Toyota Social App Award – Save The Car (Japanese/Chinese) is a social application contest run by the world largest automaker Toyota. The social applications applied are expected to deliver fun and job of car to people.

To promote the contest, Toyota prepared an official cheering song and its choreography. They lined up about 30 of D-list girls, like Anime song singer, livestreamer, charisma maid.

The responses to this on the net are, well, mostly questioning Toyota’s own sanity. Toyota USA recently went weird as well.

SAVE THE CAR – Call to Action to Creators from Toyota – Give the Car Life Joy!

Toyota loves cars. But lately we feel people’s love for care has weakened and hear voices like “We don’t need cars!” Quite honestly, we are in a crunch. What attracts people back to automobiles? Where can we find it?

We want to work with creative people who make new cultures winning over the world. Talents x Cards. That is the concept we have.

We are looking for Car Savior spreading the novel automotive charms to many people.

The contest is under the auspices of all major Japanese social game platforms, DeNA(Mobage), Gree, Mixi, NHN Japan(Hangame) and Yahoo! Japan.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Povie by a Japanese design unit Shikake is a movie decoration service in Japanese popular “purikura” (wikipedia) style. The service is bilingual, English and Japanese.

On regular purikura, you place letters, characters and shapes over your snapshot with buttons/tablet/touch panel. However, Povie will detect your motion and decorate it automatically with “Kawaii Engine”(kawaii = cute). The decorated short movie looks like this,

You may decorate in 6 different styles: night-club hostess, gothic and lolita, mori-girl (forest-girl), teeny, celebrity-like, current Japanese mainstream.

The service is currently available on iPhone and i-Mode/i-Appli. Facebook app is also under development. How it works on Docomo cellphone is demonstrated on YouTube,

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Nico Nico Douga, Japanese online movie sharing service which differentiates itself against YouTube with comments overlay-display, announced some news [J] at its first user conference in oversea, Taipei, Taiwan [zh].

One of the news is that Nico Nico Douga is planning to open a nightclub with 5 huge LED wallscreens with projecting its movies and user comments, named “Nicofarre” at Roppogi in July.

The name “Nicofarre” easily reminds Japanese people a nightclub “Velfarre”, which was the Asian largest when opened in 1994, closed at the end of 2006. The new Nicofarre will use the exact same building where Velfarre was.

The teaser site has a movie. Someone copied onto YouTube,

Nicofarre might be a new tourist place where you can experience latest culture on Japanese web from this summer.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Goo, a Japanese web portal run by NTT Resonant, a group company of NTT, announced to terminate their two sub services.

Goo RSS Reader

All variations of Goo’s RSS Readers, web reader [J], Windows application version and Japanese cellphone version will be discontinued [J]. PC and mobile web versions will stop on May 31, 2011. You may keep using the Windows app version, but no support will be provided.

In Japan, Bloglines got popular first as web-based RSS reader, then Livedoor Reader caught tech-savvy people. Later Google Reader is catching up. But as same as in English, RSS reader is not a prime tool for majority in the shade of social media like Twitter.

Goo ClipLife

Goo’s movie sharing service ClipLife [J] is also announced [J] to stop at the end of May.

According to Internet Watch [J], Goo RSS Reader began September 28, 2004, ClipLife started in August 2006.

As well as another big Japanese portal Nifty, those portals needed to have whatever new trending service under their brand, and that made them keep running those less popular web services for years. April 1st, the beginning of Japanese school year, is one good timing to cut them off and reassign their resource to something newer.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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I wrote “Poo is a magic word for primary-school children. It is an universal motif and will work even 100 years later” before. It does not change even at the disaster in Japan.  A Japanese media artist Hachiya Kazuhiko has explained nuclear crisis in a Youtube video, using the poo and fart.

English subtitles version

At first, he has explained nuclear crisis on Twitter [J], using the poo and fart. Afterward, he drew an cartoon and uploaded it on YouTube. Nuclear Boy(Fukushima nuclear power plant) said, “My tummy hurts…I can not hold my poo any longer…”  and he broke wind a bit.  On the other hand, Chernobyl leaked poo. Besides, it was diarrheal stool and he ran around. It’s unbelievable tragedy!

If everybody is wise, the difference between Fukushima and Chernobyl will be able to be understood. The fart is certainly stinking. However, it is better than leaking diarrheal stool.

Chinese subtitles version

Spanish subtitles version

French subtitles version

Tags: Japan by Chiho Komoriya
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