Japanese Web at a glance
2009-05-16 @ BarCamp Tokyo 2009
Akky Akimoto(秋元裕樹)
Asiajin/Narabe.com/Cybozu Labs, Tokyo, Japan
Agenda
- Self introduction
- Major Players on Japanese Web
- Independent packaged software vendor (800 people in whole group)
- No.1 Groupware vendor in Japan (leading #2 IBM and #3 Microsoft)
- Enterprise web collaboration package - scheduler, bulletin board, messaging, to do, project management, workflow, web database, etc.
- The main product is built on PHP/MySQL
Groupware Market Share/Japan
- Cybozu (25.6%)
- IBM/Lotus (24.7%)
- Microsoft Exchange (13.1%)
stats by Nork-Research
Cybozu Labs?
- Research subsidiary of Cybozu. 3.5 years old
- "Engineers only" company (12 engineers)
- To make innovation for the next generation product
- open sources: Mosh(Scheme interpreter), Q4M(MySQL queue engine used by Mixi), etc.
- experimental services: Mylingual, Pathtraq, iVoca, Outputz, etc.
Cybozu and Akky
- 2002-2005 engineering director of Cybozu USA in San Francisco, USA
- 2005- researcher, then pro-blogger
- kind of evangeling company/products
- Group blog on Japanese Web/IT industory news
- 2900 feed subscribers, 75% of which from outside of Japan
Comparison Charts Community Narabe.com
- "Wikipedia for Comparison Chart"
- Japanese version is so so. No one on English version.
- symfony/PHP5.2/Apache/MySQL/Amazon EC2&S3
Japanese Web Industory
quick walkthrough
Mighty Yahoo! Japan
Do not underestimate Yahoo by knowing Yahoo.com in North America/Europe
Search Share 52.5% / 38.1% http://www.netratings.co.jp/hot_off/archives/NNR01152009.htm
Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo.com
- Yahoo.com owns 33% of Yahoo! Japan
- Softbank owns 41% of Yahoo! Japan
- Yahoo! Japan has its own account system
- Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Japan Messenger are not interoperable
Y!J Engineering
- Originally the same system shared
- Localized, Branched, separately maintained
- Yahoo! Mail are totally different (In Japan, Outlook compatibility is not important)
- Chiebukuro was a model of Answers (was popular in Yahoo! Korea first)
Y!J Weakness?
Softbank
- #3 Softbank ties Y!J's mobile freehand (#1 and #2 uses Google)
- Raised Auction membership fee
- Tighter budget (water server issue)
- Stock is rumored to be collateralized for Softbank
http://www.zakzak.co.jp/top/200904/t2009041501_all.html
http://netindex.jp/en
Rakuten
- e-commerce ASP/portal(Ichiba) - 25,000 shops
- e-commerce(book, travel)
- portal(infoseek), blog
- credit card, brokerage
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A5%BD%E5%A4%A9
Rakuten news and trivia
- Rakuten helped Drecom and is using their user tracking for ads
- Rakuten is leading the political argument around online medicine shopping law
- The first IT company owns pro-baseball team (Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles) by beating livedoor-Horiemon(Takafumi Horie)
- Rakuten's Kanji(楽天) means Lotte in China, both have a baseball team in the same league
Mixi
- First successful social networking service in Japan
- chased (and passed on mobile) by DeNA(mobage town)
- First successful social networking service in Japan
Other big players
- DeNA (cellphone SNS)
- Gree (cellphone SNS)
- Kakaku.com (price comparison)
- Amazon Japan (online books/shopping)
- Gurunabi (groumet guide)
- Cyber Agent (blog, portal)
- livedoor (blog, portal)
- FC2 (blog, social sites)
