Gree And DeNA Competition Heats Up: Both Announce Cash Rewards To New Employees

DeNA, who runs Mobage Town, one of Japan’s most successful social networks, sparked a hiring war yesterday to post their new incentive reward [J]. On the announcement, DeNA tells they will pay extra 2 million yen($23,400) besides annual salary to newly hired engineers who directly applied via their website and is approved between August 15th… Continue reading Gree And DeNA Competition Heats Up: Both Announce Cash Rewards To New Employees

Vending Machines Get More Intelligent, They Recommend You What To Drink

Wherever you go in Japan, vending machines are serving drinks and beverages at every corner of the country.   We’re experiencing the hottest summer for the first time in a long time, which devotes to almost 50% increase in beverage sales at vending machines compared to their average sales revenue. A subsidiary of a public transport… Continue reading Vending Machines Get More Intelligent, They Recommend You What To Drink

NICT Introduces iPhone App Interpreting What You Speak Or Type

NICT, Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, introduced the iPhone app called VoiceTra which interprets what you speak.   It allows voice input (original) in five languages of Japanese, English, Mandarin, Indonesian and Vietnamese, voice output (interpreted result) in these five languages and text output (interpreted result) in 16 languages of Arabic, Brazilian… Continue reading NICT Introduces iPhone App Interpreting What You Speak Or Type

Subway Japan’s World-First In-Shop Lettuce Factory

Sandwich chain-store Subway Japan [J] opened a new shop “Subway Yasai(=vegetable) Lab Maru Building Store” at very central Tokyo, in Marunouchi Building which locates just in front of Tokyo station. What makes the shop so unique is that there is a vegetable factory set inside the shop and it provides fresh lettuces for sandwich. Pesticide-free… Continue reading Subway Japan’s World-First In-Shop Lettuce Factory

Jsdo.it – Shared HTML5/JavaScript Playground For Geeks

Jsdo.it is a new web developers’ community on which HTML5/JavaScript/CSS programmers can play, share and collaborate with others. On the site, user can edit HTML/JavaScript/CSS on the left pane, and run them on the right pane. Your code are publicized with your designating license, and others can “fork” it and make his/her branched version. Popular… Continue reading Jsdo.it – Shared HTML5/JavaScript Playground For Geeks

Iogous – A Display Ad Optimization Tool

A Tokyo-based Internet ad solution company, Fringe81 [JP], revealed their new ad optimization software called Iogous [JP]. Iogous is a specialized tool for optimizing display ad creative. Iogous enables to try numerous combinations of designs, colors, and texts with statistical method. Fringe81 says that the tool achieves few hundreds percent improvement of click-through-rate. It means… Continue reading Iogous – A Display Ad Optimization Tool

What is iPad – Japanese dub in Hiroshima Dialect

Another great work on NicoNico Douga and YouTube. This is a presentation “What is iPad”. Not in English nor in typical Japanese but in Hiroshima dialect. You may not be able to find what is funny if you don’t understand Japanese but a dub made on this video is gaining lots of applause from Japanese… Continue reading What is iPad – Japanese dub in Hiroshima Dialect

10-centimeter Cubic Satellite Keeps Tweeting From The Space

Nakasuga Lab., the University of Tokyo, introduced a bot account tweeting the real-time state of a satellite which is located in the earth low orbit.   The tweet(@XI-V) keeps us update with parameters like the satellite’s surface temperature, battery voltage and where it is located over of the planet and also shows us still images shooting… Continue reading 10-centimeter Cubic Satellite Keeps Tweeting From The Space

Amazon Envy II: Rakuten now wants to produce hardware (a barcode scanner)

Another case of Amazon envy from Rakuten, Japan’s biggest online shopping “mall”? It seems so. According to various reports, Rakuten is currently pondering the development of a barcode scanner. One of the reason for Rakuten to get into the hardware business – according to a company representative quoted by The Nikkei (“Japan’s Wall Street Journal”)… Continue reading Amazon Envy II: Rakuten now wants to produce hardware (a barcode scanner)

Less Talk, More Music. Automatic Aircheck Radio Sanyo Xacti Sound Recorder

Sanyo’s new portable FM/AM radio recorder ICR-XRS120MF [J] lets you record music. By detecting different frequency between DJ talk and songs, you may just collect music from radio wave into few giga-bytes SD card. The weight of the radio is 66g, which is the world lightest as an IC recorder with AM/FM tuner. Unfortunately, DJ… Continue reading Less Talk, More Music. Automatic Aircheck Radio Sanyo Xacti Sound Recorder