Batara Eto, who suggested to make a Japanese social network to his boss in late 2003 and programmed Japan’s biggest social network Mixi, let the company (E-mercury) to change their primary business and rename (to “Mixi”, of course) with the huge success, then left his CTO job in 2007 [J], is reported to invest to Xsago, Singapore-based mobile application company. He also assumes a post as Technical Advisor .

Known by his success story with Mixi and his advocacy for open source, he was rumoured to run his own small tech start-up to develop something, which was recently disclosed as a new online photo sharing site Ficia, which is under private beta. I tried Ficia and it seems to aim better photo sharing experience, such like what Gmail did against Hotmail to Flickr, by using plenty of latest web technology. Let’s hope Ficia is not fishy

Xsago’s mobile application Foyage is explained as a location based utility tool to give you shop information around you, currently covers Singapore and Indonesia, where Eto originally came from.

(Hat tip to beeant)

See Also:

Batara Eto’s interview when he led Mixi development [J]

Interview about his new start-up Etolabo and its first service Ficia [J]

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Tags: Japan, News, Singapore by Akky Akimoto
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Recruit (on Asiajin) announced their R25′s mobile site shutdown on July 30th.

(Mobile version of R25 has not been closed yet but may give you an error page. It seems to limit visitors by browser user agent and/or IP address, which is common to Japanese mobile sites. The PC site is here [J].)

Their PR answered to ITMedia [J] that this is because more advertisers want PC ads than mobile sites.

R25 started as a free weekly magazine in greater Tokyo for young train commuters since July 2004 and distributed 550,000 copies every week [J]. They also have a website and both the PC and the cellphone sites were renewed last year.

According to them, the mobile version of R25 is getting 130 million page views per month, which is not bad and as they continue the PC site they keep creating contents anyway. It sounds strange to give it up like this, but Recruit sometimes stops businesses which seemed promising from outside in their history.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Mobile Design Archive is a new blog where over 400 Japanese cellphone websites screenshot are collected.

Because of historical and security reasons, many mobile websites are not accessible from PCs in Japan, some are blocked by browser IP address, others are referring cellphone unique id. So taking screenshots of mobile sites are not easy as PC websites.

In Japanese web, as on its early stage mobile browsers had many limitations with compact-HTML tags, tiny memory, small screen size and resolution, cellphone websites evolved separately from PC sites. For most companies and services, having two different websites for PC and cellphone were, and are MUST.

Mobile web in Japan is getting more users and page views, making pretty big profit in internet advertisement with great micro-payment platform integrated with cellphone carriers invoice. There are many designing techniques specialized for mobile web. Navigation are also customized for 10 keypads of cellphones.

mobile astrology sites

Mobile web screenshots are sorted out in 35 categories. Each screenshot has a link to the original site (works if the site permits PC access), and QR code for access. It is a good place to get a quick overview of Japanese mobile designs.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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ESPer2008 conference has been held with 100+ attendees in Shinagawa, Tokyo at 14th September 2008.

ESPer is a conference held by alumni of the Mitoh software grant (Exploratory Software Project) (in English). The Mitoh is a grant by Japanese government which is given to individual software developers. There are around thousand Mitoh alumni in Japan and they have strong network.

Unlike other government subsidiesin Japan, Mitoh is only given to individual software developers. Companies like Hitachi or Sony cannot receive the grant. In other words, most of IT subsidies goes into big companies. Amount of each grant varies from 1 million yen to 44 million yen. Foreigners living in Japan also can apply for the grant.

iPhone DJ software IPJ Fujin/Raijin:

Atsushi Hoshino talked about his demo trip to San Francisco. He demoed an iPhone DJ software “IPJ” (in English) in the front of Apple Store San Francisco during WWDC. His guerrilla marketing effort is very funny and new to Japanese software developers.

IPJ has many features which are needed by DJs. Unfortunately IPJ cannot access to a music library of iPhone due to a limitation of iPhone application API. So users must transfer musics separately for IPJ from iTunes.

IPJ will be released soon. Stay tuned.

‘Afrous’ mashup framework:

Shinichi Tomita of Mashmatrix (in English) presented his Afrous mashup framework (in English).

Afrous has three products, Afrous Dashboard, Afrous MashupEditor, Afrous WebScraper. Those products provide cool UI to enable users to create their own information portal site.

Afrous Dashboard for Salesforce (picture above) is an EIP (Enterprise Information Portal) product which works on Salesforce (force.com) platform.

‘Colors’ a rich user interface browser for mobile phones:

Shohei Osawa of Naked Technology (in JP) demonstrated ‘Colors‘ (in JP), a RIA (Rich Internet Application) browser for Japanese mobile phones.

At this moment, Colors has an Java implementation only for Docomo phones. As we reported before, Docomo mobile phones can run Java application.

They have two example applications. A twitter client ‘twittie’, and a flickr client ‘flickkie’. Those applications have quite cool user interface. User interface is written with HTML-like XUI language which is created by Naked Technology.

[Disclosure] An author of this article, Shunichi Arai, has received Mitoh grant twice which are worth more than 10 million yen total.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan, Service, Technology by Shunichi Arai
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Ryo Shimizu, CEO of Ubiquitous Entertainment Inc. (also active as a blogger under the handle name “shi3z”), introduced iPong, his researcher buddy Mr. Kondo‘s toy application for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Not much by way of explanation is provided, but multiple iPod Touches seem to be connected wirelessly and serve up a virtual game of Pong. Mr. Shimizu wrote that Mr. Kondo made it in about an hour.

Ubiquitous Entertainment Inc. is a company making mobile CMS and middleware.

[Update 2011-07-09] This iPong post generated a good buzz, however, all the Youtube movie, the iPhone application and its info on the company website seemed to be taken down by Ubiquitous Entertainment months later. Probably trademark infringement?

Tags: Japan, Video by Akky Akimoto
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