Asiajin

I admit to being a net video junkie. More often than I probably should, I find myself spending time on sites like Youtube, Nico Nico Douga or Veoh. As there are hundreds of services of this kind on the web now, search engines specializing in digging up videos started emerging in the past months.

One promising video search service and a genuine Japanese product goes by the name of Fooooo. Daisuke Tanaka, director at Bank of Innovation (the company behind Fooooo), was kind enough to personally give me some insight on the service on a recent occasion.

Full-fledged video search service

At the moment, Fooooo is able to search a whopping 130 million videos from nearly 100 sources from the most different backgrounds. User can browse the site through accessing 18 different categories, they can view the most popular videos of the moment as suggested by Fooooo and -of course- can search via keyword input.

In the latter case, users don’t have to type in the whole search term since the service will complete it for them. When typing, Fooooo simultaneously offers a handful of contextual suggestions displayed in a container under the search box. This is a really cool feature and I found many interesting videos just by that way!

Moreover it is possible to limit search by play time of the videos and different channels.

As the world’s first video search engine, Fooooo established a Facebook application with which you can use main functions. The application works well but I personally prefer the “traditional” way of accessing the site itself. Fooooo also offers a widget and an RSS function.

Going global

Fooooo faces a couple of competitors in the video search field: Blinkx, Truveo, Dabble, EveryZing and newcomer mefeedia to name just a few. The Japanese player approaches video search in a different way however. Blinkx for example utilizes speech recognition technology to search within videos and puts its services in a much broader context. From a function-based point of view, Fooooo is rather comparable to video aggregators Truveo or Dabble. In my opinion, Fooooo is superior in terms of design, usability and size of database accessed.

Daisuke told me he wants to accelerate internationalization of his service. The initial homework is done already since the company undertook a considerable effort to fully translate Fooooo. Main languages covered at the moment include:

• English
• Japanese
• Chinese
• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Russian

This is an impressive list. In addition to the translation, Fooooo differentiates the “most popular” videos of the day (prominently displayed in the middle of the home page) by country/language selected. As a German, I have to say the Teutonic version is not translated well though. The English and Japanese sites are alright. I am not sure about the other languages.

However, many more Japanese web companies should go the “Fooooo-way” and make their services available for a global customership from the get-go.

Tags: Japan, Service, Video by serkantoto
No Comments »

On Friday, the first cross-cultural party for IT and web engineers was held in Pasona Tech’s office in Shibuya. Pasona Tech’s parent company, Pasona Group is a large staffing and recruitment company with over 3,000 employees. They are also present in the USA.

The event was well attended with approximately 50 people showing up (Japanese and foreigners mixed). 2,000 Yen were charged as entrance fee. Tomoyuki Sakurai from OpenBSD Support Japan did a great job as the MC.

The party was mainly focused on two presentations followed by a networking session. Sakurai’s whole idea is do hold the event quarterly as a platform for face-to-face communication between Japanese and non-Japanese engineers.

(photos courtesy of my friend Jim Grisanzio)

Making complicated things simple: Lessons from OpenBSD and PF

Ryan McBride delivered a presentation on how OpenBSD, the project he is working full-time for, tries to ease users’ lives by offering a simple yet efficient Unix-like operating system.

According to Ryan, OpenBSD’s main target is simplicity which can be achieved through “thoughtful reduction”. For example, options should be optional in order to avoid bloated programs. Moreover, OpenBSD is based on the idea that simple code leads to more security since more code means more bugs and is harder to test.

Locale Selection in Web Applications

Travis Cardwell talked about a subject which is of interest to many IT and web engineers living in Japan, especially the foreigners among them: locale selection on web sites. Producing multilingual and/or multinational web applications means dealing with a number of problems: different languages, dates, currencies, fonts etc.

Travis -who is a software developer himself- talked on how developers can overcome such obstacles. He referred to “historic solutions” like language selection screens appearing before access to a certain sites as one example. Another solution is to produce two separated sites (i.e. English/Japanese). The approach from Tokyo’s Keio University was mentioned as an example.

In Travis’ view, web applications of this kind need more control of the process. He dedicated the majority of his presentation on how to select the optimal locale as a function of the following:

• valid locales within the application (NOT the system)
• a requested locale (from a session variable, GET variable, cookie, database, URL, etc.)
• an HTTP_LANGUAGE_ACCEPT string (usually passed from the browser)

According to Travis, it is very important to take into consideration the valid locales within the application. Also the requested locale should be determined outside of the framework, as not everybody wants to query for cookies, etc.

The event was closed by a short panel discussion and free talk after the presentations summarized above. As always, I found the networking part was highly valuable since this is the occasion on which Japanese and non-Japanese professionals can mix and converse about the most diverse topics.

Tags: Community, Japan by serkantoto
4 Comments »