Ask Dot JP(ask.jp) announced [J] the end of its search engine service in Japan, to restructure their business operation. On 25th of this month, June 2009, web search, blog search, product search and category search will be closed. They had already closed down their movie and image search last month. The announcement says that some… Continue reading Ask.jp Shuts Down Its Japanese Search Engine
Recipe Sharing Site Cookpad Goes IPO
Cookpad [JP], Japan’s biggest cooking site, announced today that they will be listed to Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers section on July 17th. CEO, Akimitsu Sano, started the service on 1998. Cookpad is a recipe sharing site with 558,939 registered recipes. The site has 6.8 million unique users and 351 million page views per month. Cookpad… Continue reading Recipe Sharing Site Cookpad Goes IPO
Eva-Phone Confirmed To Produce Additional Lots
NTT DoCoMo announced it would introduce a new model cellphone handset[J] featuring a new animation film, EVANGELION: 2.0 YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE[J] which is scheduled to be released at cinemas in late June. All of 20,000 lots reserved for advance orders were completely sold out as few as in five hours just after DoCoMo had… Continue reading Eva-Phone Confirmed To Produce Additional Lots
Manga Mode: DoCoMo brings e-manga to European cell phones
Japan’s biggest cell phone carrier NTT DoCoMo and major publisher Shueisha have teamed up and plan to launch an e-manga delivery service for cell phones in Europe. Dubbed Manga Mode and launched yesterday, the service already lets manga enthusiasts in France choose between about ten different titles. Certainly the manga with the biggest potential is… Continue reading Manga Mode: DoCoMo brings e-manga to European cell phones
Honda Launches Ranking Site To Encourage Owners To Compete In Fuel-Efficiency
Today, Honda Motor launched a page, titled “Eco Grand Prix”[J], on its corporate website, which shows realtime ranking in fuel-efficiency of the company’s brand new hybrid vehicle “Insight” being driven nationwide in Japan. A fuel-efficiency optimization system installed on each of the vehicles will automatically transmit data to Honda’s information analysis center, and it ranks… Continue reading Honda Launches Ranking Site To Encourage Owners To Compete In Fuel-Efficiency
Google Developer Day 2009 Yokohama
Google held “Google Developer Day 2009“, an annual conference introducing a number of technology trends that the company had recently developed, in Yokohama on Tuesday and started with a keynote speech made by its Tokyo office president Koichiro Tsujino[J]. Following Tsujino’s expressing his appreciation for a large participation in the event, the company’s senior product… Continue reading Google Developer Day 2009 Yokohama
Dial Phone Number To Get To Website
NTT Mediacross (NTT-MC)[J], an NTT group company specifically focusing on providing TV broadcasters with several solutions to make their programs more interactive with program viewers, introduced a new service enabling to navigate the viewers easily to a website that a broadcaster would like to present in synchronization with program broadcast. The service is scheduled… Continue reading Dial Phone Number To Get To Website
Japanese Newspaper Finally Tweets
For the first case in Japanese newspaper’s history, Asahi Shimbun, one of the country’s nationwide major papers, set up an account for Twitter[J] today, and is running play-by-play tweet about the scene of a preliminary match for this year’s football world championship, Japan vs. Qatar, which is now being played at Nissan Stadium in Yokohama.… Continue reading Japanese Newspaper Finally Tweets
Japan’s First Mobile WiMax Officially Announces Its Launch In July
UQ Communications, Japan’s first mobile WiMax carrier fund-raised by six shareholders including KDDI and Intel Capital, announced officially it had set the service launch on July 1st. Toshiba, Panasonic and Onkyo(known as its brandname of Sotec[J] for PC) started accepting advance orders for new WiMax-enabled laptop models. Sony and Fujitsu will also start selling new… Continue reading Japan’s First Mobile WiMax Officially Announces Its Launch In July
GeeksOnaAPlane: Silicon Valley meets the Tokyo tech scene
While it’s not unheard of that entrepreneurs and VCs from Japan go to California for information exchange, fund-raising (sometimes), networking and other purposes, Americans taking the trip to Tokyo are still the exception. This is the main idea of an initiative called GeeksOnAPlane, initiated by Silicon Valley icon Dave McClure (his San Francisco-based venture capital… Continue reading GeeksOnaAPlane: Silicon Valley meets the Tokyo tech scene