September 6th, 2012
Like in every other country, businesses in Japan are gradually veering away from the traditional methods of advertising and switching to inexpensive and widely broadcast digital methods. Internet has been regarded as the chief beneficiary of this switch when compared with other means of digital advertising.
In a report published by Dentsu (2009) and shown below, it is indicated that the amount spent on advertising by traditional media dwindled by 14.3%, while there was a corresponding increase in the spending on Internet advertising. And this trend seems to have been upswing since then; now, Japanese businesses are expanding their stakes on Internet advertising because of its comparative advantage and cost efficiency.
Though, it is inferred that mobile advertising (using mobile phones and other telephony media) grew considerably in Japan lately more than Internet advertising (web-based/PC one), but there is hope that more people will turn to the Internet in the near future as many indications point to the fact that many Japanese consumers now rely on Internet search engines to find relevant information about goods/services they are interested in purchasing.
Apart from being cost-efficient, Internet advertising offers broader coverage, reaching so many people within a very short period of time. And it has been discovered that search engine advertising seems to do better than banners and other forms of display Internet advertising. The good news, though, is that Internet advertising enjoys higher production rate when compared with traditional advertising—meaning, more Internet advertisements can hit the market faster than their corresponding traditional advertisements.
With a firm projection that the Internet advertising will become widely utilized by Japanese businesses in not a distant future, there is an accompanying requirement for proper data storage, flexible access to digital content and smooth retrieval procedure. This is where cloud computing comes in; it is an indispensable technology that must be adopted for optimum performance and quick business operation.
Arguably, more access to the internet indicates that more digital files, content and data will be generated, and not many businesses are prepared to handle such unexpected hike in the volume of data received, processed and stored for easy retrieval. Adopting cloud computing will help businesses solve the problem of sudden overcrowding of data that may cause their servers to crash. Cloud technology will not only guarantee perpetual business activities, it will also maintain a great culture of dependability and trust.
In Japanese business circles, building business trust is a non-negotiable aspect of business practices. And the best approach for building trust is to provide uninterrupted supply of goods and services that consumers will grow to like and constantly request for. Cloud computing will help businesses keep their promises of timely response and delivery.
There is no doubt that Internet advertising will assist business owners in Japan to personalize their advertisements. This is almost impossible in traditional advertising where advertisers follow rigid procedures for formatting and publication. Internet advertising allows businesses to personalize the content and appearance of their advertisements for better pitching to their target customers.
Cloud computing is believed to be attractive nowadays to businesses that adopt it worldwide because there have been improvements in the issue of data protection/security. More so, the decrease in the cost of maintaining IT infrastructure and personnel makes cloud computing a must-try technology for businesses that aspire to cut its overhead cost of operation and maximize profits.
On a more positive note, cloud computing has the power to attract more customers due to its wide distribution power; it can also help businesses to retain those customers through the delivery of timely, efficient and reliable services that will win their loyalty for years to come. Interestingly enough, unbending loyalty is one of the rare attributes of Japanese customers that many service providers in other countries truly admire.
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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/
September 5th, 2012
A few months ago, the talk of social media gaming in Japan was centered around the new government regulations regarding kompu gacha. This mechanic was included in games by some of the biggest game social media games in Japan, including companies like GREE, Zynga, Klab, Konami, Sega, and Namco Bandai. Although the news caused shares to plummet and widespread panic about the future of social gaming in Japan, a few months later we’re starting to see that the effect of regulations on these companies’ bottom lines was minimal. Although there is no question that the gacha ruling did impact these companies’ revenues, their numbers a few months after the incident are looking quite healthy.
Understanding the basics of kompu gacha
Mobile gaming in Japan is an extremely lucrative industry. One of the reasons for this is that many games incorporate what is known as gacha. This is usually a game mechanic involving a micro-transaction in exchange for random in-game items. Some game developers in Japan depend on gacha to the extent that about half of their revenue comes from this practice. In fact, this practice started to spread from Japan and many of these developers started to establish gacha successfully in North America (for example, Rage of Bahamut by DeNA immediately comes to mind.)
Kompu gacha goes a step farther (“kompu” means “complete” in English.) In the case of kompu gacha, players are rewarded for putting together sets of items, usually very rare items. In fact, getting whole sets can be quite expensive, running into the hundreds of thousands of yen. However, the addictive nature of these kinds of practices prompted the Japanese Consumer Affairs Agency to act by regulating these kinds of games. Due to the fact that kompu gacha is such an important percentage of many of these companies’ revenues, it has lent itself to abuse, leading to many complaints from consumers. Most of these complaints deal with children having easy access to gacha in games, often purchasing hundreds of thousands of yen of in-game items in only a few days.
The predicted impact of regulation on the Japan’s social gaming industry
Pressures from the public and from the media caused many of the major gaming companies to self-regulate. However, the government stepped in due to this practice’s close resemblance with gambling. While the regulation is not particularly large, it was predicted to have a huge impact on the industry. After all, kompu gacha was a key profit generator for companies like GREE and DeNA. The stock in these companies plummeted by twenty percent after news got out and analysts predicted losses of up to fifty percent in these companies’ profits! More importantly, most Japanese social gaming companies are in the process of expanding into the United States market. This raised concerns on the impact of gacha regulations on the North American market.
Impact of gacha regulations lower than expected
Although the media covered the initial news of gacha regulations extensively, the exact regulations on kompu gacha are yet to be made public. However, as major social gaming companies in Japan release their mid-year numbers, the impact of regulations was considerably lower than expected. Although the media was predicting huge losses just a few months ago, most social gaming companies in Japan have reported profits, some (such as DeNA) with impressive growth of around twenty percent. This growth is all the more impressive considering that companies like DeNA and GREE have already stopped using kompu gacha mechanics almost entirely, despite the fact that specific regulations have not been disclosed yet. It seems that spending on virtual money has allowed companies to overcome the loss of kompu gacha on their games. However, it is entirely possible that the full impact of the loss of kompu gacha will be felt during the rest of the year.
Is kompu gacha really necessary for success?
If one thing has been proven in the last months is that kompu gacha is not an essential element for profiting in the Japanese social media gaming market. While smaller companies started to abuse and manipulate this unsavory aspect of social media gaming, the largest players have proven that to be successful in social gaming, it is necessary to have strong fundamentals. These three basic points of building a successful gaming company in Japan include:
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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.
September 4th, 2012
“Please help, save me! Do something!” These are simple messages that people convey when they experience a natural disaster like the 2011 Japanese Tohoku Earthquake and consequent Tsunami. Natural disasters like floods, tsunami, tornadoes, hurricanes or man-made (or technological) hazards are difficult to predict and to fully prepare for. These disastrous events can occur anytime, anywhere.
A natural disaster or man-made disaster of intense magnitude can disrupt power supply, destroy hardware infrastructure, or limit connectivity and can cause entire business establishments to tumble down. For a country like Japan, which is among the world’s most technologically advanced nations, the impacts of outages in data centers can be catastrophic. This scenario was a testimony for the growing need for effective cloud disaster prevention and backup strategies in order to combat such catastrophic events. Most Japanese enterprises have adopted the latest cloud-based data management and business models and when tragedy struck, it delivered a key blow to all their business processes, rendering millions using their services stuck in the uncertainty without any means to carry out their activities.
Loss Prevention:
Disasters are inevitable, but the question is: Are you prepared? According to a study by Gartner, 80 percent of all companies that experience a major disaster will go out of business if they cannot gain access to their data within 24 hours. As far as cloud computing is concerned, there are several key aspects to make note of while the initial infrastructure for such business model is planned and implemented. As with any issue, prevention is better than cure and wiser methods to prevent data loss or information damage is a much safer way to combat outages in cloud services rather than having to assemble every piece of information from scratch after the disaster has occurred.
During the great tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011, one of the biggest mistakes made by Japanese businesses was that their data centers and cloud infrastructure was all set up at seismically sensitive and disaster prone geographical locations. If this infrastructure was set up at a location that is usually immune to natural disasters, then the chances of service disruptions due to disasters would have been minimized.
Identify the disaster recovery plan:
Having an effective disaster recovery procedure is a key factor in this context. For countries like Japan, which often lie in the war path of nature’s forces, it is wise for businesses to have an effective disaster recovery procedure prepared and documented as soon as they shift to modern age business models such as cloud computing-based operations.
Decisions should be made as to who will head the recovery team, how many members should be present in the recovery team, what kind of software and hardware tools are required for recovery, the costs involved in the entire recovery procedure, estimation of time required for every individual recovery module as well as the total time for the entire recovery procedure, criticality and priority of tasks should be documented so that higher priority tasks with high criticality can resume their services before lower priority tasks as well as tasks depended on these high priority tasks. These procedures may seem easy to read, but require months of effort and teamwork to formulate an effective Recovery Decision strategy.
Decisions should be made as to who will head the recovery team, how many members should be present in the recovery team, what kind of software and hardware tools are required for recovery, the costs involved in the entire recovery procedure, estimation of time required for every individual recovery module as well as the total time for the entire recovery procedure, criticality and priority of tasks should be documented so that higher priority tasks with high criticality can resume their services before lower priority tasks as well as tasks depended on these high priority tasks. These procedures may seem easy to read, but require months of effort and teamwork to formulate an effective Recovery Decision strategy.Periodic drills carried out for disaster recovery procedures would be a very intuitive option as the recovery team will then be well prepared and know exactly what to do in the event of a catastrophe without having to wait for instructions and vital information at a time when speed of operation is more important than anything else. Working on live scenarios of recovery would provide enough expertise for recovery staff to deal with once a catastrophe occurs.
A major factor to note is that, recovery of cloud-based business models is one of the most critical tasks as far as a modern business enterprise is concerned. No data should be lost or damaged and the procedures should be completed as fast as possible because every second of service disruption can prove to be fatal for the businesses future. As such, technical staff with proper expertise should be deployed and enterprises should not take chances with any aspect of recovery.
So, enterprises in a modern country like Japan should always be on the alert when it comes to natural disasters and they should put in every effort to ensure that their services should not be disrupted and if disrupted, they should be restored without any loss of information as soon as possible.
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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.
September 3rd, 2012
Not so long ago, only the very large companies could afford to set up ERP systems. The reasons were simple – costs were high, risks were even higher and some implementations even resulted in abject failure and bankruptcy. The benefits were also correspondingly high and any company with a successful ERP would be operating at a different plane altogether. Small and medium businesses simply could not think of these solutions.
The situation is very different now. ERP delivered as a service – essentially a subset of SaaS has changed the game and leveled the field. SaaS by itself is seeing growth rates of 25.5% and will hit revenues of $40 billion by 2014, nearly 34% of all software will be utilized over the cloud and this growth would continue for some time to come. Research shows that although ERP in the cloud was just 2% of the cloud computing market in 2010 – 2011, this is a field that has begun to evolve and its market share would increase to 21% by 2015. Therefore ERP moving to the cloud is not an unexpected phenomenon.
Battling an uncertain economy
In an uncertain economy, companies have much to gain by embracing the efficiencies and process visibility that ERP can bring. With ERP in the cloud, companies are able to lower the cost of ownership and if ever the company wants to move to on premise hosted systems, the cloud SaaS vendor provides assistance with the migration process.
There used to be a feeling that on-premise ERP systems were more capable and . offered greater functionality. This is no longer true. Most cloud ERPs are able to tailor their offerings to handle any specific requirements. Security has ceased to be a stumbling block and availability of systems is at par or higher than that of in-premise systems.
Going Hybrid helps
Many businesses have experimented with hybrid ERPs. This means that some part of the ERP system works in the public cloud and others – perhaps the ones that deal with what the company considers its key capabilities – are maintained in-house or in a private cloud. Such an approach is more readily accepted by conservative Boards. They would rather try the less critical modules first and if the experience is good, then they would move more critical modules online as they get more confident.
Research quoted above also showed that nearly 79% of respondents were looking to reduce their TCO of ERP. 54% of the small and medium businesses polled also wanted to avoid procuring new servers, hardware and software to set up the ERP. Other advantages are –
While all other ‘traditional’ advantages of the cloud remain and are not being discussed here due to paucity of space, there are some areas to watch out for as well.
Control over data – It is important to be careful about how your data is being stored in the ERP database. It is worth checking how easy it would be to switch from Vendor A to B at some time in the future. You do not want your data to be stored in a proprietary format that can only be read through the vendor’s own application.
Managing your Service Level Agreement – Your SLA must clearly spell out the vendor’s responsibilities. The standard parameters of availability, etc. must be there, but it is equally important to ensure clauses like modifications to meet your specific needs, assistance during migration to in-house infrastructure or to another vendor and so on.
Managing the process – Simply because another agency is manning the data center does not mean that you can afford to sit back and relax. A certain amount of core competence in ERP management is still essential. There is training to be done all the time to make new entrants aware of the ERP and how it is to be used and work is to be done to identify areas of improvements and upgrades. These upgrades and improvements have to be an ongoing process and make your ERP grow and become more effective.
In the final analysis – An ERP solution in the cloud is a great leveler and gives small and medium industries the resources they need to compete with multinationals in niche areas. With the benefits of ERP and the agility that comes with being small, these businesses can grow and prosper.
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.
September 1st, 2012
The new budding technology, otherwise known as cloud computing is attached to multiple advantages including efficiency, accessibility and ease of use. This entry explains some of these advantages as one of our engineers gives concrete illustrations of some of the processes that make up the dynamics of cloud computing.
Cloud Computing in a Nutshell
The great idea behind cloud computing is the separation of the software and hardware. Before cloud, in order to put up a website, one would buy a server, have it setup and OS installed by a technician, and send it off to the data-center to be tucked into a rack with power, network, and cooling. Now software designers can concentrate on the OS and their software while the provider takes care of the physical hardware.
How? They make sure that the physical hardware underlying the virtual machines keeps running. If that is working well, accessibility and cloud flexibility services to the virtual machines running on them can be provided - services not available to those running their own hardware and software.
User monitoring of the cloud
The virtual machines the customer uses acts just like a physical machine. This is so the customer can install the server OS they need and everything performs as it should. So the customer manages everything inside that virtual machine. But wrong configurations, user mistakes, malicious code, bad updates, traffic spikes, run-away processes, etc do still happen inside the virtual machine. Therefore the user knows best what to monitor and how to fix it.
Monitoring alerts and such give the user more control and warning without having to constantly watch the server themselves. For most situations the user can decide what should be done and they are given the tools available to a cloud service.
Addressing issues arising from the provider’s services
When the situation arises where the problem is in the provider’s physical hardware or cloud services and not the user’s virtual machine, there are methods for solving those:
What can a user gain from monitoring performance?
Monitoring setup by the user should catch common problems the user can fix. Some may include overloaded virtual machines and/or services, services that stop responding.
If the problem lies elsewhere the user can check any maintanence/trouble reports posted on the control panel by the provider. If those don’t seem to be solving the problem then the user should contact the provider where they can example the virtual machine and see where the problem is.
What is the difference between a hot migration and a cold migration?
The migration function is yet another advantage of using virtual machines in Cloud computing systems. There are two types of migration function: hot and cold.
Hot migration is the transfer of the OS and applications from virtual machines to physical machines without stopping OS operations or applications. In a highly demanding environment such as a public cloud, with even the best servers, the risk of failure starts to rise after around 3 years. The hot migration function easily avoids downtime caused by failure and maintenance issues with physical machines. Hot migration fulfills several needs:
Hot migration can be seen as a service not offered by the traditional non-cloud setup. Also, it means flexibility and choice when the user understands they can protect themselves from the physical hardware underneath.
Cold migration, meanwhile, suspends OS and applications on virtual machines before transferring them to physical machines. Types of migration available depend on the hypervisor selected. With cold migration, you have the option of moving the associated disks from one datastore to another. The virtual machines are not required to be on shared storage. The virtual machine you want to migrate must be powered off prior to beginning the cold migration process.
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About the Guest Author:
Bryan Kinney is a technical engineer at GMO Cloud. He has been working in the I.T. field for the last 18 years but have been into computers personally for 29 years. Always loves good logical puzzles and non-logical human ones too. Originally from the Northwest USA and can get into hiking and survival camping.
August 31st, 2012
Over the last 20 – 30 years, pharmaceutical companies have heralded new breakthroughs in the discovery of new drugs. All of these were based on the promises made by modern advances in the computing capabilities of those times.
The first of these techniques was computer aided drug discovery (CADD). This relied on complex modeling techniques and high end graphical workstations that opened up a new field called ‘rational drug design’. While this did result in some important drugs, even including the early treatment for AIDS, it did not revolutionize drug research.
A few years later came a new technique called high throughput screening (HTS). Once again medical science thought it was on the verge of a disruption in discovery techniques of new medicines but the same story repeated. There were some discoveries, but not enough to justify the huge amounts of outlay required.
Part of the problem lay in the amounts of approximations that the researchers were forced to make. Drug discovery relied on modeling 3-D molecules of candidate drugs and creating 3-D models of receptor sites in the human body and then finding if there were possible matches that worked. This technique was so computationally heavy that it was just not possible to model tens of thousands of prospective drug molecules in a practical time frame. As a result, researchers worked on a large degree of approximation to get a reasonable degree of performance from computer systems of that period. Some simulations could last months even after simplifying the assumptions and making many compromises.
These compromises and approximations greatly affected the process of discovery. What worked in a computer model, often did not work in real life situations and the entire process had to be repeated. In the final analysis, this pushed up the cost of producing new drugs.
The Cloud Changes Drug Discovery
The entire scenario has changed with the advent of cloud computing. Rather than wait for 10 CPUs to work 100 hours to throw up a possible solution, it suddenly became possible to harness 1000 CPUs and get results within an hour. With this kind of performance improvement, the need for compromises and approximations vanished. The programs could be made as realistic and accurate as possible and yet the enormous computing power which was on call ensured that answers were forthcoming in a few hours at the most.
In one well publicized case, a large cluster was set up on a cloud computing platform, the work was done and the cluster shut down all in 20 minutes flat. And the cost? Essentially loose change at $6.40! In the traditional drug discovery world, it would have taken months to procure and set up the cluster itself and the costs would have been astronomical – all to be recovered from the end user.
Taking advantage of this capability, specialist software for drug design and discovery have begun to be available, these have a molecule database of more than 100 million compounds each with their individual physical properties, shapes, stereochemistry and chemical properties. There is no way this kind of data could have been used, had it not been for cloud computing services.
Yet another advantage of the liaison between drug discovery programs and cloud computing is that it had made experimentation and innovation possible. Previously, when a single simulation would run a month, every step had to be a deliberate, well thought out affair. There was just no room to follow a sudden train of thought or an inspiration. No ‘what if’ scenarios were possible. Today, however, with a simulation costing a few dollars and taking a few minutes, there is much greater experimentation going on. The results will be visible soon in new drugs and more radical treatment.
Finally, cloud computing has given the researcher the magic wand he always wanted. Maybe it will banish some deadly diseases and save some impoverished people by giving them access to cheap yet powerful drugs. This is the true disruptive power of cloud computing.
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.
August 30th, 2012
Just recently, comScore Inc. has released new information on the state of smartphone usage in the Japanese market. Based on their survey, 1 out of 4 mobile users in Japan is using a smartphone. The number of smartphone consumers has jumped by 43% this year compared to last year. This data establishes how smartphones have become an integral part of the mobile market in the country and how it is going stronger in the coming years.
Since many of the locals enjoy various mobile features as well as its flexibility when they are on the go, mobile phones have become a main medium to engage in different activities. With the production of smartphones, the Japanese will not allow to get left behind as this innovative gadget obviously has better technology and capabilities. They are able to enjoy more games and applications thru their iPhones or Samsung Galaxy phones that are constantly being upgraded for their satisfaction.
With millions of users, the Japanese market is utilizing their smartphones to access the Internet for varied purposes from research, emails, social sites and work-related functions. The wide array of features in the smartphone allows for greater flexibility especially when they need to access the web. Its connectivity to the Internet brings about the hot topic in the market today, that is, mobile cloud computing.
With mobile cloud computing, smartphone users can access mobile applications through their browsers instead of buying or downloading applications from the mobile company’s store. Japanese consumers can definitely benefit from easy-to-access web-based applications that will not cost a buck. Instead of paying a mobile app developer, they can do their work anywhere and anytime they want by accessing their stored information through the cloud. They won’t need to bring tons of papers or external hard drives when they travel in order to carry out their business. Mobile cloud computing could then complement the fast-paced lifestyle of the Japanese who love the latest technology not merely to stay ahead but more importantly to enhance their lives.
Companies wanting to promote their applications could also connect to more smartphone users through a cloud-based application with a mere Internet access. Consumers also won’t need to get higher versions of their smartphones to use their favorite applications or update the application every single time on their mobile since all they need is the web. Instead of draining their batteries when installing that application, they can just click on that website and save on power and electricity bills.
With these many advantages, mobile cloud computing is seen to further expand in the Japanese smartphone market. Though it still has to resolve important issues on security and unreliability when it comes to Internet access, more and more people are starting to value what it has to offer especially for the young generation of professionals. As smartphone users continue to multiply, mobile cloud computing is seeing a great number of patrons especially with those who have integrated an Internet access in their smartphone plan.
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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.
August 29th, 2012
The land of electronics or the land of gadgets, we should say – Japan has been a forerunner when it comes to all kinds of gadgets. People in Japan are often the first to lay their hands on the latest and the coolest gadgets ever made. It is no surprise that the smartphone mania bug that hit the rest of the world did not spare the shores of the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese embraced smartphones long before they were called smartphones. Almost all major smartphone manufacturers have established their presence in the Japanese market. Besides, no multinational company would want to ignore the business prospects in the world’s second largest economy.
Over the years, smartphones have become a lifestyle gadgets among the Japanese with almost all the latest smartphone models and variants sold throughout the country. However with the exception of Sony no domestic player is prominently present in the international smartphone manufacturing sector. Nevertheless, these domestic players contribute a significant part to the smartphone population of Japan. The main reason being the several general public service facilities available in such locally sourced smartphones like for example Metro Tickets, Mobile TV broadcasts, etc.
A recent survey conducted by comScore revealed that Japan’s smartphone usage increased phenomenally over the preceding years. comScore studied over 4000 mobile subscribers to analyse the recent trends in the Smartphone usage in Japan. Survey results indicate a near 43% increase in the smartphone adoptation as compared to the previous years. Falling smartphone prices and introduction of new generation operating systems were found as two key factors contributing to this phenomenal growth.
Until a couple of years ago Apple used to have lion’s share in the smartphone market in Japan, but today over two thirds of the country’s smartphone users are using Android based smartphones. Google will be pleased to hear this as they have achieved their primary objective of beating Apple in one of the key smartphone markets, but Apple just cannot be written off. With the global launch of the iPhone 5 around the corner, the company may have the final say by the end of the year.
Despite being shadowed by the remarkable feats achieved by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, Microsoft continues to maintain a noteworthy presence. Although statistically Microsoft finds itself at the bottom of the table with only 3.2 per cent of the smartphone users opting for Windows-based phones, but they, too, are hoping for a strong comeback very soon with Windows 8 OS.
So what exactly is driving smartphone companies to introduce new variants into a market which comprises of most technologically advanced consumers on the planet? The answer is simple: Japanese people embrace any new form of innovation or technology with an open heart. Their tendency to always try out the latest in the market compels manufacturers to introduce newer models on a continuous basis. Though the global economic turmoil may affect smartphone sales elsewhere, the Japanese are in no way going to compromise on their quest for modern day technologies.
The meteoric rise of Android is attributed to it being available as an open source platform, which results in most smartphone makers churning out smartphones loaded with an Android operating system. Locally manufactured Android phones are way cheaper than international brands and hence Android became the technology of the masses. Though not as popular as Apple’s iTunes, Google’s Play Store is quite rich in terms of number of applications and most of top rated applications offered as free. More and more local manufacturers are adopting Android OS because it adds global appeal to their already economical smartphone models.
According to the comScore survey, Sharp is considered as the top smartphone brand in Japan, followed closely by Panasonic, Fujitsu, NEC and Sony. The survey figures show that Smartphones have literally taken over PC’s as the dominant gadget of the new millennia. With a host of new smartphones slated to be launched later this year by top brands, the scene is only going to get better in the days to come.
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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.
August 28th, 2012
The digital media market in Japan is huge and expectedly booming. This is made possible by the new generation of Japanese youth who gladly accepted modern lifestyle and embraced all manners of new digital technologies for communication, socializing and business purposes.
Japanese use digital media in 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 increased the number of digital media users in the country, a trend that is expected to grow even as 3-G and 4-G devices are mass-produced to facilitate quick access to the internet.
Blogging is a popular activity in Japan; even the Washington Post has described 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. Majority of bloggers in Japan do so anonymously, and when they participate in online forums they tend to hide their identity from other users.
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; they are using them to network with friends and business associates; and a few Japanese businesses have started turning 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 find ways to reduce the cost of marketing and advertizing using the social media avenues.
As more and more Japanese people utilize e-commerce sites like Yahoo Japan, Rakuten, Amazon, etc. to purchase their goods and merchandise, this practice has definitely increased the frequency at which people used the search engines to find the products they are looking for. 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 there is every possibility that more Japanese forum-posters or forum-managers will 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 have to immediately face two major obstacles:
While it is possible to easily localize one’s services in Japan to satisfy the requirements of Japanese customers, most foreign entrants to the Japanese digital media market will have to soon contend with the issue of creating enough storage capacity to store the large amount of electronic files, data, and digital content arising from their operations. Also, they will 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 as well as increase their service performance, because customers can confidently use the digital media without worrying about losing important files or having their personal information or data omitted due to the small space available for storage on some foreign companies’ servers.
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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/
August 27th, 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.
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