Category: News

Nico Nico Douga announces partnership with Yahoo! Japan

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… Continue reading Nico Nico Douga announces partnership with Yahoo! Japan

twitter in Japanese is on twitter.com with ads

We found it. Anyone can switch your twitter to Japanese menu (and advertising!) from [Settings]->[Account tab]->[Language drop down]-[Japanese]. Or if your browser’s language settings precedes Japanese, you will see Japanese interface on twitter.com Here you are, At top of the sidebar, you can see an ad box, which is planned to be backported to English… Continue reading twitter in Japanese is on twitter.com with ads

twitter Japan launched … where?

Nikkei Shimbun wrote that twitter, Inc. (San Francisco, California) starts its Japanese localized version on 23rd (already today in Japan, JST = Japan Standard Time). Digital Garage has been working on this localization. Japanese tweets (messages on twitter) are gaining about 20 % of all twitter users, and its interface are expected to be translated… Continue reading twitter Japan launched … where?

Japan exempts programmers’ jury duty because they are “too busy”

According to Mainichi, for new citizen judge system planning to be introduced in May 2009, Japanese supreme court developed guidance that what kind of jobs are excusable to decline jury duty summons. The jobs list, having over 10 jobs and situations as initial draft, includes System Engineer (often said “SE”, a bit different from the… Continue reading Japan exempts programmers’ jury duty because they are “too busy”

research: 40% of Japanese blogs are spam

Nifty Laboratory, a marketing research section of Nifty, which owns one of the biggest ISP in Japan @nifty, also provides big blog hosting service Cocolog, announced its new splog(spam blog) filtering technology combining several different splog finder methods. They also applied the filter to Japanese blog articles, sampled 100,000 for each month from their 450… Continue reading research: 40% of Japanese blogs are spam

Drecom rescued by Rakuten

Drecom announced that their board had decided business alliance with, and will raise 900 million yen shares to Rakuten, Japan’s top E-Commerce firm. Drecom, which is a blog system vendor for small and mid sized companies, also doing web services. Rakuten will be the second shareholder of Drecom with 20.02% stocks, following to the founder/CEO… Continue reading Drecom rescued by Rakuten

2D barcode tombstone

Ishinokoe (means “voice of stone”) K.K. announced their newly designed tombstone series “Kuyou no mado” (“commemoration windows”), which has QR Code (Japanese 2D bar code) inside. This QR Code, enhanced version “Design QR Code”, developed and trademarked by IT Design, can have small extra images in the code, which does not prevent proper code scanning.… Continue reading 2D barcode tombstone

Anti-virus vendor Trendmicro website got hacked

Trendmicro Japan announced that some of their website pages are found to be modified from March 9th to 12th. Those hacked pages had a virus by which visitors could have got on their PC. Their infected page list contains both Japanese and English pages about some virus information, but we could not find the counterpart… Continue reading Anti-virus vendor Trendmicro website got hacked

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