Motoko’s weblog

I just came back from a little short of 3 weeks Japan trip. Everywhere I went, it seemed that Internet has become more and more a part of Japanese people’s lives. The search box was still very popular in ads. The QR code seemed to completely took over the bar-code as it was used on food packages, on appliance labels, etc. I even saw it on business cards!

The Internet penetration rate in Japan is very high (70%). However, especially in a country side and for older generations, it can still be a little intimidating. To help these people using Internet, I saw places like City Hall, Legal Affairs Bureau and Tax Agency set up several PCs in the office for people to file paper works online with the assistance of office staffs. Continue Reading »

We all talked about how popular SNS and video sharing became in Japan in 2007. As the rest of the world starting to pay attention to these as new means of marketing, “2007 Web services usage survey” done by Japan.Internet.com hints that Japanese are already looking for the next “thing”.

According to the survey, BBS (bulletin board services), Net auction and surprisingly the Video sharing lost some popularity in 2007 from the previous year. Continue Reading »

I’m pleased to write that I’m co-hosting the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in Tokyo next Spring! We are currently making all the strategic plans, selecting speakers, contacting sponsors, etc. to produce a great event for Japanese SEO/SEM professionals in Japan.

(Sorry for not posting any new articles here for a while. November has been a really crazy month.)

More information about SES Tokyo 2008.

One of Japan’s largest mobile portal sites, “mobile@nifty”, opened its shopping search services. The users can search products from 10,000 shops participating the service.

More and more people are accessing Internet from their cell phones. In June 2006, research by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication showed that there were more mobile Internet users (approx. 69.23mil) than PC Internet users Continue Reading »