YAPC::Asia 2008 will be held May 15-16 in Tokyo

YAPC::Asia 2008 (Yet Another Perl Conference) will be held May 15-16 at Tokyo Institute of Technology. YAPC::Asia is one of the biggest technology conference in Japan, and is a bilingual (Japanese/English) conference with many speakers from overseas. Early registration has been started. Usually the seats are sold out soon. Presentation deadline will be Feb. 25th.

Japanese stock market has lost its confidence

The Osaka prefectural police is investigating ‘Orben‘, a public company, for securities fraud. Orben acquired 16 companies in two years from 2004. Orben executives allegedly reported false income and revenue for their subsidiaries. Supposedly, owners of Orben had sold their stocks at very high prices. An industry expert says Orben is well known for Yakuza… Continue reading Japanese stock market has lost its confidence

Asiajin Meeting Tokyo #1 on 26th(Tue), Feb.

We are going to hold our first readers’ meeting on 2/26 (Tue) night. Asiajin Meeting Tokyo The meeting will include 5-6 English presentations about 1. popular net services in Japan, or 2. their project/product. Those presentation will be in English by Japanese web entrepreneurs/developers, all of whom heavily use Japanese net services everyday at their… Continue reading Asiajin Meeting Tokyo #1 on 26th(Tue), Feb.

RubyKaigi 2008 CFP deadline approaching

RubyKaigi 2008, which will be held June 20-22, at the Tsukuba International Congress Center in Tsukuba Japan, is now open for session proposals. If you want to share your technique, code or passion about Ruby, don’t miss the deadline! Deadline: Feb. 17th (Sunday) JST.

Web umbrella Pileus

Even hardcore geeks might have never dreamt of something like this: An umbrella which is connected to the Internet! This gadget was developed by researchers at Tokyo-based Keio University. The “Pileus” umbrella looks ordinary from the outside but actually is a quite clever piece of hardware. The umbrella is able to display web sites on… Continue reading Web umbrella Pileus

Fastladder RSS Reader is now Open Source

Fastladder, an English localized version of the Japan’s most popular web-based RSS Reader “livedoor Reader” becomes Open Source today. Codes written in Ruby on Rails/Javascript are available on Google Code. The lincense is an MIT license. The installable binary package is also downloadable from fastladder.org. For Windows/Mac/Unix. It is still the same web-based (and “fast”,… Continue reading Fastladder RSS Reader is now Open Source

Some Niconico-douga videos available without registration

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… Continue reading Some Niconico-douga videos available without registration

Yahoo! Japan is worth $28billion

The market capitalization of Yahoo! Japan stands at $28 billion (as of Feb. 2008). Telecommunications conglomerate Softbank is the largest shareholder, holding 41% of the company’s shares. Yahoo! owns 33.4% of Yahoo! Japan’s shares. Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! is $44.6 billion while Yahoo!’s share of Yahoo! Japan is worth $9.3 billion.

Japan’s Internet filtering initiatives

Can you regulate the Cyberspace? Should you? It seems some forces in Japan think it’s possible and you should. There has been a lot of efforts by the Japanese government in the last few weeks to regulate and censor the Internet in various ways. 2 weeks ago, Japan’s National Police Agency hinted it may soon… Continue reading Japan’s Internet filtering initiatives

Hatena Haiku English version released

Hatena Inc., USA subsidiary of Hatena Corp, one of the web-geek community center in Japan, released its Hatena Haiku‘s English version today. It’s clearly influenced by microblogging platforms like twitter, but adds its own unique functionality. One is the drawing tool on comment forms, where users can post messages via handwriting. Another community oriented feature… Continue reading Hatena Haiku English version released