Asiajin

On March 10th, Tokyo District Court broke into a flat of ex-Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie, a fallen IT entrepreneur star whose arrest caused so-called “Livedoor Shock” in 2006, distrain upon his golf bag, wine cellar appliance, television and shamisen(Japanese guiter) by valued them as 330,000 yen ($3646) in total.

Horie is appealing his alleged securities fraud to the higher court. After bailed out, he publicly said that he won’t get back to web business, and rather chase his space development business. He moved his popular blog to Ameblo blog hosting, which is run by his close ally Susumu Fujita’s CyberAgent. He also gets huge number of twitter followers, and is writing some articles on magazines.

Blog, Twitter and recently started paid newsletter are frequently updated with thoughts, including politics and his court case. Probably because of disbelief to mass media who bashed him, he has been building up those direct channels. Although English Wikipedia on Horie seems to stop update for years, he still keeps influences on Japanese websphere.

On his blog, he wrote that those irreconcilable plaintiffs (1700 of 3300, Mainichi reports), who can get money by reconciling from Livedoor Holdings, to whom Horie had agreed to pay 20.8 billion yen($230 million), are just harassing him by law abuse.

He pointed out that the plaintiffs thinks he lives in luxury, as this time’s claims 8 million yen shows, which image is manipulated by mass media. However, it turned out that 330,000 yen seizure unexpectedly revealed his simple lifestyle.

He also wrote that his recently purchased Shamisen, which was evaluated as 100,000 yen ($1000) by bailiff, was just 19,800 yen, by showing link to an online shop.

Livedoor Shock, which directly lowered whole stock market and Livedoor’s stock price, discouraged IT entrepreneurship (which was already far weaker than the one in US) a lot in Japan, which is blamed by both pro- and anti-Horie.

See Also:

Tokyo Broadcasting System Television(TBS)’s movie report by taking Horie’s back from lunch without knowing his flat was intruded [J] – The TV station Horie tried to take over in 2005 was Fuji TV, TBS is the one escaped from Rakuten takeover. It is not unknown yet how TBS became to knew this happened.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »

Last week our RSS subscribers passed over 5,000, which is a good milestone. Twitter followers also increased to 400. Following @asiajin also will notify our latest articles. Thank you so much.

Here is the first half of January Japanese IT/Web interesting news links we did not take as a dedicated article. (part 2 is here)

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise noted.

• Cellphone Shipments In Japan Drops The Lowest Level In 5 Years – 2009 3Q
• Liberal Democratic Party launches Internet video channel, J-Channel
• Bijin Tokei 2D (2-dimensional, Anime) version collaborated with Pixiv
• Bijin Tokei goes on TV in Kansai, 5 minutes program
• Bijin Tokei Voice Actress Version released
• New Service Namings Name What You Often Experience But Does Not Have Name
• Nippon TV (channel 4 in Tokyo) had Twitter teaching program on new years holiday
• Tweeting National Diet Member (and ex-fashion model) Renho asked how to use Nintendo DS illegal dongle for her son
• Love Plus AR cards were sold by 100,000 yen on Yahoo! Auction
• Ameba Celebrities’ password were posted in Excel on their blogs
• CyberAgent release on their Ameba password leak incident [pdf]
• A maid hair salon was opened in Taipei (Not Tokyo)
• Anime “Eden of the East” AR events are held in Tokyo
• Nippon TV will broadcast a new entertainment program interacts with Twitter users
• Mixi Introduced MySpace-like Personal Page Decoration Feature For PC
• CyberAgent starts illustration mashup community AmebaPACO
• MSN Sankei News starts enabling users to reproduce the news footage pictures on their blogs without permission.
• Rakuten, Yahoo Japan, Mixi and more teamed up for promoting e-commerce industry.
• Motion Portrait introduces HourFace, the iPhone app allows you to see how you will look like when you get older.
• Niconico DVD – NicoNico comments overlay on Your Watching DVD
• A Japan’s real estate portal releases a GPS-enabled iPhone app showing the average price of apartment rent cost classfied by town.
• NTT Docomo started mobile cartoon service for India’s Tata DoCoMo cellphone subscribers.
• Yahoo! Japan phishing suspects arrested.
• NTT Communications invests in Swiss online language learning site.
• Latest i-mode browsers are reported to cause security leak with old-style mobile site
• CyberAgent released the iPhone app allowing you to browse Ameba blog posts.
• Bikini Liquor Shop.
• OGC2010 Web/Game Conference Feb 17th
• Mr. & Mrs. Ukigawa, who are well-known for having invented a Japanese front-end processor(FEP), quit the company they’ve founded and launch a new company to develop user-friendly application platforms.
• Livedoor launched TechWave, an IT-oriented blog moderated by former Jiji Press tech correspondent Tsuruaki Yukawa, and Market Hack, an alternative investment-oriented blog by financial expert Takao Hirose.
• Naver’s Storage Service N Drive
• YouTube announces the grand prix winner of YouTube Video Awards Japan 2009.
• Kenko.com launched an English-language version.
• Contactless smardcard “FeliCa” for the iPhone to be introduced in Japan. Flight System Consulting, Focal Computer and Morphie are jointly developing it. [pdf]
• Flight System Consulting just released the iPhone app enabling your tweet by speech.
• Programmers’ friend Potechi-no-te – magic hands for potato tips
• Ascii-Art assist service for Twitter AA Hoshu
• NTT Docomo announces its own Android App Market for the coming new Sony Ericsson device
• GMO Payment Gateway to start Payment Service for Social Apps
• Navar Japan N Drive adds iPhone and Mac support
• Evernote opens Japanese site and declares Japanese localization is under way
• CoroPura Starts Another Location Based Social Game on Mobage Town
• Taiko no Tatsujin Goes On iPhone
• David Meerman Scott interviews @masakiishitani about Japanese Twitter scene
• Web game company AQInteractive aquires LinkThink(WebKare)
• Yahoo! Japan and others’ guide for children internet usage recommend parents to allow PC first
• iPad page on Apple Japan does not have iBooks

If you want to know any specific news more, but unable to find them in other English blog/media, please let us know.

As you see, we know a lot things to write but contributors time are limited. So we are looking for authors. We will help Japanese research/reading part so do not worry if your Japanese is not perfect.

We also want sponsorship to keep this group blog. Ideal if from Japanese companies because our initial motivation was to introduce them to non-Japanese web. Problem is we only write in English and they do not check English sites If you know them please suggest us to them!

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
3 Comments »

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)

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »

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)

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
1 Comment »

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.

See Also:

BBC NEWS | Business | Japanese tycoon guilty of fraud

Takafumi Horie | Japan — Business People Technology | www.japaninc.com

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
2 Comments »