Asiajin

News on the latter half of January 2010 which we did not write as a dedicated article. Part 1 is here.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• METI Lottery In Exchange For Used Cellphone Campaign Collaborates Hatsune Miku
• Chinese Guy In Saitama Arrested By Providing Proxy Servers For Chinese Gamers To Play (and earn by RMT) Japanese Online Game
• Harlequin Novels On Nintendo DS
• Kobe-based sports tabloid Daily Sports to start publishing e-edition.
• “Onsei Ninshiki Fusen ST”, iPhone App to Memo by speech-recognition
• Mekiki’s Patent Lawsuits Against Facebook Explained By American Lawfirm
• Sekai Camera’s Tonchi Dot and 5 companies Runs St. Valentein Day’s AR Event at Shibuya
• KDDI says 10 million cellphone sale this fiscal year will be difficult, at 3Q report
• Transcosmos Sells DART Business To Google, Lawsuit To Be Dissolved
• Twitter Japanese Mobile Site Adds Cellphone-mail-to-tweet function
• Nifty Lanches Cloud Service
• Sending Thousands of Origami Crane to Haiti Project On Mixi Causes controversy on Japanese web
• Over 200km Freekick Machine
• Kakaku.com launches Android app
• Two Fishing Boats In Tokyo Bay Starts To Tweet 1 2
• Mobage Open Platform begins, 92 apps by 40 companies at the launch day
• TV Tokyo’s Documentary Went Too Far On Taking Sony Walkman’s (one month) Takeover Against iPod
• Digital Garage Makes Another Investment To Twitter
• Dentsu purchases Innovation Interactive [English]
• University of Tokyo associate professor complained on Google Japan’s Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) applied to students during the recruitment
• Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications starts the internet contents self-rating experiment
• January Forbes Asia Cover Features Gree Yoshikazu Tanaka
• A blogger counts how many common apps on Mixi Appli and Mobage Appli platforms. 36 out of 86 Mobage Apps are also on Mixi
• CyberAgent CEO admitted (their Twitter Clone) Failed to investors, but he has not given up
• Softbank Continues Free iPhone 3GS Plan
• KDDI, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners and Hokkaido Broadcasting To Hold An AR Event At Sapporo Yukimatsuri
• Docomo President Shows Interest In iPad At 3Q Fiscal Report Meeting
• Thanko’s 80 ports USB Charger
• A new Japanese font Kazuraki fully-proportional in both writing directions
• Asahi writes about Twitter user reports from Stopped Shinkansen train

Please let us know if you think we should write details on any news above.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Like Google US offers free WiFi in 47 airports, Google Japan announced 30 minutes free WiFi gift everyday for mobile users, at three chainshops, Tully’s Coffee, Pronto coffee/bar and Lotteria hamburger in populated areas [J] from November 30th to February 28th.

On this campaign [J] to promote Google services (you need to register with your mail, and click a banner ads by Google about Google Japan themselves), Google cooperates with NTT-Broadband Platform(NTT-BP)’s paid WiFi network Wifine [J]. Wifine also provides free access which limits town-guide websites, but for this one, you can enjoy all the internet for 30 minutes. If you have two mobile gadget, 30 minutes for each.

See Also:

NTT-BP side’s release [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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In Tokyo Metro train, I noticed small ads by Google Japan. The ads are for Google Mobile Search promotion.

This one suggests to search Google by “Shibuya Movie” when you want to know if the film “Taken” can be watched from now in your location (Shibuya).

So Google Japan wants more cellphone users to use Google for mobile search. Interestingly, how these ads guide cellphone users to the Google mobile site is “to search by Google”.

“To reach Google Mobile, search ‘Google’ on your cellphone”

Here in Japan, it is common practice that paper ads have a search box with keywords and search button (though you cannot really press it), when you try to take someone to your website. And this Google ads have “Google” in Japanese Katakana, phonetic letters “グーグル” as the search keyword.

Asking to “search by Google(グーグル)” implies, Google Mobile Search is not a major search service in Japan. Here Google Japan tries to change mobile users’ default search site.

So what do people use? If you are a Softbank, #3 carrier, user, your phone has “Y!” button and searching on Yahoo! Japan Mobile is much easier. This was done because Softbank owns good amount of Yahoo! Japan stock. For Softbank users, this ads expect to search “Google” on Yahoo!

But did No.1 NTT DoCoMo and No.2 KDDI au both tie up with Google? Yes, respectively in 2008 and in 2006 they shook hands with Google. Both now use Google’s engine for their official search results.

However, the results page are not same as the results on Google.jp mobile. Both DoCoMo and au search shows 1. their ads space, 2. their matched “official menu” websites, then 3. Google’s mobile search results, 4. PC search results and in DoCoMo’s case 5. “search by other search engines” links.

The following is a search result page sample provided by DoCoMo.

And the first page is occupied by the top ad and followed official sites. Google’s results of the internet mobile and PC sites are shown when you scroll down.

This train ads seems to intend to grab some users from those carriers’ official search to the simpler, and carriers-menus-free, internet search results.

See Also:

KDDI au’s announce to use Google as a search engine for their mobile service EZweb in 2006 [J]

NTT DoCoMo’s release to cowork with Google on mobile search and others in 2008 [J]

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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In commemoration of announcing “Favorite Places[J]” as a promotion campaign of Google Map, on Monday Google Japan[J] placed “real” red pins at several locations, which imitate mark-up symbols used on Google Map, including JR Shibuya Station and a Buddhist temple next to Tokyo’s fish market that foreign visitors never forget to drop by.

The pin statue is 4 meters (=13.1 feet) high, and a specially designed pin has a hole in the heart of its body, where a small monitor shows you the video of hot spots selected by celebrities as their favorites. The pin statues are exhibited at the following locations for the dates given.

• Honganji Temple in Tsukiji: from August 3rd to 9th
• West Exit, JR Ebisu Station: from August 3rd to 9th
• Center Exit, JR Shibuya Station: from August 3rd to 9th
• New South Exit, JR Shinjuku Station: from August 4th to 5th
• Central Exit, JR Ikebukuro Station: from August 8th to 9th
• Exit for Showa St., Akihabara Station: from August 8th to 9th

The videos being played at the pin with a hole are available on YouTube as well. The following is prepared by Google Japan and introduces “Favorite Places” in Tokyo. (4 mins. 20 secs.)

In Kyoto, Japanese-style paper lanterns are decorated at the Favorite Places.

Via Google Japan Blog[J] and CNET Japan[J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Masaru IKEDA
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Google Japan announced their apology on their search results for some users were showed garbled texts from 9th evening to 11:30 p.m. for around 6-7 hours on their official blog [J]. The bug affected some Japanese users and some other language users, as they wrote. It also said that it was caused by engineering human error.

I myself had not had such a problem so it might happen not on whole Google Japan’s servers but in some clusters.

A blog “Bikkel no Kuuchu Teien”(Hanging Gardens of Bikkel) reported his/her searching results of “cherry blossom”.

S/he and some other reported their browsers thought the page as Turkish. The correct results can be gotten now is like this,

The cause was not explained in the official statement so let us search Japanese users reporting. There are many blogs, 2-channel bbs comments and Yahoo! Chiebukuro (Yahoo! Answers Japanese) questions.

According to a Oshiete Goo (Goo’s answers), the garbled page header did not have a character encoding meta direction “UTF-8″. Some people suggested to set browser encoding manually with UTF-8, which solved the garbles.

Most reports indicated that it happened only with Windows and Internet Explorer. Browser’s automatic encoding detection algorithms are different so probably no-encoding worked badly on IE this time for those users.

Many other bloggers reported that their uninstalling Google Toolbar solved the problem, but the official announcement denied that the bug was nothing related with Google Toolbar.

Yahoo! Japan’s daily Kyu-Jyosho Word Ranking (Surging Keyword Ranking) on 10th showed “Google Garbled” as 12th rank.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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