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)
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)
Takafumi Horie, aka Horiemon, who founded livedoor, one of the Japanese major web companies, who was arrested by securities fraud in 2006, began twitter and quickly getting thousands of followers in hours today.
His first post [J] was “I started twitter. I’m thinking what to eat for lunch”. Later he reported he had eaten squid ink pasta and soup.
After his original popular CEO blog on livedoor was shut down after the incident, he left the livedoor board but still keeps 17.25% stocks. He started another blog [J] in August 2008 on Ameblo [J], which is operated by CyberAgent which CEO is his close ally Susumu Fujita [J].
After 10 tweets and 4,382 followers at this point, he only follows only one, another successful web entrepreneur friend Masatoshi Kumagai [J], CEO of GMO Internet [J].
As Japanese twitter has not growing as fast as English one, and unlike English, celebrities are already active on (regular) blogs and have not come into twitter world much, 4,000 followers in hours is pretty fast. That shows many web users are highly interested in Horie’s words, thoughts and activities.
BBC NEWS | Business | Japanese tycoon guilty of fraud
Takafumi Horie | Japan — Business People Technology | www.japaninc.com
On Monday, Livedoor Co., Ltd.[J] launched “EDGE src [J]“, a new website which showcases Livedoor’s software and source code which is being distributed to developers under its open-source policy.
The company set up an internal team and a project called “EDGE [J]” to develop software and services on an experimental basis. Since its inception last October, the team has released a number of free software projects including a recommendation engine, a web application framework, an RSS reader and an Apache web server module (similar to mod_auth_cookie) to manage the length of time a server remembers a user’s credentials.
The company encourages developers to use these resources and to develop their own applications. The code has also been adopted in some of its portal sites.
The company is killing two birds with one stone. Results coming in from the experimental project contribute to both promoting the company’s name and fostering developer communities.
Livedoor is well known for having attempted to take over the giant Tokyo broadcaster Fuji-TV, and also for a 2006 incident in which the company’s founder and former CEO was arrested on accusations of securities fraud.
The new names “EDGE” and “EDGE src” come from the company’s original name “Livin’ on the edge”. These choices reflect Livedoor’s employees’ determination to remember their beginnings and to do business honestly in an effort to recover their users’ trust and to effect a turnaround in the company’s business.
From my point of view, Japanese tech ventures such as Livedoor’s EDGE project, seem to set up systems allowing employees to spend a part of their time working on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions, copying Google’s 20-percent rule which continues to breed innovative products and services.
(Proofread by: Sean O’Hagan)
Livedoor started a video search service[J] on its portal, in association with Tokyo-based tech-venture Accessport Inc. Livedoor adopted Accessport’s video search engine called “Woopie“, and it allows keyword-searching of more than 300 million videos indexed from more than 300 video-sharing sites worldwide. The service’s search results reflect new videos uploaded to these sites within as little as five minutes from the time of the search.
The retrieved videos are played in an embedded player on Livedoor’s results page, and Livedoor’s bloggers can freely add them to their blog posts.
Accessport was founded two years ago by several engineers from mainland China, and it mainly develops and integrates web application software using open source technologies. “Woopie” won the Good Design Award in 2008. This award was set up to evaluate and recommend consumer goods produced by Japanese manufacturers in terms of user functionality and design, originally launched by Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry.
News Release from Accessport: Livedoor Adopts Accessport’s video search engine technology [J]
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.
