Written on February 4, 2008 – 6:04 pm
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
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Today Fon Japan and Livedoor, one of Japan’s biggest ISPs, announced they would start a partnership to connect their free Wifi access points across Japan.
Livedoor is coming out of some hard times after the very public and very dramatic securities fraud convictions that led to sentences for four executives in early 2007. Most notoriously, founder Takafumi Horie (aka: “Horiemon”) was famous for his brash and aggressive business style and bore the brunt of the blame for the charges brought against the company. Even so, Livedoor still has its sights on going public in 2008. The Fon deal would appear to help their expansion. Fon, launched its wireless network in Japan in late 2006 and is currently the biggest wifi network globally.
The deal lets Livedoor customers connect to Fon’s 31,000 access points around Japan (as well as 240,000 globally) and also for Fon users to connect to Livedoor’s network which is primarily centered around the inner Tokyo area and currently has about 2,200 access points. The combined service will be free until at least the 4th of August, 2008, but there are plans to continue the service as free after that time as well.
The catch for the general user is that you have to be a member of either the Fon network or Livedoor. But from my initial checking, it doesn’t seem to be such a big deal to join. To become a Fon network member you need to buy a base station and share a Wifi signal yourself (thus extending the network). However, the simple way to access now seems to be through Livedoor where it looks like a regular login account to the Livedoor portal should get you in.
Some useful links :
Written on January 16, 2008 – 10:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Twitter announced fifteen minutes ago that they will expand their services to Japan. The blog post says: “Despite the fact that Twitter is in English, we continue to see exciting growth from all over the world. Japan, in particular shows a very strong and growing demand for Twitter services. Movatwitter and Twitterpod are great examples.”
In order to cover Japan in a decent and Twitter-worthy way, they partnered up with Digital Garage. This company has made an investment in Twitter and will commit engineering and other development resources because hey, you gotta return the favor.
The guys from Twitter are looking forward to cross-ocean adventure: “We’re really excited about Twitter Japan because it’s a big step towards our goal of becoming a worldwide communication network.”
Thank you, Robin Wauters from the conference Plugg, for tipping us!
Written on January 15, 2008 – 12:03 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
When writing a recent article about the biggest internet stories in Japan for 2007, I wrote about probably the biggest story of the year, hot-shot video site Nico Nico Douga. This site is uniquely Japanese and has some truly strange and bizarre content. By using time referenced text chat on top of the video feeds, the site manages to create a unique social landscape that western sites have yet to match.
This is the 7th most popular site in Japan after just 1 year of existence. Many of the funny jokes and comments are in Japanese, but I have still had a lot of people asking me to show them how to access the site.
When navigating a foreign language site you always have a few challenges but you can usually get by with a few guesses and some lucky clicking. For Nico Nico Douga, this is a bit more difficult than usual because you need to register first before you can see anything.
So, in order to help more people understand what this phenomenon is, I have put together this handy guide to registering and getting to the fun stuff so you can all benefit from my 6 years of clicking through Japanese websites.
(more…)
Written on January 12, 2008 – 12:02 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
As we already in 2008, it’s a good time to look back and see how much the Internet landscape has changed in the last year in Japan.
Internationally there have been some big shakeups, led by the dramatic effects of the meteoric rise of Facebook to prominence, both good and bad. On these shores, too, there has been plenty of online action, so we’ve rounded up some of the events that have reshaped the Japanese Internet landscape this year.
The big hit
Nico Nico Douga
Any discussion about the top Internet stories of 2007 starts and finishes with Nico Nico Douga. This video-sharing site is uniquely Japanese, blending online video-sharing with user-created, short chat-like text comments that are synced to the movies, allowing whole conversations to flow across the frame. The type of content has ranged from the crude to the incredibly insightful and inventive, and some users have even subtitled music videos with the song’s lyrics. The videos themselves are a geek’s paradise, consisting mainly of anime, video-game footage and videos of young ladies. The unique format and addictive nature of the Web site has millions tuned in, giving it one of the most dramatic growth surges ever as it went from a January launch to become the seventh-most visited Web site in Japan as of December, according to global site-ranking service Alexa.com.
Mobile gaming gets the big company treatment
Disney Wonder Days
Following in the footsteps of the innovative 2006 avatar-based mobile-gaming platform MobaGe-Town, this April Disney threw in its hat with a big press push and its own avatar-based game and social-interaction platform. Disney Wonder Days capitalized on the brand popularity and makes its money from monthly subscriptions. The range of games is pretty slick and offers Disney fans a healthy selection of characters. What it represented mostly was media giant Disney jumping into the mobile social media space to capture the hugely lucrative children’s market. You know the scene is changing when the big names get involved. (more…)
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