Livedoor Wiki has added a new notation [J] for gamers who want to share the game’s tips and tricks. If you write like this,
&pad(ps3){6,2,3,plus,shikaku}
then it will be displayed as this,
For convenience, a game command editor is provided so you may press those buttons to generate notations like above.
(all screenshots are from 941::blog [J], a Livedoor director Kushii’s blog)
According to an Aichi regional newspaper Chunichi Shimbun [J], there was an interesting new attempt on Bon-Odori, traditional summer dance festival around Japan, to avoid future noise problem bothering neighbors.
15-20 minutes in their regular festival, 50 FM radio are lent to bon dancers, who are attending locals, and they dance with music from their earphones. The festival space keeps silent.
The festival space is planned to move to other in 2015, where hospital locates near by. And this trial is to see if this radio-driven silent bon festival can be an answer for noise issue, as the organizer said.
The city, Tokai-shi, Aichi prefecture is suburb of Nagoya, Japan’s 4th biggest city. I do not know if there are many such people getting mad at bon festival music, but in the crowded country, some people are sensitive not to generate noise. Like talking over cellphone is banned at many train lines, which encouraged mobile web growth. (Though daily urban life in Japan is surrounded a lot of public announcements)
On Tuesday, June 30th, two people from Twitter USA had an user meeting [J] with 200 Japanese users at Omotesando.
“t” and “tsu” (the first letter of “twitter” in Japanese) hat receptionists welcomed Japanese twitter fans.
Newly recruited Japan Country Manager Yukari Matsuzawa (@yukarim) and Head of Mobile Kevin Thau (@kevinthau) came down from San Francisco.
With @f-shin, who runs the most popular cellphone twitter front end service movatwitter, which must be thought as an important third party app for Japanese users, is also promoted on the Twitter Japan’s top page sidebar frequently, I asked Kevin if Twitter is thinking an official mobile site/app for Japanese cellphone. His answer is no. He explained to us that device specific sites/apps are expected to be made by third party by utilizing API, instead of Twitter themselves. That is somewhat disappointing for me because in Japan, many sites have more traffic on mobile than PC and there are a lot of things you can add by making cellphone specific apps and/or career official menu.
By the way, movatwitter obviously includes the trademark “twitter” in its service and domain, recent “tweet” trademark news reminds me.
Also, some users questioned to Yukari if the current search function which is simply broken and not working with Japanese language would be fixed in near future.
Current Twitter search takes keywords by using white space as a splitter, which makes no sense with languages like Japanese (and Chinese, Korean, etc. I guess). So the search results on twitter often becomes blank. Yukari said that they are working on the issue and it would be fixed soon in this summer by introducing tokenizer algorithm for Japanese.
(Following to the part 1)
5. Livedoor (Asiajin articles)
Tomo Tsubota, Livedoor Blog [J] Business Department, opened and shared their user demographics and billing method.
Livedoor Blog started in 2003 and became black ink in Sep. 2007. 30% of sales come from premium service, which is used by 17% of active users. (60% revenue is from advertising)
The provided billing methods are credit card, payment at convenience store, BitCash [J] (pre-paid e-money), bank transfer and e-money(both Edy [J] and iD [J]). Ratio by sales amount are,
| 80% | credit card |
| 10% | convenience store |
| 6% | BitCash |
| 3% | bank transfer |
| 1% | edy/iD |
When seeing ratio by generation, 54% of teenagers use convenience store, then 13.2% use BitCash. This is easily explained because they usually do not have credit cards. For users over their 60, 34.1% uses convenience store with less credit card usage, he explained that credit card is not a friendly payment method for elders.
6. Mixi (Asiajin articles)
By Mixi Nengajo, why Mixi went with the new year greeting snail mail project, was told. It was intended to charge users communication.
Mixi is frequently asked “Why do not you to go e-commerce and sell things to its 17 million users?”, and Mixi’s answer is they try to think users’ value first. As Nengajo can effectively use social graph, and encourage communications.
7. Hatena (Asiajin articles)
Hatena’s Yuichi Kawasaki told their goods, Hatena Star (virtual applauds), premium version of their social bookmark service, blog book publishing and new kids-users introduced by cooperation with Nintendo DSi (all [J]), with comparing their service with newspaper, Facebook and mobile social network services.
Sessions memo of Monetize Hacks #3 by Shiraber [J]
ITmedia News [J]
[Update 2009.07.06] all presentation movie are up on the organizer Kushii’s blog
24th night at Roppongi Hills, the third Monetize Hacks meeting was held by some web directors from Livedoor and Hatena by welcoming 120 web directors and entrepreneurs in and around Tokyo.
The first monetize Hacks [J] was called for web directors greeting and exchanging ideas around 15 people, the second one [J] was a group competition style with 30 people, now the third one with seminar style is with 120 web people who are keening on how to maximize website monetization in Japanese websphere.
The main theme is “User Billing”. Seven Japanese popular web services directors/leaders made presentations.
1. Yahoo! Japan Research [J] (Asiajin articles)
Researcher of Yahoo! Japan Research Masao Kakihara gave a general view of service monetization strategy.
2. Pixiv (Asiajin articles)
Takanori Katagiri told Pixiv and its monetizing experiences.
Pixiv is now getting a million users, 0.7 bilion page views/month and 15,000 new illustrations per day. 140 servers supports it.
Currently not so profitable (yet). They combine banner ads, contents match(Overture), Amazon affiliate, membership fee (525yen/month).
He also talked how to increase affiliate income by pushing well-sold items heavily.
3. Unoh
Unoh is a 15 people company which is running Photozou(photo sharing), NeoAd(mobile ad), Machi-Tsuku (mobile game). CEO Shintaro Yamada’s talk was about their new mobile geo-location game Machi-Tsuku monetization. How fixed-rate billing and item-sales systems make difference on sales and user behaviour.
He pointed out how avatar/item charging services (like Gree) are designed carefully not to exchange money and virtual points directly, which is often done in social game sites in west, which seem less successful on profit-wise.
4. Kayac (Asiajin articles)
Yui Tamada, director, Kayac said “No one can predict what service takes off. Small start, get user feedbacks.” They impose themselves to create 99 new services in one year, which results making one service every 2-3 days.
Combination of web application consulting and a lot of original services for selling brand works effectively as free advertising/technology-showcase.
Success stories: Wonderfl (online Flash builder), Koe-bu (voice social network community), Pocket Friend Conti (mobile avatar)
“Make things first, monetization comes later.” “Originality is important.”
(continued to the part 2)
HongKong-, Tokyo-, London- and Silicon Valley-based tech start-up MotherApp has kindly developed the iPhone/iPod reader app for us. Click on the link below for it. Absolutely free.
