Nicofarre – Nico Nico Douga To Reincarnate Legendary Roppongi Disco

Nico Nico Douga, Japanese online movie sharing service which differentiates itself against YouTube with comments overlay-display, announced some news [J] at its first user conference in oversea, Taipei, Taiwan [zh]. One of the news is that Nico Nico Douga is planning to open a nightclub with 5 huge LED wallscreens with projecting its movies and… Continue reading Nicofarre – Nico Nico Douga To Reincarnate Legendary Roppongi Disco

Moedroid – Android Apps Review Site Only For “Moe” Apps

Moedroid [J] is a Japanese Android review site which introduces “moe” applications only. “Moe” is a Japanese slang which means “little, adorable and cute” mostly in the context of Anime. So the site is dedicated for introducing cute Android applications. The main content is “moe” Android app reviews. There are app rankings, featured corner to… Continue reading Moedroid – Android Apps Review Site Only For “Moe” Apps

Copyright Mark May Mean “Miss” For Japanese Teens

You know what copyright mark © means, don’t you? It should be common for all cultures that young generation try to differentiate themselves by changing their languages from adult. In this case with Japanese teenager girls, they have been using © for totally different purpose since mid 1990’s. Here is an image from monthly teens’… Continue reading Copyright Mark May Mean “Miss” For Japanese Teens

Google Japanese Input Drops Beta Tag, Does Even Fortune-Telling

If your language has much more letters, say 3,000 characters, than multiple times (shift/crtl/alt) of number of keys on keyboard, you need an input method environment(IME) to tell computers what letter you want to type. There are many IMEs exist for Traditional/Simplified Chinese and Japanese. These days operating systems have those IME bundled, on Windows,… Continue reading Google Japanese Input Drops Beta Tag, Does Even Fortune-Telling

ex-Yahoo! Japan Employee Blogs About Irrational Cost Saving And Micro Management

An Engineer, who recently resigned Yahoo! Japan, the country’s most successful web company, wrote his experiences in his 4 years – as a foreigner in English. From the article by Jon Keating (@emostar ), he wrote many interesting observations which can be applied to many Japanese establishment companies. “Creating quarterly goals that must be met… Continue reading ex-Yahoo! Japan Employee Blogs About Irrational Cost Saving And Micro Management

Fake Toilet Flushing Sound Keychain Meets Characters

Japanese women are known to feel ashamed even by their sound of peeing listened by other buddies. Portable noise maker Eco Hime (= ecological princess), which saves you when you are in the public bathroom accidentally does not have the built-in noise generator, are now visually improved as well with popular characters. The characters are,… Continue reading Fake Toilet Flushing Sound Keychain Meets Characters

Emoji/Manga Relation Explained Fully

You might have heard about that Gmail and iPhone has added Japan originated emoticon, Emoji, set. You may know that Google has been promoting those “letters” into Unicode standard. Filing those drawings as new letters is, though Chinese letters were made from drawings thousands years ago, not acceptable for all people, some says it is… Continue reading Emoji/Manga Relation Explained Fully

Mixi Adds New Friends-Making Feature For Shy Japanese

Mixi, Japan’s largest social network service, introduced a new feature around Mai-Miku(=My Mixi, my friends) management, called My List. Your new “My List” is completely private for you, no one can see who is on it. You may add other Mixi users by random browsing, or from recommended users list. Without letting them notice, you… Continue reading Mixi Adds New Friends-Making Feature For Shy Japanese

The First Practical Kyoto Address Search Yahoo/Google Do Not Offer

If you ever lived in Japan, you know that Japanese address system is uneasy for people who get used to the western system on which all streets have a name and name+number identify the single location. In Japan, addresses are rather area name. Two Giants Yahoo! Japan and Google have been working well with this… Continue reading The First Practical Kyoto Address Search Yahoo/Google Do Not Offer

Project CodeRepos – All Our Code Are Belong To Us

CodeRepos is a software repository space where many top-level Japanese web programmers contribute and share their source code. Kazuhiro OOSAWA, aka Yappo, is known well by his privately running Japanese search engine iYappo for more than decade, a famous hacker among Japanese Perl community, also called “Shogun” by some geeks. On his blog on August… Continue reading Project CodeRepos – All Our Code Are Belong To Us