Asiajin

Movie and music rental store operator Geo said yesterday they plan to buy all outstanding shares from Posren (post rental), Livedoor’s online DVD rental service for 560 million Yen ($5.3 million). The deal is supposed to take place July 1st.

Geo tries to close the gap to market leader Tsutaya, which operates Discas for renting DVDs and music CDs online. Another competitor is DMM. Tsutaya announced a new distribution for HD video just a few days ago. Aichi-based Geo’s own service is called Geo Land.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Fastladder, an English localized version of the Japan’s most popular web-based RSS Reader “livedoor Reader” becomes Open Source today.

Codes written in Ruby on Rails/Javascript are available on Google Code. The lincense is an MIT license.

The installable binary package is also downloadable from fastladder.org. For Windows/Mac/Unix. It is still the same web-based (and “fast”, as they claim in the product name) application, but you may use it with non-internet web-based system/feeds in your company. livedoor recommends you to use their original free-hosted version if you do not need to access those intranet RSS feeds.

As a web based RSS reader, livedoor Reader leads off to Google Reader (localized in Japanese) and Bloglines by user-share.

Tags: Japan, Service by Akky Akimoto
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