Asiajin

Tokyo-based publication and human resources company Recruit held a presentation and ceremony event introducing the fifth edition’s prize winners of the Mash-up Awards[J] contest last weekend. More than 50 tech companies sponsored the event and their founders and directors served as the juries to evaluate nominees. An applicant for the contest must use one or multiple APIs provided by those companies to develop a brand new mash-up service. 346 entries were reportedly confirmed in the edition.

The picture shown above is courtesy of the contest organizer’s Ustream live programming.

The excellent invention prizes go to the following five finalists:

• Social Combat V[J] (developed by MEX) – won the grand prix
  
  
  Media Extension, a group of three web developers working with an ad production company, introduced a social application of duke-out. The app allows you to set your character by picking up parameters from social network services such as Twitter and mixi.

• Cast Oven (developed by 100kw-sgss) – won the juries’ special prize
  
  This microwave oven will show you a YouTube video which has an exact length of the time enough to heat a food that you wish to cook. You no longer get bored to wait to cook it up. This work’s concept is to put the time for content consumption in niche segments of our daily lives. The Adobe AIR-app picks up the signal of telling you the time length from the microwave and finds an appropriate video from YouTube.

• OpenSocial Dashboard (developed by stomita)
  It is a web application that shows you a variety of OpenSocial gadgets. You can embed this on your blog or website, and you may have multiple dashboards and switch each of them to the other depending on your needs, for instance, for private or on business.
  

• radioooo[J] (developed by mizzusano)
  
  
  This is an Adobe Air-app and works with Twitter and YouTube. The app will find YouTube videos that you and other radioooo users have requested and play them one by one. All users can hear the same sounds and share the same experience at the same time, that is a very similar user experience which we have when listening to the radio. When you like a song playing on it, just press stand! or clap! button on the app, that will transmit a Twitter message with a hash tag which allows the other users to share your feelings such as “stand”-ing or “clap”-ing as though you were at a live house while listening.

• Travatar (developed by 1Pac.Inc.)
  
  
  If you install this app on your iPhone, your avatar in the app will be able to move to someone’s iPhone when the two of the iPhone are physically closed each other. The avatar repeatedly keeps moving from someone’s iPhone to the other’s, and as a result, your avatar can be carried even to outside Japan while you are unaware. Each device of the iPhone does not communicate with the others directly (so, it doesn’t use BlueTooth technology), every device transmits its geographical attribute to the server to learn if any other is located nearby.

See Also:

• ASCII dot JP [J]

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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Tokyo Gundam could not move like this!

Singapore Navy also has a transforming battleship.

via 21th Century China News Blog [J]

See Also:

Critics on news Huanqiu.com in mainland China [Simplified Chinese]

Tags: Joke, Taiwan by Akky Akimoto
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Mixi [J] (Asiajin articles), the biggest social network service in Japan, starts their OpenSocial compliant application platform Mixi Appli officially opened to every Mixi user on PC. Mixi Appli Mobile is planned to follow next month.

Mixi announced its OpenSocial platform last year and has been running closed beta test with third party developers for months.

From the first day, over 130 applications are published by individuals and companies including Rockyou Asia, who must already know well how to succeed on OpenSocial platform by huge success on Facebook App, Walt-Disney Japan, Konami, Sony, Nike Japan, Nikon, Japan Tobacco, Honda, Yahoo! Japan, Recruit, etc.

During the closed beta, they provided another domain for developers, and it was unknown how much Mixi pushes applications to regular users in the official release.

The following is the new top page screenshot provided by Mixi PR,

On it, Mixi Appli update box is located just after the My-Mixi(friends)’ diary box, followed by community updates box and My-Mixi photo/book/music/etc. updates box. At the bottom of the centre column, user-enabling Mixi Appli-s are displayed.

Each box can be moved up and down by user, and on my own account, Mixi Appli notification box is placed after other three, diary, community and activity update boxes. I think I did not customize any, so this 4th position is the current Mixi Appli’s default position (don’t tell me to take another account for check, because another account registration requires me to purchase another cellphone), which I think not so greatly promoted, but understandable as most of Mixi users are not tech-oriented so it is still unknown if many of them will jump on this Application bandwagon.

The other symbolic change is that Mixi removes “Beta Version” label from its logo, which they did not take away even when they IPO-ed so thought as a symbolic “perpetual beta“. Although it is not on their release, some media report that Mixi states they are not beta any more and got advanced to the next level with this Mixi Appli launch.

See Also:

Mixi’s Press Release [J]

Some of first Mixi Appli applications and providers [pdf, J]

Tags: Japan, News 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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Drecom[J], a company developing blogs and web2.0 services, has released an AD service to seek design of web banners for mobile sites from public users, named as “Atsumete Banner-na[J]“(meaning collect Banner-na).

A banana-shaped character is used as a mascot for the service. Advertisers post themes for banners, then public users create banners and register them to the service. Posted banners will be published to measure the advertising effectiveness and the best effective banner will be chosen as  an official banner to be used widely. The creator of last winning banner will be awarded 50000 yen ( about $500).

This service is only limited for mobile, but there is also a similar service released by Recruit[E] former to this one. A service named C-team, is a crowd sourcing service for advertisement design for banners. Users who posted highly effective banners will be rewarded by cashable points. This service is not limited for mobile websites, differ to Atsumete Banner-na.

Drecom is gaining quite a good benefits from J-Ken[J], a ringtone download service selling ringtones made by public users.  There is also a prosperous service to crowd source ad movies, filmo, operated by Enigmo[E].

Japan is a country known by many talented creative amateurs so these kind of ad services for crowd souring might increase further.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service by Hiroumi Mitani
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