A speech recognition and transcription service called Moji Moji TV was selected as “Best Startup” of the IVS Fall 2009 Launch Pad (that ended just now). Here are short profiles of all the services that demo’d at the event. (Please note some of the companies have yet to launch homepages in English, but some do offer globalized services, too.)

One Winner and five runners-up:
Moji Moji TV by Catalog (winner of the demo pad)
Best of show went to Moji Moji TV, which appears to be a very powerful speech recognition and transcription service for videos launched in private alpha last month. The engine supports Japanese only, but English and Chinese versions are in the works. Moji Moji extracts audio from a video (self-made movies, YouTube clips etc.) and automatically displays the spoken words as text, which then can be edited by the users. The text can be used to tag and sub movies, and it’s also possible to search for certain words or expressions within them. There’s also an iPhone app called Shabetter that automatically transcribes what you say into the iPhone mic and posts it to Twitter. More information on Moji Moji TV in English can be found here.

This video (in English) shows how Moji Moji TV works:

V-Sido by Wataru Yoshizaki (runner-up)
Most robots used for entertainment, in research and other areas have one common problem: They can only move in a slow, mechanical and chopping motion. Developed by robot fanatic Wataru Yamazaki, V-Sido is a software-based, real-time control system for humanoids that helps make them move smoother.

Spysee by Ohma (second runner-up)
Spysee is a person search engine whose English version launched at TechCrunch 50 this year (Spysee was a demo pit company). A Chinese version is in the works. The service pulls information and media on individuals from the web and presents them on a person-specific page (example: Barack Obama). Spysee’s original Japanese version went live last year and has gone through several iterations since. One example is the way Spysee monetizes its service now: It allows users to donate real money to individuals who need help in funding their personal goals (Cheering Spysee), getting a cut of the donation in return.

m-police by milog (third runner-up)
m-police is a fully automatized site monitoring system that’s able to detect profanity, insults and “legally problematic” sentences on the web and subdivides relevant expressions into 16 different categories. The company says about 5% of all posts in the Japanese blogosphere can be regarded as being relevant for m-police, and 22% of those can be called potentially dangerous. Some Japanese social networks employ up to 300 “surveillance officers” to keep their sites clean. m-police can push down costs from 6 Yen (7 cent) per post monitored by human beings to 3 Yen.

AEGISGUARD by KLab (fourth runner-up)
AEGISGUARD is anti-virus software that’s not only free to download but also completely available in English. The main purpose of the program is to protect your important files and folders from viruses (of which more than 5 million exist today) and malware by granting only white-listed programs access to them. AEGISGUARD developer KLab says this way, unknown or new viruses are effectively fenced out. The solution can be installed with conventional, blacklist-based antivirus software on the same PC.

Symphonic Motion by AITIA (fourth runner-up)
Symphonic Motion is an augmented reality-based entertainment engine that’s not designed for mobile devices for a change but rather for large-sized displays (that can be several meters in diameter). The technology uses “physical” AR, meaning you can get in front of the camera and move CG elements you see on the screen around by moving your arms, for example. Maker AITIA is marketing the solution as interactive, fun digital signage applications to corporations, exhibitions and event organizers (demo movie).

The six other demo companies:
OpenSocial Host by HeartRails
OpenSocial Host is an integrated platform for developing, distributing and managing OpenSocial applications, e.g. for sites like MySpace, hi5 or Japan’s biggest social network Mixi.(which opened its site for external developers back in September this year). OpenSocial Host supports mobile apps, offers paid and free options, but it’s Japanese only.

Location Amplifier by Koozyt
The key idea behind Location Amplifier is to “amplify” the real world by pushing “rich”, location-based content onto mobile phones, for example location-based games or guides. At IVS, maker Koozyt demonstrated how a person’s movements can be tracked even inside buildings (where GPS regularly fails). It’s also possible to use Location Amp to walk from exhibit to exhibit in a museum and let your mobile device tell you what you’re currently looking at (demo movies). The technology is based on PlaceEngine, a service that relies on Wi-Fi to estimate your location, even when there’s no GPS.

Zeke CMS Social Game Kit by Ubiquitous Entertainment
Ubiquitous Entertainment CEO Ryo Shimizu demo’d Zeke CMS Social Game Kit, a (Japanese-only) platform for developing games to be deployed in social networks like Facebook or Japan’s biggest social network Mixi. One of the games that was built using the system is called “Tokyo Treasure”, a scavenger hunt, which combines AR elements with the real world, using the iPhone camera (”It’s game over when you’re tagged!”).

Droidget AR by GClue
Droidget AR was described as the world’s first widget framework for augmented reality services on Android. These widgets can be “picked up” at the physical place where they’ve been left by other people and used instantly, without the user having to access the web. Example: When you’re in a restaurant, switch on the camera on your Android phone, point it at the door and click on the AR tag you see to instantly access the menu (demo movies).

Jitsu Kuukan Toushi Keitai by KDDI au one Labs
KDDI, Japan’s second biggest telecommunications company, presented an augmented reality application that launched in June this year for a limited number of Japanese cell phones. Their Jitsu Kuukan Toushi Keitai app (which roughly translates to: cell phone that allows real space transparency) works just like many of the other mobile AR apps out there. It uses GPS, the phone’s camera, 6-axis sensor and screen to locate where you are and point you to where you want to go through tags. But if you point the phone to a wall or a human being, you can also “see through” them, meaning the app will display tags located behind them.

This video shows how Toushi Keitai’s “see-through” function works:

Odette Solution by ORSO
Odette Solution lets you create mobile Flash sites (nearly 100% of Japanese mobile phones have Flash Lite installed). The Japanese-only, cloud-based ASP service offers various templates whose elements you can edit in various ways, for example by drag and drop. But you can also create mobile web pages by putting together different elements. Odette Solution will be launched next spring.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The main selling point of the browser is still intact: Lunascape users can instantly switch between Firefox, IE or Safari/Chrome mode by right-clicking tabs or by clicking on the engine switcher button on the bottom left of the screen.

The browser should come in handy for web developers and designers who have to test sites for browser compatibility or for those people who aren’t satisfied with either one of the five big browsers (in case there are any). But the Lunascape developers say they aim at establishing a “Unified Browsing Platform” for everyone. Their ultimate goal is to help general web users overcome the hassles they encounter when using IE at work and Firefox at home, for example (different UIs, bookmarks, settings, add-ons etc.).

Screenshot: Triple engine selection

But what’s new in Lunascape 6.0?
Probably the biggest change in comparison to version 5 is that in addition to IE and Lunascape-specific add-ons, Lunascape now supports Firefox add-ons, too. The browser still doesn’t work with Chrome or Safari plug-ins, but Firefox add-on support was the most requested feature coming from users in the past year. And a new wizard makes it possible to transfer all of your add-ons from Firefox 3.5 to Lunascape 6.0 automatically if you’re so inclined.

Screenshot: Firefox add-on in Lunascape 6.0 browser

Users can now operate tabs in any kind of window split view, meaning you can compare any given web page rendered by the three different engines side-by-side in one browser window (vertical, horizontal, thumbnail, cascade). This makes a lot of sense and should actually have been included in the previous version already.

Screenshot: Multi-view tab display

Some smaller revisions include a new extra-minimalist interface available that does away with a lot of the clutter of Lunascape ’s previous version and a revamped “floating” sidebar that can display a number of dedicated add-ons (i.e. a minimap).

I’ve tested Lunascape 6.0 for a few days now, and the browser is still a little buggy but pretty stable for a beta release. Granted, the changes from version 5 aren’t huge, but especially the Firefox add-on support and the new design and interface should make Lunascape 6.0 worth taking for a spin. The race for the ultimate browser continues.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This time, TokyoCamp gave a total of 29 startups from three Asian countries (Japan, Singapore and Korea) the chance to present their services to Japan’s leading journalists, fellow entrepreneurs, top-level VCs and TechCrunch readers. Here are thumbnail sketches (of varying depth) of all companies that were present at the event. (Here is my report on the first TokyoCamp that took place in August this year.)

Demos from TechCrunch50 alumni from Singapore, Korea and Japan

iTwin
Singapore-based iTwin was one of the two non-Japanese startups demoing at TokyoCamp (it’s a spin-off from A*STAR, a Singapore government-funded research agency). Their two-part USB drive iTwin, showed to the world at TechCrunch50 in September, is intended to be a “cable-less cable”. After connecting the iTwin to a computer, you can give one part of it to someone else who’ll have remote access (over the web) to the computer via his own computer.

iTwin’s Kal Takru told me his company is currently plans to release the device in five to six months, with the price likely to be $99 including worldwide shipping. Initially, the iTwin will be available online only – even though following TechCrunch50, the company was bombarded with inquiries from retail chains all over the world.

Sealtale
Social widget service Sealtale was Tokyocamp’s guest from South Korea and another TechCrunch50 finalist. Sealtale users can express their interests, preferences or causes via so-called seals (interactive widgets). Once these seals are integrated into your blog or social network page, you can communicate with other people who have the same interests as you within the seal itself (via RSS feeds, comments, posts, audio and video files). Sealtale works across various blog platforms and social networks.

The three members of the six-man company (all of whom are college students) who were invited to Tokyo told me they now feel there’s life before TechCrunch50 and after. Following TC50, Sealtale in South Korea apparently got a boost in terms of user base, massive media attention (the service was even featured on national TV) and increased interest from brands and companies. Just one example: Sealtale was chosen as a partner for a media campaign in Korea’s political space and distributed more than 120,000 seals to users all over the country in the process. Sealtale’s major global roll-out is planned for the middle of next year.

Spysee
Tokyo-based people search engine Spysee launched its English version during TechCrunch50 in September (the service was in the TC50 demopit). You can use it to look for any person on the web, with Spysee scraping various information on that person off the web (bio, news, blog posts, videos, related individuals etc.) and displaying it on a single page (example: Barack Obama’s Spysee entry).

LIFEmee
LIFEmee is a life management service that allows you to store and share the significant aspects and events of your life online (from “the cradle to the crave”). You can keep a diary, list up significant events in your life (career history, places you lived in, hobbies etc.), share your future plans, manage assets, store your last will or compare certain elements of your life with other LIFEmee users.

The service launched at TechCrunch50 (LIFEmee presented at the demo pit) in English. The LIFEmee team has since been working on localizing the service into Japanese and collecting early user feedback for the English version to optimize features and functions.

Demos from Japanese startups

Joker Racer
Joker Racer, a service that just recently won the Grand Prix at another big demo event in Tokyo, lets users from all over the world control Wi-Fi- and GPS-enabled models cars through the browser or iPhone (in real-time). The cars are customized and offered by JokerWorks, the new company behind the service, itself. A bunch of videos can be found here.

But at TokyoCamp, CEO Yoski Akamatsu presented the “Joker Racer R/C Server” for the first time, the world’s first linux server exclusively designed for R/C model cars to be controlled over the web (specs and more pics here). This means you can buy the mini server, connect it with your own R/C car, and then control the car using its standard servo/speed controllers and a mounted standard web camera.

For end users, the server’s final price and release date are yet to be determined. But JokerWorks already accepts inquiries from event organizers and advertising and promotion agencies.

Lang-8
Youyou Ki, CEO of Lang-8, showed a revamped version of his award-winning language learning site whose interface is available in 14 languages. The main idea is to let users write in the language they’re learning and have native speakers of that language correct the text (this video shows how this works). Lang-8 users can get in touch with each other directly through the site, too. The service is free.

Cerevo Cam
I’ve written an extensive article on the Cerevo Cam, a digital camera that automatically uploads pictures to various social media sites via Wi-Fi or 3G, in late August. Now, roughly nine weeks later, the device is finally priced (just under 20,000 Yen/$220) and dated. The Cerevo Cam and Cerevo Life, a photo management site specifically designed for buyers of the camera, will be available at the beginning of next month. CEO Takuma Iwasa is still determined to sell the camera outside Japan but couldn’t give me details.

At TokyoCamp, I tried out a fully working prototype, which instantly uploaded pictures to a nearby panel computer via a 3G modem stick plugged into the camera.

HaaLee
HaaLee isn’t a web startup, but the company, whose team is based out of China, Japan and the US, showed a pretty cool blue-tooth stereo headset that does not plug-up the ears. Instead, users are supposed to place the speakers against the skin just in front of the ears. The idea is to be able to listen to music on your cell phone or portable media player while still being able to hear sounds around you. HaaLee is currently in discussions with various brand companies and carriers to take the headset to market.

Jingoo
Tokyo-based MetaCast presented Jingoo at Tokyo Camp, a Japanese-only add-on for Firefox or the Internet Explorer. Once installed, Jingoo occupies a column on the right of your browser window (”Jingoo Zone”) that allows you to access customized apps that are supposed to make your life on the web easier. These apps (there are 17 at this point) can be anything from games you can directly play in the “Jingoo Zone”, a clock, maps, shopping tools, a tweet stream etc. Jingoo is free.

Pixiv
Launched in September 2007, the Japanese-only “social illustration” service Pixiv broke the one million member mark in June this year (it’s currently ranked at 60 in Alexa Japan). Users (talented amateur artists, pros and art enthusiasts) spend more than 13 minutes on the site per visit, submitting 15,000 drawings per day on average and discussing them in a social network that’s built around the drawings.

Here’s how a typical drawing, submitted by a Pixiv member, looks (each piece gets a dedicated page):

The free site makes money mainly through display ads and premium memberships ($6 per month) but also organizes real life events. Learn more about Pixiv in the excellent English Wikipedia entry.

Patent Bureau
Patent Bureau is a technology media company that aims at automating the process of delivering relevant technology and intellectual properties information in real-time. The company claims their interactive data base, dubbed astamuse (Japanese only), is being used by patent offices in Japan for trial decisions and court precedents for intellectual patent cases. astamuse wants to be the ultimate destination site for anybody involved in creating, using and managing technology and intellectual properties to explore their territory. Patent Bureau is currently working on covering additional languages.

Rigureto
Rigureto is a free community and communication platform through which users can anonymously express and share their negative feelings (i.e. “I just lost my girl friend.”) with other users who can then post messages of comfort (i.e. “Don’t worry, you’ll soon find another one.”). This happens virtually in real-time, as it usually seems to be a matter of a few minutes or even seconds to get a reaction. Think an online, crowdsourced Dear Abby (even though some users post just in order to communicate with other human beings – and it usually works). Rigureto users receiving positive comments can thank other members by sending them “arigatou” points, which can later be redeemed on the site. The service is Japanese only at this point.

UserHeat
UserHeat is an in-page web analytics tool that visualizes user behavior in three different ways (mouse movement tracking, clicking behavior and “gazed” area, an educated guess of which areas of a given page were viewed the most). Install the tool on your web site, wait for a certain period of time to analyze how visitors use it (1,000 to 1,500 page views are apparently the minimum) and let UserHeat display the result via “thermographic” images that are superimposed over your site (sample heat map for a Japanese site selling contact lenses). The service is available in English, Chinese and Japanese, and it’s free.

Notable mentions

Here are the 16 other services demo’d at the TokyoCamp event: fabric video (a video delivery system to be made available next year), MOT (an ASP business tool), Photiva (a digital signage solution), Tabereko (an iPhone app for gourmets), Wombit (a Wi-Fi-enabled touch panel computer currently being developed by Tokyo-based Omnibit), Ataritsuki CM (a solution that links TV commercials to the web), Speeda (a database that users can access to get structured economic data in an SaaS-like model), Orihime (an online shop set up by a college student who sells self-designed and made-in-Japan PC bags and cases), AdLantis (an online ad management system), Cognitive Function Balancer (a piece of interactive software for self-test and training for mild cognitive impairment), Phroni (a Firefox add-on that displays information on keywords you highlight on a web page), RainbowApps (a platform that allows you to list up your iPhone apps and discover which apps other iPhone owners have installed), Conit (an iPhone app developer), Istpika (a social gaming company developing for Facebook, iPhone and other platforms), Pankaku (one of Japan’s most successful iPhone app development companies) and Linkthink (an entertainment content provider).

Many thanks to all attendees, demo companies and Nikkei Digital Core for making TokyoCamp a success. Special thanks to TechCrunch50 finalists and Asian guests iTwin and Sealtale for the journey to Tokyo. Another TokyoCamp might follow very soon!

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Results are mainly filtered through analyzing the color and shape of the object or person pictured. Upload a picture of a red car, for example, and Gazopa will find pictures of similar cars on the web – without you having to type any keywords (search via keywords is also possible though).

Since September 2008, more than 40,000 users have tested the service, which entered open beta today. And Hitachi America, the company behind Gazopa, has used customer feedback to improve the quality of search results, tweak the site’s design and add a number of features in the past year.

One of the most notable additions is the Gazopa iPhone app (iTunes link), which is pretty cool and lets you take and upload photos with your iPhone to quickly get similar images off the web. The app has all of the main features of the web version and is free. There’s also a new Gazopa Drawing Facebook application.

Gazopa now allows users to browse through Flickr images and filter out those without a Creative Commons license. When you hover over a particular image, Gazopa will show you its size, how similar it is to the one the search is based upon, licensing details and a URL that will take you the picture’s Flickr page. Another new feature is the news tab under which users can find images related to the latest news. Those images can be filtered by time (uploaded within one month, a year etc.), shape and size.

Granted these aren’t earth-shattering new features, but GazoPa has indexed over 60 million images so far that can be searched even if they have no or inaccurate meta data. The open beta version is still a bit buggy but more than OK for a test run. One major point that leaves room for improvement is that searching for inanimate objects with distinctive features seems to lead to significantly better results than searching for human beings that look similar. It would be nice if Gazopa could at least distinguish between men and women, for example, which isn’t always the case.

Asked what differentiates his service from Google Labs’ similar search service, Gazopa project leader Hideki Kobayashi said that Google doesn’t let users find similar images of all images displayed and that uploading a picture by yourself isn’t possible. Gazopa also competes with “reverse image search engine” TinEye, which, however, doesn’t necessarily look for “similar” images but tries to find exact matches of pictures instead.

Here’s a demo video for Gazopa’s open beta version:

Screenshots:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I’m delighted to announce the TechCrunch Japan TokyoCamp 2009, which will be held on Friday, November 6. TokyoCamp 2009 is co-organized by by DESIGN IT!, LLC. (a Sociomedia group company that runs TechCrunch Japan) and Nikkei Digital Core (a community under the umbrella of the Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business publication).

There’s going to be a demo pit (no less than 21 of Japan’s finest startups will demo their wares) and a meetup/networking party afterward.

Registration is required for both events. Here are the details:

TokyoCamp 2009

Demopit
Date: November 6, 2009
Time: Demopit 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Venue: Nikkei Shimbun 2F SPACE NIO*
Fee: Free

Meetup
Date: November 6, 2009
Time: Meetup 8:00pm – 10:00pm
Venue: Manhattan Bleu (B2 floor of Sankei Kaikan, 2 buildings away from Nikkei HQ / Google Maps)
Fee: 6,000 yen

Use this entry form to register.

Please note that we are extremely restricted on numbers this time, so don’t be disappointed if you can’t get on the guest list (TokyoCamp 2009 is strictly an “invitation-only” event). We hope everyone has a great evening and are looking forward to seeing you all on November 6!

Update:
Registration is closed.

*
SPACE NIO, 2nd floor, The Nikkei Head Office
1-3-7, Otemachi, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo Metro Otemachi station: Take exit C2ba for The Nikkei Head Office

Don’t confuse this new location with the old Nikkei Head Office at 1-9-5 Otemachi.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The summit reassured me of one thing: The Chinese market for mobile hardware, software and contents is big already and it’s bound to become huge in the very near future.

Just a few stats about China’s online landscape:

• world’s largest Internet population: 338 million Chinese are online (US: 220 million)
• most cell phone users in the world (710 million)
• China Mobile, the world’s biggest cell phone carrier, boasts nearly half a billion subscribers (the US as a whole has 271 million)
• China’s telecommunications industry generated $210 billion in revenues between January and July 2009 alone
• China’s mobile phone penetration rate currently stands at just 53.5% (USA: 88%), hinting at room for massive future growth

The smartphone market and 3G are still in their infancy though. Research firm BDA China says just 17.4 million smartphones were sold in China in 2008 (Nokia commands a 67% market share in this segment), with the total likely to hit 36 million units this year before growing to 56 million in 2010. The iPhone will be released in China next week. The number of China Mobile’s 3G subscribers (who use the company’s homegrown 3G standard) currently stands at just 1.33 million, but the country’s three biggest cell phone carriers (China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom) say they’re ready to invest $66 billion in China’s 3G networks over the next two years.

So the 3G Industry Summit in Kunshan probably couldn’t take place at a better time. The program also included a launch pad, which gave a total of 14 companies from China (two were from Japan) the chance to pitch their services onstage to over 200 top-level executives, VCs and entrepreneurs in the country’s mobile tech world.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of all of these companies. The list is by no means representative of China’s mobile startup scene but should serve as a reasonably large and up-to-date cross section of the industry.

Demo 1:
UNOH
UNOH CEO Shintarou Yamada showed a mobile (and Japan-only) game his Tokyo-based 15-man team launched in May this year. Machitsuku is a geo-aware city-building simulation (the game’s title means “Build a city” in Japanese) with cute graphics, social elements, surprisingly deep gameplay and virtual items users have to pay for (the game itself is free). Yamada said the game will be provided to leading social networks like Mixi (background) and Mobage-town (background) soon, but I am hoping for an iPhone version.

Demo 2:
Urbian
Urbian develops mobile applications for enterprises, but the company also offers a slew of iPhone and Android apps for end consumers. At the summit, CEO Christopher Kahler, an Austrian based in Shanghai, demonstrated a nifty mobile learning application that will be soon launched in China, Japan, the Philippines and other territories (the China version alone will be used by 5,000 schools all over the country). The solution will be available for the iPhone, Android, Symbian and other platforms.

Demo 3:
CrossMo
CrossMo intends to solve the fragmentation problem in the mobile space by offering an online data management and synchronization tool for cell phones that’s completely hardware agnostic. The service detects everything on your phone once you connect it to your PC via USB and backs up and synchronizes your ringtones, music files, address book etc. This works even after you replace your cell phone with another model.

CEO Lei Jia said 70% Chinese of consumers download contents from the web to their phone, not over the air. CrossMo looks like a very powerful tool and reminds me of DoubleTwist (concept-wise), so too bad it’s China-only.

Demo 4:
MobimTech
MobimTech CTO Yi Liang demonstrated imiChat, which seemed to be a very cool real-time video chatting solution. You can use it to video-chat from cell phone to cell phone but also from the fixed web to cell phones (voice- and text-chatting is also supported). imiChat is free and supports a number of cell phones. It uses GPRS/EDGE networks and doesn’t need to run on 3G (MobimTech actually sells this technology to 2.5G handset makers).

Demo 5:
BokanTech
BokanTech CEO Bo Wang presented iBokan, an iPhone app destination site that features an impressive number of hit apps. He highlighted mobile edutainment apps such as Cute Math (apparently the only app that was featured twice in the AppStore as “new and noteworthy”) and Jumbo Book (an interactive book series with 20 episodes so far). BokanTech also plans to soon release a service called Kukapp, which Wang described as “Google Analytics for iPhone and Ovi apps”.

Demo 6:
NavTeq China
Navteq China Director George Qie focused on how to create an ecosystem based on location-based services (LBS). His main point was that LBS can be used for many applications: navigation, social networking, games, productivity (workforce management, for example), commerce and security. Qie said this versatility is the reason why LBS can be used for the integration of applications of different nature and that the advent of 3G in China will fuel the growth of LBS developed in China.

Demo 7:
SocoGame
SocoGame CEO Ye Shen said at $147 million in sales in 2008, the Chinese market for mobile games is still small but will likely balloon to almost $750 million in sales by 2011, with growth expected to accelerate significantly after that year. One major difference to the West: Chinese gamers usually expect a mobile game to be free, but they’re ready to pay later for virtual items, for example, forcing developers to come up with compelling games with long-time appeal.

Shanghai-based SocoGame itself is a major player in China’s mobile gaming sector. The company produced more than 100 mobile games for a number of different markets so far, i.e. Monkey King (specifically designed for Asia) or Jewel Quest Deluxe (specifically designed for markets in North America and Europe).

Demo 8:
LEG3s
LEG3s is an award-winning mobile job hunting service specifically targeted at China’s 200 million migrant workers. The service informs those people about open positions, salary levels, the current situation in the job market etc. in over 100 cities in China. LEG3s has so far attracted 3 million end users who have to pay reasonable fees and can access the service through low-end mobile phones (LEG3s is pre-installed on some of those). CEO Jason Liu expects the user base to grow to 5 million by year-end.

Demo 9:
TrustMobi
TrustMobi is a Beijing-based startup that operates in an often overlooked field: cell phone security. CEO Bing Song expects that the mobile web will grow significantly in the near future and that zombie computers might soon be joined by zombie cell phones. His company offers an integrated security solution that can handle file recovery, virus detection, firewalls for mobile emails, SMS and MMS protection, file encryption etc. for a number of different handsets. TrustMobi was responsible for mobile phone security during the Beijing Olympics last year.

Demo 10:
Apexone Microelectronics
I had trouble keeping up with this presentation due to the slides that were available only in Chinese and the deep technical details CEO James Gao presented on his company’s optical navigation solutions. Check out Apexone’s excellent English web site if you’re interested in this field.

Demo 11:
Playing.com.cn
This Tianjin-based company has so far developed over 50 smartphone games, which are being sold in more than 20 countries and regions. CEO Zhen Su demonstrated what he called a “convenience store for mobile apps”, consisting of an IM client, various games and a virtual pet simulation. The company provides an API for other game developers who can sell their content on Playing.com.cn’s web site.

Demo 12:
MTrend Group
MTrend Group Founding Partner Mano Wang shared interesting information from a recent analysis on mobile web usage in China. Here are some findings from the mobile web user panel Wang quoted from:

• 22.6% of China Mobile users born after 1990 used the mobile web in 2009 for the first time (this is vastly different from Japan, for example, where users start much earlier).
• 63.9% of mobile gamers play between 10 and 30 minutes per day.
• 57.1% of China Mobile subscribers say they’ve already read a newspaper on a mobile device.
• 38.8% are starting to switch to non-pirated music on their cell phones. 13.2% listen to pirated music only, while 26.1% buy all the songs they store on their cell phones.
• The three hottest mobile apps among Chinese university students using China Mobile are Mobile Baidu ( China’s largest search engine), Mobile QQ (China’s No. 1 social network) and 12530 (China Mobile’s music Wap portal).

Note: MTrend is China Mobile’s main brand for data monitoring so these data points aren’t representative for all of China.

Demo 13:
Panda LLC
Tokyo-based Panda is currently preparing a 3D treasure hunting game with very cool graphics designed specifically for smartphones, i.e. the iPhone. The two demo videos Panda Director Issei Matsui showed during the presentation were pretty cool. I’ll add them here once I get my hands on them.

Update:
The app is an interactive comic/game with some awesome graphics and funny gameplay. It’s called Makibishi Comic and is available in English for $0.99 in the App Store. The app’s official English site can be found here.

Here are some screenshots and a demo video:

Demo 14:
MotherAPP
Ex-Googler and CEO Ken Law said his Hong Kong-based company’s main mission is to solve the platform fragmentation problem in the mobile space for developers by offering three solutions: Generator lets you create native apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry simply through using MotherApp Language (a restricted set of HTML with special markups), which sounds like a powerful solution to me. MotherBlog converts a blog or your Twitter into a native iPhone app – without any coding. The company also supports other companies in making a given mobile app compatible with all major platforms (showcases), claiming tailor-made end-to-end development takes about 9 weeks.

Demo 15:
Hozom
Why trying to set up yet another mobile social network when you (kind of) carried one in your pocket all along? That’s what Hozom CEO Ziyang Liu asked himself and tries to add social components to a form of network you already have in your cell phone, namely the contact list. The idea is to connect entries in your phone’s address book with services like Twitter, QQ, IM etc. in addition to integrating social gaming and geo-location elements using your friends’ contact data. Another selling point is Hozom’s slick design and elegant UI.

Demo 16:
MoTech
MoTech offers a mobile travel assistant for the millions of foreigners visiting China every year. The app comes with a set of around 1,000 different phrases the average tourist needs to feel comfortable in China (transportation, emergency situations, shopping etc.). Choose the sentence and let your mobile phone speak it out loud in Mandarin Chinese (the app also lists points of interests and the names of restaurants). In his presentation, Motech CEO Austin Xie also touched upon the slew of other interesting products and solutions for Non-Chinese speaking people his company provides.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

As in many parts of Asia, the 800-pound gorilla in the web arena is Yahoo: The company established Yahoo Taiwan as early as 2000 after a buy-out and acquired Wretch, a wildly popular platform for blogging and sharing media, in 2007. Today, these two sites are the biggest in the country, with Facebook following as the No. 3 (Facebook now has 3.9 million users in Taiwan).

But the country does have promising tech start-ups with a global focus, too, some of which I talked with earlier this week during a (private) trip to Taipei. The TechCrunch/Crunchgear meetup on Monday, organized together with partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting (a local innovation strategy firm), was a blast. Over 120 people attended the meetup despite of a typhoon that traveled through Taiwan that day (we actually had to stop registration after a few hours due to space restrictions). Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO sponsored the event.

A total of six Taiwan-based startups were given the chance to pitch their services (all are available in English) to the audience. Here’s a rundown on all of these companies.

Startup 1:
Swagly
Swagly, which calls itself a word-of-mouth affiliate network, is targeting a multi-billion dollar market: the monetization of social networks and video sharing platforms. The key idea is to let people buy what they see in pictures and videos via a product-tagging widget. This widget is placed right below the pictures or videos, with the social network users tagging products themselves (demo).

If a friend sees a user-tagged Gucci bag in an album photo, for example, the Swagly widget will show details of the bag and where the friend can buy it (Swagly works with a slew of American retailers by integrating with Commission Junction and LinkShare). In the case of a click or sell-through, Swagly shares the revenue with the publisher and the user who tagged the product.

Startup 2:
DragNTalk by Taroko Technology
DragNTalk is what appears to be a quite powerful application that makes it possible to project presentations (and other documents) onto nearby computers just by using drag and drop. The software automatically displays presentation materials as web pages in your browser. And all you need to do to share a presentation is to share a local web address with your listeners in a local network (details).

You can then drag and drop any kind of file into the DragNTalk pane and go through your slides just like you do in Powerpoint, for example. The application lets you take snapshots of materials that are available in unsupported formats to be able to share these, too. Listeners can view the presentation you give in their browser windows.

DragNTalk is currently available as a trial edition, with a USB-powered wallet-size wireless router supporting the application in the works (people connecting through the Wi-Fi network spawned by the router will then be able to see the presentations automatically).

Startup 3:
Ragic
5-man startup Ragic wants to take on big enterprise solution companies like Salesforce with a dead simple database creation tool that’s based on a spreadsheet UI. Ragic claims their users can build a full-scale enterprise application like Salesforce’s account management system by themselves in about an hour – without any coding. Alternatively, users can customize and deploy applications offered by Ragic, i.e. their issue tracking or employee management solutions (Ragic’s own account management system is here).

The six applications Ragic currently offers are free to use for a limited time and are as easy to use as Excel. The company earns money by charging customers on a monthly basis (just like Salesforce in the form of a Platform as a Service model) and selling OEM licenses to web design companies.

Startup 4:
Starmugs
Starmugs was surely the most unusual of the demo companies presenting at the TechCrunch Taipei event. The site sees itself as the primary online destination for all lovers of Starbucks City Mugs, apparently quite popular collectible coffee mugs Starbucks started selling in 1994. If you’re one of these people, Starmugs lets you list up, display, trade and share stories about your mugs. The site even has its own virtual currency (Mug Cash).

Startup 5:
Citiport
Launched at DEMO last year, Citiport can roughly be described as a mix between Yelp and TripAdvisor. The site offers travelers “insider information” on the best places to visit in cities around the world. The idea is to collect recommendations on so-called “hotspots” (restaurants, bars, nightlife, shopping, sightseeing, hotels etc.) from people who live in these cities. These locals can be contacted directly on the site and may be ready to help travelers get around in real life as local tour guides.

Startup 6:
YusReader by Cloudonline Technology
YusReader is a nifty full-content RSS reader and sharing platform. The site encourages you to log in with your Facebook account, as YusReader makes it possible to find blogs read by your Facebook friends and share your own favorite blogs with them. The site is also pre-populated with blogs grouped in several categories (sports, lifestyle etc.), but allows you to add your own RSS feeds, too.

Each blog is displayed as an icon in a customizable grid-view. Click on the icon to view the blog in a full browser window where you’ll find a YusReader bar at the top. You can choose the blog you want to read via a drop-down menu and quickly browse through the articles from that blog by scrolling up and down with your mouse.

Event sponsor:
IPEVO
Founded in Taipei, Taiwan & San Jose, California in July 2007, IPEVO creates devices that expand and enhance the overall experience over the Internet. Renowned for its iconic line of VoIP and Skype hardware, IPEVO has established a reputation for innovating award-winning designs and affordable products to help make the Internet a better place for what matters most–connecting, communicating, and sharing with the world around us.

IPEVO’s current product line includes the best-selling So20 Wifi phone for Skype and the Kaleido R7, a digital frame that features a unique pivoting display design and comes bundled with EyeStage software to wirelessly stream Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and other Internet contents from a PC or Mac to the frame. Available in late October, the Point 2 View USB Camera (pictured below) is a 2.0 Megapixel, PC & Mac compatible webcam that sits on a versatile swing-arm stand.

Many thanks to all attendees, demo companies, co-organizer Chili Consulting and sponsor IPEVO. xie xie! You can find many more pictures of the event here (courtesy of Chili Consulting).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Every guest should have received the invitation by now, and please remember the venue changed (the schedule remains the same though). Thank you very much for the incredible interest in the meetup, which is sponsored by Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO.

Please note you can’t register for this invitation-only event anymore – sorry.

Special thanks again to Chili Consulting for organizing this meetup. Make sure to follow the company’s Facebook page and blog for any last-minute updates (which are very unlikely to happen).

I’m looking forward to seeing over 100 TechCrunch readers and a handful of selected Taiwanese demo companies tomorrow.

Use the hashtag “#tctaipei” when twittering about this event (although I know Plurk is quite big in this country).

Taipei 101 picture taken from Flickr

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Here are the details (in Chinese):

• Event date: October 05 (Monday), 2009
• Time: 7:30pm – 9:30pm (doors open: 7pm)
• Venue: Mary’s Bistro 2nd. Floor, No.89, Sec 2 Ren-Ai Rd., Taipei City
• Fee: NT$250 per person

Register for the event here. Please note that we are restricted on numbers, so don’t be disappointed if you can’t get on the guest list (this is strictly an “invitations only” event).

Please send an email to service [AT] chiliconsulting.com if you’d like to sponsor the event. Do the same if you have something cool and “made in Taiwan” to pitch (i.e. mobile tech, a web service, gadget etc.). Use the hashtag “#tctaipei” when twittering.

Special thanks to Chili Consulting for organizing this meetup (make sure to follow the company’s Facebook page and blog for updates).

We hope everyone has a great night and are looking forward to seeing you all on October 5 in Taipei!

Update:
Thank you very much for the huge interest in this meetup. Please note you can’t register anymore.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

TechCrunch50 has always been very welcoming towards companies from countries other than the US. Last year, for example, a total of five companies from Japan made a showing at the event (three startups presented onstage, two were in the DemoPit).

This year, Korea sent four promising companies to TechCrunch50 (finalist Sealtale, and DemoPit participants UniQube, touchring and FillThat), while Japan had two startups exhibiting in the DemoPit (LIFEmee and Spysee).

These are the four noteworthy Korean services that made it to TechCrunch50 this year:

Sealtale (TechCrunch50 finalist)
Launched by six college students, the Korean version of Sealtale, a social widget service, has attracted 200,000 users in six months (the English version launched Monday on TechCrunch50’s first day). Sealtale lets users express their interests, preferences or causes via so-called seals, which are interactive widgets. You can integrate these seals into your blog or profile page on a social network and interact with other people within the seal itself. The system works across various blog platforms and social networks. The seals can include content like text (RSS feeds, comments, posts), audio and video files.

Sealtale allows you to design and distribute your own seals, too. Companies can create branded seals and use them as viral marketing vehicles. A movie studio, for example, could create a seal for one of its movies and provide trailers and text-based information for users who choose to show that seal on their blog.

Read more about Sealtale in our previous post.

FillThat (DemoPit company)
Monetizing blogs is notoriously difficult. FillThat intends to solve this problem by creating a revenue stream for bloggers within a blog’s commenting space. The way it works is that you buy virtual currency (”Fill Dollars”) with real money and then pay for your comment to boost visibility (it’s also possible to achieve this by taking action, i.e. completing an offer). FillThat will go live next month.

Touchring (DemoPit company)
Touchring wants to bring voice communication into the social space. The Flash app makes it possible to call up friends over so-called Touchrings, cell phone-like icons that you can design yourself and integrate into your blog or profile on various social networks. Calls with other Touchring users are free, but you can also make phone calls to landlines and mobile phones (rates). Touchring launched yesterday.

UniQube (DemoPit company)
Seoul-based Solspectrum showcased UniQube in the DemoPit, an in-stream ad placement solution that’s supposed to help video portals monetize their content. The aim is to enhance brand awareness and customer engagement by integrating interactive ads into video clips or movies at the right moment in a non-intrusive way.

When an actor eats a pizza in a certain scene of a movie, for example, an overlay pizza ad could be displayed. Viewers choosing to click on it could then sign up for a competition or get discount coupons directly within the video without navigating away to another page. Snippets containing the interactive ads can be cut out and sent to friends via Twitter, Facebook and other media. UniQube users can track the distribution paths and effectiveness of their video ads in real-time. The solution is built upon Silverlight and still in development.

These are the two services from Japan that were in the TechCrunch 50 DemoPit:

LIFEmee
LIFEmee is a comprehensive life management service that allows you to store and share the significant aspects and events of your life online (from “the cradle to the crave”). Keep a diary, list up and control personal assets, upload a Last Will and Testament, lay out future plans and compare certain elements of your life, i.e. your annual income, with LIFEmee users around the world.

LIFEmee launched at TechCrunch50 (a Japanese version follows soon). Read more about this service in my previous post.

Spysee
The Japanese version of this people search engine went online last year and instantly gained impressive traction. Much like Spock, Spysee is focused on collecting information on individuals and shedding light on their relation with other people. Type in “Michael Arrington”, for example, and you’ll get a mini bio, a diagram displaying people (relatively) close to him, pictures (i.e. this one), relevant news, keywords, blog posts and video clips. Spysee went live Monday (in beta).

Photo credit: Fumi Yamazaki

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Users can choose between a set of different tools to organize their life on the site. For example, they can keep a daily diary (”MyLife”), list up significant past events in your life (”MyHistory”), manage their assets and annual income or even upload a Last Will and Testament.

LIFEmee visualizes all the data you enter in the form of a time line (”LIFEstream”) that reaches from past to future events and lets you browse through these events with the click of a button. For example, you can write about memories of your wedding party that took place 3 years ago but also motivate yourself by uploading a picture of your dream house you plan to buy 5 years later. You’re free to choose to keep all your information private or share it with friends.

But you can also open life data stored on LIFEmee to everyone, making it possible to share and compare aspects of your own life with that of other members around the globe. This so-called “World function” allows you to look into what kind of assets those users have or how high their annual income is. LIFEmee also automatically ranks your own assets and income with other users so that you can compare your financial situation with members with similar jobs and biographies living in the same area, for example.

LIFEmee launched today and is currently in alpha mode.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

But there are more location-based social networks out there, and one of them, Centrl, is now intending to further bridge the gap between mobile phone users and the web at large (a move we called for last year). The service, which has been available on the iPhone [iTunes link], Android, BlackBerry [JAD file] and Nokia since May 2008, extended its offering with a web app a few days ago. The service runs within major social networks and lets you login from your existing accounts (on Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, Friendster, Ning, Hi5, bebo, Orkut, iTimes, or Sonico) on any platform and device, which means there’s no need to register. (It’s free to use in all variations, too).

iPhone and Facebook versions (click to enlarge):

Centrl’s new web application basically does all what the mobile version does: broadcast your own location to your friends, help users find coupons, restaurants, bars, gas stations, general points of interest, real estate, or events near you by pulling information from Yelp, Citysearch, Wikipedia and other sites (Centrl calls these sites “layers”). The web app is completely integrated into Centrl’s social network versions and mobile phone apps.

It’s also possible for users of the web version to contribute and share content, for example by marking a certain place on a map, uploading a picture of it, adding a comment and posting a link to Twitter (mobile app users can do this, too). Centrl then automatically creates a profile page based on that information for other mobile or web app users to view and interact with.

Screenshot of the Centrl web app (click to enlarge):

Centrl’s web version also introduces location-based communication in real-time. According to CEO Murat Aktihanoglu, his service is the first to offer a “free IM on a map”-system that doesn’t rely on SMS and is completely device- and platform agnostic (as long as you’re a Centrl user). The way the messaging system works is that people accessing Centrl on a PC, for example, can see the location of people using one of the mobile apps and instantly start text-chatting with them, virtually in real-time and without fees for both sides.

Centrl has attracted 500,000 users so far. The service is based out of New York and angel-funded with $500,000.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The local developer community has noticed and produced a slew of apps aimed at a global audience. What follows is my subjective selection of the “best” of these made-in-Japan apps, all of which are at least available in English. (I left out iPhone games released by big companies such as Capcom, Konami, Sega or Namco to focus on apps created by startups or individuals based in Japan instead.)

My personal favorite is a free (and fantastic) GPS-based photo sharing app called Memory Tree (just like all the apps in the following list, it works worldwide). But here’s a round-up of all the 32 apps I chose, grouped in six categories (games, productivity, tools, photography and art, music, and everything else).

Category: Games

1. Gang Street Wars by DigiDock (iTunes links: $1.99 for a limited time / free version)
Addictive mix between real-time strategy and (side-scrolling) tower defense game with cartoon graphics and random gore effects. You play a gang leader whose mission is to conquer bases of rivals by sending out gang members with different combat skills.

2. Broadway Cafe by Artscape and Istpika ($4.99)
Pretty deep and professionally designed restaurant simulation game that lets you assume the roles of a waiter, manager and owner. Dash around taking customer orders, serving meals in time or doing the dishes. But you also take care of the interior design of the restaurant, its personnel, finances etc. (the app contains more action elements than it sounds). Broadway Cafe also connects to its Facebook counterpart from where you can recruit Facebook friends to join the game (demo video).

3. Glandarius Wing Strike by IZUMOGASIN ($4.99 / free version)
Great-looking 2D shoot ‘em up aimed at hardcore gamers. This vertical scroller features six long stages, boss fights, chain attacks and a cool soundtrack. The initial version of the game was so hard that the maker later decided to add an “easy” mode. Definitely the best 2D shooter for the iPhone.

4. Samurai Chess by Conit ($2.99 / free version)
As the name of the app says, it’s a Samurai-themed chess game (in 3D). Players can challenge both the CPU or Samurai Chess players anywhere in the world (provided they’re online via 3G or Wi-Fi).

5. iYamato by Geppetto ($0.99 / free version)
2D shooting game in which you defend legendary battleship Yamato against aerial attacks. Not really a deep game, but it’s action-packed and ideal to kill 10 minutes from time to time (demo video).

6. LightBike by Pankaku ($2.99 / free version)
LightBike, which made it to the No. 1 in Apple USA’s app sales ranking a few months ago, is a 3D motorcycle racing/action game whose design resembles the setting of the Sci-Fi movie Tron. Up to 4 people can battle it out by using just two iPhones and Wi-Fi (demo video).

7. Vay by SoMoGa ($4.99)
Originally released in 1994 for the Sega CD system, Vay is one of the best 2D RPGs ever made. Cute anime-style graphics, retro-Sci-Fi setting, voice output in English, animated cutscenes and most importantly, dozens of hours of old-school gameplay. SoMoGa (based out of Florida) puts the complete original game in your pocket.

8. newtonica by Field System ($ 4.99)
Strange, but beautifully designed action game in which you rotate a sphere so that incoming meteors hit the cores with the matching colors. A bestseller in the Japanese App Store with a great soundtrack (demo videos).

9. newtonica2 by Field System ($ 0.99/ free version)
The sequel to newtonica is a mix between action and puzzle game, cheaper than the first one and better gameplay-wise. The game’s 36 stages will keep you busy for a while (demo video). There’s also newtonica2 resort, an add-on or remake of sorts (available for $0.99).

10. iNinja by Geppetto ($1.99 / free version)
One of the few Ninja-themed action games actually made by a Japanese company. Deflect oncoming Ninja attacks with shuriken (throwing stars), eliminate enemies with knives, land combo kills or set booby traps in 28 levels. There’s also a two-player Wi-Fi mode.

11. ExZeus by Hyper Devbox ($0.99)
3D rail-shooting game with fantastic sound and graphics in Space Harrier style. You control one of three giant robots to fight off an alien invasion. It’s not the longest game out there, but a total steal for this price (demo video).

Category: Productivity
12. Zeptoliner by Ubiquitous Entertainment ($6.99 / free version)
This “outliner” app helps you to arrange your ideas in a systematic way. You can jot down thoughts and then use a number of functions to structure them hierarchically. It’s also possible to import OMPL files to edit documents you created on your computer (demo video).

13. ZeptoPad 3.0 by Ubiquitous Entertainment ($19.99)
This note and whiteboard app isn’t cheap, but it’s an extremely versatile, vector-based illustration program. It lets you stream what you do on your iPhone to a computer screen or projector in real-time and has simply too many functions to mention here (click here for details and make sure to check out the video below).

14. gottaDo2 by Istpika ($2.99)
A social task manager that lets you knock off tasks from your to-do list to feed the cute little monsters living inside the app. You can watch them grow or punish you if you’re too lazy. It’s also possible to sync tasks with the gottaDo Facebook app.

15. PokéDia by s21g ($2.99)
A daily diary/planner app that’s available in 16 different languages. Each page of the virtual diary represents one day, and you can turn pages (move to certain days) by flicking to the right or left. The app lets you jot down notes anywhere on the screen and move the entries around on the page itself and between days. It can be used as a task manager, too (demo video).

Category: Tools
16. TapNext by Conit ($3.99 / free version)
This app turns your iPhone into a remote control for presentations. Maker Conit says it’s the only software of its kind that’s compatible to Powerpoint, Keynote and OpenOffice Impress and can be used via Wi-Fi or 3G. You can theoretically use a PC located in Europe to deliver a presentation in the USA with TapNext through Skype (details and demo video).

17. ServersMan by FreeBit (free)
Launched in February, this app, which turns your iPhone into a personal web server, is still one of the most popular apps in the Japanese App Store. And it has become even more useful with OS 3.0b, adding a number of functions to the already impressive list of features (read more here). And the best app of its kind is free, too.

Category: Photography and Art
18. PlayPix 3 snaps by LivingImage ($2.99 for a limited time)
PlayPix is like a lighter version of Animoto’s iPhone app. Select three pictures from your photo album, choose a graphical theme and the app will create a slide show with background music for you. You can save the slide show on your iPhone, upload it to YouTube or Facebook and share it via Twitter or Email. During my test, PlayPix actually worked faster than Animoto’s iPhone app (demo video).

19. Memory Tree by XeNN (free)
A GPS-based photo sharing app with a fantastic big idea: Take a picture anywhere in the world, “drop” it on the spot you took it at (simply by shaking your iPhone) and add a text to it. This geo-tagged picture can later be “caught” by other Memory Tree users who are in the same area by swinging the iPhone “like a butterfly net” (”Same Place” function).

If you click the “Same Time” button, you can catch and view countless photos the users of the app took around the globe in the last hours (regardless of your location), thereby creating common photographic memories worldwide. This is just very cool.

20. Koredoko (free)
This app lets you shuffle through geo-tagged photos in the camera roll and shows a Google map of where (and when) you took them (demo video).

21. TiltShift Generator by Takayuki Fukatsu ($0.99 for a limited time)
Takayuki Fukatsu is offering seven different photo apps that proved to be so popular that some of the pictures created with them were used in a real-world exhibition [JP]. TiltShift Generator is Fukatsu’s newest app, and it lets you shoot miniature pictures in retro style (samples). But you should check out his other apps, too.

22. Art Remix by Appliya Studio (free)
This app is based on a pretty cool idea: Tokyo-based iPhone app publisher Appliya is providing a platform called Appliya Studio [JP] that turns the creative work of artists and photographers into iPhone apps that are then distributed worldwide through the App Store. One of the many apps already available is called Art Remix. It lets you modify a total of 23 artworks with a set of customizable icons and then save and share the remixes with friends.

23. Ukiyo-e Beauties by Appliya ($3.99)
A historic Japanese art app that offers a total of five different paintings and 20 woodblock prints from the traditional Ukiyo-e art form (in 1,150 x 800 resolution and 4xzoom). It took maker Appliya several months to create the app in collaboration with two professors of art history (demo video).

Category: Music
24. NESynth by New Forestar ($1.99)
For game geeks who happen to like music: This virtual synthesizer simulates 8-bit sounds from games people played in the glorious 80s. In P2P mode, you can hear what the other person plays on your own iPhone (demo video).

25. Rekords by Delaware ($1.99)
Rekords is a Japanese music label that distributes songs solely within the iPhone/iPod touch ecosystem. I bought their first record (iTunes link). The music is weird, but you get two English songs and can switch the virtual vinyl record you see on the screen from side A to B by flipping your iPhone. It’s also possible to jump to a certain part of the song by moving the record player’s arm.

26. PocketGuitar by Shinya Kasatani ($0.99)
Already a major global success, this app displays a set of virtual guitar strings that you can strum and press with your fingers. Users can choose between six virtual guitars (even a Ukulele is available) and modify the sound with a number of different parameters (demo videos).

27. iShakuhachi by GClue ($0.99)
The Shakuhachi is a traditional bamboo flute that’s unknown even to many Japanese people. Users can play it by blowing into the iPhone mic, tilting it and covering the five holes with their fingers. GClue offers an iKoto (Japanese Harp) app, too.

Category: Everything else
28. Quick Pigeon by Ubiquitous Entertainment (free)
Cute push notification messenger app that uses a “virtual carrier pigeon” to send a quick “yes or no” question to people in your contact list. The recipient(s) view the email on their computer or iPhone, press “yes” or “no” and the message reaches you via push notification (along with a twitter sound).

29. Bijin Tokei by PHIRIA ($2.99)
This clock app brings 1,440 pictures of Japanese girls to your iPhone (Bijin Tokei means Hot Girl Clock in Japanese). The pictures fade in and out every minute, and each of them is showing a different girl who holds up a sign displaying the current time (to be exact, the models themselves change just every few minutes).

30. Wikiamo by Satoshi Nakagawa (free)
Wikiamo is better than the official app for Wikipedia (iTunes link) that launched just a few days ago simply because it makes Wikipedia pages much easier to read. The app also appears to be faster, lets you browse through certain articles when you’re offline (via page-caching) and has some other functions the official app doesn’t offer.

31. NatsuLion by Takuma Mori (free)
This app might be a good alternative for people who are still looking for a simple iPhone Twitter client that’s very quick and easy to use. It’s completely ad-free, too.

32. Amamiya Momo by Xtone ($2.99)
Amamiya Momo is a virtual anime girlfriend who lives in your iPhone, interacts with you and gets moody quickly. For example, she’s nicer when your’re home than when you’re out on the streets. Her mood also depends on which time of the day it is. There are 200 different pre-programmed patterns of behavior and Japanese voice samples (subbed in English). More info on this GPS-based app can be found here.

Nota Bene:
I sifted through countless app descriptions and sites from Japanese companies in the last weeks and have to say the vast majority of the English texts I stumbled upon are of horrific quality. Some were even so bad I couldn’t understand what the app is about. This is absolutely embarrassing, especially when you expect users to pay.

And why some of the apps have been available in the US App Store for months but never made their way to other countries (i.e the German store where I mostly buy from) is totally beyond me, too.

Special thanks to Nobuyuki Hayashi for his contribution to this article.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The occasion: The blog, which is one of Japan’s biggest and mainly translates articles from TechCrunch into Japanese, is under new management (by DESIGN IT!, LLC., a Sociomedia (Japan’s anwer to Adaptive Path) group company).

Here are my thumbnail sketches of all of the twelve demos I saw at Tokyo Camp.

I’vRead by Akky Akimoto
Officially launched at Tokyo Camp, I’vRead keeps a record of all books you’ve read via your Twitter account and lets you find users with a similar taste in books. All you need to do is to type the title of the book (or its ISBN or Amazon URL), add “@ivread” to the tweet and (as an option) write what you thought of it. Each of these tweets will then be automatically added to your personal user page on the I’vRead site (you don’t need to register at the site itself, being a Twitter user is enough). Look here for an example.

dango
dango wants to empower online game creators worldwide to focus more on the development of content and less on the things they have to deal with after a game is finished, especially the distribution problem. The company of the same name offers a comprehensive, integrated framework called “dango-PLAY”. The system delivers online games to a number of social networks (i.e. Facebook or Japan’s Mixi) and dango’s homepage itself, using a single program and source code (dango is open source [JP]).

dango-Play aims at creating an integrated ecosystem for online games by matching users, linking to other games based on the framework, providing SMS services, managing user ID data, freeing developers from tracking user behavior etc. etc.

One of the first games that’s been released based on the dango system is Facebook app “meromero park”, an ultra-cute mix between a social network, a virtual world and a pet-rearing game (the web version has already gained massive popularity in Japan and Taiwan). The Facebook app is available in English and French.

Jin-Magic TCP Traffic Optimization Technology by Akira Jinzaki
A veteran network technology guru and a Chief Technologist in Residence at Breakthrough Partners, Akira Jinzaki has single-handedly programmed what appears to be a powerful TCP traffic controller with the potential to change the way Internet traffic is currently being managed (99% of the Internet traffic is TCP-based). Jinzaki says his Jin-Magic software manages TCP traffic in a cost-effective way that is transparent to the network to get the most out of the exiting plumbing.

The software can sit anywhere in the network between the two end-points. WiMAX was used for the demo. Reception in the demo room was 2 to 4 bars out of 6 and TCP transfer rates were at best 1Mbps (with standard set-up). Turn on the Jin-magic on the server side configured to maximize TCP flow, the rates climbed up in the 4Mbps to 7Mbps range. The technology allows providers to maximize service for their investments. It may enable mobile data providers to serve 2 to 3 times more customers with uninterrupted video bandwidth with the existing infrastructure. Jin-Magic can be ported to smartphones, too.

PeKay’s Little Author
PeKay’s Little Author is a Facebook application that lets users create a graphic story using original characters on-screen and print it out in the form of a picture storybook. Alternatively, the virtual storybook (example) can be shared with others online or turned into a web greeting card.

PeKay’s Little Author is the brainchild of a well-known Japanese artist. The video below shows how the app works:

IxEdit by Sociomedia
Launched at Tokyo Camp, IxEdit is a JavaScript-based “interaction design” tool for web applications that can be used from within the browser. Web designers can use IxEdit to practice DOM-scripting without having to code anything. The tool allows for elements of web pages that require “interaction”, i.e. pull-down menus, to be created with basic knowledge about HTML and CSS (no JavaScript coding is required).

IxEdit can be downloaded for free. View sample elements here.

Mobile Vein Authentication Technology by Universal Robot [JP]
Universal Robot’s compact mobile vein authentication software (40KB core module) can be installed on cell phones, for example, and uses the camera to scan your wrist vein for identification. The technology seems to have many advantages: It works fast (I tried it myself), it’s completely software-based, compatible to a variety of CPUs and operating systems, usable for persons doing hard manual labor (who can’t use fingerprints), and most importantly extremely accurate (the company speaks of a false accept ratio of 0.001% and of a false reject ratio of less than 0.1%). The award-winning software works even with cameras with a 1MP sensor or lower.

Kuchikomi@Sousenkyo [JP] by Hottolink
Tokyo-based Hottolink has shown a self-developed word-of-mouth analysis tool (dubbed “Word Of Mouth@General Election Of The Lower House” in Japanese) that’s supposedly able to predict the results of the general election of Japan’s Lower House (according to CEO Koki Uchiyama) that took place just today.

The prediction tool analyzes what’s being written in Japan’s blogosphere about political topics dynamically (it updates its projected results daily). Uchiyama said internal tests with previous elections proved to be very promising. We’ll know if the prediction model really works on Monday morning Japanese time after the election results are official (I will deliver an update here later).

Update: The prediction proved to be pretty accurate. HottoLink projected the winning party will get 257 seats in Japan’s lower house (it received 221) and the runner-up will get 40 (it received 64 in the end). Accuracy for the election as a whole stands at a good 80.33%.

LogEarth
LogEarth requires a GPS logger or an iPhone GPS logger app to work. The service then records where you move around in the world (provided there’s a GPS signal) and visualizes your route with the help of Google Maps. The log data can be posted on blogs, too.

The 3 Augmented Reality Brothers [JP]
The 3 Augmented Reality Brothers aren’t really brothers, but their augmented reality project certainly had the highest show value at Tokyo Camp. Watch the Japanese video below to get an idea of what these guys are doing (their Vimeo channel is here).

AR3Bros episode-i | twitter & AR from ar3bros on Vimeo.

dodaii by Feynman
dodaii is an in-app purchase management ASP created for iPhone devs. The system handles the payment records for companies offering apps in the App Store for a fee. More information on dodaii can be found in this English PDF and here. dodaii is currently in closed beta.

Kanshin Kuukan [JP]
Kanshin Kuukan is a community site that helps its members find relevant products, restaurants, movies, songs etc. based on recommendations from users. The company of the same name showed a demo video of an iPhone app that scans the Twittersphere for relevant tweets and is scheduled for release in December (Japanese only).

Manetron
Manetron is an iPhone app that puts a Mellotron (an electro-mechanical, vintage keyboard) in your pocket. The app is available in the App Store for $2.99. Watch the video below to see and hear how Manetron works.

Many thanks to all attendees and demo companies who helped making Tokyo Camp a blast. And sorry to everyone who didn’t make it on the guest list this time (just like last time, we were overwhelmed by the response), but another event like this might happen again in the near future. Arigatou gozaimasu!

More pictures from the event were made by alpha blogger Masaki Ishitani and TechCrunch Japan’s translator Umihiko Namekawa.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The company has just seven employees (two of them are part-timers) but big plans: Cerevo intends to dramatically simplify the process of uploading and sharing pictures online by providing both an extra-easy to use camera (the “CerevoCam”) and a photo sharing site (”CerevoLife”) specifically geared towards owners of that camera. And the company wants to bring its idea in front of a global audience.

Combination of Wi-Fi/3G-enabled camera with photo sharing service
Users first need to get the digital camera that Cerevo designed completely from scratch. The device features a 9MP CMOS sensor, Wi-Fi 802.11n (b/g/n), 3G HSUPA support, a USB port, a MicroSD card slot and a 2.4-inch LCD.

The noteworthy point about the CerevoCam is the network function. It’s able to upload pictures to CerevoLife, a photo management and sharing service optimized for play with the camera. Photos are being transferred automatically (via Wi-Fi), which means you can shoot pictures late at night and find them on CerevoLife the next morning without having to take the camera out of the bag. The site offers 5GB of free storage space for every user, which is enough for around 4,000 pictures.

Cerevo notifies you of picture uploads via email and allows you to share pictures from your email client (or CerevoLife) on Flickr, Twitter, Picasa and other services. You’ll get a warning via email when the battery is about to die, too.

If you plug a 3G modem into the camera’s USB port, you can upload pictures directly from the device to various sites in real-time. (With Wi-Fi, pictures take a few seconds to pop up on CerevoLife.)

Launch by year-end in a crowded market
It’s amazing what Cerevo CEO Takuma Iwasa and his tiny team have accomplished so far, but the start-up is facing serious competition, especially when the CerevoCam will actually sell. The network functions could be easily integrated into future cameras by the big makers. Not to speak of the many smartphones out there, which are already being used to flood sites like Flickr and YouTube with pictures and videos (even though Cerevo scores with the convenience factor). And there is no shortage of decent photo management sites either.

Cerevo plans to launch both the CerevoCam (for about $210, in black and white versions) and the corresponding photo site by the end of this year. Iwasa told me this could happen in Japan in late October/early November when things go well, with international markets following soon after (CerevoLife will get a fully translated interface, while the camera features Japanese and English menus).

The company has so far raised $1.3 million in series A from Tokyo-based VC firm enova [JP].

You can read more about the CNET Japan event (in English) here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

A service called Joker Racer emerged as the big winner of the evening, but the other presentations weren’t too shabby either, with some of them earning special jury awards from various Japanese media. A good number of the fourteen services are available in English (or will be soon). Here’s a rundown on all of the companies that presented at WISH 2009:

Joker Racer (Winner: Grand Prix and Agile Media Network Award)
Joker Racer lets you remote-control model cars via your browser window, from anywhere in the world and in real-time. The Linux-powered and Wi-Fi-enabled model cars are equipped with GPS, a mini Linux server and a web cam mounted on top of them. It will even be possible to control the cars with the iPhone.

You can already register on the site but have to be patient until the official launch on August 26 when you want to take a spin. More videos can be viewed here.

Cerevo [JP] (Winner: Impress Award)
Cerevo presented an early version of a digital camera designed completely in-house that’s supposed to play with a photo sharing service the company is working on concurrently. The Wi-Fi-enabled “Cerevo cam” automatically uploads pictures to company servers without users needing to do anything. Pictures can then easily shared with friends (via cell phone email, for example) or uploaded to Flickr, Twitter and other sites. Expect both the Japanese and international version to launch probably later this year (read more about Cerevo here).

Action*Pad [JP] (Winner: CNET Japan Award)
Action*Pad is designed to be a simple to-do list that can be accessed by a group of people over the web (both fixed and mobile). Users just need to type in the URL and a password (registration isn’t necessary) to start getting things done. The service hasn’t officially launched yet.

Dressphile [JP] (Winner: Nikkei BP Award)
Dressphile is a combination of an offline and online business. Shopping addicts suffering from a lack of space in their apartments can either send in excess clothing or have it picked up. Dressphile will then store the clothes in its own storage facility at a monthly rate of $3 per item.

The company also offers a cleaning service and online database of your clothes, which are each pictured in a grid view. Dressphile is considering to let users choose to open these personal “online closets” to other people to sell off unneeded clothes that way.

Lang-8 (Winner: IT Media Award)
Lang-8 is a language exchange site with a social networking slant that’s been established in 2007. Available in 14 different languages, Lang-8 focuses on improving the writing skills in the language you study. Blog entries written in a foreign language can be viewed and checked by native speakers of that language. Read more about Lang-8 here.

xtel (Winner: Gizmodo Japan Award)
xtel is the name of a development support system for “ubiquitous contents” provided by Keio University in Tokyo. A total of four modules were presented: MOXA (a small I/O board), Talktic (compiler library for the development of applications on MOXA), Entity Collaborator (Java-based network to create network applications) and LIFE (server solution).

Tons of cool stuff the university created can be found in this bilingual PDF.

CONIT iPhone Content Payment System
CONIT presented a content payment system for the iPhone that should be of interest to many of the iPhone developers out there. The company has developed a solution that reduces costs for those developers offering subscriptions and and in-app purchases with their apps (new and existing ones). The system eliminates the need for setting up a content server. More in the English presentation embedded below.

Yonda4 [JP]
Yonda4 is a service that keeps track of books and comics you’ve read using Twitter. Just type the title of the book and add “@yonda4” to the tweet (it’s also possible to squeeze in a mini review). You can then access the Yonda4 website to see a list of your books and find users who have a similar taste. Android users can scan the barcode of a book and tweet its title instantly with Yonda4’s Android app.

Kokuban.in [JP]
Kokuban.in is a Flash-based “social drawing” service that lets users create images on a virtual blackboard with a mouse, “recording” the process from start to finish. The service launched last year, and there are now hundreds of thousands of animated clips on the site. CEO Yoshinori Munehara mainly talked about a new system that’s supposed to keep “impolite” comments on kokuban.in under control.

User Insight [JP]
User Insight is a web marketing tool that analyzes user behavior on a given site and visualizes the data collected with a heat map. The tool is supposed to answer the question what type of user (sex, age etc.) shows interests in which pages and which parts of those pages are clicked at the most. User Insight will go live next month, with versions in English and Chinese currently being in development.

Sony Bank’s “Jinseitsuuchou/Bankbook Of Your Life” [JP]
Sony Bank (an online bank operated by a Sony Japan subsidiary) presented a personal finance management system called Jinseitsuuchou, which roughly means “bankbook of your life” in Japanese. Just like the many other online finance trackers out there, the Sony tool helps users keep track of their personal expenses and budgets.

30min. [JP]
30min. is a location-based city guide portal that scrapes information on restaurants, shops and other service providers from the blogosphere. Based on where you are, 30min. delivers information on locations accessible within 30 minutes, enhanced by statements taken from blogs (currently, a whopping 8,000 blogs written by individuals are indexed). There’s also a free 30min. iPhone app [JP, iTunes link].

Nissan Carwings [JP]
A Nissan representative summarized the Web-related strengths of Carwings, Nissan’s (still) Japan-only and high-spec car navigation system: Display and text-to-speech conversion of RSS feeds, integration of Google Calendar, display of Google Maps information, integration of gas price comparison portal gogo.gs [JP] etc.

Link Knowledge [JP]
Link Knowledge is what appears to be a pretty powerful SaaS solution with a focus on CRM and SFA (sales force automation). The key idea is to scan information from business cards and feed it into a database, which can be accessed by Link Knowledge clients, i.e. direct marketers or sales people, to systematically identify potential customers.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Users can share music files, photos or videos across (almost) any device via drag and drop and share the files with others. DoubleTwist’s main selling point: It supports hundreds of devices, from cell phones or mobile gaming devices to portable music players. For example, the software can sync all music files you bought on iTunes with your Blackberry, Nokia phone, Kindle or Sony PSP without you having to worry about file format compatibility. Media files can then be uploaded to sites like Flickr, Facebook or YouTube from within doubleTwist.

Watch this video to see how the app works:

It’s safe to say Apple isn’t probably a big fan of the software. But doubleTwist co-founders Monique Frantzos and Jon Lech Johansen (better known as DVD Jon) silently enhanced the app in the last few weeks and told me today they have more plans for the future.

doubleTwist added support for video downloads from YouTube and now works with Android phones and the Palm Pre, too. Drag and drop any YouTube video you want to watch on the go on your Android G1, for example, into the doubleTwist window and copy it onto your device in seconds. iPhone 3.0 compatibility, bundling deals with several cell phone makers and a more sophisticated podcast engine are to be expected in the near future, too.

Entry into gadget-crazy Japanese market
Things are going very well for doubleTwist in the English-speaking world, and starting today, the application is available as a localized version in mobile phone-crazy Japan (Windows-only for the time being/demo video). According to Johansen and Frantzos, the main reasons for choosing Japan as the first Non-English market are:

• a myriad of super-advanced cell phones from different makers (about 100 a year) delivering a mediocre software experience
• world’s highest penetration of iTunes (1 out of 4 broadband users or about 13.6 million Japanese use iTunes to manage their music)
• high online video consumption (21 million Japanese users watch YouTube videos for 187 minutes per month as opposed to Americans who are on YouTube for 134 minutes monthly)
• strong demand for high-quality online video (mobile YouTube delivers low quality but doubleTwist can show YouTube videos in high-res)

doubleTwist’s entry into Japan makes sense, as the country is one of the world’s biggest markets for music and movies (for example, Japanese users downloaded music worth $10.2 billion to cell phones in 2007). Nearly 170 Japan-only cell phones from local carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank are supported from the start. DoubleTwist has set up a Wiki page for each one of them, an exclusive pilot service for the Japanese market that might be expanded to all doubleTwist-compatible devices in the future.

The company has so far raised $7.5 million in series A and B from several major venture capital companies in the US, Europe and Asia, including Index Ventures (investors in Skype) and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Japanese tax authorities started making these allegations as early as 2007 but now seem ready to pull out the hammer. The way Amazon operated so far is that every time Japanese customers buy something from Amazon’s Japanese website, they legally make contracts of purchase with Amazon offices in the US. The problem for the Japanese taxation bureau: These sales were booked and taxed in the US, even though Amazon operates two companies in Japan, Amazon Japan and Amazon Japan Logistics. (Click here for more background on Amazon’s position in Japan.)

Reportedly, income of several hundred of millions of dollars wasn’t taxed in Japan under the U.S.-Japan tax treaty, as demanded by local tax authorities now. Amazon is currently in talks with authorities to invalidate the accusations.

Amazon has a history of getting in trouble for the way they deal with taxes. In its 2008 annual report [PDF] released in April this year, Amazon.com disclosed that even more trouble may be on the horizon, especially in Japan (page 73):

We are under examination, or may be subject to examination, in the following major jurisdictions for the years specified: Kentucky for 2004 through 2008, France for 2005 through 2008, Germany for 2003 through 2008, Luxembourg for 2003 through 2008, and the United Kingdom for 2003 through 2008.

In addition, in 2007, Japanese tax authorities assessed income tax, including penalties and interest, of approximately $119 million against one of our U.S. subsidiaries for the years 2003 through 2005. We believe that these claims are without merit and are disputing the assessment. Further proceedings on the assessment will be stayed during negotiations between U.S. and Japanese authorities over the double taxation issues the assessment raises, and we have provided bank guarantees to suspend enforcement of the assessment. We also may be subject to income tax examination by Japanese tax authorities for 2006 through 2008.

(emphasis supplied)

But even the $119 million tax bill in Japan isn’t peanuts, even for Amazon (provided they really end up having to pay it): Their operating income, for example, stood at $842 million last year for the Amazon group as a whole, with the Japanese subsidiary estimated to having contributed 10% of that number. We’ll stay tuned.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

In North America, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in the B2C arena – by very, very far. After the US launch in 1995, the company quickly established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. But although Amazon wins in Canada and Europe, things are not going as well in Asia. In China (where Amazon started offering a localized site in 2004), it practically gets destroyed by local player Taobao [CN]. Traffic-wise, Amazon gets dwarfed by a local e-commerce site in Japan, too: Rakuten.

Amazon is active in Japan for a good reason: In its last report [JP, PDF], the Japanese government said the country’s online B2C sector grew by 21.7% to over $55 billion in 2007 on a year-on-year basis. (Note: Statistics from different sources can vary widely because of totally different methods of measurement. The Japanese numbers, for examples, do include travel.)

Now it seems Rakuten wants to take its global plans (laid out numerous times in the past) to the next level, with CEO Hiroshi Mikitani saying just this weekend he wants to see his company generating $1 million in daily sales outside Japan by the end of this year.

This short case study tries to shed light on Rakuten’s background and key success factors, why they win against Amazon in Japan and what efforts they make to go global.

1. Rakuten vs. Amazon Japan
With 47 million members (1 in 3 Japanese is registered), Rakuten Ichiba (Rakuten Marketplace) is a household name in this country. The biggest difference to Amazon is that Rakuten was founded as a B2B2C company without a warehousing function. It’s a platform for individual merchants to sell their products to individual customers online.

And they’ve been very successful with it, even though Amazon launched their Japanese site as early as 2000. Look at the table below for a head-to-head and a Google Trends traffic comparison chart:

2. Rakuten’s success factors: Aggressive pricing and wide diversification
The idea and main success factor for Rakuten was helping Japanese brick and mortar businesses that wanted to set up customized online storefronts by themselves. As early as around the end of the 1990s, CEO Mikitani began systematically undercutting prices of existing hosting services by up to 75-85% and combined this with an aggressive sales and consulting model. As a trade-off for cutting out middlemen, merchants had to pay upfront, which made it possible for Rakuten to maintain a positive cash flow. Until today, the site offers its merchants a number of services to make their lives easier (real-world seminars, a monthly merchant-only magazine, phone support etc.). In return, Rakuten pockets fixed “virtual real estate” fees from the 28,000+ merchants currently registered on the site, in addition to commission payments (2.6% of each retailer’s sales revenue).

In parallel, the company stepped away from its original B2B2C roots in the last years, quickly turning into a gigantic web conglomerate. And the company transformed more radically than Amazon did in the US: Rakuten acquired popular online portal Infoseek (Alexa Japan rank: 20) to drive traffic to the main site, established an auction service (now Japan’s third largest), provides online securities brokerage, bought an online travel service (Rakuten Travel is now Japan’s biggest hotel reservation site) and offers a blogging platform (the No. 3 in blogging-crazy Japan). In addition, there is a Rakuten credit card (nearly 2 million Japanese own one), a personal consumer credit service, an e-bank (Japan’s biggest), a ticket sales service, a real-world Rakuten baseball team, a popular golf court reservation sub-site etc. etc. You get the picture.

3. Rakuten Marketplace: 35 million items from $1 to $100,000
But despite the rapid diversification in recent years, Rakuten is still known mainly as an online shopping site for the Japanese. And in contrast to Amazon, they can get anything on Rakuten, from used $70,000 four ton-trucks, Gucci handbags, digital content (Amazon Japan doesn’t offer downloads), down to apples and oranges directly offered by regional farmers.

The price level is relatively low for many items, as many shops offer identical products and the collected setting allows for users to quickly compare prices. Shipping is generally free on all books, DVDs, CDs and similar media. Rakuten also has the so-called “Super Points” system in place, a reward program for members (you are not required to register to buy on the site). Amazon’s counter offer, “Amazon Point”, was established as late as 2007.

Here is the translated version of Rakuten Ichiba’s massive top page (click to enlarge):

4. Amazon Japan’s strong position
Seeing this cluttered top page (which isn’t regarded unusual in Japan at all), it’s interesting to notice Amazon resists the urge to change their globally uniform design approach to accommodate Japanese tastes (Amazon’s US site basically serves as a design blueprint for all their sites worldwide).

But Amazon isn’t doing business as usual in Japan, making additional investments in its subsidiary instead. Next month, the company will set up a new distribution center just outside Osaka (it will be Amazon’s biggest in Japan). In the last weeks, three new categories with some 130,000 items were added to the site. And it’s possible for Japanese retailers to open an online shop on Amazon since 2006 already.

Overall, Amazon has positioned itself very well in Japan, proving that foreign web companies can enter this country successfully. And they also show that being inferior in traffic doesn’t always translate to being (proportionally) inferior in sales. Amazon’s parent company doesn’t break down sales figures on a country level, but some sources [JP] estimate the Japanese subsidiary rakes in roughly 10% of Amazon’s total sales and income. Assuming this is true, this would bring sales in this country to around $1.9 billion and operating income to a handsome $84 million (even though just yesterday, Japanese tax authorities reportedly demanded back $119 million in taxes from the company for unreported income).

5. Rakuten’s internationalization efforts and English services
Rakuten has been talking about going international for years now, and they’re already testing waters in a handful of countries. In the US, Rakuten acquired New York-based e-commerce company LinkShare for $425 million four years ago (Rakuten USA itself is headquartered in Boston). Rakuten Taiwan and Rakuten Europe (in Luxembourg) were established last year. Rakuten Travel has expanded to Korea, Guam, Thailand and China.

International customers can already book hotels in many Asian countries through Rakuten Travel’s English interface (which is on Rakuten Japan and works very well). About a fourth of all items available for Japanese customers can be ordered from selected countries through a service called Rakuten International Shipping Services. Non-Japanese users can access Google-translated item pages (24 languages are currently supported), place an order, pay via credit card and then wait for direct delivery from Japan (it’s even possible for foreigners to collect Super Points).

This is just a makeshift solution, sure, but way better than what many other Japanese online retailers offer.

6. Conclusion
Rakuten says sales outside Japan currently account for less than 10% of total sales, and overseas sales are currently growing at an average of about 20% monthly. Mikitani regularly mentions Asia (China in particular) as the next big market for his company.

But the current economic crisis has triggered what seems to become a trend among online giants: selective internationalization. MySpace decimated non-US staff just recently, Facebook is rumored to have second thoughts about China and Germany-based business social network Xing last week decided to shelve expansion plans for the US and China.

That’s why my guess is Rakuten will avoid battling it out with Amazon in their core markets and focus on untapped countries or niche segments instead – despite those aggressive announcements of the past. (In January last year, for example, the company said it will make inroads into 27 different countries by 2013. Mikitani regularly claims his final aim is to build the world’s biggest Internet company.)

Things are going quite well in Japan, but on a global level, Rakuten will have a tough time. The big competitors will certainly not cede markets such as Latin America, Africa, India or South East Asia to them standing by and doing nothing. In the US and core markets in Europe, Amazon dominates. In China, Taobao already established itself with 120 million users.

For the time being, there shouldn’t be a realistic chance for external players to win these markets over. This is true even for a conglomerate like Rakuten and its charismatic leader (who, in addition, still has to deal with a pretty strong service called Amazon domestically).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.