Asiajin

Here is a list of where Japanese users usually go on the web when they want to connect with their friends, buy something or get information. I feature “made-in-Japan” sites and software only (well, almost), knowing that i.e. Google, Amazon and Firefox are highly popular in this country as well.

Some of these Japanese sites are also available in English. I linked to the English versions whenever possible and marked them with [ENG].

Note: This list is highly subjective. If you have other ideas, please let us know in the comment section.

I) General web services

What is the Japanese equivalent of Google?
Yahoo! Japan.

Wikipedia?
Wikipedia Japan.

Facebook?
Mixi.

Flickr?
Yahoo! Japan Photos.

Digg?
Minna no Topics (Everyone’s topics).

LinkedIn?
No equivalent.

Twitter?
Twitter Japan.

Youtube?
Nico Nico Douga.

Amazon?
Rakuten.

delicio.us?
Hatena Bookmark. [ENG]

dooyoo (price comparison engine)?
Kakaku.com.

Netflix?
Posren.

Craigslist?
No equivalent.

imdb (Internet Movie Database)?
Nihon Eiga Database (Japan Movie Database).

Wall Street Journal Online?
Nikkei Online. [ENG]

monster.com?
Rikunavi.

Ebay?
Yahoo! Japan Auctions.

Alexa?
Pathtraq.

4chan?
2 channel (the original).

last.fm?
Mixi Music (registration required).

Technorati?
Kizasi.

Second Life?
Meet me.

Yahoo! Answers?
Oshiete!goo and Yahoo! Chiebukuro.

II) Blogs

What is the Japanese equivalent of Techcrunch?
Asiajin. [ENG]….Joke, people!

the Huffington Post?
No equivalent.

tmz.com?
Zakzak.

Boing Boing?
Zaeega.

Gizmodo?
Gizmodo Japan.

III) Web tools and software:

What is the Japanese equivalent of Gmail?
Yahoo! Japan Mail.

Blogger?
FC2.

the iTunes store?
iTunes Japan (Lismo for mobile downloads which accounted for 90% of all music downloads in 2007 in Japan).

BitTorrent?
Winny.

Opera?
Sleipnir [ENG] and Lunascape [ENG].

IV) Web Companies

What is the Japanese equivalent of Federated Media?
Agile Media Network. [ENG]

Sequoia Capital?
NGI Group. [ENG]

Admob?
Cirius. [ENG]

In case you want to know more, please add a comment.

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
5 Comments »

On Friday 4th July, Niconico Daikaigi 2008 (Daikaigi = Big meeting) was held by Dwango/Niwango at JCB Hall, Suidoubashi, Tokyo, with 2,000 atendees and over 10,000 users via broadcast.

This biggest event for Niconico Douga had a lot of new services/functions release, with a secret surprize.

Niconico Douga Update

New version code is “Niconico Douga (Summer)” [J].

• Nico-script(user scripting language for movie play handling) enhancement
• new Nicowari-questionnaire function
• Movie player internationalization plan to German and Spanish from July 25th (English is not planned to avoid big traffic surge, as said.)
• New Niconico-Market’s theme song
• H.264 format is now available to non-paid members
• New policy that parody/spoof/mash-up (so-called “MAD”) are removed if original rights-holder demands (which we already reported)

Niconicommunity

Niconicommunity [J] (Niconico + Community) is a new communtiy feature with which premium (paid) member can open a closed group. The group members can upload movies play and comments privately.

Niconicommons

Niconicommons [J] (Niconico + Commons) is a new web service to provide a registration based license declaration for copyright holders, planned to be released in August. Sounds like Creative-Commons but independent, probably different for targetting mainstream Niconico Douga users, who make parody and mash-up videos using Japanese animation, songs, etc. Social Networking Drawing Service “pixiv” will be the first external service who joins this Niconicommons.

Secret Guest: the “Father of the i-mode” joins Dwango

Takeshi NATSUNO, ex-director of NTT Docomo who led the world most successful mobile web network “i-mode”, appeared and was introduced as a new full-time advisor of Drango.

He talked “There are no other globally competitive contents than Niconico Douga. Most Japanese do not recognize that.”, “I am in charge of making it profitable.”, “I could not make i-mode worldwide because of each countries’ regulation around mobile. But the Internet has no such barriers”.

See Also:

Nikkei ITPro report [J]

Thanks for photos by takesako.

Tags: Event Report, Japan, Video by Akky Akimoto
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On Friday, Japan’s very own video portal and geek paradise Nico Nico Douga announced a partnership with this country’s most influential web site, Yahoo! Japan.

First, Nico Nico decided to expand its “ichiba” (market place) offering by adding a Yahoo! Shopping button beneath all of its videos. Users can alternatively click on an Amazon button to see merchandise which is somehow related to the videos they are watching. Moreover, it is possible to download music and ringtones.

Picture: New Yahoo! Shopping button

Picture: Search results from Yahoo! Shooping

It is about time Nico Nico Douga made a move. While the site is wildly popular especially in the otaku community, Dwango (Nico Nico Douga’s parent company) is said to lose around 100 million Yen a month due to high server and other costs.

Further moves announced

Also, Yahoo! Japan now integrates videos from Nico Nico into its search index (under the video tab). This is the first time Nico Nico shares information with outside parties. Users still need to login in order to actually view the material though.

As a third result of the collaboration, it is planned that users owning a Yahoo! Japan ID can soon login to Nico Nico without registering to the video service (probably by OpenID).

If this collaboration doesn’t help Nico Nico to further expand its user base and sales, I don’t know what will.

Tags: Japan, News, Video by Serkan Toto
3 Comments »

I noticed that the animation gif gallery on Niconico Douga is on del.icio.us popular.

Some people may think what the hell it is. It is not a free-icon gallery.

As the page is a kind of secret page, there are no explanation on it. The page title means “No Title” in Japanese. These icons have been made (and still increasing) for Niconico Douga’s top page, where these animation icons are randomely displayed. If you are a registered user and logging it, you will see them.

So what is the purpose of them? Nothing. It seems that the people inside originally made them just for pleasure. Sometimes that space also shows ad animation GIF recently.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Niwango hold a press conference about its Niconico Douga’s update release “SP1″ (upgraded from “RC2″) on March 5th 13:00 (JST).

Current statistics of Niconico Douga provided by director Seiji Sugimoto:

• 5.6 million registered users
• 1.14 million of users using cellularphone version
• 189 thousands paid users
• listed on NTT Docomo’s i-mode official site
• Ads sale in Feb 2008: 32 million yen
• Sales from Niconico Ichiba(market) in Feb: 86 million yen
• Copyright holder partners: 38 companies
• under discussion with JASRAC

New features by Hiroyuki Nishimura:

• Niconico Movie Maker free tool given out to encourage potential movie creators
• H.264 support
• Top page design renewal
• My profile page added
• Provides widget to other blog service providers and social networking services, starting with livedoor blog, Hatena Diary, So-net blog and trunc
• Mini-games on movies with score ranking
• Enhanced “Nico-script” for clickable link, comment-suppression, poll functions on top of current jump function, on March 13th
• Niconico News Maker : CGM news, in April
• Niconico Dai Hyakka : CGM encyclopedia, in April

President Hiroshi Kobayashi talked that their Niconico Douga business is still in red, but improving supported by advertisement/affiliate. They haven’t touched mobile version ads yet so it is being planned toward profitable.

Japanese geek’s portal Hatena announced its joining hands with Niconico Douga by allowing new embeddable Niconico-Douga-video widget on its diary(blog) service. (You may see kitten video with Niconico-comments without Niconico-account on the annonunce page)

[update 2008-03-19] Vox supports Niconico Douga Widget. As Vox is an international service, now it is possible to show Niconico Douga widgets in non-Japanese blog.

See also:

Niconico douga | Asiajin

Niconico-Douga expressed its Taiwan version begins next week | Asiajin

Some Niconico-douga videos available without registration | Asiajin

Tokyotronic: How to register for Nico Nico Douga

Photo by shike@current. Thanks.

Tags: Japan, Service, Video by Akky Akimoto
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Niconico douga, the 2007 biggest hit in Japanese web, is a video sharing community service with enhanced overlay comments feature.

Although it is popular among Japanese users, there are not many non-Japanese videos and comments, mainly because it requires user registration and it does not offer English menu. If you want to try it by yourself, Our writer Serkan Toto explained how to use Niconico-douga at Tokyotronic.

In December, Gihyo, a tech-oriented publisher (like O’Reilly in US) held a web technology meeting WEB+DB PRESS Tech Meeting, and Niconico-douga company Niwango, offered to host the meeting videos available WITHOUT Niconico MEMBERSHIP. At this point, these 6 embedded videos (with viewers’ comments, of course) are the only opened videos you can see how movied on Niconico-douga.

Although these tech talk videos are not mainstream type on Niconico-douga, you may be able to see how they are same as, and how different from other YouTube like video-sharing services. Number of comments are not so high, and font size and colors have not much variety when you compare with popular (usually Anime and/or parody) videos on Niconico-douga popular video ranking, though. I am sure that services like YouTube and Ustream.tv can take the flavour in.

You can also see what kind of tech presentations are made in Japan in Japanese. All speakers are top-notch web application/service engineers, including Hatena CTO Naoya Ito, and ex-livedoor CTO, A-list tech blogger Dan Kogai.

Tags: Japan, Service, Video by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »

Niconico douga is a rapidly growing video sharing site in Japan. Site’s feature is not very different from Youtube, but one cool difference gained big attraction. The difference is a comment feature which enables users to write timely comments on the video screen itself.

The feature allowed users to share ‘experience’ with other users.

Niconico douga attracted many users quickly. At a start, they superpose comments on streaming videos from youtube servers. Resultingly, Youtube started to refuse accesses from Niconico servers. They were forced to set up their own video servers.

Their own video servers are heavy burden to company’s balance sheet. The company, Dwango is its name, has spent about 600 million yen for servers.

Dwango changed the problem into a revenue. They limit peak time usage, and allow unlimited access only for paid users. 144,000 users are paying the fee and, the sum is 68 million yen per month. Advertisements and affiliates are making 18 million and 15 million yen accordingly.

Niconico douga’s success is backed by a powerful team. Lead developer is Akihiko Koizuka, a very powerful programmer. 2ch’s Hiroyuki is doing an advisor.

Currently Dwango is earning most revenue from ringtone services.

See also (in English):

1. Dwango company site
2. Tokytronic’s detailed article

Niconico douga:

• Page views: 59.5 million page views per day
• Video plays: 15 million plays per day
• Comments: 3.2 million comments per day
• Revenue: 101 million yen per month
• People: Developer, Akihiko Koizuka

Dwango (FY 2007):

• Founded: August 1997
• Revenue: 22.2 billion yen
• Loss: 1,408 million yen
• People: Chairman/CEO, Nobuo Kawakami
• People: President/COO, Hiroshi Kobayashi
• People: Managing Director, Hideki Mori

Tags: Company, Japan, Video by Shunichi Arai
6 Comments »

via CNET Japan

Online Video sharing/comment services Niconico-Douga will upgrade October 10th 6:00 p.m. (JST) with access/visibility related enhancement, from the owner company Niwango’s release.

The release also includes that they will open Taiwan localized version of Niconico-Douga on October 18th.

Niwango’s main area is cellular phone contents, but their started Niconico-Douga got popular as almost same as YouTube, especially for heavy internet users. Niwango is also known that it has business relationship with Hiroyuki NISHIMURA, the founder/owner of 2-channel, which is the biggest anonymous BBS in Japanese.

Tags: Japan, Taiwan, Video by Akky Akimoto
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