Kiban Shoujo(Circuit Girl) is an FPGA circuit board by coterie hardware circle Respon [J].

According to their site, all line-patterns have meanings as circuit and really works as a CPU.

via Akiba PC Hotline [J]

Tags: Japan, Joke by Akky Akimoto
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Mangajet [J] is a new Japanese service which let you make a Japanese manga-comic style illustration with provided characters, background images, baloons with your text.

The generated comic strip can be saved and shared on Twitter.

Following to the Japanese manga standard, text will be written in top-to-bottom direction so Western languages won’t fit well, unfortunately.

The service was released as a promotion of a free digital manga material directory Manga Sozai Jiten, which is run by Datacraft.

There is Feel on!, a web service to comicalize your Twitter timeline as well (and that one now supports English).

via INTERNET Watch

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Twitcmap [J], run by a illustration sharing community Tinami [J], is a web service to try to make a huge map of the world’s largest self-publishing comic fair “Comic Market” [J], which is held twice in a year in Tokyo, in a user-generated style with utilizing Twitter.

Comic Market official says that there are over 35,000 circles set their booths during 3 days convention. On this Twitcmap, over 11,000 of them registered their booth location, with their circle name, illustration, description and Twitter account.

If you log in and register your circle, you can find location of other circles which you follow on Twitter. As those small circles socialize each other, and give each other small helps such like lending hands when their friends circle have too many purchaser lining up, this kind of directory is useful.

The 81th Comic Market is running from 29th to today at Tokyo Big Sight.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Japan’s national carrier Japan Airlines(JAL) announced the world’s first digital manga(Japanese comic) service “Sky Manga” on board with one of the nation’s largest publisher Shogakukan and digital publishing company eBook Initiative Japan [J]. The new service will be a part of new Boeing 787 debut on JAL.

The service will start from March 2012, 90 comics in total, the first to the third series of each 30 manga-s supplied by Shogakukan. The manga-s are changed each couple of months. The first selection includes following popular comics series (click to Amazon Japan),

Major―Dramatic baseball comic (1)

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Takafumi Horie, an ex-Livedoor CEO who is in Jail since June 9 this year in violation of the Securities and Exchange Law, aka Horienmon, was announced to start a new manga series on fortnightly mahjong (wikipedia) comic magazine Kindai Mahjong [J].

There are two mahjong-only comic magazines in Japan. People playing mahjong is decreasing, but that shows how it is still popular.

The December 1st issue forenotice above features this new series “Horie Senki K24S Episode1″(Horie’s War K24S) with most of its space. The ad has phrases like “The biggest impact on this year!!!!”, “New Series from jail now (-now is a popular Twitter jargon in Japanese)”, “In year 1991, Horiemon first got on mahjong when he moved up to Tokyo”, etc.

So this comic will be a story which young Horie, who entered the nation’s top university, The University of Tokyo, plays mahjong. Besides his many business essay books, he already wrote two novels, which are fiction but strongly models him and around.

After he left the company, the Livedoor was broken into a stock-holding company Livedoor Holdings, which was already disbanded, and the portal company Livedoor is going to be merged into NHN Japan next January.

He still keeps influences to many people by Twitter(@takapon_jp [J])( and a paid newsletter, both are updated via his agents.

See Also:

ex-Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie’s Last Nude! Before Imprisonment

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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