{"id":5970,"date":"2009-10-14T19:38:21","date_gmt":"2009-10-14T10:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/?p=5970"},"modified":"2009-10-14T19:38:21","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T10:38:21","slug":"technorati-japan-closes-service-october-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/technorati-japan-closes-service-october-23\/","title":{"rendered":"Technorati Japan Closes Service October 23"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/img.asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/technorati_japan_logo.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5972\" title=\"technorati_japan_logo\" src=\"http:\/\/img.asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/technorati_japan_logo.png\" alt=\"technorati_japan_logo\" width=\"319\" height=\"39\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nTechnorati in the US <a href=\"httphttp:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2009\/10\/14\/the-new-technorati\/\">relaunched today<\/a>, introducing a set of new features and a fresh overall look, and received <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2009\/10\/13\/technorati-raises-another-2-million-in-venture-capital\/\">a 2 million USD cash injection<\/a> yesterday, but a few hours ago Technorati Japan has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.jp\/weblog\/2009\/10\/service_close_hyobans.html\">announced<\/a> [JP] it will cease to exist as early as October 23. The move itself isn&#8217;t too surprising to many people in Japan&#8217;s web industry, but the speed with which Technorati Japan jumps into the deadpool is (that&#8217;s Thursday next week).<br \/>\nTechnorati Japan is operated by Tokyo-based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.garage.co.jp\/en\/\">Digital Garage<\/a>, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasdaq.co.jp\/ir\/show.do?stock=4819&amp;type=00&amp;lang=E\">JASDAQ-listed company<\/a> that also takes care of Twitter&#8217;s Japanese operations. But unlike Twitter, Technorati Japan is a separate entity that&#8217;s 70% owned by Digital Garage (there&#8217;s no &#8220;Twitter Japan&#8221; as such by the way).<br \/>\nAnd Digital Garage is in trouble: In fiscal 2009, net sales fell 13% year-on-year. Income only took a turn from red to black because of <a href=\"http:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/16\/video-rental-store-chain-to-be-lead-shareholder-of-kakakucom\/\">substantial Kakaku.com stock sales in May this year <\/a>(180 million USD). Compared to 2008, the value of company assets were reduced by a whopping 25%. But there&#8217;s also a relation to Technorati in the US: <a href=\"http:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/01\/digital-garage-sells-back-30-of-technorati-japan-to-technorati\/\">In August last year<\/a>, Digital Garage issued new shares to Technorati Inc., leading to a 30% ownership by the Americans (which cost them 700,000 USD).<br \/>\nInteresting factoid: Digital Garage itself mentions the word &#8220;Twitter&#8221; 21 times in its latest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.garage.co.jp\/en\/ir\/pdf\/090814_dg_en.pdf\">financial report<\/a> (ENG, from August), while the word &#8220;Technorati&#8221; appears just two times. So even though they wrote they&#8217;ll try to move Technorati Japan &#8220;into different business areas in support of Twitter-focused efforts&#8221; (page 15), my guess is they knew what would come and they can now focus on making money with Twitter (no pun intended).<br \/>\nAt least the closure of Technorati Japan probably makes another company happy: Technorati&#8217;s main competitor <a href=\"http:\/\/kizasi.jp\/\">Kizasi<\/a>, a Japan-only blog search engine and aggregation service (<a href=\"http:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/10\/kizasi-blog-search-engine-and-analyzer\/\">review<\/a>), shouldn&#8217;t be too sad about the news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Technorati in the US relaunched today, introducing a set of new features and a fresh overall look, and received a 2 million USD cash injection yesterday, but a few hours ago Technorati Japan has announced [JP] it will cease to exist as early as October 23. The move itself isn&#8217;t too surprising to many people&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/technorati-japan-closes-service-october-23\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Technorati Japan Closes Service October 23<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,24],"tags":[911,3636],"class_list":["post-5970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-news","tag-digital-garage","tag-technorati","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiajin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}