December 2010 Japan IT Links (Part 1)

Early part of December news which we did not write as a dedicated article. Continued to (Part 2)

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Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Twitter Eating Record Service Eatwit
• ex-Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie’s Paid Newsletter Subscribers Passed 10,000 – 840 yen/month so it is a quite profitable business now.
• FarmVille For Mixi On TechCrunch [En]
• Tabelog Pays T-Points (Inter-company loyalty rewards point) To Restaurant Reviewers
• A thief (under arrest) had an eye for targets by Google StreetVIew.
• Net Buzzword Awards 2010 Grand Prix
• Groupon Clone Minarari Company Solad Gets 50 Million Yen From Japan Asia Investment
• 1 Million Yen New Year Lucky Bag Comes With Wii And 408 Ever-Released Games
• Japan Fair Trade Commission To Announce Google-Yahoo! Japan Search Alliance Has No Problem, Nikkei Reports , Reuters [En]
• LovePlus Cellphone Charger
• Tsukemimi Camera – iPhona Camera App To Compose Animal Ears On Any Face
• New Year Greeting Card Exchange With Celebrities And Anime Characters – Only for 400 yen!?
• DMM Begins Coupon Service via MyCom
• SugarSync Releases Japanese Version, Site, Android And Yen Payment via Cnet Japan
• Funny question on Hatsugen Komachi: “Recently I see ordinary people writing blogs. Why do they do blogging like celebrities?”
• Gree Releases Android App – Docomo/KDDI au Users Can Now Register Gree From Smartphone
• Greater Tokyo Map 1880-1886
• Microsoft announces Innovation Award results.
• Yahoo! Japan’s Search Engine All Switched To Google’s Confirmeed By Y!J President Inoue
• DeNA And CyberAgent Ventures Cowork To Assist Asian Social Game Developers
• Japan Maritime Self Defence Force Releases Salute Trainer iPhone App – app site via @noma. WSJ covered [En]
• Jimmy Wales Photoshopped By Japanese – Jimmy Wales Twitter Bot (in Japanese)
• Interesting interview with Mixi CEO Kasahara – He says there were some kind of light talks of an acquisition of Mixi by Facebook with Facebook execs 2 years ago.
• iPhone/iPad Apps Awards 2010 Event
• Tech Side Of The”Facebook” Movie’s Japanese Translation Is Checked By Shintaro Yamada, Zynga Japan GM
• Dragonball Author’s Home Identified By 2-channeler, Publisher Confirmed It By Requesting Deletion (to 2-chan, instead of Google)
• 2010 New/Buzz Word Awards
• Nikkei Digital Version Paid Subscriber Is Over 90,000
• Gree To Gain More “Share” Button On Rakuten Services. Mixi’s buttons are already there.
• Tokyu CATV Enters Local Coupon Service
• Softbank Mobile Is Unreachable At Web Exectives Event IVS
• Tonchidot’s PR lady visited Layar Office, reports they have characters from Dennou Coil – Dennou Coil is good anime to think near-future technology. photo via @Chihokomoriya
• Gree Platform for smartphone Begins [pdf]
• Petting Virtual Boyfriend Mobile Game Karepet Passed 300,000 Users – The game (only accessible from Japanese feature phone) is free for three major carriers. 100 million page views per month
• Zynga Japan now has 56 employees
• Cupmen for Cupmen – stopper for your instant noodle. pun of “men” and men(“noodle” in Japanese)
• Mixi Begins Iine(I like it) button
• Naver’s N-drive enhancement
• Number Of Flash Coupon Services Is Over 130 In Japan – One of them Luxa researched
• HAtsune Miku Live Party
• Cloud service company Nekojarashi (foxtail) allocated new shares to SBI investment for 60 million yen.
• Twitter Seeking Asian Language Search Engineer – Twitter’s Japanese search has been horrible.
• HootSuite Japan Testing Feature Phone Version – private beta, and very limited target = Softbank Mobile non-smartphone users
• Nico Nico Douga Access Banned From China
• NHK Tests To Show Animation With Twitter Feedbacks Side-by-side – It’s TV Niconico-nization

If you want to know any specific news more, but unable to find them in other English blog/media, please let us know.

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