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Japan’s Digital Media Market: Opportunities for Future Expansion

The digital media market in Japan is huge and booming. This is made possible by Japanese youth who embrace all manners of new digital technologies for communication, socializing and business purposes.

Japanese use digital media in a variety of platforms: blogs, microblogging, social networking websites, bulletin board systems (BBS)/forums, instant messaging, video-sharing sites, search engines, e-commerce etc. The invention of mobile devices and smartphones has also helped increase the number of digital media users in the country, a trend that is expected to grow even as 3G and 4G devices are mass-produced.

Blogging is a popular activity in Japan, with even the Washington Post describing the Japanese as “wild bloggers”. Millions of Japanese are also reportedly engaged in microblogging on their cell phones and other hand-held devices. People blog about fashion, entertainment, sports and other non-controversial topics, while shying away from discussing knotty issues like politics and religious tension. The majority of bloggers in Japan do so anonymously, also tending to hide their identity in online forums.

Social media sites like Mixi, Facebook, Myspace and other less-known ones are springing up to catch Japanese users’ attention. Users are patronizing these sites to find out information about their preferred products/services, then using them to network with friends and business associates. A few Japanese businesses have turned to social media websites nowadays to market their services/products and win the hearts of new customers. There is no doubt that the use of social media technology in Japan will increase in the coming years as business owners seek ways to reduce the cost of marketing and advertizing.

As more and more Japanese people utilize e-commerce sites like Yahoo Japan, Rakuten and Amazon to purchase goods and merchandise, use of search engines to find products has definitely increased. A survey that was conducted in 2009 revealed that Yahoo Japan remains the most popular search engine in Japan, followed by the Google sites.

Similarly, Youtube has remained the most used site for video-sharing among Japanese people. This is followed by home-made video-sharing site named NicoNicoDouga, with an estimated 13 hours per view. Using the digital media for bulletin boards and forums is gaining popularity gradually, and more Japanese forum-posters or forum-managers will likely emerge in the coming years.

While all these instances point to a booming and prosperous digital media marketing in the near future, any new entrants (foreign companies, especially) into the country will immediately face two major obstacles:

1. Customizing services to suit Japanese customers who prefer to interact only in Japanese language;

1. Adoption of cloud computing to manage the bulk of data that will be generated, processed and stored in the course of operating in Japan.

While it is possible to easily localize services to satisfy customer requirements, most foreign entrants to the Japanese digital media market will have to contend with storing the large amount of electronic files, data, and digital content arising from their operations. They will also be required to provide a fast and reliable access to their services on a regular basis.

Cloud computing offers incomparable opportunity for companies to enlarge their storage capacity and increase service performance. Customers can confidently use digital media without worrying about losing important files or having personal information or data omitted due to lack of space available on some foreign servers.

For social media sites, a promising future means that they need to be ready for sudden traffic surges. In order to do this, they need a cloud host that has a high availability system. GMO Cloud gives an illustration of this configuration for sites that want to start with basic specs and eventually increase resources as requirements increase.

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About the Guest Author:

Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/

News Aggregators Quite Popular In Japan – Debate On Their Validity Continues

A survey by Dentsu Public Relations carried out last month showed that nearly twenty percent of Japanese people are heavy news aggregator users. These kinds of websites, known as matome saito in Japanese, collect news and information from various news sites in one convenient location. However, despite their popularity, their legitimacy has been questioned repeatedly due to the problems of recycling copyrighted content. As their popularity in Japan continues to increase, we will probably see increased focus on regulating and removing news aggregators that are egregious in unauthorized use of copyrighted content.

The Study

The survey included 1200 Japanese residents, more than a third of whom use the most popular news aggregators. While about 75% of them used news aggregator websites once a week, nearly 18.5% used these websites daily. Only about thirty percent of the people interviewed saw the news on television after seeing it online. This shows that in Japan, this medium has become an established news source, with nearly a third of the population receiving their news on these kinds of websites and on social media platforms. Most importantly, news aggregators often serve as a quick, information-packed diversion for younger Japanese residents, where the use of news aggregators was considerably higher than the average. By customizing the kinds of news they want to receive, they can find information they are interested in at a glance.

Are News Aggregator Sites Ethical?

News aggregator sites have been the subject of much debate in Japan. One of the most popular news boards in Japan, 2Channel, recently started to block websites and blogs that would collect their content. This is not only an ongoing problem in Japan, but also in the West. For example, the Associated Press (AP) has sued a news aggregator service recently because of problems with the way they use AP content without a license and charging their clients a fee. When it comes to these kinds of websites, the line between social media distribution of news headlines, news clippings, and actually stealing content is blurry. Search engines can be customized to act as news aggregators and actually create copies of copyrighted content, but this kind of use is actually accepted by the courts.

Advantages and Disadvantages of News Aggregator Use Over Traditional Media

Particularly for the younger crowd, news aggregators are a handy source of entertainment and those that integrate social media also allow sharing and commenting on news with friends online. With the unique kind of obsessive smartphone use in Japan, it is natural for these kinds of websites to gain prominence. However, news aggregators have their disadvantages as well, as was seen in the March 11 tsunami incident last year.

Although social media and smartphones are extremely important, traditional media outlets still play a very important role in Japanese society. In fact, the vast majority of people interviewed in Japan considered that television was their main source of information in the days following this natural disaster. In fact, more people used radio as their most important source of information than smartphones, probably due to numerous Internet outages and an overload of the mobile network. This anomaly is almost certainly due to a generational shift. Analyzing the numbers, it is clear that the younger generation’s use of mobile devices, news aggregators, and social media is staggeringly higher than older Japanese residents.

What This Tells Us About the Japanese Market

This disproportionate use of mobile devices as news sources indicates that there is a very important potential market in Japan. Trends clearly show that use of news aggregators will increase in future as the present younger generation starts to become the dominant force in Japan’s population. With news organizations like AP starting to get into the news aggregator sector themselves, we will probably see traditional online news reporting being gradually replaced by a model derived from today’s news aggregators.

For news aggregator site owners, a reliable server host is important in order to deliver unhinged quality service to those who want to be updated on current news and events. This feature is related to autoscaling and high availability. Read more about these features on GMO Cloud’s Features page.

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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.

Will Mobile Cloud Computing Ever Take Off?

Sophia is the mother of Emily, a 6-month old baby. She is a software engineer and works from home for a reputable software firm. While working in her home-office, her iPhone beeps to indicate that a message has arrived. She checks the message that reads, “URGENT! Emily is out of her crib.” Sophia thus rushes to Emily’s room and puts her back into her playpen. The Wi-Fi presence attached to the crib sensor transmitted the status of the baby to her iPhone application.

This is a hypothetical scenario, but the technology mentioned is not. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, VoIP phones and other off-the-shelf Wi-Fi devices have completely changed the way we live.

According to a report from IT research firm Gartner, cloud computing, social media, mobile technology and the ubiquity of information are converging to form a “nexus of forces” that transform user behavior, revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old models and creating new leaders.

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a mixture of networking, cloud computing and mobile computing. It is a rapidly developing segment of the mobile market.

Why  is mobile cloud computing growing?

Smartphones, versatile all-in-one communication devices, have nigh replaced watches, cameras, alarms, music players, books and even laptops.

The Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy study states that 42 per cent of America’s 14-and-upward population is now a smartphone owner. Similar to Swiss Army Knives, smartphones are used to perform texting, calling, taking pictures & making video clips, gaming, playing music, internet browsing and sending emails, making transactions for work or personal use.

When the term “internet everywhere” is becoming a reality, smartphones, cloud computing and web access are going side by side. New technologies like cloud computing, virtualization, and mobility have created interest among companies of all sizes, enabling them to protect crucial information and recover from potential disasters such as floods or fires.

Benefits of mobile cloud computing:

• 1) Mobile cloud computing offers access to a wide range of applications on a need basis.

• 2) It eliminates the need of being tied up to a single cell phone service provider.

• 3) Mobile devices do not have sufficient storage capacity. Mobile cloud computing enables users to store/access large amounts of data in cloud. So, computing and storage will be in the cloud and the presentation of product and/or service will be on device.

• 4) Running applications in the cloud is an effective way to improve reliability. When the mobile device is lost or destroyed, the data stored in cloud is preserved.

• 5) Service providers can easily add and expand an application.

• 6) Other benefits include mobile commerce, mobile learning, mobile healthcare, mobile gaming, photo sharing, keyword and video searching.

Tech-savvy users are empowered by the cloud as it offers more flexibility and enables them to determine their usage pattern. Certain sectors like media, technology, entertainment and “knowledge industries” have shown wide adaptation of mobile services. Find out cloud technology’s high availability features and its other advantages, visit GMO Cloud’s feature page.

Obstacles facing mobile cloud computing:

Smartphone usage is increasing at rapid pace, but a large number of people are still using feature phones. These lower-end phones will not disappear any time soon, and phone manufacturers might come up with smarter built-in web browsers that can hinder the growth of mobile cloud computing.

The main issues with mobile cloud computing are non-availability of wireless bandwidth and fluctuations in network service delivery. Adaptive network monitoring is another major roadblock for this technology.

The above mentioned challenges are not easy to overcome, but service and network providers are working to improve a user’s mobile cloud experience. The future for mobile cloud computing is surely bright, but consumers will have to be patient with some of its shortcomings, soon to be addressed.

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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.

The Entertainment Industry Bats for the Cloud

While visual effects have always relied heavily on large and flexible storage, it is only recently that almost every aspect of film production has become heavily dependent on  cloud computing. Editing, storage and post-production work are all carried out in the cloud.

In the early days there were some worries caused by concerns about cloud security, bandwidth and loss of control. Even though hundreds of other industries were already storing terabytes of data in the cloud, the entertainment industry stayed aloof. It was only after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that people became aware that organizations dealing with very large quantities of data could be wiped out without adequate data protection.

Visual Effects studios began to look at alternate means of managing and securing data, and the public cloud was perfectly positioned.  Studios realized that they could use the processing power of the cloud to reduce their own IT expenditure besides just getting reliable storage. Specialist cloud computing data centers that offered studios petabytes of data (1 million GB) and access any frame of the movie quickly began to emerge.

Other service providers realized that entertainment businesses know very little about information technology and began to offer instantaneous plug-and-play solutions. MTV, Shine Group and BBC are all heavy users of cloud computing. These plug-and-play solutions are extremely easy and intuitive to use and require almost no trained manpower.

Reality TV shows the way

Yet another big fan of cloud service is reality TV. The format of cloud services allows reality TV producers to store enormous amounts of raw footage, tag it rapidly and locate specific scenes with ease. This searchable database of tagged video is the backbone of production. Only a cloud platform can satisfy the sheer size and processing capability needed.

Contract Management

Those who know something about the entertainment industry are aware that there are a large number of contracts that need to be negotiated for every production. These contracts have to be refined and approved before being subjected to negotiation and consequent re-editing. For this to be done on-line there is a requirement for collaborative file- sharing and document management.

This requires specialist capabilities that companies are rarely able to find in-house. You need to set up an online conference room where participants can discuss and share documents as the negotiation progresses. It is no surprise to find that there are a number of companies that specialize in this service while being able to demonstrate strong security and manage version control of documents. Well-known users of this cloud computing service include DreamWorks, Media Horse and Relativity Music Group.

Vfx is supreme

However, it is the visual effects groups that are the best-known and most powerful advocates of cloud computing. Many studios feared that connecting to a data center over the Internet would make work painfully slow and perhaps kill the creative process. Service providers have worked with RAM and Flash to bring latency down to acceptable limits, with the best service providers achieving 0.1 milliseconds.

DreamWorks uses a 15,000 processor core cloud service to animate its characters. Just four seconds of animation takes 96 frames and these take nearly 10 hours of computing time to ensure that the animation is precisely as the director has visualized it. Once that is done, the 15,000 core processors get to work stitching the frames together. Doing this kind of work with only in-house equipment meant millions of dollars in costs. Doing it in the cloud is much cheaper and needs very little setup time.

Democratizing the Industry

The cloud is also making it possible for small producers to experiment like never before. It has brought down the costs of production, resulting in many productions that would otherwise never have made it to the screen. More realistic 3D and graphics are just the beginning of a new trend.

Cloud computing is fast becoming an indispensable component of the entertainment industry. One of the reasons is because of its capability to meet system demands of the industry. Check out the High Availability configuration example of GMO Cloud and see how cloud is able to do what traditional hosting cannot. Quality is going up all the time while costs are dropping. Think carefully about this when you watch your next film.

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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.

Making It Big in Japan’s Gaming Industry

Many Western social and gaming companies are trying to break in to Japan’s massive market. The challenge that comes with entering this market is huge. Those who have tried and failed (think Microsoft Xbox!) can attest that this market is quite resistant to foreign invasion, especially if poorly-planned.

While the rest of the world is going crazy over this social media platform, the Japanese have developed their own social and gaming media. The localized context of their games is much more attractive to gamers, as well as the nature of using aliases instead of their real names.

Foreign companies wishing to make it big in the Japanese social gaming scene must consider several factors. Topping this list is the current culture of Japanese when it comes to accessing their favorite games. The most effective approach is by going mobile, as mobile phone companies include games in their mobile phone payment plans! Giving your games a local feel to adapt to Japanese culture while being accessed on mobile phones is your biggest task in order to lure Japanese consumers.

The multi-billion dollar gaming industry in Japan hit its peak when social games featured monetization techniques where the gamer could purchase virtual goods embedded in the game. However, a recent controversy has sprung up over the legality of such a money-making technique. Anyone wanting to enter the local market has to understand the nature and effects of using this gacha approach in their games before deciding whether or not to include it.

Perhaps a good strategy is for free games to be downloaded either from computers or mobile phones. You could start by offering free trials for social game applications and then sell the game for an minimal fee. Advertisements placed in games could rack up further profit. You could also offer a premium content fee, often used in Japan.

Choosing what type of social game to develop for the Japanese market is also crucial. There is a need to study and understand the kind of games that Japanese enjoy and patronize. Most of these games involve puzzles, cards or role-playing. If lost, you can do what others have tried: tie up with a Japanese developer who knows how to make that game relevant to the local market. Another option is merging with successful game makers in Japan to promote your game. One example is GMO Cloud America – whose mother company is based in Japan. Alongside their cloud service, they can also provide expert advice and assistance on Japan market entry. View their Game Server configuration example and see the recommended setup for cloud servers.

No matter what your tactic is, entering the gaming industry in Japan entails a huge undertaking. It is not a simple market to penetrate but once you know which routes to take based on research and marketing strategies, you can reap huge benefits.

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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.