CategoryMiscellaneous

The main trigger for my establishing this blog last year was the ridiculously small amount of information I could get about the Japanese web industry in English at that time. Asiajin (which I am co-authoring) followed suit and improved the situation dramatically, now boasting over 1.800 RSS readers...

Here are a couple of VERY useful calendars for tech and web freaks who want to plan ahead for industry events of all kinds:

IT events in Japan (in Japanese, recommended)
ZD NET’s calendar (Japanese )
@IT’s calendar (Japanese)
StartupDating Tokyo (event newsletter in Japanese, English)

I guess there is no doubt that in a couple of years, the link between Television and the web will be much stronger than it is now. Here in Japan, TV sets featuring direct Internet access are expected to be sold as early as next year. In preparation of this move, manufacturers and web TV providers...

There is a huge interest in Japanese geek and otaku culture in the west and I feel it is even growing. Now, one of the most influential and famous geek blogs of this country, Netafull, decided to establish an English version. In my “Top 50 blogs of Japan” ranking from January, Netafull...

I personally believe the basic concept behind the idea of Second Life (the existence of “virtual worlds” in 3D populated by avatars) will be here to stay in the web world forever. In Japan, people took a liking to Second Life particularly after Linden Lab decided to translate the site...

Typing in Japanese can be a real pain. Whereas using the Roman alphabet to type on a keyboard is a relatively direct and easy issue, typing in Japanese usually involves a lot of converting (i.e. from the Japanese alphabet Hiragana to the Chinese characters called Kanji). Also, there sometimes are...