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08.27.2012
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 start to see an increased focus on regulating and removing news aggregators that are particularly egregious in their use of copyrighted content without permission.
The Study
The survey included 1200 Japanese residents. More than a third of the people interviewed use the most popular news aggregators. While about 75% of them used news aggregator websites about once a week, nearly 18.5% of the people interviewed use these websites daily in order to keep updated on the latest news. One of the most surprising parts of this survey relates to how the use of news aggregators relates to television news coverage. 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 clipping, and actually stealing content is quite blurry and not established clearly. 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
There is no question that news aggregators offer numerous advantages. Particularly for the younger crowd, news aggregators are a handy source of entertainment and those that integrate social media also allow sharing and commenting news with friends online. With the kind of smartphone use that occurs in Japan, it is also quite natural for these kinds of websites to gain prominence since they are often more convenient to consult on a mobile device than traditional online news websites. 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 in today’s Japanese society, traditional media outlets still play a very important role in Japanese society. In fact, the vast majority of people interviewed in Japan considered that their 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 disproportionately 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 growing in Japan. Trends clearly show that use of news aggregators will definitely increase in the future as the younger generation starts to become the majority of Japan’s population. With news organizations like the AP starting to get into the news aggregator sector themselves, we will probably start to see traditional online news reporting being gradually replaced by a model derived from today’s news aggregators.
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:
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.
08.24.2012
Sophia is a mom of Emily, a 6-month old baby. She is a software engineer and works from home for a reputed software firm. While working in her home-office, her Apple iPhone beeps to indicate that a message has arrived. She checks the message that reads, “URGENT! Emily is out of her crib.” Sophia rushes to Emily’s room and put 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 changed the way we live- both literally, in terms of our emotional and physical well-being.
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 will build and transform user behavior, revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders.
What is Mobile cloud computing? 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?
People’s love for smartphones is growing. Smartphones, which is a versatile all-in-one communication device, is playing a far greater role in our lives and has replaced watches, cameras, alarms, music players, books and even laptops to a certain functional extent.
The Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy study states that nearly half (42 per cent) of America’s fourteen year and older population is now a smartphone owner. Similar to Swiss Army Knives, smartphones are now used to perform a variety of tasks including, but not limited to 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. The new technologies like cloud computing, virtualization, and mobility have created a lot of interest in companies of all sizes as it enables them to improve their ability to protect crucial information and recover from potential disasters such as floods or fires.
Benefits of mobile cloud computing:
Tech- savvy people 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.
Obstacles facing mobile cloud computing:
It is agreeable that smartphone usage is increasing at rapid pace, but one should not forget that there is still a large number of people who are 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. In addition, adaptive network monitoring is another major roadblock for this technology.
The abovementioned challenges are not easy to overcome, but service and network providers are working (both from communication as well as computing sides) to improve a user’s mobile cloud experience. All in all, the future for mobile cloud computing is surely bright, but consumers will have to be patient with some of its shortcomings, which should be addressed in the near future.
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.
08.23.2012
For quite some time, the visual effects and the animation industry stayed on the sidelines and watched as other industries moved into cloud computing. Then suddenly, the benefits became too large to be ignored. While visual effects have always relied heavily on large and flexible storage and abundant computing power it is only in recent years that almost every aspect of film production has become heavily dependent on cloud computing. Editing, storage and post production work is all carried out in the cloud.
In the early days there were some worries caused due to concerns about 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 that dealt with very large quantities of data could be wiped out if they did not protect their data adequately.
Visual Effects studios began to look at alternate means of managing and securing their data and the public cloud was positioned just right to catch their attention. 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 nearly instantaneously 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 very rapidly. This searchable database of tagged video is the backbone of the production and due to the sheer size and processing capability needed is something that only the cloud platform could achieve.
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 and then are 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 offering precisely this kind of service while being able to demonstrate strong security and manage version control of documents as well. Among many other users of this kind of cloud computing service, DreamWorks, Media Horse and Relativity Music Group are some well known names.
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 altogether. Service providers have worked with RAM and Flash to bring latency down to acceptable limits, the best service providers are able to achieve 0.1 millisecond.
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 and this will result in many more productions that would otherwise never have made it to the screen. More realistic 3-d and graphics are just the beginning of a new trend.
Cloud computing is fast becoming an inseparable component of the entertainment industry. Quality is going up all the time while costs are dropping. Think of this when you watch your next film.
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:
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.
08.22.2012
Japan has one of the biggest gaming industries in the whole world at the moment. A lot of Western social and gaming companies are trying to break in to Japan’s massive market of gamers because of the huge potential revenue from these consumers. However, the challenge that comes with entering this market is not an easy burden to take. Those who have tried and probably failed could attest that the Japanese market could be quite resistant to foreign invasion when it comes to their beloved games whether online or downloaded into their personal computers or mobile phones.
An excellent example of a slow reception of outside products would be Facebook. While the rest of the world is going crazy over this social media platform, the Japanese have developed their own social and gaming media that best provide what they want. The localized context of their games is much more attractive to Japanese gamers as well as the nature of using aliases instead of their real names.
So if a foreign company wants to make it big in the Japanese social gaming scene, there are various factors to consider when creating that strategic plan to promote your game in this country. Topping this list is the current culture of the Japanese when it comes to accessing their favorite games. The most effective approach to reach this market is by going mobile. It is a common scene in the streets of Japan to see a person using and playing in their mobile phones. A lot of them include games in their mobile phone payment plan because it is a common form of entertainment. And while Americans focus on social networking with featured games, the Japanese have games in the forefront of social media with chatting and messaging on the sidelines. Giving your games a local feel to adapt to their culture while being accessed on mobile phones is your biggest asset to lure those Japanese consumers.
The multi-billion dollar gaming industry in Japan has also hit its peak when social games featured monetization techniques wherein the gamer could purchase virtual goods embedded in the game. This definitely made a huge impact for Japanese gamers who enjoyed such a practice. 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 to include it in their game.
Perhaps a universal strategy not only applied to Japan but to the rest of the world is by having free games that could be downloaded either from their computers or mobile phones. Affordability is of course anyone’s concern whether you’re from the East or West. You could start by offering free trials for social game applications and then sell it for an economical fee to your customers. By getting advertisements placed in your games, you could rack up some profits in the mean time. You could also offer a premium content fee which is most often used in Japan.
Choosing what type of social game you have to develop for the Japanese market is also a crucial point when wanting to enter their gaming industry. There is a need to study and understand the kind of games that Japanese enjoy and patronize. Most of these games could involve but are not limited to puzzles, cards or role-playing. You have to know which would tickle their fancy to make them want to play it over and over again. If you still feel lost in making that strategic move, you can do what others have tried, which is tying up with or paying for services of a Japanese developer who knows how to make that game relevant to the local market. Another option is by merging with existing successful game makers in Japan to promote your game. By doing this, your game could be enhanced and advertised instantaneously when connected to a big name in the Japanese gaming scene.
No matter what your tactic is, the gaming industry in Japan is a huge undertaking to execute. 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 the benefits of this top-grossing industry that has taken over the gaming world.
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:
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.
