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Archive for the ‘web 2.0 ’ Category

Bing + Twitter, Web 2.0 Summit, Mobile Web Business

21 Oct

http://www.bing.com/twitter/ just opened 20 minutes ago!

Anyhow…

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Web 2.0 Summit just opened yesterday (and is still ongoing until Oct 22, 2009) at San Fransisco. Probably the biggest event in the world for web 2.0 business, nearly every company whose service avid web surfer have used participates in it. CEO of MySpace, President of PayPal, Chairman of NY Times, VP of Facebook, and many other representatives from renowned companies, Google, O’Reilly, and so on.

The recent activities in the web 2.0 world across the globe probably indicate that there are still vast of opportunity in web business, regardless of the burst of dot-com bubble in 2001.


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The technology-heavy NASDAQ Composite index peaked at 5,048 in March 2000, reflecting the high point of the dot-com bubble. (ref: Wikipedia)

Morgan Stanley even predicts recovery in tech sector, especially in mobile internet sector enabled by smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone (ref: VentureBeat). A quote on the article:

Japan is years ahead of the U.S. in mobile data and Meeker believes it will serve as a model for what will come. She said that the U.S. has a long way to go to catch up with the patterns of mobile Internet usage in Japan. By 2013, the number of heavy web mobile users will triple to a billion users.

The article makes some promising prediction on mobile web businesses, but I still doubt Japan would also enjoy a similar growth. Indeed, Japan has always been ahead of any other countries in the world in mobile phone technology. However, Japanese mobile phones has myriad varieties and that there is currently no any standard interface across all these phones. Despite their advanced hardware, handsets here often have primitive, clunky interfaces. Most handsets have no way to easily synchronize data with PCs as the iPhone and other smartphones do. Because each handset model is designed with a customized user interface, development is time-consuming and expensive (ref: NY Times).

Moreover, the mobile market in Japan has enjoyed big waves for quite some time and there is a possibility that it will saturate soon. Will the recent introduction of iPhone (which has standard interface) in Japan be able to produce spark in the market? Probably. As far as I know, there have been 3 startup companies established soon after the sale of iPhone in Japan. (I forgot where I put the links)

Anyway, in the interview with Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, in one of the Web 2.0 Summit session, he mentioned Indonesia and Japan being the top 5 country users of Twitter. It is actually surprising to me to see Indonesia in the big 5 list considering that there was not much web activity when I left there. You can see the full interview here: TechCrunch.

 
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TiTech Student Startup “Milog”

13 Oct

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ミログ (read: Milog) is a startup company founded on October 2008 by 2 students from Tokyo Institute of Technology and University of Tokyo.  The company offers a service similar to Twitter where users can publish mini status updates or “mini logs”, hence the name “Milogs”. It implements functionalities such as tagging system on the statuses, tracking system to trace which user visits your profile, Milog notepads, and so on.

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The company is still pretty young (only a year old), but has received some spotlights on Yahoo news, NewsAsiaBiz, and several other publications. Recently Milog has collaborated with young Japanese politics group “日本の政治をおもしろくする会” to incite interest on young people on the recent election in Japan (source: Sankei News).

The service also features a cute ghost character on each of the user profile that can grow up or change expressions as the user insert statuses. The company expects to gain profit from advertisements and selling of the online items that users can use to decorate their ghost characters. From: CNET Japan.

 
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Startup School 09

09 Oct

Just got the invitation to go to Startup School 09. Flying to SF on Oct 23, baby! Great chance to meet and chat with fellow engineers, VCs, and lots of great people.

The seminar will definitely be interesting. Last year, it was attended by Jeff Bezos, DHH, Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen and several other influential people.

This year, Mark Zuckerberg, Paul Graham, Jason Fried and many other great speakers will deliver the seminar.

This will definitely be a blast.

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Japan Says Chuitter

30 Sep

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A new service that clones Twitter has appeared in Japan. But, instead of 140 letters limitation, Chuitter only lets you to type 14 letters. At first, this limitation might sound ridiculous and impossible for the user to form an intelligible sentence in just 14 characters. However, considering the wealth of information one Japanese kanji letter can convey, this might not be a problem for Japanese users. It might even give a chance for the service users to push their creativity by writing short poem, such as haikus. Read the full story on Asiajin blog.

 
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Posted in news , strange , web 2.0

 

mixi => twitter?

18 Sep

A popular Japan blogging platform, Mixi, has just implemented a functionality on their system that lets its users to write a 150 character message on their profile which will then be broadcasted to the user’s friends. Only the 2 latest messages will be shown (although, a link is provided to display all previous messages). The new feature looks very similar to Facebook status update/Twitter stream so that anyone with previous experience with the latter will feel as if Mixi is just copying them.

facebook_logotwitterMixi might still be the blogging company with the most users in Japan. However, Facebook  localization to Japanese and the recent boom of Twitter are events that Mixi probably cannot ignore. Even if it is just copying the feature from Facebook or Twitter, implementing the feature at the early stage before Facebook or Twitter strengthen their niche in Japanese market is probably the best way to instill habits of using Mixi to microblog in its users.

Is Mixi copying Facebook? What certain here is that Mixi only provides blogging service when they first started, but later added on a series of features, such as “People you might know” suggestion, ability to create photo albums and videos, and Mixi applications, which all had been the core features of Facebook. The latest micro blogging feature reinforces this assumption even further. I won’t be surprised if Mixi implements AJAX like feature to make the microblogs look more streaming like Facebook status update or Twitter. However, considering how cluttered the current Mixi layout is (it is so cluttered with ads, etc that only 2 friends’ status update are shown), I doubt Mixi will implement that using the current layout.

Is Mixi introduction of microblogging feature a good move? Probably. Considering Mixi enormous usage share in Japan and the convenient ‘all-in-one’ SNS blogging platform it provides, loyal Japanese users are less likely to move towards a new platform that provide similar functionalities i.e. Facebook, unless it provides something that Mixi does not. However, considering Mixi’s current emphasis on blogs as their main product, Twitter is likely to gain firmer standing as a broadcasting platform for different target audience such as non-bloggers. Moreover, the recent proliferation of third party services to Twitter (i.e. monitter, TweetValue, etc) has big potentials to pave new ways for the traditional SNS blogs.

 
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