Here is an excerpt of their article, put you should really read the original one:Japantrends

Featuring a masked Naohiro Ukawa, the man behind the online nightclub DOMMUNE that streams to thousands each night, the film uses the same platform idea. Different people around Tokyo are drawn into a DOMMUNE style broadcast (on the Motorola device, naturally), where Ukawa asks us to question how we associate our lives in terms of wealth. The narrative comes from the actor and writer Shimoda Kageki, considered a leading commentator of Japanese culture, and the piece features more than 20 of the countries most interesting figures right now across all areas including fashion, music, architecture and design. The short documentary style piece is shot and directed by Shouda Yukihero, who we introduced you to earlier last month with his post apocalyptic film Blind.

 

And my question is what is abundance for you guys? I will probably do a part two about this.

Because it will function as an over-the-air broadcaster, its quality will not suffer as the number of viewers increase, and it will be able to deliver digital content, including games and newspapers, simultaneously to a mass audience.

The company showed demonstrations of its main application, which allows live commenting over Twitter and Facebook as shows progress. It also has the time shift features found in many set-top boxes for on-demand viewing.

“Television is currently designed for viewing at home, with everyone sitting around a TV. We want to be more personal and interactive,” said Hiroaki Ban, a manager in the corporate strategy division of mmbi, the company that will operate NOTTV.

Ban said the programming will typically be much shorter in length than that made for traditional TV, sometimes around 10 minutes per show, because it will be aimed at mobile users looking to fill idle time. He said the company expected much of its content to be saved locally on smartphones and viewed on demand.

Japan already has a digital broadcasting system aimed at mobile devices called oneseg. But it mainly serves as a simultaneous repeat of existing channels, with little unique content, and NOTTV says it will be able to offer far better video and sound quality.

But for me the real question is how will ADs work, will it be just like normal television or can it be filter be user profile or location wise.

Image you are on your commute to work, you have a profile that shows you are 23 years old, like actions Manga and Animes (Naruto, One Piece, stuff like that), you do Kendo and loves Baseball.

In the middle of the way you see an Ad telling there is a sale for Dakoben (baseball related manga from the 70’s) collection pack close to where you are, and if you go there in the next two hours and show a digital coupon from the Ad you get 40% discount. That would be awesome.

Also this system would be perfect to notify user from disaster and emergencies.

Lets see what happen. I am excited.

Sources: PC World

Original: MMBI (translated)

109 Men’s department store in Shibuya has gone hi-tec with it’s shopping experience by introducing digital interactive clothes hangers to one of it’s shops. The hangers, from Japanese company Team Lab, interact with digital displays above the products, triggering certain images and videos to be played when the hangers are picked up by a shopper.

The hangers look the same as a normal hanger but with a larger middle area which contains an embedded RFID chip. When handled by the shopper the hanger’s chip sends a signal to a computer which controls specific displays around the store corresponding to the position of that hanger.

In the shop we tried it out in, the display infront of the item automatically changed to display the product as well as other items that might go with it. The hanger can also be programmed to change the store’s background music, lighting and any other visuals programmed.

This interactive visual merchandising not only catches the eye of the consumer and drives through further purchasing through recommendations, but also logs details and aggregates data as to how popular an item is or how effective its positioning is in store. It is also a particularly unobtrusive form of marketing that blends in with the shop itself adding to the shoppers experience in a far more natural way.

If you want to see more trends in Communication Technologies Innovation read my article about the U- Japan – Click Here

Algo this is my first post after more then a 2 years hiatus, hope to engage with new J-writers and professionals, also my goals have changed… but I will talk about that later.

I’m going to try to use a different point of view in this article and I hope you guys like it.

First lets take a look at the business model of four big Social Media Sites in Japan: Nico Nico Douga, Mixi，Mobage-town and GREE.

The data, I found in an article by Fumi Yamazaki in her incredible blog – What’s happening in Japan right now? – that translated from this article -  Comparing the business models of Mixi，Mobage-town，GREE，and NicoNicoDouga – that is all written in japanese.

mixi [ja], the largest SNS of Japan depends 93% of their revenue on advertisement.

Mixi, Inc. is a Tokyo-based web company established in 1999, initially as an online job service.

It is now known for its social network service of the same name, which is by far the biggest one in Japan. The site boasts over 19 million members and gets over 14 billion page views monthly (July 2008). The mobile version is more popular than the PC site.

Mixi is only available in Japanese and officially restricted to adults. The service requires an invitation from a member and a Japanese cell phone’s email address for identity confirmation.

Mixi offers typical SNS features such as a “my profile” page, a messaging system, photo and video hosting, a blog/diary function, music sharing, a news section, discussion communities/forums etc. External applications are not accepted.  (Techcrunch)

Compared to leading Western social networks, Mixi is rather scarce function-wise (see the screenshot below). However, here are the main country-specific differences why MySpace, Facebook or Bebo don’t stand a chance in Japan:

• Restricted membership to increase the level of safety: Officially, every member must be over 18 years old. Mixi also requires an invitation from a current user and a Japanese mobile mail address to register.
• Blogging and communication as the big ideas: Next to resyndicating external blogs, members excessively write and share so-called “diaries” on the site. Instead of focusing on messaging, status updates and news feeds, Mixi established itself as one of Japan’s biggest blogging platforms. The site also offers more than 2.5 million user-generated bulletin boards.
• Marginal approach to design and structure: It’s almost impossible for users to change the layout and look of the site, which is only available in Japanese. External applications are not allowed. One of Mixi’s most striking characteristics is the scantiness regarding functions and features.
• High level of anonymity: Mixi abides by the preference of Japanese people to generally stay totally anonymous online. The number of members using real names and photos is below 5%. Very important for Japanese users: The so-called ashi ato (footprint) function makes it possible to retrace every visitor on profile pages, improving the feeling of personal security.

Tailor-made mobile version: Users accessing Mixi’s mobile version have been clearly outnumbering those going through PCs since July 2007 (ratio of pageviews in March 2008: 60% mobile to 40% PC).

Mobage-town [ja], the leading mobile SNS/game site .

Subscribers can exchange messages, chat in communities, share music, read pocket novels, and blog, among other things. The site’s “killer feature”, however, is the vast selection of free games that makes most users register in the first place.

Each of the 11 million Mobage-town members is represented by an avatar “living” in a virtual room. Both the characters and rooms can be pimped out with new clothes and wallpaper, for example. In order to do that, users must acquire “Moba Gold”, a virtual currency established by DeNA, by clicking on ads, signing up for affiliate services and inviting new members.

The circular business model has paid off for the company, which is listed on the Tokyo stock exchange (market cap: $2.3 billion). Mobage-town alone raked in $46 million in sales in the first quarter of this year and saw nearly 15 billion page views in June. And yes, this is Japan- and mobile-only. (Techcrunch)

There is also a International version of Mobage-Town called Moba Mingle.

The premise behind MobaMingle is to blend elements of virtual worlds, social networking, gaming and mobile blogging into one integrated concept.

GREE [ja] is a Tokyo-based web services company that was founded in 2004 by then 26-year old Yoshikazu Tanaka. Before, Tanaka was responsible for operating the auctions operations for Rakuten, Japan’s biggest online shopping mall.

The name GREE is derived from a sociological concept called “Six Degrees of Separation”. The company’s flagship product is called GREE Mobile, a mix of social network and free casual gaming platform.

GREE started social network services on the fixed Internet but ultimately lost to Mixi, Japan’s biggest SNS. GREE’s fixed Internet platform is now practically abandoned.

The combination of ads and fee-based sales is working out in today’s weak online ad market: From all of GREE’s sales, 70% comes from virtual items and 30% from ads. That’s a high ratio of virtual sales for a mobile site. In contrast, Mixi is heavily dependent on advertisements (the site generates less than 10% of its revenues through premium accounts and has no avatar system).  (Techcrunch)

The biggest difference was that Mobage-town initially did not charge their users(they started doing this but is still a low ratio within the total sales), GREE does (GREE Plus for mobile, GREE premium for PC users) which makes them additional revenue source.

In 2006, GREE received around $4 million in funding from KDDI, Japan’s No. 2 telecommunications company, triggering a complete realignment in corporate strategy. The site started to focus solely on the mobile web (it’s the default social network for KDDI’s 25 million cell phone subscribers).(Techcrunch)

NicoNicoDouga [ja] is the third largest, but hottest video sharing site in Japan. Their “premium users” are increasing drastically recently, and the fixed fee from premium users has become 2/3 of their revenue. They are still on the red due to heavy network cost, etc.

Nico Nico Douga, or “Smiley Smiley Video” in Japanese, is a popular streaming video site in which users can overlay their comments directly on top of the video stream, where they play whenever others watch the video. The site is similar to conventional streaming video clip sites, except it utilizes a third interactive layer on top of the video which plays commentary from the users. Old comments drop off as new ones roll in, unless the user subscribes to a premium account. (Crunchbase)

The user-generated site was established in January 2007 and became one of the fastest-growing web services in the Japanese history. As of May 2008, Nico Nico Douga has over 7 million members (regular and mobile version combined) and gets around 2 billions page views a month. Users uploaded a total of 1.1 million videos.

Nico Nico Douga is mostly frequented by young Japanese males. In contrast to Youtube, most of the content is focused on Japanese pop culture (anime, video-game, footage, Japanese pop music videos etc.).

Nico Nico’s most distinctive feature is that members communicate via short texts inserted on top of the video feeds. Entries are time-synched and flow over the frame from right to left. Using different colors, other users can add comments later in the same way. Some videos are virtually covered with thousands of lines of text, which can be filtered or turned off.

This feature sounds totally absurd but is the main reason why users spend twice as much time on Nico Nico as they do on Youtube. Until today, over 1.2 billion comments were added to the 1.1 million videos on the site, up from 600 million in November 2007. The content mainly consists of Nico Nico-”exclusive” material such as video-game sequences, bizarre comedy clips, anime and user-made footage.

Embedding Nico Nico content is restricted, but this Youtube video serves as a good example of what is typically being contributed:

Niwango, the company operating Nico Nico, is one of 15 subsidiaries of Dwango, a media group listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Nico Nico generates revenue in three different ways. There are currently 200,000 Premium members (up from 90,000 in November 2007) who pay $5 per month for easier access to the site and additional functions. Niwango also sells ad space, accounting for around $300,000 monthly. Sales from affiliate links generate approximately $820,000 per month (official figures for February 2008). That adds up to $2.1 million a month, or a $25 million annualized revenue run-rate.  (Techcrunch)

In the chart below we can see how each site makes revenue.

To close this article I would like to talk also about Ameba Pigg.

Ameba Pigg, a virtual world developed by Tokyo-based Internet giant Cyberagent. Ameba Pigg saw 350,000 registrations since its launch three months ago, with development taking just four months.

Ameba Pigg, which is available in Japanese only, is your typical teenager-focused virtual world with cute avatars, flashy settings and annoying sound effects. There are dozens of virtual worlds like this out there. Nothing special. Watch the video to get an impression of Ameba Pigg’s look and feel. (Techcrunch)

And also this really nice presentation about Asian social media.

All the images are from a company called CarTaxi.

Most of this advertising are in São Paulo (the 4th largest city in the world) and Belo Horizonte. I live in São Paulo now but I grew in Rio de Janeiro, and the cabs in Rio are horrible.

But in Japan Taxis are incredible clean, and the drive is all dressed up, it is choking to compare with standards  of Brazilian cabs.

Well this a blog about media and marketing in Japan and here is the article I first mentioned.

In a campaign for Hajime Chaka, the beverage company makes clever use of this staple of urban life.

To commemorate the two-year anniversary of its “Hajime Chaka” tea drink, Coca-Cola Japan has launched an innovative advertising campaign to take over city taxi cab seat belts. Safety belts in 200 cabs around Tokyo and Osaka will be branded with the slogan, “Every Day Weight Support Hajime Chaka” until mid-June.

The feted beverage is billed as a “healthy green tea” using 100% domestic tea and containing zero calories. The use of seat belts is meant to accentuate the discomfort or self-consciousness one might feel belting in a hefty “metabo” waistline. Metabo is the Japanese way of saying “metabolic syndrome,” which is said to mostly effect salarymen—just the sort who might be taking a taxi home after an evening drinking session with co-workers.

Standard promotional material for Hajime Chaka features a traditional-looking warrior fighting metabo, another appeal to the middle-aged male company employee seeking to feel better about his body and energy.

Public transportation in Tokyo is notoriously plastered with advertisements and companies compete to cover new—and eye-catching—ground. The Hajime Chaka campaign goes a step further, by drawing on a physical and emotional sensation that the target consumer presumably feels upon using one of these forms of transportation—and encountering the well-placed advertisement. “Trends in Japan”

This is very important to understand when we talk about product development.

A great place to see this innovations are at the Subway that holds a large variety of advertising formats. Such as the one below presented by Japan Marketing News Blog.

Here is a part of the article :

Japanese printing companies have started offering advertisers the ability to display moving pictures on paper advertisements.

The above ad announces the debut of a new mascara from Lancome that uses a vibrating applicator brush. The poster is made from electronic paper—a technology that allows paper to be written and rewritten repeatedly. So what you’re looking at is essentially a paper poster hanging from the ceiling of a subway train in which the image changes.

Similarly some train stations are now equipped with poster banks for electronic paper ads that can refresh with new images at specific intervals. If you’re an advertiser and you rent the space, you can replace the ad whenever you want while sitting right at your office desk, since the wall frames are connected to PHS phone networks that tap into the internet.

Another great example of using space in the Subway Station and creating some kind of interaction of the brand with the consumers are the gift wall such as used by the Ipod Nano and Canon. (Pictures and info from Ping Mag)

Ipod Nano

Canon

But using the walls are not enough, so why not use every little space to do advertising, here are some examples from Ping Mag also.

The floor:

The pillars:

The ticket gates:

The escalator

And of course inside the subway

But this last one is one of my favorites – a tunnel print animation – incredible.

The Pocket Film Festival held in Japan is an event that explores the potential for audio-visual expression that lies hidden in a “practical high-tech toy,” and through various media, aims to construct an ideal method of communication that excites our sensibilities – something not yet obvious even to artists.

Pocket Films Festival is a partnership between the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and the Forum des images of Paris.

Mobile Novels are growing rapidly in japan.

A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each. The first mobile phone novel was written six years ago by fiction writer Yoshi, but the trend picked up in the last couple years when high-school girls with no previous publishing experience started posting stories they wrote on community portals for others to download and read on their cell phones.

The Economist says that the growth of mobile novels in Japan noting;

“with sales of books in decline, a new market has come as a godsend to Japan’s publishing companies. Sales of mobile-phone novels—books that you download and read, usually in instalments, on the screen of your keitai, or mobile phone have jumped from nothing five years ago to over ¥10 billion ($82m) a year today and are still growing fast.”

Here are some websites where you can download and create your own Keitai Shousetsu.

But as an evolution Mobile Soap Operas are becoming a fad in Japan also. Here is what the article from Creative Review says.

M-SOAP OPERAS: Voltage
Production company Voltage special­ises in M-games and M-soap operas. Shooting for half an hour a week, Voltage breaks weekly stories down to five-minute chunks which get downloaded by young girls largely in search of romantic titillation. It claims hits of up to 10K per episode. CEO Tsuya Yuuzi likens the current era to the early gaming industry.

Considering the vastness of the media industry in Japan, or even the amount of research done in private organizations, the volume of academic research is quite modest, as is the number of doctoral degrees in the field. There are only a few departments of journalism, media studies or communication in universities in the entire country, and they are mainly in private universities.  In many cases faculty members interested in the media work at departments of sociology, political studies, economics, psychology, informatics, anthropology, literature or philosophy, rather than having a department focusing exclusively on media and communication.

Research in media and communication outside the academic community is abundant and rich. Most television companies, newspapers and advertising agencies have their own research units or subsidiaries, which most commonly focus on audience and/or marketing research aimed at developing the business of the companies.

Here are some of the Media research institutes presented in the same report mentioned above.

Japan Society for Studies in Journalism and Mass Communication (Nihon Masu Komyunikeishon Gakkai) was founded in 1951 as the Nihon Shimbun Gakkai, Association of Newspaper Research. Currently it has about 1400 members. There are about 30 companies supporting the association, which publishes an annual journal Masu komyunikeishon kenkyu. The journal publishes theoretically based research on varied subjects written by academic researchers. The association was originally run at the University of Tokyo, but now participating universities take turns in the administration of the ssociation. Currently the office is at the Tokyo Keizai University.

Japan Academy of Advertising (Nihon Kokoku Gakkai) was founded already in 1966. It has currently 622 members and 34 supporting companies. The aim of the association is to do theoretical and empirical research of advertisements and act as a lobbying organization. The supporting organizations include Asahi Shimbun and other newspapers, several advertising agencies and
television companies. The association is coordinated at Waseda University,  marketing Department. It publishes the annual journal Kokoku kagaku (Journal of Advertising Science).

Gendai Fuzoku Kenkyukai does not have an official name in English, but the name can be loosely translated as “Research Association of Contemporary Culture”. The association functions within the framework of sociology and cultural studies and was founded in 1975, inspired by professor emeritus Takeo Kuwabara at Kyoto University. The association focuses on research of contemporary culture, including popular culture, everyday life and media usage and publishes the journal Gendai Fuzoku.

The Japan Society of Information and Communication Research/ JSICR (Joho Tsushin Gakkai) is a foundation. It was founded in 1983 to commemorate The UN World Communication Year. Currently JSICR has 937 individual members and 54 organizational members. The association was founded to encourage and do research on telecommunication from humanistic, social, cultural and political viewpoints. Prior to the establishment of the association, telecommunication was mostly considered just from a technological point of view. In the 1980’s, when faxes and data communication spread into everyday usage, it became necessary to bring social sciences into the analysis. Currently the society focuses on social, political, cultural and economical problems of the information society and globalization of information flow.

The society has seven thematic study areas with respective study groups:
- legal issues in information and telecommunication
- economic issues in information and telecommunication
- information society
- international information
- information culture
- multimedia
- information behavior

The society also holds internal lecture meetings, symposiums and presentations of individual research projects, but also an “International Communication Forum”, with international guests. The association has an independent office in Toranomon, Tokyo. Currently the president of the association is Professor Youichi Ito from Keio University MediaCom. In addition to the annual report Joho tsushin nenpou, the association publishes an academic journal three times a year. The journal is called Joho tsushin gakkai shi.

Japan Association of Social Informatics (JASI) (Nihon Shakai Joho Gakkai) was founded in 1991. It aims at a desirable development of society in the age of information technology, wishing to establish a theoretical approach where the social system is perceived from the point of view of information. It focuses on the relationship between the new information and communication system and the social systems. The themes of interest include:

- the basic theory of social information informatics
- information, economics and the city
- information society, law and security
- media and culture
- communication and social relationships
- local citizens, their activities and ICT
- information systems and social applications
- game, simulation and network analysis

RITE, Research Institute of Telecommunication and Economics (Kokusai Keizai Tsushin Kenkyusho) is maintained by the Foundation for Multimedia Communications. Members of the
foundation include e.g. the Ministry of Communications (MIC), NHK, all major ICT-companies in Japan and several cities and prefectures.
RITE is a semi-public organization and it collects funding from both public and private sources.
The research at RITE focuses on e.g. international comparison of telecommunication and broadcasting laws, social structure and communication technology, new business opportunities and technological innovations in ICT and convergence of multimedia, communication and broadcasting.

There are plenty other Media research institutes and this is not the place to show all of them but to the end this article I have to talk about two of the most interesting research institutes. One founded by NHK and the other by NTT.

NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute (NHK Bunken) (NHK Hoso Bunka Kenkyujo) was founded in 1946 as a comprehensive research establishment of NHK. Bunken conducts
research on audiences, research and development for program-making and programming purposes and research on media-related issues in broadcasting and digital media.
Japan’s Broadcasting Law stipulates that the public broadcaster must conduct research activities along with broadcasting television programs. NHK researches program contents, investigates both Japanese and foreign broadcasting cultures and makes surveys on audience attitudes. The research acts as background information in basic policy-making of the public broadcaster. Bunken makes most of its research results available for the public and publishes several journals.
Bunken also conducts research that refers to media and media usage only indirectly. Every five years NHK conducts “The Survey on Value Orientations of the Japanese”, surveying 5000 people to grasp changes in the people’s attitudes and values. The survey has so far been conducted seven times, and the latest issue is from 2004. Bunken also conducts time budget surveys every five years.
One of the large research areas at Bunken is the research of media language. There is virtually no research on this field done outside Bunken, which means that research on language used in commercial broadcaster’s programs is virtually nonexistent.
Another strong research area at Bunken is media education. It also focuses on international comparisons of different media phenomena, from contents to industrial issues.
Obviously, Bunken also conducts research on the role of public service broadcasting in Japan and in the international setting.
Currently Bunken has about 80 employees, including part-timers. This makes the institute the largest among the traditional mass media company research units and much larger than any university research unit. However, the number of the researchers has been decreasing, as has the number of employees at NHK in general. Most of the employees come to work at Bunken as part of their circulation within NHK, and only a few have academic degrees beyond the usual bachelor level.
However, there are also some researchers who have moved to NHK from universities and some have doctoral degrees.
The publication volume of Bunken is vast. Some of the regular publications include the English journal NHK Broadcasting Studies (previously Studies on Broadcasting), and several journals in Japanese: monthly research report Hoso Kenkyu to Chosa (Research and Surveys on Broadcasting), Hoso Media Kenkyu (Studies of Broadcasting and Media), which publishes critical essays, and NHK Detabukku,Sekai no Hoso (Databook of NHK, Broadcasting in the World).

InfoCom Research Inc. (Kabushiki Kaisha Joho Tsushin Sogo Kenkyusho) was founded by NTT in 1985. It currently has about 95 full time employees, of which 75 are researchers. With this size, InfoCom is the largest think tank in the telecom research area. It does commissioned work for NTT and its different subsidiaries, as well as for different governmental organizations.

InfoCom conducts research on the global development and situation of information and communication industries and does research and analysis on e-commerce and other ICT related markets. It also takes on commissioned work from e.g. local governments for consulting, proposals and formulation of regional ICT plans and conducts consulting of management strategies and information system development. InfoCom has websites and email newsletters, in Japanese, on ICT sector news for registered subscribers. Most of its commissioned work is naturally confidential, but some reports are published on its website. InfoCom publishes the annual data book Information and communication in Japan in English.

And to close this article a picture of the CGM  (Consumer Generated Media) Night conducted by Danny Choo and other Jbloggers and web developers. This meeting of Media Generators has a strenght to become (someday in the future) an important Media Research Institute.