Teachers’ Concerns Vault Website Watchdogs To Thriving Business

We’ve got a social issue of clandestine school weblog sites on which children slander their classmates by posting anonymous messages. For school teachers are too busy to resolve these issues, education boards of several local authorities tend to outsource website patrol operations to watchdog experts. Tokyo metropolitan government put its patrol work on public bid… Continue reading Teachers’ Concerns Vault Website Watchdogs To Thriving Business

Mainichi Starts Tweeting Following Asahi

Mainichi Newspaper, which is considered to have Japan’s longest newspaper history, and its English edition, Mainichi Daily News (MDN) set up accounts for Twitter, and started tweeting news developments every minute. Furthermore, the company put a twitter link button at the bottom of each story on the news portal site, which encourages visitors to quote… Continue reading Mainichi Starts Tweeting Following Asahi

iPhone 3GS Purchase Livestreaming Girl in Tokyo

At a flagship shop of Softbank Mobile, Japanese reseller of iPhone, there are people began lining up for tomorrow morning, new iPhone 3GS. Ketsudan Potaufe, a web unit sends a live reporter girl to there and let her broadcast live report from there on ustream. [update] ustream.tv stopped its service. old link was: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/potaufe The… Continue reading iPhone 3GS Purchase Livestreaming Girl in Tokyo

Another Sekai Camera? KDDI’s Lab Unveils AR Cellphone App

Japan’s second largest telecommunication company, KDDI introduced today an “augmented reality” cellphone app[J] allowing transillumination of the objects you shoot with a camera embedded on the phone. This new app is now available at the experimental lab menu[J] of the company’s website. With a GPS feature and a built-in 6-axis force sensor, the app will… Continue reading Another Sekai Camera? KDDI’s Lab Unveils AR Cellphone App

Manga Avatar Candidate Goes For National Election

Fumiya Satoh, a manga artist who draws a boy detective story “Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo” which has been sold 80 million copies, who is also a director of culture of the Happiness Realization Party, had a press announcement of her running for coming national election of the house of representative with blotting out herself with… Continue reading Manga Avatar Candidate Goes For National Election

Apply Your Original gTLD To Be A Millionaire

Today at noon, the Tokyo-based independent ISP Interlink[J] started the world’s first contest inviting new generic top level domains (gTLDs) of your own. We used to have a limitation in choosing an option of gTLDs, but it was fully liberalized by the resolution that was made at ICANN‘s board meeting in 2008. .car(dot car), .web(dot… Continue reading Apply Your Original gTLD To Be A Millionaire

Explore Japan With Your Favorite Driving Video-streamers

Currently, there’s a boom that many geeks install wireless-enabled video cameras on their cars, and that they publish captured on-board video movies on video sharing sites such as Nico Nico Douga[J] (link to videos tagged with on-board camera view, requiring username and password) and Ustream. The videos can make you feel as though you were… Continue reading Explore Japan With Your Favorite Driving Video-streamers

Japanese government: Google Street View isn’t soo bad

Google took multiple beatings from various Japanese sides (press, politics, activists etc.) ever since deciding to launch Street View in this country. Google Japan countered concerns if their service is consistent with existing Japanese law by taking some Japan-specific actions, such as using special cameras. So far the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the… Continue reading Japanese government: Google Street View isn’t soo bad

CyWorld Pulls Out From Japan

CyWorld Japan [J], a Japanese localized version of the most successful social networking service in Korea, CyWorld, announced its withdrawal from Japan in August 2009 [J]. According to the announcement, the direct cause of this shut-down is the operation failure of periodical site maintenance on May 26th. It is explained that the unstable errors after… Continue reading CyWorld Pulls Out From Japan

Does Skimming At Bookstores Make You Feel Restless? Try It Near Utility Poles

Livedoor Wireless[J], an outdoor WiFi service provided by a dot-com company which is known for its founder being accused of fraud, teamed up with the tech company Wayz Japan[J] running a website which aggregates the content of magazine back-issues, and now any passerby-es are allowed to read the back number contents near a number of… Continue reading Does Skimming At Bookstores Make You Feel Restless? Try It Near Utility Poles