This is a follow-up post for my monthly column on The Japan Times, Why do Japanese advertisers suggest Internet-search keywords?. There I explained why many of paper/TV ads in Japan are asking people to search by keywords, instead of typing URLs. Soon after the column was published, I got a question from a reader if… Continue reading Japanese-Style Search-By-Blabla Ads Fail Sometime
Category: Trend
Will You Use Color Emoji Folders And Files On Mac OS X Lion?
[Update 2011-08-01] Some emoji-s may cause troubles by bugs. NAOI reported [J] folder with emoji-s categorized in specific section could disappear. Japanese blogger NAOI pointed out how Lion, the new version of Mac OS X, added more support of color emoji on its system level. Gmail has been known its emoji support, but that support… Continue reading Will You Use Color Emoji Folders And Files On Mac OS X Lion?
Japanese Twitter Users Play On New Japanese Hashtags
Official Twitter blog announced [J] that Twitter is capable of Japanese character hashtags. (our post reported it) Then, a lot of Japanese Twitter users started strange wordplay. This is a trend hashtags of yesterday’s Tokyo. What are these long hashtags? They are themes of wordplay. # like a game in “Who’s Line Is It Anyway?” (Akky) For… Continue reading Japanese Twitter Users Play On New Japanese Hashtags
Web Reactions – Japan Analog TV Ends Its 58 Years History
All Japanese analog terrestrial television broadcasting were terminated today at 12:00 p.m. July 24 (Japan Standard Time) as planned, aiming more effective radio wave usage by re-assigning their bands from analog TV to newly introduced digital TV. They have been simultaneously broadcast until today. All channels stopped in 44 prefectures, besides three prefectures, which suffered… Continue reading Web Reactions – Japan Analog TV Ends Its 58 Years History
Mobage And Gree Both To Bring Their Flash Games Into Smartphone
Two huge Japanese social gaming networks who are working on oversea expansion showed a new move to utilize their accumulated assets on Japanese feature phone world – Flash based games. On June 30, Mobage company DeNA announced [J] that they had purchased Broadtail, a Tokyo-based tech start-up, who developed a tool named “ExGame” to run… Continue reading Mobage And Gree Both To Bring Their Flash Games Into Smartphone
Nielsen: Evernote And Dropbox See Significant User Growth In Japan
Certain American startups do pretty well in Japan, if a report issued today by Nielsen Japan (NetRatings) is to be believed (as with all web statistics providers, take the following numbers with a grain of salt). The company investigated the traffic Dropbox and Evernote have seen in the past 12 months, and it appears the… Continue reading Nielsen: Evernote And Dropbox See Significant User Growth In Japan
Mixi To Turn Off Its Unique Footprint Function
Mixi, Japan’s largest Facebook-type social network service, today announced that they would change their ashiato(footprint) service from June 13th. Mixi’s footprint is a feature to show you which your network friend browsed your page (profile, diary, photo, etc.) at how many seconds/minutes ago. By this, Mixi in early days acquired users stickiness, by making polite… Continue reading Mixi To Turn Off Its Unique Footprint Function
Groupon Japan And Recruit Pompare Show Strong Recovery After The Quake
Japanese flash coupon vertical search Coupon-JP has just released an April version of sales estimation of major social coupon services [J, pdf] after March report skipped by the quake. Groupon Japan, which started by US Groupon purchasing a local clone last summer, has been leading the market but got damaged by terrible osechigate at the… Continue reading Groupon Japan And Recruit Pompare Show Strong Recovery After The Quake
5,000 Yen($60) To Enable Twitter On Your Smartphone
A cellphone shop in Yokohama offers a service to set up your smartphone for tweeting by 5,000 yen, @poppo1028 reported. Twitter and other social media has been getting more and more attentions on TV, newspaper and magazines after the Eastern Japan earthquake. Both good side and bad side of social media at disasters were reported,… Continue reading 5,000 Yen($60) To Enable Twitter On Your Smartphone
Study: Post-Quake Sales Of Japanese Group-Buying Sites Down 36%
What’s the overall size of Japan’s market for online group-buying sites? Tokyo-based Luxa (which runs one of these sites/more info here) regularly issues reports on the domestic industry as a whole. And according to their latest study, the quake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 had a rather large negative effect on the… Continue reading Study: Post-Quake Sales Of Japanese Group-Buying Sites Down 36%