Social Illustration Service Pixiv Hits 4 Million Members

Pixiv, the most popular of Japan’s many social drawing services, announced [ENG] it hit an amazing four million registered users last Saturday (January 28). It took the site, which launched on September 10 in 2007, exactly 1,602 days to reach that milestone. That’s about 2,500 users per day – not bad at all, especially for… Continue reading Social Illustration Service Pixiv Hits 4 Million Members

Personal Assistant Siri Personified In Drawings As Well

iPhone’s new voice interface Siri is getting kind of artificial personality with human voice and many prepared witty answers. If so, such “virtual person in machine” is of course the Japanese anime/manga people’s favorite theme as seen on human voice synthesizer Hatsune Miku and her Vocaloid buddies are followed by a lot of illustrations, comics,… Continue reading Personal Assistant Siri Personified In Drawings As Well

July 2011 Japan IT Links (Part 3)

Continued from (Part 2). Last part of July news which we did not write as a dedicated article. Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated. Twitter as a fool detector “Twitter, a fool detector” is a recent buzzword in Japan. It came from net-savvy’s dry humor by observing “normal” people tweeted socially unacceptable… Continue reading July 2011 Japan IT Links (Part 3)

Social Illustration Service Pixiv Hits 3 Million Members

Japan has quite a few “social drawing services” that let users upload self-drawn images and connect with each other. But Pixiv is the biggest of them all. The eponymous company behind the service has announced that Pixiv hit 3 million members on March 29. The number of users doubled since January last year, when we… Continue reading Social Illustration Service Pixiv Hits 3 Million Members

Japanese Web Community As Person

Gijinka (anthropomorphization) is what Japanese anime/manga people love, and it often passes the language barriers. On giant anonymous bulletin board 2-channel, some amateur cartoonists seemed to vie in their personification sense [J]. 2-channel: They know who they are well. derision for everything is their basic attitude. Nico Nico (Douga): Hatsune Miku, young girls’ livestream on… Continue reading Japanese Web Community As Person

Japan’s Top Search Keywords in 2010 By Yahoo! Japan

It is a year-end buzzword ranking season. Yahoo! Japan, Japan’s most popular search portal, though the backend search engine has been gradually switching to Google’s one (everyday more people report that their search results are the similar with the Google’s results), eventually gets the highest number of search volume in Japanese. Yahoo! Japan just released… Continue reading Japan’s Top Search Keywords in 2010 By Yahoo! Japan

Social illustration network Pixiv now has 1.5 million members, racks up 1 billion PVs monthly

Japanese “social illustration site” Pixiv continues to amaze. The site, which lets users present self-made drawings to other users and offers a number of basic social networking functionalities, now counts a whopping 1.5 million members [JP]. Not bad for a completely domestic site that’s only available in Japanese (although  some foreigners exhibit their works on… Continue reading Social illustration network Pixiv now has 1.5 million members, racks up 1 billion PVs monthly

“Social illustration” network Pixiv now has 1 million members

Pixiv [JP], a Japanese-only “social illustration” network (Asiajin articles), today welcomed its one millionth member. The site boasts a healthy growth rate, as the user base stood at 100,000 in March 2008. Pixiv claims the site sees 720 million page views monthly and that users submit 15,000 illustrations daily. It’s not hard to believe. Look… Continue reading “Social illustration” network Pixiv now has 1 million members

Monetize Hacks #3 Report (part 1)

24th night at Roppongi Hills, the third Monetize Hacks meeting was held by some web directors from Livedoor and Hatena by welcoming 120 web directors and entrepreneurs in and around Tokyo. The first monetize Hacks [J] was called for web directors greeting and exchanging ideas around 15 people, the second one [J] was a group… Continue reading Monetize Hacks #3 Report (part 1)

Promotion Character Battle: Digital Deer vs. Analog Bear

Since Tsuyoshi Kusanagi stepped down from the role promoting digital terrestrial TV service (see this for more details), NAB,  the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan, were forced to introduce a new promoter, which is Chide-jika[J], punning the words of digital TV and deer. In opposition to the deer’s activity, users of Japan’s largest… Continue reading Promotion Character Battle: Digital Deer vs. Analog Bear