for Cybozu Labs as a company blogger (in Japanese). Lunarr’s Toru TAKASUKA is a former CEO of Cybozu, though he left Cybozu years ago with selling his all stocks to start Lunarr in Portland, Oregon USA. Akky AKIMOTO has been working for Cybozu group for years and has ever worked under him when he was in charge of Cybozu US development.

See also:

Co-organizer of the tour, Hisashi KATSUYA’s blog on CNET Japan

Yoshinori TAKESAKO’s report with Niconico Douga photo slide

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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