You might have already seen photos of a “real” sized Gundam statue standing in Odaiba, Tokyo bay front. If not, you can see thousands of pictures on Flickr. The organization behind it, Green Tokyo Gundam Project Committee, who claims that building Gundam is for ecology enlightenment and inviting the Olympics to Tokyo in 2016, holds… Continue reading A Keepsake Picture With Tokyo Gundam Auctioned For Over 1 Million Yen [Update: 2.6 mil Yen]
MCF Announces This Year’s Award-Winning Mobile Projects (2/2)
Continued from the previous post. ———- Excellent Award (Mobile Solution Category) Won by McDonalds Japan[J] and the JV, a McDonalds’ joint venture with NTT DoCoMo, with their customer relationship marketing project by using cellphone wallet and mobile apps. Every Friday they distribute virtual discount coupons for McDonald’s meals to participating members’ handsets, which is valid… Continue reading MCF Announces This Year’s Award-Winning Mobile Projects (2/2)
Japan Persists “Packaged” Music, This Time On Memory Card
Avex Marketing, a Japanese music company in Avex Group, released world’s first music/video package sold on microSD memory card. “micro REBOOT Ichi(one)” by a group THE REBOOT is also on sale on their website [J] for 2,500 yen (about 25USD). It says that the music, video and lyrics PDF in the microSD can be viewed… Continue reading Japan Persists “Packaged” Music, This Time On Memory Card
MCF Announces This Year’s Award-Winning Mobile Projects (1/2)
Last Friday, Mobile content forum (MCF)[J], a consortium of many Japanese mobile device developers and mobile app developers, announced this year’s award[J] winning projects, which were chosen from brand-new innovative projects that were released in the last twelve months. ———- Excellent Award (Mobile Content Category) Won by Weathernews, the world’s largest private meteorological company headquartered… Continue reading MCF Announces This Year’s Award-Winning Mobile Projects (1/2)
Drecom To Quit Job Board Service
Drecom, once was a college-venture star IPO-ed, recently financially helped by Rakuten, announced that they would shut down their job board service “Drecom Job Board” at the end of August, 2009. Job Board services is not greatly doing in Japanese web, as the top player is going to stop it. Some popular IT bloggers such… Continue reading Drecom To Quit Job Board Service
Japan’s Best-known Midnight Radio Program Goes Mobile
Most Japanese, who are younger than 40 years old, would have listened to this program. “Allnight Nippon[J]“, which is aired live every midnight on Nippon Broadcasting System(NBS)[J] and its affiliate AM radio stations nationwide and has 43-year history, now goes to mobile. One of Japan’s oldest private radio broadcaster NBS and ringtone content provider Reco-choku[J]… Continue reading Japan’s Best-known Midnight Radio Program Goes Mobile
Keitai Shousetsu export: China to get 100 Japanese cell phone novels
A big web trend from Japan that gained traction in China is now poised to become even bigger: Keitai Shousetsu (cell phone novels). These novels, which are not only being read on cell phones but also written on them, are hugely popular in Japan where they are a multi-million dollar industry. Tokyo-based Digi-Book Japan (a… Continue reading Keitai Shousetsu export: China to get 100 Japanese cell phone novels
Startup Showdown: Two Business Contests Announce Finalists
A couple of tech-oriented business contests announced the finalists on Friday. At first, Tokyo-based VC firm ngi Group and online game developer Aeria[J] jointly held the 1st edition of business contest for potential student entrepreneurs, which is titled “I-SHIN” meaning revolution in Japanese. The plan entries were open from last April to last May. The… Continue reading Startup Showdown: Two Business Contests Announce Finalists
Japanese P2P Filesharing Network Being Attacked From Cloud
As same as other fields, for point-to-point(P2P) file sharing, there are Japanese counterpart of Kazaa/Limewire/Torrent. Once it was Winny, but after the developer of Winny was prosecuted for making a file sharing application which possibly leads copyrighted material distribution and the development ceased, the open source successor Share took the position of the most popular… Continue reading Japanese P2P Filesharing Network Being Attacked From Cloud
Search engine Baidu to offer e-commerce support in China for Japanese companies
Another case of Chinese and Japanese web companies shaking hands. Chinese search engine Baidu is a super-power in its home market and has, as the company’s first regular service outside of China, launched a Japanese version (Baidu.jp) back in 2007. Expectedly still struggling to gain market share from established players like Google and Yahoo, Baidu’s… Continue reading Search engine Baidu to offer e-commerce support in China for Japanese companies