Tag: JAPAN

In just a day and a half, the massive virtual populations of Zynga's FarmVille, CityVille, and FrontierVille have donated more than $1 million in aid for victims of the natural disasters in Japan. Zynga has added special virtual goods to several games which players can purchase to donate funds. It's a very clever use of in-game purchases, and one even the most jaded of FarmVille detractors ...

Over the weekend, large corporations have been scrambling to offer support to the devastated north east of Japan, where a tsunami destroyed towns and farmsteads and looks set to claim over 10,000 lives. Google, as always, was the first to respond with a Google Person Finder for Japan. There is now a full Google Crisis Response page for the earthquake and tsunami, which is full of extensive ...

Google has teamed up with its satellite imagery provider, GeoEye, to create updated satellite images of Japan since the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit. Google has integrated the images into both Google Earth, using a KML file, and Google maps. They've also released the high resolution images through a Picasa album, all in the vein of trying to help co-ordinate relief efforts and help ...

Tragedies like the massive earthquake which recently hit Japan are bad enough, and they're compounded online by nefarious types who want to profit from the inevitable increase in search engine queries. It's a common way to trick users into installing malicious programs like fake antivirus or fake system maintenance tools. By getting in quickly on new search terms as the become popular, ...

Over the New Year celebrations, Japan broke a Twitter record just four seconds after midnight on the 1st of January 2011, with 6,939 tweets per second (TPS). That's more than double the previous record of 3,283TPS, also set by the Japanese nation in their defeat of Denmark in last year's World Cup. Japan a country of over 127 million people, the tenth largest population in the world, likes to ...

When it comes to potential new features for Twitter, the Japanese version has always been a testing ground. For example, Twitter in Japan is supported by ads, which haven't hit the US yet (and nobody seems sure if they ever will!). While I'm just fine using Twitter without ads, we'd love to see an English version of Twicco, which basically adds group support to Twitter. You can test it out for ...

There are two interesting Twitter stories making the rounds this morning. First up is the launch of a localized version of Twitter for Japan. The fact that the microblogging service is branching out to other countries isn't particularly surprising. But what is significant is the fact that the Japanese version of Twitter features advertisements, something which the English language version of the ...

A few months back we realized that we don't know Kentucky from Kansas thanks to Statetris, an online game that combines geography with Tetris. At the time, all we could do is bungle the placement of US states. But now that Statetris has gone international, we realize just how little we know about world geography. There are new versions of Statetris for Africa, Europe, France, Japan, the ...

The Japanese government is working with 10 major Japenese auto makers to develop a standardized automobile operating system. While we're tempted to make jokes about blue screens of death and unexpected errors, the truth is many cars now include complex electronics and require a computer system to coordinate all those newfangled parts. And developing a uniform operating system is going to make ...

How do you get people to stop posting television clips and full episodes to the internet? You probably don't. But a government panel in Japan has an interesting take on that idea: don't try to stop internet pirates, just regulate them. The Intellectual Property Rights Policy Work Group is expected to issue its recommendation this week. If adopted, anyone would be allowed to post television ...

The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors is kind of a little upset at YouTube for the amount of content that is available on Google's service that their members own copyrights for. Just last December YouTube was ordered to delete 30,000 files that were in violation of Japanese rights holders. JASRAC sent out a letter recently to YouTube asking that they delete the files immediately when found ...

Imagine you were unexpectedly thrust into a world where those same cute Mac-and-PC ads were on TV, but they were in a language you couldn't understand!* That world is, well, Japan, and those ads are right over here. They're just like the American ads we're used to, except with two funny Japanese dudes, and they're in Japanese. You can check out the ads in their full-resolution glory at Apple ...

The ever popular MySpace social network has banged out a special Japanese version of the networking service, and launched it today. MySpace is currently running national versions in Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, and in the UK. This new language integration is a team effort between News Corp. and Japanes bank Softbank. The main competition in Japan for MySpace is the 6 million member service ...

The impact of Google's new ownership of YouTube has revealed itself this week in a big way. According to Ars Technica, the video sharing site removed 29,549 Japanese videos from its database at the request of JSRAC, the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, whose members identified the videos as containing unauthorized materials from Japanese movies, TV shows, and music ...

Google has reportedly opened up access to Gmail for users in Japan, after a successful launch of open access for Australia and New Zealand users. Google is trying to raise its presence in the mobile phone capital of the world, where more people access the internet from mobile phones than from personal computers. [via Reuters] ...