Japan Archive

Editor’s note: This report comes to us live from Japan!

Tokyo – Twitter announced the launch of their first localization language to be Japanese from a press conference held at the offices of their Japanese partner Digital Garage. Streamed live on Ustream, Biz Stone and other members of the Twitter team had questions translated and answered between Japanese and English to the mainly Japanese audience in attendance. Daniel at CNET broke the news.

"This is the first localization Twitter has done and we’re really exited about it", said Biz. "We’re all here having a bit of sake to celebrate the occasion".

The interface isn’t simply a translation of the Twitter UI into Japanese. It’s also going to be used as a test model for Twitter to see how audiences react to the idea of ads being placed on Twitter. The Twitter Japanese interface went live several hours earlier (accessed through ANYONE’S account by going to the Account tab under Settings and looking for the Language drop down menu), and was already displaying the first first banner ad set up by Twitter.

It will be interesting to watch how audiences react to having ads placed on the highly popular social networking site. Digital Garage has already invested about 1 million US into having their partnership with Twitter.

Robert Sanzalone is a new media specialist, blogger and writer based in Nagoya Japan.

Cabel Sasser recently came back from Japan and has provided a look into what is the latest Web marketing subway billboard craze: search terms. I’ve embedded one example at the bottom of this article. This type of search term marketing is something I’ve written about before with regards to Yahoo and it branded search results was one of my suggestions for Google. It’s an excellent way for a brand to tie into a search engine past the typical text ad or ad banner purchase. For the time being it would eliminate ad blindness on search engines.

My guess is that recall from the subways ads is minimal at best. There are so many adverts within a short trip that remembering not only which search engine to use, but also what the correct term is to enter is a bit much for the average person.

Enter the QR code. We’ve written about these new barcodes (shown above) several times before. While I don’t know if the specific QR technology is the best one, the ability to snap a picture or scan a code for more information is a much stronger message than any advertisement that pushes to a search engine. It’s immediate, there’s no recall and if setup correctly the scanned code could send information back to your desktop or laptop for a rich experience. It also helps the marketer keep a brand top of mind — hit them on the subway, and get them involved at home or at the office. It’s the future.

Editor’s note: The article below is part 2 of our 3-part series on QR mobile barcodes. Yesterday we took a look at Google and real world hyperlinks. Tomorrow we will look at mobile barcodes from a marketing perspective. Grab our feed to be instantly notified of the next post in the series.

In Japan, barcodes (QR codes) are being used by marketers and the media as a method for direct access to customers. They are mainly targeting mobile-savvy twenty- and thirty-somethings leading them to sales promotions for products such as snacks and beverages.

The Real Life of Japanese mobile and Internet users

Out of its 120 million population, 69.23 million Japanese people access the Internet via mobile phones. About the same number (66.01 million) access the Internet using a computer. And almost all of the mobile phones in the Japanese market now are equipped with a barcode scanner by default. More details can be found here and here (in Japanese).

Some examples of QR codes that are hand-held

Staff/Crew Recruiting Ad from McDonald’s

Promotional Site for Jagariko Snack Food

Here is my recent mobile barcode scanning history

• Downloading free ring-tones from the snack shown above
• Created a barcode for my contact info including phone number & email address by using my mobile. And then my friend could scan it from my mobile and grab all of my contact details.
• Accessing English language training services for my mobile from my mobile.
• Added the barcode to my Moo-like card!

Conclusion

The Internet and mobile phones have heavily impacted communication technology globally. Barcodes may become a smarter way to open new doors leading consumers to Internet sites in the near future as being done in Japan currently. In fact, lots of Japanese citizens who don’t even own a computer at home access Internet via mobile phone. In addition, even those who own a computer are using the Internet from mobile phone for its handiness. The same ideas can be applied in the U.S.

The current bottleneck of barcodes in my opinion, are ad-hoc content services that don’t provide further paths to stimulate consumers interest. Service providers need to come up with exciting ideas to continue to keep users attracted. Finally, it is also necessary to continuously improve the user interface on mobile phones.

This article was provided by Satoko Hibi, an engineer and co-founder at s21g.com. s21g is planning to release a service called, "typeout" this Spring, which is a private place for scrapbooking with some social functions including a Twitter-like inteface and a powerful search engine. Here is more information in English.

Earlier this week, we posted notes from Google’s advertising discussion at the Advertising Club of NY. Part of the discussion which took off across the tech blogs was around bar codes (like the one on the left) being used in newspapers to drive consumers to a Web site or activity when scanned by a mobile phone.

I found a post today from Internet.com’s Japan site (translated) which has some interesting details about how Japanese consumers use mobile phones and interact with advertising. Here are the survey results with regards to how Japanese consumers find out more information about an advert that interests them:

Q1: When out and about, if an advertisement catches your eye, how do you use your mobile phone to find out more information? (Sample size=300, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
From a scanned QR Code or bar code	125	41.7%
Send a blank email and access the URL in the reply	104	34.7%
Type in the URL directly	100	33.3%
Use keyword search (to SQ)	92	30.7%
Use OCR (text reading) feature	21	7.0%
Other	0	0.0%
Never really looked up more information	75	25%
Don’t use internet on my mobile phone	47	15.7%

I though the cuecat had huge potential had it been executed correctly (and ethically) and now we might just see this happen with these new, interactive barcodes. Google certainly believes there is a market for these codes. Here is the video of Google Account Executive for Print Ads Tiffany Shen Miller discussing the bar codes:

The dominance of mobile media and technology in Japan has created a slight disconnect between Web 2.0 activities here and in the U.S. As advanced as Japan's techology culture may be, the Japanese have traditionally relied less on computers for their internet activities and much more on their mobile phones – yup, even for all their daily email, news, blogging, shopping, and research. That said, there are still a few interesting developments in the Web 2.0 arena here in Japan, some of which are covered by two sites – PingMag and Read/Write Web, so I will briefly summarize them and integrate a few words of my own. First, some background on these sites: PingMap is a web-centric blog / magazine produced by web design firm IMG SRC, Inc. The Web 2.0 article was written by an acquaintance there, so you may notice a plug or two for their sites :) Read/WriteWeb is written by independent webtech consultant and analyst Richard MacManus. There are also a number of other good articles by on his blog so be sure to check them out.

On to my analysis!

PingMag
PingMag does a good job finding and comparing Japanese Web 2.0 services to their U.S. counterparts. For social networking, the U.S. has MySpace while Japan has Mixi. I should add that since the article was posted, Mixi has IPO'd in Japan to a tune of $1.9 billion. And remarkably, as I mentioned before, there hasn't been much coverage overseas. For the second-fiddle Facebook, in Japan we have Gree.

The video-sharing space has been interesting to watch as it is perhaps the first time a U.S. service has become dominant in Japan. Typically the language barrier has been a stop-gap for many businesses trying to enter this country, but YouTube's ease of use and multi-lingual support (in the comments, for example) has been a boon for its popularity here and an example of how one might succeed without investing time and resources into localizing the interface. As long as the need is great – and for YouTube in Japan's case, it was very much so – the Japanese and their rather hilarious mastery <http://www.engrish.com/> of English can overcome any obstacles. We likely will not be seeing a viable competitor sprout from Japan for legal and political reasons, so expect YouTube to gain exposure here as we move forward.

I'm personally not all that familiar with podcasting services, but for the Odeo and Podcast Alley users out there, Japan's very own ZapZap may be of interest – especially since it's one of the few Web 2.0 services aspiring to appeal to both the English and the Japanese community. If nothing else, at least the design seems to indicate an appreciation for "web 2.0-yness" :P

37signals' Ta-da Lists is mentioned as a productivity-enhancing web platform, and from Japan the article mentions Orchestrate – which is a fun implementation, but the author isn't exactly sharing objectively (Orchestrate is his personal project). There is however a fascinating project in beta form (what isn't?!) called CheckPad. You can tell CheckPad is clearly targeting the Japanese market with their focused integration of mobile devices.

The U.S. / Japan web 2.0 services comparison gets interesting as we enter the blog-buzz aggregation arena – from the U.S. we have Technorati, and from Japan, Kizasi. Kizasi is less encumbered by senseless adds and provides a clear, focused representation of its purpose – to show what's hot in the blogosphere, now. Technorati does a better job of promoting the blogs, while Kizasi is more focused on the subject matter across them.

Lastly, there's a dearth of comparable news aggregation sites provided by the Japan web-centric community. While the U.S. has Digg and TechCrunch, TechCrunchHQ apparently caught a waft of opportunity and has opened their own service here – TechCrunch Japan. Japan Entry is a big challenge for most industries, and usually requires partnering with a Japanese firm in order to build reputation and respect with the client base. But the web-space may prove to be different as it's a younger domain and new services are more quickly experimented with and adopted by a younger demographic.

The PingMag article never mentions Web 2.0 poster-child photo-sharing site Flickr, but team Japan has its own contribution to this space with Zorg, which aspires to be more for the professional demographic (although I think Flickr appeals to them quite well already). Zorg is still relatively new and actively hiring!

Read/Write Web
Read/Write Web has a more recent article in the style of an interview with Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners). There are some good statistics throughout on some of the services mentioned also in the PingMap post, and a good discussion to give readers a sense of the unique challenges web 2.0 projects face in growing in Japan. Overall Yahoo's dominance is felt very strongly here as culturally the Japanese are wary to try new things, but Masashi notes that recently Yahoo is struggling as engineers move to develop newer and more entrepreneurial services such as social bookmarking site Hatena and SNS Gree.

There's a good discussion towards the end on the maturing of Japan's web-space, its strong online advertising market, its hot IPO market, and the reasons behind the dominance of mobile platforms.

About the Author

Matthew is a music and technology enthusiast who aspires to raise the awareness on the benefits of internet technologies and services in mobile-dominant Japan.