Takigawa Lardux Christel Masami, born 1977, is a Japanese news anchor. She has become an internet phenomenon in Japan like Mélissa Theuriau.
A website called Gedo-style created a funny image generator called ‘Takigawa Christel generator‘ which creates a video capture image with a fake caption.
Probably you may noticed that two new editors joined Asiajin. It’s a big first step to make Asiajin to be a renowned blog about Japanese and Asian IT.
Hiroumi Mitani is working at international development office of Rakuten. He is the first guy who contacted us for joining. His Japanese blog is here.
Serkan Toto is a German based in Tokyo. He is sharing a passion with us to introduce Japanese IT to the rest of the world. Currently, Serkan prepares to start his own IT company in Tokyo. He runs a his own blog ‘Tokyotronic‘ on Japanese IT.
It’s really delightful to welcome two passionate bloggers to Asiajin. Please expect us to produce a lot of great articles this year!
| Rank | USA (indeed.com) | Japan (jobdirect.jp) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Java | 66346 | Java | 4580 |
| #2 | C++ | 42495 | PHP | 3163 |
| #3 | C# | 32673 | VB + VisualBasic | 2748 |
| #4 | JavaScript | 29491 | Perl | 1198 |
| #5 | Perl | 24415 | Flash | 799 |
| #6 | VB + VisualBasic | 20159 | JavaScript | 526 |
| #7 | Flash | 16619 | C++ | 292 |
| #8 | PHP | 10703 | Ruby | 110 |
| #9 | Python | 5990 | C# | 101 |
| #10 | Ruby | 3749 | Python | 26 |
* Numbers of job openings in USA and Japan were taken from indeed and Jobdirect, respectively. C language is omitted due to the technical difficulty.
Do you have any idea why C++ is popular in USA and PHP is popular in Japan?
* This article is reproduced from “yukoba no nikki” by Yu Kobayashi with permission.
Newsing is a social bookmark service similar to Digg. The big difference is a coloured circle beside the bookmarked news title. It’s a graphed circle with red and gray and “circle” means thumbs up and “cross” means thumbs down.
newsing.jp
Users can express their attitude to the bookmarked news by clicking either a red circle or a gray cross. You might not familiar with this expression but it is quite general and familiar in Japan.
In western countries “check” is a sign for correct. But in Japan “check” usually used as a sign for wrong.
The sign for correct is “circle( Maru in Japanese)” and the sing for wrong is “check” or “cross( Batsu in Japanese)”.
You can see how it’ s used in Japan by watching a famous quiz TV program during 80’s in Japan. It was kind of a reality show. Thousands of people joined to the quiz contest to travel from Tokyo, Japan to New York, U.S.A.. By answering correct answers certain numbers of participants could survive to travel further. First, 100 people can go out from the main stadium to Narita Tokyo international airport. And finally only three people survive to reach New York and fight final quiz battle to be a champion of quiz.
Trans America Ultra Quiz: YouTube
Well “circle” is a shape that means a lot in Japan.
If you make a circle with your thumb and forefinger that means “money”; representing a coin. And the circle is of course even used in a national flag.
You can find “circle” and “cross” also in buttons of playstation controller. “Cirle” is normally used to accept the commnad and”Cross” is used to cancel the command for typical Japanese games.
Kotonoha is a unique service collecting comments to the questions posted by users.
Kotonoha
Various type of questions are posted by users from silly one to the serious one. You can see how people react to each questions by reading the comments posted for “Circle” or “Cross” of that question.
So how was your day today? Maru or Batsu?
January 18th, Tokyo – DeNA, a company which runs Mobage town, will establish a subsidiary in the states. “DeNA Global,Inc.” will be located in California, supposedly San Francisco Bayarea. They will launch a US version of their very profitable mobile business there.
Also they revised upward their net profit forecast from 4.5 billion to 6.3 billion. The revenue and operating profit forcased was revised from 25.5 billion to 29.0 billion yen, and 9.0 billion to 12.5 billion yen, respectively.
On Tuesday, the monthly Tokyo2point0 event in Omotesandou/Tokyo was held for the 8th time. The venue was really packed. Andrew Shuttleworth (the organizer) told me he would love to see more people to RSVP before coming. Also, companies can contact Andrew directly for sponsorship to help the volunteers currently running the event.
You can sign up directly on the Tokyo2point0 site itself, go to Tokyo2point0’s Facebook group or get some information on Mixi.
Besides the (very important) networking part, the event mainly focused on three presentations. Two of them were English only. Judging from what I have seen, the Japanese people present were able to follow the speakers without problems though.
1) HTML 5
Michael Smith from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) delivered a detailed speech about HTML 5. Mike talked about the changes the fifth major revision of the Web’s main language will bring.
(all pictures in this posting courtesy of my friend Professor Ichinohe)
The core issue HTML 5 addresses is the problem of interoperability between browsers. The W3C is working to determine conformant user agent/Web browser behavior to overcome one of the biggest obstacles Web developers are faced with nowadays.
The new HTML version is still a draft. Michael was expectedly not able to predict precisely when all advantages HTML 5 delivers will come into effect.
(This presentation was off-the-record so the video will not be published.)
2) ONGMAP
Yuki Naotori from Open Associates/7ns presented his Award-winning Google maps mash up “ONGMAP”.
ONGMAP is thankfully also available in English. The service is describing itself as being the sum of “Google Maps+Web API+Tons of Geo Data”. Yuki said he wanted to create a very easy-to-use Web site.
Users can click on an area of interest on ONGMAP and the service scrapes various info about that particular place from external sources. Depending on the country, this info may include:
– weather
– WiFi spots
– local events
– hotels, restaurants, schools, convenience stores, beauty salons (!) and much more
– videos
– etc. etc.
Yuki also talked about his new project called “Japaaan”. In essence, Japaaan is a social network for people interested in discovering Japan’s “hidden” and cool tourist spots. Moreover, members will also meet offline and actually travel to selected sites. Gaijin and Japanese people are invited to join.
You can view Yuki’s presentation slides here.
Watch his presentation here.
3) Trendmap
My Swiss friend Oliver Reichenstein from Information Architects caused a great stir last year in the Web world with what inititally was a joke. His company basically used the Tokyo metro map as a design background to display the relationship between Web services worldwide. Oliver told me he wanted to use this idea for the company name cards and later was overwhelmed by the huge international interest in his concept!
The map illustrates popularity, success, importance and other factors of about 200 Web sites from all countries. You can download the second version (from July 2007) here for free (PDF).
Oliver explained the yet-to-be released third and updated version of the Web trendmap. This time, Information Architects decided to go for an isometric approach.
Watch his presentation here.
My friend omo created ‘Favidle‘, flickr variant of ‘hot or not’. Favidle obtains images from flickr with tags like ‘woman’, ‘girl’, etc… If user clicks a ‘Favor’, the image will be saved into their album and shared as a favidle. Here’s my fav album.
Very simple site, yet quite appealing.
Here’s the list of the biggest community-based developer’s conferences in Japan. Please leave a comment if I forgot to mention your favorite conference.
YAPC::Asia Tokyo (Yet Another Perl Conference) had been held twice, and was very successful. YAPC officially adopts two languages (Japanese and English), and many speakers attended from different countries. Previously Audrey Tang from Taiwan, did a great talk on Haskell.
RubyKaigi 2008 will be held in Tsukuba on June 20th-22nd. English speakers are expected to talk. Here is the CFP. The deadline is 17th February. Previously David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails developer), and Dave Thomas (author of Programming Ruby) gave keynotes.
Developers Summit 2008 will be held on February 13th-14th. Joel Spolsky will talk. The conference is held by Shoeisha, a software book publisher. I’ve never attended this conference before.
Open Source Conferences are held in many cities in Japan by Toru Miyahara, the president of a company called Begi.net. I’m not sure there was any English speaker in OSC before, but they may welcome English presentation or booth.
ALPSLAB Ryakuchizu (ALPSLAB 略地図) is a Flash powered sketch map generator. It generates a map which shows major crossings and guides to the objective while omitting unnecessary part from the original map.
It is strictly a beta, and not provided for real use. Usually I doubt this kind of beta services which lack real business commitment can obtain users and earn profit. Anyway it’s a very intersting technology, and worth introduction. It can be very useful service, if development continues.
Alps-sha is a map publisher with 70 years history. Originally it was not providing any web map service. After Alps-sha had declared chapter-11 and get bought by Yahoo Japan, Alps started its web service devision ‘ALPSLAB’ and released many web services.
There is an impressive number of search engines specializing in blogs. Internationally speaking, Technorati and Google’s blog search are the most prominent examples. There is also a localized Japanese version of Technorati.
Kizasi (pronounced “kizashi”) is a Japanese blog search service which was started in January last year by kizasi Company, Inc.
This is kizasi’s translated top page (click to enlarge – accessed January 8th, 2008, Japanese time):
Under “Tools” on the top row you can find a kizashi widget, information about the kizasi API, RSS etc. “Lab”means applications by kizasi which are still in beta-phase.
The container on the left features the following topics:
All, society, sports, stars, entertainment, life, fun, moving/impressive news, surprising news, sad news, scary news and hateful news.
Kizasi crawls Japanese blog texts for words and analyzes connotations and usage patterns in order to point out structures and frequently used terms. As of today, kizasi takes into account blogs from 5,816,944 people who are ressponsible for a whopping 139,229,585 entries.
The service ranks key terms by genre and also analyzes pictures related to the words in question. Kizasi refreshes rankings every 10 minutes.
After clicking the current No. 7 search term which is “F2008”, the following page appears (click to enlarge):
The frequency of the word “F2008” appearing in Japanese blog texts over the past year is shown as a graph on the top right, along with a tag cloud on the left which corresponds to the term. Kizasi also previews the newest blog entries containing the word “F2008” and retrieves videos from Youtube related to the search term.
The use of a time scale and frequency of site updates distinguishes kizasi from its competitors. Current consumer tastes, general trends and the buzz in the Japanese blogosphere can be spotted in a structered way and at an early stage.
Kizasi is mainly owned by the CAC group (88%). Yahoo Japan bought a 5% stake in kizai in summer 2007.
Kizasi’s successful penetration especially in the Japanese mass media was followed by Blogwatcher, Inc., launched by Recruit and Titech. The company established a blog analysis service called Shooti in July 2007. Wadaino is another domestic player in the Japanese blog search market mimicking kizasi’s ranking concept but based on different categories.