| Date | Title | Description |
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| Apr 7, 2013 | Messaging App Line’s Kawaii Characters Get Their Own Cartoon Series In Japan | Line’s animated characters, which helped it become one of Asia’s top messaging apps with more than 120 million users, now have their own cartoon series.
The TV show, called “LINE TOWN,” premiered on Tokyo TV Channel 6 last week (h/t Asiajin... |
| Nov 26, 2012 | After 20M Downloads On Android, Japan’s Bitcellar Brings FxCamera To iOS | Bitcellar, one of the rare Japanese app developers that faces outward from the country and reaches a global audience, is finally making a debut on iOS after a long and successful run on Google’s Android platform.
The company is behind FxCam... |
| Jan 2, 2012 | Sleep Buster: Japanese Company Develops Anti-Sleep Driver Seat Sheet | There are quite a few systems and gadgets on the market already that prevent people from falling asleep whilst driving, but Japan-based Juki has developed an entirely new one: a sheet [JP, PDF] that can be mounted on the driver’s seat and t... |
| Dec 12, 2011 | From The Infinity Ventures Summit In Kyoto/Japan: 13 Demos From Japanese Startups | I took part in the Infinity Ventures Summit Fall 2011 (IVS) in Kyoto/Japan last week, a two-day web industry event organized twice a year by Japanese VC firm Infinity Venture Partners. Like at every IVS, a few hours of the schedule were res... |
| Nov 1, 2011 | Where In The World People Do Not Use Facebook | Way back in December of last year, Facebook released its connections map. FlowingData.com recently released an inverse of the Facebook friendship map, showing where in the world people don’t use the social network. Facebook has not been abl... |
| Oct 17, 2011 | Twitter Brings Promoted Tweets, Trends & Accounts To Twitter Japan | Following the September launch of Twitter ads in the U.K., Twitter is now bringing its advertising products known as “Promoted Tweets,” “Promoted Trends” and “Promoted Accounts” to its Japanese version of the service Twitter.jp. According t... |
| Sep 14, 2011 | Via Local Telco KDDI: Website Builder Jimdo Lands Deal With Google In Japan | It doesn’t happen too often that a European web startup (or any foreign startup, for that matter) makes it in Japan, but Jimdo is one of the very few examples of those that did. After reading an article on the website building service from ... |
| Aug 3, 2011 | Hitachi To Stop Producing TVs By Year-End | After Pioneer decided to shut down its TV business in 2009, Hitachi yesterday announced they are ready to stop producing and outsourcing all production of TVs to makers in Taiwan and other Asian countries. And even though Hitachi said they ... |
| Aug 1, 2011 | iOS App Scans Printed Music Notes, Plays Them In Real-Time (Video) | I am extremely unmusical (on the verge of being tone-deaf) so I can’t decide whether this new iPhone app is good or bad: Japan-based musical instrument maker Kawai has developed a camera app that scans music notes printed on paper and plays... |
| Jun 14, 2011 | This USB Pot Charges Your Cell Phone By Excess Heat | Charging your phone the usual way is too boring for you? Then consider the Hatsuden-Nabe, manufactured by a Japanese company called TES NewEnergyCorporation. It’s basically a pot with a USB port, and it can turn heat that would normally be ... |
| Jun 12, 2011 | Why Japan’s GREE Overpaid For Mobile Social Gaming Startup OpenFeint | Over the past year, there’s been an apparent trend taking place of Japanese gaming companies acquiring U.S. social game developers. DeNa bought social gaming company Ngmoco for $400 million last October, adding to an acquisition of mobile s... |
| May 29, 2011 | Infinity Ventures Summit In Sapporo: Demos From 14 Japanese Startups | Earlier this week, I took part in Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS) Spring 2011 in Sapporo [this and many of the following links are in Japanese], a two-day, invitation-only event that takes place twice a year in Japan. IVS attracted over 400 ... |
| Apr 16, 2011 | From the Teclosion 2011 Spring Event In Tokyo: 15 Demos From Japanese Startups | On Friday, I attended Teclosion Spring 2011 in Tokyo/Japan, a one-day web industry event (backed by DESIGN IT! LLC, a media company in the UI/UX information and startup business) that was very much focused on the local startup scene. The la... |
| Apr 13, 2011 | Japan's GREE And Mobile Community mig33 Sign Deal To Bring Social Games To Asia | Big news from Asia’s social games industry today: Japanese mobile social gaming juggernaut GREE and mig33, a mobile community that’s especially popular in Asia, have just announced [PDF] a cooperation with the potential to change the social... |
| Apr 12, 2011 | Is Fujitsu Prepping A Symbian/Windows 7 Dual Boot Cell Phone? | Take this with a grain of salt: Japanese tech blog Juggly is reporting [JP] that Fujitsu is working on a cell phone with both the Symbian and Windows 7 OS (not Windows Phone) on board. According to the article, the handset will be released ... |
| Mar 29, 2011 | Video: Kinect-Powered "Ghost In The Shell" Cyberspace Booth | And yet another Kinect hack: Japan-based web company Kayac has set up some kind of semi-closed “cyberspace booth” [JP] in a department store in Tokyo, in which the “experience” is largely based on the Microsoft sensor. The booth is supposed... |
| Mar 3, 2011 | The iPad 2 Fancy Case Looks Like A Japanese Bathtub Lid | Ok, first let me get this one little cultural quirk out of the way: Japanese families share bathwater and the new iPad 2 case looks just like a bathtub lid. Yeah. Really:
Japanese bath tub lid is common item in Japanese home. The reason is ... |
| Feb 14, 2011 | Pac'n Twit: Pac-Man Twitter Client For The iPhone | It’s not that the App Store suffers from a lack of Twitter clients, but this new one is too cool to pass up: NamcoBandai in Japan released PAC’N TWIT, an awesome iPhone app [JP] that has Pac-Man written all over it. The app is only availabl... |
| Feb 11, 2011 | Via NFC: Japanese Social Network Mixi First To Let Users "Share" Real-World Items | Japan has always been the land of mobile. As such, it’s no big surprise that the country’s biggest social network, Mixi (JP, 23 million members), sees 25 of its 29 billion monthly page views coming from cell phones. And according to Mixi, i... |
| Feb 1, 2011 | Japanese Social Mobile Games Company DeNA To Hit $1.3 Billion In Revenue | Japan’s leading social games company, DeNA (listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a $5.4 billion market cap), is running from one record to the other. The company, whose mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town boasts over 22 million use... |
| Jan 31, 2011 | Chinese Gundam Copy Now Looks Less Like The Original, Still Ugly | Do you remember the embarrassingly ugly and uncool Chinese copy of the awesome Gundam statue Bandai erected in Tokyo and later in Shizuoka? The rip-off caused such a splash that mass media in Japan (and the world) started reporting about it... |
| Jan 20, 2011 | The Homunculus Project Wants To Merge You With Your Car (Video) | The “intelligent” car is something virtually every automaker is working on at the moment, but that didn’t stop a group of students from Japan’s Tsukuba University from coming up with their own quirky invention: meet the Homunculus, a car th... |
| Jan 13, 2011 | For His Blog: Man Has Been Taking Pictures Of Same Vending Machine For 5 Years | It’s no secret the Japanese love their vending machines, but this is extreme: a man from Sapporo has been taking pictures of the same vending machine (almost) every day since August 2005. The man, a person called Ikeda, is still uploading e... |
| Dec 21, 2010 | Video: Smartphone Test Robot Simulates Countless Flicking And Tapping | Tokyo-based Japan Novel Corp. is offering a robot that can simulate the process of flicking and tapping on a smartphone touch screen over and over again. Dubbed Quality Commander [JP], the machine can be programmed so that it touches the di... |
| Dec 10, 2010 | Japan's Social Gaming Giant DeNA Under Suspicion Of Breaking Antitrust Law | Bad news from Japan’s multi-billion dollar social gaming industry earlier this week: Tokyo-based mobile gaming heavyweight DeNA (current market cap: US$4.5 billion) was investigated on Wednesday by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) ove... |
| Dec 1, 2010 | Mobile Ad Network Jumptap Lands Deal (And Investment) In Japan | We last covered mobile advertising network Jumptap in August 2008, when the Massachusetts-based company raised $26 million to penetrate the rapidly growing mobile web market. Although another ad startup emerged as the winner in that race, J... |
| Nov 25, 2010 | Bar Android: Tokyo Now Has A Drinking Place For Android Geeks | Yesterday, we reported that Android is on the rise in some regions in Asia, but I believe not one of the countries the article refers to (Indonesia, South Korea, Singapore etc.) has what Japan has: a Bar Android. As the name suggests, it’s ... |
| Aug 30, 2010 | From WISH 2010 In Tokyo: 15 Japanese Startups Demo Their Services | On Saturday, I attended WISH 2010 in Tokyo (where I live) to see a total of 15 Japanese startups presenting their services onstage to a panel of judges and an audience of 550 people. The event was organized by online marketing company Agile... |
| Jul 27, 2010 | Yahoo Japan To Use Google Search (And Not Bing) In The Future | The spectactular search deal Microsoft and Yahoo struck last summer doesn’t extend to all country markets. In Japan, Yahoo search will be powered by Google in the future, as announced [JP] on the Google Japan blog and by Yahoo Japan itself ... |
| Jul 19, 2010 | Portable watermelon cooler | Just when you think you’ve seen it all in the world of gadgets, Japan churns out yet another unique device. This time it’s the Marugoto Tamachan [JP], a watermelon cooler and heater. That’s right, the machine doesn’t just cool watermelons, ... |
| Jun 24, 2010 | Coca Cola vending machine with 46-inch touchscreen | If you needed more proof that touchscreens are becoming ubiquitous, look at these new vending machines Coca Cola is planning to set up in all over Japan by year-end. They feature 46-inch LCD touch panels (1m high, 57cm wide) instead of butt... |
| Jun 16, 2010 | DotWar: Twitter-based strategy game | It’s certainly not the first Twitter-based game out there, but DotWar, a made-in-Japan strategy/action title is a pretty satisfying time waster. The game is bilingual (English/Japanese) and actually to be played outside Twitter, on a separa... |
| Jun 13, 2010 | Infinity Ventures Summit In Sapporo: 11 Demos From Japanese Startups (GeeksOnAPlane Final Stop) | Just a handful of the 30+ Geeks On A Plane (GOAP) who started their Asian field trip in Shanghai, and then moved on to Beijing, Seoul, and Singapore, made it to Japan, the final stop of the tour. The highlight of the Japan leg was the Infin... |
| Jun 2, 2010 | Video: Japanese doctors use iPad during surgery | As we all know by now, the iPad can be used in many ways, and we know it’s a hit product. The Japanese seem to embrace the device, too (it came out in that country a few days ago). And for some strange reason, Japanese doctors in particular... |
| May 11, 2010 | Japanese Mobile Gaming Giant DeNA Goes Global With iPhone Social Network MiniNation | Japan has two listed mobile gaming companies with a multi-billion US-dollar market capitalization, GREE ($2.7 billion) and DeNA ($4.2 billion), with both companies offering services in Japan only. But DeNA just yesterday rolled out MiniNati... |
| May 10, 2010 | CubeSat XI-V: Japan gets tweeting satellite | As if the Akiba Pulse Box (the Twitter heart beat posting device) or the Bowlingual (the iPhone Twitter app for dogs) weren’t enough: Japan now boasts the world’s first tweeting satellite, the CubeSat XI-V. Developed by the Nakasuka Lab at ... |
| May 10, 2010 | Yahoo Japan And China's Taobao Announce Cross-Border E-Commerce Tie-Up | Big news from the Asian web world today. Yahoo Japan (Japan’s biggest website) and Taobao (China’s largest e-retailer) have agreed to launch a cross-border initiative under which both services will link their online shopping services starti... |
| Apr 23, 2010 | New market study shows iPhone continues to be big in Japan | A lot has been written on how the iPhone performs in Japan, the world’s most advanced mobile nation, but the general consensus in this country now is that it sells very well (even though both Apple and provider SoftBank Mobile refuse to bre... |
| Apr 16, 2010 | Video: Japanese company shows Super Mario Bros. on Kindle emulator | We’ve shown you an N64 emulator running on a hacked iPad just a few days ago, and now it’s time to see how Super Mario Bros. would look like on a Kindle. And the short answer is that the 1985 NES game would look awful: it’s slow, it’s in bl... |
| Mar 5, 2010 | Japanese company offers anti-pollen allergy ringtone | Do you remember the ringtone for dogs a Japanese company started offering two years ago? Now Japan gets to download another equally zany app for their cell phones, a ringtone [JP] that’s supposed to clean your nostrils in case you suffer fr... |
| Feb 10, 2010 | Bowlingual: iPhone app translates what your dog barks, posts it to Twitter | Do you remember the Bowlingual, the portable dog language translator that was released in Japan last year? The basic concept behind the $250 device (which people living outside Japan can get here) will soon be used for an iPhone app that tr... |
| Jan 11, 2010 | MyGengo Is Mechanical Turk For Translations | Several ways to translate web sites, texts or documents online have emerged in the past few years, with Google Translate probably being the best-known tool. Google’s service is free and works for most quick and dirty translations, but when ... |
| Dec 29, 2009 | For men on trains: Japanese company sells anti-groping gloves | Groping women in trains (or anywhere, really) isn’t only happening in Japan, but this country with its big cities with trains that are full of people (=easy bait for gropers) everyday has a particularly big problem with molesters. It’s a cr... |
| Dec 21, 2009 | Japan's Red Cross uses Augmented Reality to get geeks to donate blood (video) | This is one of the reasons why I live in Japan and nowhere else: In order to get more people to donate blood, the Japanese Red Cross Society decided to skip juice and cookies and to go high-tech by using augmented reality-powered digital si... |
| Dec 7, 2009 | Castoven: Microwave with built-in YouTube player (video) | Two researchers from Japan’s Keio University (which yours truly attended just until recently by the way) have developed a kitchen appliance aimed at the total web geek in you, a YouTube-powered microwave. The so-called Castoven [JP] is base... |
| Nov 28, 2009 | "Misunderstanding": Twitter Japan Now Says There Won't Be A Subscription Model (Update 3) | We reported yesterday about Twitter Japan’s plans to start charging followers to view tweets from certain users starting January and explained why this paid subscription model could work in Japan.
Well, please forget it, this won’t happen. ... |
| Nov 27, 2009 | 6 Reasons Why Twitter Japan's Subscription Model Might Work (In Japan) | We reported today that Digital Garage, Twitter’s partner in Japan, is ready to roll out a new, Japan-only way to monetize the service. The way it’ll work is pretty simple: Japanese Twitter users will soon be able to charge their followers t... |
| Nov 18, 2009 | NEC prototypes battery-less remote control | NEC Electronics, an NEC subsidiary, has announced the development of a remote control [JP] that works without using batteries. Every time users push a button on the device, they generate a small amount of electricity through vibration. NEC ... |
| Nov 12, 2009 | Infinity Ventures Summit In Miyazaki, Japan: 12 Demos From Japanese Startups | I am currently in Miyazaki/Japan, attending the Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS), one of Asia’s most prestigious web industry events. Organizing VC company Infinity Venture Partners reserved some hours of the program to give a total of twelve... |
| Nov 8, 2009 | TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp: 29 Asian Companies Show Their Wares | The TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, a demo event for web startups that took place this Friday, was a total blast. No less than 350 people came to the demo pit and meetup, which were co-organized by DESIGN IT!, LLC (a Sociomedia group compa... |
| Sep 6, 2009 | Japan's 32 Best iPhone Apps (All Available In English) | It’s not really a secret that Japan is absolutely crazy about cell phones. And even though domestic makers churn out more than 100 different handsets every year (some of which are simply amazing), the iPhone is selling over here. SoftBank M... |
| Aug 29, 2009 | Live From Tokyo: Cerevo Debuts Digital Camera That Automatically Uploads Pictures To Multiple Social Media Sites | I just came back from the CNET Japan Innovation Conference 2009 [JP] in Tokyo, where Cerevo, currently one of the most ambitious tech start-ups in Japan, showed its self-developed digital camera aimed at heavy social media users for the fir... |
| Aug 20, 2009 | The Solar-UFO is a UFO-shaped vessel that serves as a water purifier | A Japanese company called NTT Facilities, a subsidiary of telecommunications behemoth NTT, obviously has enough time for something cool like this: The so-called Solar-UFO [JP], a UFO-shaped vessel that serves as a water purifier and is powe... |
| Aug 13, 2009 | Flipnote Studio: Nintendo DSi gets social drawing service in six languages | There are seven million Nintendo DSi in the world now, and the system is the first in the DS series (total sales: 102 million) boasting Internet connectivity. And Nintendo just stepped up efforts to tap the handheld’s network effect by rele... |
| Aug 4, 2009 | iPhone users: This virtual girlfriend will never leave you (video) | There are a number of Tamagotchi-style apps for the iPhone out there, but now Tokyo-based Xtone gives us Amamiya Momo, a virtual catgirl girlfriend that lives in your iPhone, speaks to you and expresses emotions (there are English subs for ... |
| Jul 29, 2009 | MovieSD: Japan gets "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" on microSD | I don’t know why, but microSD seems to suddenly become an alternative for distributing digital content lately, at least in Japan.
Two weeks ago, a Japanese entertainment company was the first in the world to start selling digital content on... |
| Jul 7, 2009 | iPhone Godzilla Swallows Japanese Cell Phone Market | Apple's iPhone is taking it to the competition worldwide, belying the idea that the iPhone's popularity is a uniquely American phenomenon.
TG Daily reported that "Apple has cleaned up in the smartphone market in Japan," based on a... |
| Jun 28, 2009 | Heart beat posting device lets your Twitter followers know you're alive | It surely didn’t escape anyone’s attention Twitter is on track to becoming a mass phenomenon globally. The service is also growing nicely in Japan where it has been embraced by the geek community in particular (Japanese is the only alternat... |
| Jun 26, 2009 | Videos: KDDI develops new "augmented reality" cell phone app | Augmented reality (AR), the mixing of real-world data with computer-generated information, is currently a hot topic in the web world and is poised to play an even bigger role in the very near future. And cell phones in particular seem to be... |
| Jun 24, 2009 | Win $10,000+ with an idea for a domain name | A Japanese company called Interlink [JP] is organizing a contest to find potentially lucrative future gTLDs (generic top-level domains). And the best thing is that the “World Domain Cup” is open to everyone with the contest’s dedicated web ... |
| Jun 12, 2009 | A Recipe Site Goes IPO, In Japan (Cookpad) | It seems that even in this downturn, there is still room for tech IPOs, at least in Japan. Cookpad [JP], the nation’s biggest site for sharing recipes, today announced it will be listed in the “Mothers” section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange o... |
| May 18, 2009 | Big Brother in Japan? University tracks students via free iPhones | They say don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but this present Tokyo-based university Aoyama Gakuin gives to students in the School of Social Informatics does have a significant catch. The present in question is an iPhone the students get ... |
| Mar 12, 2009 | Bijin Tokei: Hot-Japanese-Girls gadget for iGoogle and Vista released | A Tokyo-based design company calle Phiria [JP] has recently launched Bijin Tokei (Hot Girl Clock), a site where you get to see one hot Japanese girl every minute for 24 hours. (The service experiences server problems from time to time so yo... |
| Feb 13, 2009 | Google Japan Apologizes For Awkward PR Campaign, Gets Punished With PageRank Reduction | On Monday, we covered an embarrassing pay-per-post campaign Google launched in Japan with the aim of boosting awareness of a new keyword hitlist box on the Google Japan top page. It now turns out the move, which was (to my knowledge) first ... |
| Feb 9, 2009 | Pay Per Post: Google Uses Every Trick To Beat Yahoo In Japan | Google is undoubtedly the dominant search engine globally, but in a few countries such as Korea (Naver), Russia (Yandex) or Japan, local competitors are winning. Especially Japan, the country with the world’s third biggest Internet populati... |
| Jan 12, 2009 | Sony Vaio P doesn't quite fit, gets ridiculed by Japanese geeks | Sony’s new subnotebook Vaio P does look like a neat little machine but several official promo shots of the device triggered a wave of mockery in the blogosphere of its home country Japan.
The problem is that Sony thinks the Vaio P fits in t... |
| Dec 24, 2008 | QR codes on tombstones help mourners to stay in touch | QR codes have yet to conquer the US and Europe but are prevalent in mobile phone-crazy Japan. Denso Wave, a Tokyo-based tech company, invented the nifty little two-dimensional bar codes as early as 1994. And they are everywhere now in Nippo... |
| Dec 5, 2008 | Top 10 International Products of 2008 | We live in a technologically rich and increasingly Web-savvy world. In this post, we celebrate the World Wide Web by selecting our top 10 international products of 2008. What do we mean by ‘international’? We looked for products that were d... |
| Dec 2, 2008 | MobaMingle adds a Japanese flavor to mobile social networks | We at TechCrunch expect a rapid expansion of the market for mobile social networks. And with the iPhone’s success as one of the main catalysts of the development, services like Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, Loopt (which even offers a Tec... |
| Nov 10, 2008 | Black Magic: Japanese company sells audio LAN cable for $1,070 | On Novmeber 15th, Japanese online shopping community Zigsow will start selling the so-called BLACK MAGIC [JP], a strangely named LAN cable, which is 1.5 meters long. The maker claims the buyer will get a super high quality product since the... |
| Nov 3, 2008 | Irrepressible widget-maker RockYou targets Asia, raises $17M | RockYou, a company that started out two years ago making simple slideshow widgets for MySpace, and, more recently, applications for social networks including Facebook, is now invading Asia.
It has taken on strategic funding and sweet deals ... |
| Sep 24, 2008 | paiTouch: Virtual boob simulator for the iPhone | Although the iPhone didn’t turn out to be a superhit in Japan, some local programmers have come up with interesting ideas for the device in the last months, i.e. to use it as a futuristic tagging and information terminal.
Now anonymous Japa... |
| Aug 31, 2008 | Google's Strategy In Japan: Avoid Yahoo And Take Over The Mobile Web First | Google may be the leader in the worldwide search engine market, but in Nippon, it has some catching up to do: In 2007, Yahoo Japan saw a whopping 76% of the nearly 350 billion search engine and portal-related pageviews registered in the cou... |
| Aug 27, 2008 | Samurai Weapon: Awesome blog destroyer widget | Video game publisher Koei has released a very cool "interactive" widget (see below) featuring a Samurai you don’t want to mess with. The site, where you can download the widget from, was launched to promote Koei’s "Kunitori Z... |
| Jul 20, 2008 | Lonely? Try fondling Augmented Reality Cyber Maid Alice | Augmented reality (AR), the combination of virtual worlds and reality, is a cool concept that leads to useful applications in navigation systems, medicine, architecture and many other fields. Geisha Tokyo Entertainment Inc. [JP] now found a... |
| Jul 20, 2008 | Japan's Mixi: A Social Network As A Purely Local Phenomenon | Japan’s biggest social network is called Mixi, launched in February 2004 by the company of the same name. Drawing in one in five web users in the country, Mixi now boasts over 15 million members. The site ranks sixth on Alexa Japan and rack... |
| Jul 10, 2008 | This app turns your iPhone mobile phone into an abacus | http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcrunchgear%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F1072887%3Freferrer%3Dblip%2Etv%26source%3D1&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip... |
| May 30, 2008 | Japanese geek programs iPong multiplayer game for iPod Touch | It is claimed that this wireless multiplayer Pong game for the iPod Touch was coded in about an hour by a single person.
via Asiajin |
