GMO Cloud

Social Media in Japan

Unlike in other Asian and Western countries, social network sites in Japan did not commence until in 2003 with Goco as the pioneer. A year later, Mixi came to the limelight, followed by MySpace in 2006, 2nd Life in 2007, and Twitter in 2008. Each of these social networks was successful one way or another. Each also shares common features yet is distinguished from the rest.

Photo upload was among the primordial features of these networks, where account owners and friends are able to view and make comments about photos, and where everyone can connect to others. There is also the community interaction. Blogging is another feat which allows account owners to express emotions and thoughts. Shout-out is a micro-version of blogging.

While at the beginning, the social media sites were patronized mostly by teenagers and college students, the introduction of LinkedIn in 2003 created a new market: professionals, entrepreneurs and corporations. In Japan, the functionality of social media gears towards financial, informative and physical gains. Social networks have become a source of useful information for job applicants, employers, and entrepreneurs.

Communication becomes an integral part of every social network. This communication feature was exemplified in the wake of catastrophes that struck Japan in early 2011. These network sites were the platform of exchanging crucial information between regular Japanese and agents of government for rescue operations, and between Japan and other countries for relief operations.

Facebook and Twitter Give Faces to Media Users

While 58 per cent (based on comScore) of Internet users use social media, the people who engage in social network activities did so anonymously. In a local survey conducted in March 2012, real name usage has increased from 5 to 44 per cent in one year.

The launch of Facebook in 2005 attracted high school students for age-relevant networking. Facebook slowly proved its worth to other markets, especially the corporations and entrepreneurship, both of which realized the need to make changes to reach out to liberal audiences, who dare to reveal their real names online. In 2010, Facebook introduced an interface change plus an office in Tokyo.

As of March 2012, Facebook had 10 million monthly Japanese users, double 2011. These statistics put Facebook as the second most popular social network in Japan after Mixi with 15 million subscribers. Mixi, threatened with the progress of Facebook teamed up with Twitter. The duo has not disappointed their followers and subscribers thus far.

On the other hand, Japanese people are easily drawn to the features of Facebook and Twitter as they are able to connect to the other side of the world, and businesses reach out to their consumers more easily and quickly. Two of the popular social networks that served as a key tool for communications during the last earthquake in Japan were Facebook and Twitter.

Slow but Sure

Despite being a voracious technology consumer, Japan is a late bloomer in social networking. Japanese people are more inclined towards gaming in different consoles including smart phones, and promise a lucrative and competitive market. For example, as Japan is already saturated with mobile gaming platforms, Facebook takes advantage in providing effective tools for local business – an instant success for local entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, Twitter, available in Japanese language two years ago, supports individualism, a characteristic of Japanese onliners. Best known as a micro-blogging site, Twitter provides an attractive platform for Japanese people from all walks of life.

The impact of social media from the Western world may be slowly surfacing in Japan. But social media in Japan will remain reflective of the local culture: history—rich, dynamic and colorful.

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About the Guest Author:

Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

The State of Cloud Computing in Japan

A country report on the state of cloud computing in Japan makes for good reading. The country comes in at 1st place in the BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, which looks at accumulated points of several different aspects of cloud computing and grades countries accordingly. The various aspects considered were legislative readiness, anti-cybercrime laws, management of intellectual property rights, interoperability, international harmonization of cloud computing rules and infrastructure and statistical indicators:

• Laws and regulations concerning collection and use of personal data – Japan has had a Law for Protection of Personal Data since 2005. There is also a law on this subject that is specifically applicable to the public sector.

 

• Scope of coverage – the data privacy laws are comprehensive and cover both private and public sectors. There are certain relaxations for organizations that hold less than 5000 records, but these relaxations do not interfere with the basic provisions of data security.

 

• Compatibility with Privacy Principles of the EU data protection directives – Japanese laws are broadly based on EU directives and OECD guidelines. However, the exemption that Japan provides to small datasets is not part of EU or OECD guidelines.

 

• Japanese data privacy laws are compliant with APEC Privacy framework and Japan is a full member of the APEC.

 

• Recourse to legal remedy – there are clear legal remedies available to individuals. Article 13 of the Japanese Constitution lays down the groundwork for this and says that all people shall be respected as individuals. In the past there have been occasions when the constitutional provisions have been tested and upheld against the government.

 

• Role of independent regulatory agencies – while there is no single regulatory agency, every major government department has its own watchdog. These agencies can even ask for reports from the private sector and issue orders for corrective action.

 

• Controllers of data are not required to register themselves with the government. In general, they are free to work independently.

 

Japan has an exceptionally high penetration of broadband. By 2010, over 90% of Japanese homes had broadband exceeding connectivity at higher than 30 MBPS. It also has the highest number of fiber-to-home connections – and a stated target of covering 100% homes with fiber giving greater than 100 MBPS connectivity, taking cloud computing far beyond most developed world dreams.

One great cloud success story is the migration of the Japanese postal service to use cloud computing. The Japan post network has 244,000 post offices and more than 100 million clients. Prior to 2007, it was getting bogged down with a slowing network and having problems servicing its six million insurance clients and 14 billion individual posted items.

A new solution was needed. Shutting down – even temporarily – was not an option and something transformative was required. After the postal service was privatized in 2007, a decision was taken to move to the cloud. A SaaS / Paas combination was chosen with some services being purchased as they were and others being written specifically for the postal service.

All 24,000 post offices were given connectivity. An iterative model of development was followed that allowed each to test the new services and offer comments in real time. This shortened development time considerably and enabled developers to respond to feedback in real time. One after the other, services were migrated to the cloud and the entire migration – consisting of billions of records – was completed within the same year.

Cloud computing in Japan has pushed the level of service delivery to levels that are unprecedented for public offices. Developers should take note.

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About the Guest Author:

Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.

Performance of Western Social Media Giants in Japan

The early establishment of Twitter as a social media force in Japan and the meteoric rise of Facebook in the first two quarters of 2012 are two cases that should be studied in order to gain valuable insight into the Japanese market. Facebook went from having a tiny market share, barely breaking two percent, to recently overtaking the biggest local social media network Mixi with fifteen million Japanese users. For a while, this market seemed impenetrable. However, thanks to a strong marketing strategy, Facebook is on a clear upward trend and may conceivably overtake Twitter in the next year.

Culture is a big part of social media success in Japan

Japan is one of the most active countries online. While this should logically mean that social media networks like Facebook would have immediate success, the culture is such that it is easy to fail in the Japanese markets. This is because social networking is a very big deal in Japan and the Japanese social media giant Mixi seemed unstoppable only a couple of years ago. Sites like Mobage-Town and Gree, which combine social media networking with Japan’s love for video games, have a similarly large market share.

Taking a look at Twitter’s success in Japan

While domestic networks are important in Japan, Twitter became very popular early on. In fact, Japan is one of Twitter’s largest markets due to its popularity with more than eighteen million Japanese people. So, why did Twitter succeed almost immediately while Facebook stagnated? The fact is, Facebook had a time disadvantage.

When Facebook was just being founded, Mixi was already an important part of the Japanese social media market. Mixi was created as a Japanese version of Friendster, which was quickly driven out of the market by Facebook in the United States. However, in Japan Mixi thrived, along with the other social networks that are more game oriented. This was the first obstacle for Facebook: they were competing against social network companies that had years of advantage in a very particular market. Twitter entered the Japanese market back in 2008, rapidly adding Japanese language to its platform (the first non-English Twitter language, in fact), and offering a new option for social media users in Japan.

How Japan’s cultural considerations initially hindered Facebook’s advances

One of the main aspects of the main Japanese social networks is anonymity. Japan’s computer users value their online anonymity and there is a strong culture of creating online characters using pseudonyms and handles in order to stay anonymous. Twitter also has this advantage, allowing computer users to hide their real life identity behind a user name. The main problem with Facebook is that it is geared towards interacting with friends, meaning that they need to know who you are in order to find you. Social media networks in Japan are, instead, centered around community pages that receive huge amounts of anonymous visitors. In these kinds of online locations, your own identity isn’t as important as with Facebook.

What can we learn from Facebook’s meteoric rise in Japan?

Ultimately, Facebook focused its efforts on adding features that would appeal to Japanese users. They strengthened their mobile platform, which had a huge effect on the social capabilities of this network. They also added small changes that were specific to the Japanese market. For example, blood type (many Japanese people believe that you can divine a person’s personality from their blood type), and Facebook in Japan added a way to share this information with your Facebook friends. While there is no question that Mixi still has more subscriptions and has a stronger mobile platform than Facebook, this social network is now competing actively against Mixi, surpassing it in PC users and in active users.

Social media success in Japan requires several elements that can work against newcomers or companies not knowledgeable about Japanese culture:

• Getting to know the well-established local social media giants and offering something that they are not particularly good at.

 

• Understanding the importance of localization. Not only with the language but with regional quirks involving website design and cultural considerations.

 

• Japanese social media users require a strong mobile platform. Any successful social media network in Japan will need to be portable and mobile most of all.

 

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About the Guest Author:

Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.

Cloud Computing: What Next for SMBs?

Cloud computing is no longer a name associated with big IT houses. The picture has changed dramatically in the past five years. From mere technology to supreme collator of different business procedures, cloud computing has evolved as the best resource for start-up companies, irrespective of geographical location. Additionally, non-IT companies have started to leverage cloud computing to run business efficiently. Most remarkably, suppliers and manufacturers can now work on a common global interface thanks to cloud computing. But what really makes cloud computing the technology of the future is its potential to create new revolutions in the Small and Medium Business (SMB) sectors.

SMB’s are predominantly relying on Software as a Service (Saas), facilitated by cloud computing in conjunction with data virtualization. The reason is the huge reduction in infrastructure costs that requires much less hardware components to be installed. According to a survey report by Gartner the SaaS market will increase to nearly $10.5 Billion by 2014, one of the biggest enterprise service growth stories in recent times.

Applications developed to support SaaS models are proliferating among enterprises worldwide, especially among start-up companies. A recent survey published by Techaisle reaffirms this growing affinity between SaaS solutions and SMB units, finding that SMB’s praised the core business productivity tools that cloud based SaaS models offer, probably due to cost savings.

in a shaky world economy, financial stability is of paramount importance to SMB organisations. There is a need to reduce initial capital investments made in infrastructure, and ensure that the business pays for only the resources it needs. Cloud computing makes it possible for SMB organizations to achieve this. If they were to follow a business model of their own by investing in unique proprietary resources, expensive redundancies would occur.

Recently, Microsoft sponsored a study of about 3000 Small and Medium sized business enterprises from among 13 nations. The survey conducted by Edge Strategies pointed out that SMB’s are ever willing to adopt benefits of cloud computing and want to maximise profits by adopting SaaS models to reduce capital expenditure. According to 54% of surveyed SMB units, SaaS has reduced expenses tremendously. 59% of surveyed organisations also reported increases in productivity. 69% agreed that their business future looks brighter due to the cloud.

Technical feasibility is definitely a reason why SMB’s are willing to adopt cloud computing on an unprecedented scale. Heads of SMB’s need not be responsible for hardware as well as software installation and maintenance, as they are only using an interface, which provides them with all necessary resources. Location independence, faster services and device independence are all reasons key reasons why SMB’s prefer cloud-based business models today.

It is not only big IT enterprises that benefit from cloud computing, but SMB’s aswell.

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About the Guest Author:

Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.

Smartphones are the Future of Social Networking

The world today is becoming more portable, more mobile. A decade ago, the smartphone was a thing of future. Everyone used to see PDA’s from Sony Ericsson and Motorola as phones from the future because they revolutionized the mobile phone segment by introducing pressure-sensing touchscreens.

Today, we love smartphones, chatting, sending messages and being connected. All of those things are brought together by the idea of a tiny device that has replaced the need of physical objects including camera, calculators, navigation units/maps, alarm clock, camcorder, calendar, flashlight, newspaper and even radio.

However, what brought about the mad rush in the smartphone market is still an unanswered question. Many hail the iPhone from Apple, whereas others cite Android OS from Google as the crucial lease of life injected into the smartphone market.

Smartphones have become cheaper and will become more affordable. They have changed the way people see portable information as well as the internet. According to comScore, three out of five US smartphone owners of ages 13 and older access social networking or blog sites. The usage of social media platforms is on the increase thanks to the growth of smartphones and today the phrase ‘mobile social media management’ is a key buzzword. The small keypad on the smartphone makes texting easy on popular networking applications like Facebook.

A new study by Flurry  reveals that today people spend more time on social networking websites via their smartphones as compared to gaming. When compared with the same period in 2011, current usage has jumped by 60%, which is encouraging for social media platforms as they can now focus on providing more mobile-friendly content and applications.

Today it is all about one-touch solutions. Whatever software service you may require is readily available either online or offline. Both the categories together make up the smartphone application market, which is expanding in big leaps every year. Enterprises are finding huge marketing potential in smartphone applications as these apps can convey business deals, offers and services more accurately to potential customers. Location-based marketing and sales is possible because of the high levels of portability smartphones offered.

A recent World Bank and InfoDev study puts some amazing facts about smartphone usages. According to the report, nearly 75% of the global population has access to some form of mobile telephone communication. Over 30 billion mobile app downloads took place in 2011 in the combined OS category consisting of iOS, Android and Windows. (There are proprietary Java-based and other platform-based OS available for smartphones too).

The prominence of smartphones in social media is evident from Facebook’s recent acquisition of Instagram for nearly $1 Billion. Facebook values the importance of smartphones and the impact a smartphone application like Instagram can have on its overall brand image. Applications streamline information throughout mobile social media and hence facilitate easy access and modification of content in different social feeds.

The rise in smartphone popularity has definitely changed the way we describe the terms ‘internet’ and ‘globalization’. Cheaper tariffs, higher comfort and strong interfaces are what mark out smartphones as the device of the future.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the Guest Author:

Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.