Asiajin

This month’s Tokyo2point0 was held at Nishiazabu Super Deluxe with two sessions.

Google: Programming the Cloud

After (very) short talk on marketing pitch of Google Cloud usage, Gregor Hohpe from Google Inc. talked on technical/architectual advantages of Google engineering system and external services.

It is explained that the characteristics of Google’s services are formed by concentrating on getting “roughly correct”, contrary to strict system such like used for money handling system.

Technologies for Google internal

Four technologies support it are drilled down.

• Google File System(GFS)
• Bigtable
• MapReduce
• Sawzall

For Google, Peta Byte (1000 Terabytes) is the common unit to handle. These tools are designed for taking care those massive data processing on thousands of servers.

Google Technologies opened to outside

Google Data API including Calendar API and Google App Engine were explained with sample application demo.

Korean Internet Ventures

Andy Lee, Softbank Media Lab in Korea was connected to the room via Skype Video Chat, introduced three Korean startups by showing their English demo videos.

All of three venture service are related with visual content creating. Drawing, movie and sound things. The used demonstration video are hosted on Tokyo2point0 website.

• Sketchplan (video)
• Kloseup [Korean] (video)
• Storyberry [Korean] (video)

All services are run in Korean so far. Andy said that it is possible some of them will make Japanese localization in future.

Probably because of the internet lag, and the style of presentations by videos, there could not be active discussions between remote Korea and the conference room. But it was a good trial. I hope we will see another improved session with somewhere oversea.

Tags: Event Report, Japan, Korea by Akky Akimoto
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Google Japan starts Google Map Street View in Japan.

Now the street view is available in some principal cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, etc. You know, using Street View we can see the 360-degree view of a place.
The following image is the view of Shibuya.

see street view

Almost all of related news refer to the problem of privacy. Google tries to solve this problem by defocusing human faces and car numbers. In addition Google lets users to report the wrong scenes, for example if we can specify an individual person, thus they can always check them.

According to the official blog of Google Earth / Maps team, they starts Street View in Australia at the same time.

By the way, Junya Kondo, Founder & CEO of Hatena, wrote that he found a friend (actually his wife she is) on the Street View. And in 2ch community, they are heating up for watching various scenes, for example the scene of a sweet couple of high school students.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Wataru Yamaki
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You might notice that Google changed their favicon image which you see on your browser addressbar this week.

Here is NTT Resonant’s portal site “goo“’s icon,

goo is one of the biggest portal in Japan, though the gap to the leading Yahoo/Google is big, goo is ranked at 10th among Japanese websites in Alexa traffic.

If you think their name “goo” sounds like a Google’s copy, that’s not possible. “goo” was established in 1997/3 as a Japanese search engine based on Inktomi technology, whilst Google was founded in 1998/9.

So does this mean Google try to steal goo’s popularity in Japan? Of course not. The icon change seems to be applied all over the world. It’s just a designer’s accident but also shows how Google does not care about their local competitors.

Thanks for letting us notice > Tatsuwo

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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