Joshua Schacter, who runs the del.icio.us community url service is going full-time on it. Good luck to Joshua!
March 2005 Archives
I can't wait to try this out- I have high hopes for this new service from Yahoo!
Simon Richmond, author of The Rough Guide to Tokyo, The Rough Guide to Japan (Penguin UK), veteran tourist, and onetime Tokyo resident, has a pretty interesting op-ed in Japan Today.
I think that the Japanese government and the Japanese people as a whole are not really fully invested in the idea of having more tourists in Japan. Japan's the second strongest economy in the world. Being the 33rd most popular tourist destination means that Japan's economy is not reliant on tourism. That's both good and bad.
I think Yokoso! Japan is a tatemae issue.
...as a one-time resident and frequent traveler in Japan over the last 14 years, I'm not holding my breath on lasting benefits from the [Yokoso! Japan] campaign. I know that Japan's international tourism problem cannot be fully solved by extra foreign-language signs or snazzy electronic gizmos. Larger issues need to be tackled, among them communication and coordination of policy between various government and private bodies.
...
In addition to thinking of ways to tempt foreign visitors here, the Japanese government should be encouraging more of its own citizens to travel overseas, improve their language skills, and get used to interacting with foreigners. Only then will Japan be able to extend a sincere and meaningful Yokoso to overseas visitors.
The trouble with 'Yokoso' [Japantoday.com]
Michiko Kakutani savages Peter Carey's new book on his travels through Japan with his son.
"Wrong About Japan" does not give the reader a tactile appreciation of manga or anime or any other aspect of Japan's pop culture. It does not probe, save in the most superficial manner, the dynamic between East and West that informs much of that youth culture. And while it provides a couple of touching glimpses of Mr. Carey and his son, it does not delve into their relationship or their feelings about their joint trip. Instead, "Wrong About Japan" turns out to be a thoroughly cursory travelogue that feels as though it had been written on a tight deadline for an airline magazine.
A Father-and-Son Adventure to the Heart of 'Japanese Cool' [nytimes.com]
Ouch!
A review like this (Carey is a Booker Prize winner, no less) is depressing for a few reasons. It is yet another person who merely added to the noise and did not work to help to bridge the cultures. It seems to reinforce stereotypes about the "other"-ness of Japan. Nippon Goro Goro says
"This is probably one of the worst non-fiction books ever written about Japan in the post WWII era."
Robert Alan Feldman of Morgan Stangley (Tokyo) has some interesting thoughts on the whole Livedoor/FujiTV spectacle. This is the first time that I've actually touched upon this topic, even though it is a daily discussion topic for Japanese people everywhere.
Basically the short story is that there's a 32-year old Internet entrepreneur, Horie, who's CEO of Livedoor, an Internet portal. He's raised a lot of money with Lehman Brothers and is trying to do a hostile takeover of FujiTV, one of the main TV companies in Japan.
Because Japan is new to hostile takeovers, it is a big discussion issue. In general, I don't think too much of Horie and Livedoor itself, but I do think that hostile takeovers should become more common in Japan- if only to clear out bad management and moribund businesses.
The boardroom and the population are way ahead of the politicians. At recent seminars and discussions in Tokyo, the debate on the Livedoor/Fuji TV battle has shown many nuances. Boardroom people have limited sympathy for either side, in view of the tactics used and the histories of the companies involved. Moreover, the boardroom understands that (1) corporate law changes will create many more opportunities for Japanese companies than for foreign companies, (2) the public largely supports Livedoor — not because of the proposed deal itself but because it sees a crying need for aggressive agents of change. One CEO of a major company said to me, “Two-thirds of the boardroom wants Fuji TV to win (despite reservations about their methods), but two-thirds of the population wants Livedoor to win. We cannot have strong companies if the people do not support us.”
I do think it is very telling that the Japanese people want Livedoor to win- they've invested heavily in Livedoor and it would bolster the stock. Whether it is the right thing to do for Livedoor, I think this debate is healthy for Japan. There should be more hostile takeovers in Japan.
The iPod vs. Walkman comparison has been discussed so many times, but it really is worth repeating because it is such a stark comparison. It's a perfect example of Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma," as well. Randall Stross of the New York Times has a good overview of the situation vis-a-vis Sony's new CEO.
Sony Connect, the late-arriving, woefully designed answer to the iTunes Music Store, still lamely insists on using Sony's proprietary compression standard. Apple got away with holding to its own standard only because it got everything else right, and was early to boot. Sony Connect must lag somewhere around 300 million song sales behind Apple, but pretends otherwise.
Arguably, Walkman product managers are even more blind to market reality than those at Connect. Today, they are selling the 20-gigabyte Network Walkman for $50 more than the comparable iPod, even though it cannot use any music sold on Apple's site or on those of the many competitors that use Microsoft's widely licensed compression standard.
A company thrives when it has all that it needs to make a compelling product and is undistracted by fractiousness among divisions that resent being told to make decisions based upon family obligations, not market considerations. Mr. Jobs appreciates the advantages of keeping content separate from distribution. At Pixar, he's in the digital movie business, which uses many skill sets that are used over at Apple, too. Yet he has elected to let the two live happy separate existences, without falling for the synergy myth.
I've long since stopped even looking at Sony products for my own purchases. There was no reason to do so until the top management changed, but now that it has, I'm doubtful that it will make a difference at the product level, especially considering Stringer is from the media side of the business. Does anyone see Stringer taking a different path with respect to DRM than what the company has done to date? Consider me skeptical.
My fear is that Howard Stringer won't rock the boat in Japan as much as I believe he needs to. He is not of that personality, and even if he has an office in Tokyo, he's made it clear that he will stay in NYC. This is not the profile of a person required to turn around a sinking ship.
I wonder what's worse for a large Japanese company - a Japanese CEO who no one within the company cared about (Idei) or a non-Japanese CEO who isn't going to be hands-on (Stringer.) The problem with Sony is in Japan. If Stringer isn't based in Japan, there's less of a chance that he can drive the necessary changes.
The future for Sony is still unclear.
How the iPod Ran Circles Around the Walkman [nytimes.com]
Pretty big news today that Microsoft has purchase Groove Networks.
Gates definitely wanted to work with Ozzie, but more importantly, Ozzie's team is bar-none when it comes to really understanding the Internet and the future of work on the Internet.
Microsoft, Groove Networks to Combine Forces to Create Anytime, Anywhere Collaboration [microsoft.com]
Microsoft to buy Groove Networks | Tech News on ZDNet [zdnet.com]
Red Herring Blog: Bill Gates gets Ray’s groove on [redherring.com]
Software Only: Microsoft: Groovy Baby! [Jeff Clavier's Typepad Weblog]
!!! Google Suggest in Japanese !!!
The New York Times today covers 2 weblogs written by celebrities.
Rosie O'Donnell
Need Some New Luster? Try Rosie O'Donnell's Method: Create It by the Blogful
and
Wil Wheaton
A Computer Is Also a Screen, Wil Wheaton Discovers
It's a bit strange that they decided to cover two celebrity weblogs on the same day, but it makes for an interesting pair of reads.
U.S. Senator Max Baucus (D. Mont.) writes a special report released by The National Bureau of Asian Research.
It's a 40 page report, but the portion by Baucus is only 10 pages. The rest is an intro and reference material. I don't know much about Baucus, but any legislation or political pressure that can lead towards greater business between the US and Asia is of interest to me.
The United States should engage large Asian economies in both bilateral and regional trade agreements, and participate in regional economic planning wherever possible. We must seize on the past successes of sectoral agreements, and encourage better enforcement of intellectual property rights. U.S. borders must also remain open to foreign businesspeople, academics, and students in order to ensure that the United States remains the world’s most competitive economy.
For the United States, Asia is fast becoming a region of lost opportunities and waning influence. If, however, we can muster the political will to take the steps outlined above, Asia will once again take its rightful place near the top of America’s trade agenda.
Asia’s Rightful Place in the American Trade Agenda [nbr.org]
Boris found me an incredible image of Tokyo from the sky. It's a superimposed photo of 1948 Tokyo (black and white) vs. 1992 (color).
Increcible to see how the city has changed in 45+ years. One wonders what it would look like in 2050.
Steve Clemons has a great post on his The Washington Note blog about the Japanese imperial family and the ruckus surrounding proposed changes in Japanese laws to allow a female to ascend to the throne. (Japanese law currently does not allow for gender discrimination but the Japanese imperialists don't recognize that bit.)
There are many sites out there to search for music but one new one deserves your attention.
It's UpTo11.net and it's a music lover's tool for finding music that you might not know that you like.
UpTo11.net is doing a few cool new things including: analyzing p2p network music collections to see pattterns in music ownership, using wikipedia data on music artists, and other cool features. From their about page:
In order to unlock the potential of your fellow fans to help you find music, we've analyzed the collections of over a quarter million music collections (more every day) from the P2P networks. As you can imagine, this represents a vast amount of variety of musical tastes and, up until now, an untapped resource. Using some proprietary algorithms (i.e some math we made up), we've been able to find patterns in the way people collect music. And perhaps not surprisingly, we have found that people generally collect artists in a few genres, and fans that collect in the same genre generally have overlapping musical tastes. What is fascinating though is that not every user has every band from any one genre in their collection. And it is these areas of difference that make for the best recommendations.
Also, Seb Paquet mentions upto11.net's popularity slider on Corante's Many-to-Many.
Please give upto11.net a try and let them and others know what you think.
The big news of this weekend is that Idei AND Ando will step down and Howard Stringer will be named by the board to lead Sony.
I'll bet money that Stringer won't move to Japan. He'll have 2 offices, I'm sure, but will be permanently based in the NYC office. If Stringer can lead a turn-around as Ghosn did at Nissan or Gerstner did at IBM, this is the time to do it.
Lots more on this to come. This will be big news for quite some time.
Sony to Name Non-Japanese Executive to Top Position [nytimes.com]
Sony Considers Shaking Up Top Management [AP via Yahoo! News]
UPDATE: Ryoji Chubachi is named President of Sony and CEO of the electronics business. I don't know much about him.
Sony Names Head of U.S. Unit as Chairman [reuters.com]
My favorite radio station in LA is now podcasting most of their spoken word shows (not their music shows, sadly, due to copyright concerns, I'm sure.)
Boris has an idea to use XMLHttpRequest to fight comment spam. Looks interesting!
bopuc/weblog: Using AJAX and a small private key to thwart comment spam
JJG recently wrote an artice about XMLHttpRequest, wherein he renamed the technology as "ajax" for asynchronous javascript + XML. That article is now available in Japanese via a Creative Commons license.
Pretty cool.
David Weinberger has the scoop that the NY Times.com will begin to open up their archives by publishing "topic pages" of NYTimes content. The issue at hand is that currently, older articles are go into the for-pay archive after 10 days and all the old links to the NYTimes die. Therefore, if you search for a news topic, NYTimes archive stories are almost never in the top results.
Between the purchase of About and this new strategy, it should be interesting to see what the other for-pay archive news content businesses will do (i.e. the Wall Street Journal.)
THIS, this is very cool!
This is cool- we can call in to hear the OECD's economic survey of Japan.
8:30 AM Eastern Standard Time on March 8th is 10:30 PM Japan Standard Time, March 8th.
OECD’S ECONOMIC SURVEY OF JAPAN 2004
Tuesday, March 8, 2005, a Videoconference
Co-Sponsors: OECD Washington Center and the Japan Information Access Project
Speakers: Dr. Randall Jones, OECD, Paris, Dr. Edward Lincoln, Council on
Foreign Relations, Washington, DC, and Mr. Jun Iwasaki, Bank of Japan,
Washington Office
Time: 8:30 – 10:00 AM
Location: OECD Washington Center, 2001 L Street, NW, Suite 650, Washington,
DC
Registration: reservations necessary, Free, lite breakfast
Register Here: http://www.oecdwash.org/NEWS/EVENTS/event_registration.htm
For more information, please contact the OECD Washington Center, (202)785-6323, washington.contact@oecd.org or JIAP, (202) 822-6040, access@jiaponline.org
Listen from outside Washington! Dial 1-800-531-3250; ID: 3850588
You can hear the lecture, and participate in the discussion remotely.
I havent tried it yet but this is a cool Mac OS X client for the Japanese game Go.
Charles Cooper, an editor at CNet, waited 2 hours on hold for tech support from Symantec only to be told that he had to pay to receive the tech support for something that the Symantec product should have done in the first place.
This kind of thing is RAMPANT in the IT/computer business and MUCH more needs to be done to get companies to do REAL support.
Two hours-plus hanging in phone purgatory was not enough. Symantec was giving me two choices: I could receive tech assistance by e-mail; in that case, I would pay $39.95. Or I could resolve the issue with a live "expert" like Muta for $69.95.Why should I spend more money to get rid of an infected file that Norton Antivirus was supposed to take care of in the first place?
Click.
You might assume a company that makes antivirus software wouldn't gouge paying customers who can't install its product because a minor Trojan horse has infected the computer's drive. Isn't that what this stuff is supposed to fix in the first place? One day, I hope to put that question directly to Symantec's chief executive, John Thompson.
Bob Wyman of pubsub.com has an interesting post about how syndication data may be structured in the future to be more functional than it is today. Think about how syndication data may replace email...
As I May Think...: Will Scoble's book be out of date before it is read?
I'm still gathering information, but it looks like Yahoo! Japan is making a hostile take-over bid for ValueCommerce Japan.
Each ValueCommerce share is worth 260,571 yen.
There's 41971 shares outstanding (54.85%).
That makes the total shares outstanding to be about 111 oku-yen. Double that figure (basically) to get the valuation of ValueCommerce at about $200 million.
Interesting. A small step backwards, but Nick is right to keep the focus on the tone of the weblog. That's what makes it different from other media.
Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, declined to comment specifically about CheapTickets.com, but, wrote via e-mail, "We'd rather lose the occasional advertiser than the character that attracts the audience in the first place. If an advertiser wants a safe environment, there are thousands of tired media outlets to choose from."He continued: "Weblogs are supposed to be unexpected and wincingly frank. That's an essential part of the appeal to a generation that's turning away from network television and print media. We had a million visitors to our sites on Tuesday alone."
CheapTickets.com pulls sponsorship of Gawker blog [prweek.com]
Tokyoartbeat.com will be presented at Pechakucha night on Wednesday, March 2nd.
See you there!
