I hope to keep the momentum going with a few more tweaks and enhancements over the coming month. Enjoy!

My favorite is the Singing Tree, at the bottom.

I love Neatorama, btw.

The registration process is pretty straight forward, nicely taking into consideration the international community by, for example, distinguishing between current country of residence and where one is originally from (if different). But then again, my guess is that the target audience for this service would consider more than one country to be “home”, and there’s no clear option to note that (except for in an open “profile” text box perhaps).

Which brings me to the mindset that will doom asoboo. Directly under this open profile box is a disclaimer warning users that they are, ultimately, not in control of their profile. What better method to scare away potential fans than to say certain types of personal contributions will be removed? Any sufficiently built SNS framework will filter out unwanted profiles by virtue of the social interactions that are created as the network grows. A big benefit of all this interconnectivity is the ability to let the users decide lest the development team gets caught in a never-ending game of cleanup. Let the users decide what an undesireable personality or profile is. After all, if asaboo gets going successfully and brings in a large user-base, does the development team really feel they can police all the accounts?

Remember Friendster’s policing of profile images? It’s no wonder they’re slowly receding in the rear-view-mirror. At least MySpace and Mixi don’t make you feel like you’re answering to anyone. Aside from creating accounts and obtaining personal information, there’s virtually no barrier to entry for webservices – so any hint of policing before even getting started will just push users on to another service that doesn’t come with that “watchful eye”. If asaboo wants to be a true competitor to the SNS services already out there, it will have to change this policing image.

Technorati Tags: japan, web2.0

The basic deal after putting your favorite workout music on the device is you get to choose from a number of objectives for your run: a target distance – say 3k, 5k, or 10k; a set time to run – say 30 min., 45 min., or 60 min; or a set number of calories to burn – say 400, 500, whatever. All of the options are customizable, so you could set to run for 88 minutes if you wanted.

During the run, you have the option of listening to a female voice (a sort of gruffly sultry mix) or male voice announce every fixed unit of your target how much you have left. In other words, if your objective is to run a set time, she’ll chime in every 5 minutes with how much time has elapsed, or how much time is left if you’ve passed the half-way point (which she announces enthusiastically as well). If your objective is to run a set distance, she’ll chime in every 1k or 1mile doing the same thing as with time. You can of course mute the “trainer” if you want, but I found it quite useful and surprisingly not annoying – music fades to the background so that you don’t have the voice yelling in your ears.

Another surprisingly fun part of this kit is its online integration with Nike+. Not only does the nano store up to 1000 workouts, but it presents each one in a nice graph and subsequently allows you to compare all of your runs with yourself – to gauge your progress – or with the million+ other users who are logging their runs. If you click on the thumbnail and look at the path, you’ll see some stats from my last run. Each little circle on the yellow line represents when I listened to the trainer-voice – the evenly spaced ones were the fixed-interval announcements, and the randomly spaced ones are when I clicked to hear my progress. You’ll notice the yellow line is also a bit squiggly, basically visualizing my speed throughout. There’s a pretty big hill towards the end of my run, so that probably slowed me down a bit :P

I’ve only tested the kit once, but it feels quite accurate. And it’s super exciting to finally have the stats to my runs logged without any hassle. Sitting down with pen and paper to jot times and calculate progress is the last thing I want to do after sweating for an hour. This is a seriously well implemented example of how technology is making my life easier and more enjoyable.

Technorati Tags: fitness, ipod

On to my analysis!

PingMag

… does a good job finding and comparing Japanese web 2.0 services to their U.S. counterparts. For social networking, the U.S. has MySpace while Japan has Mixi. I should add that since the article was posted, Mixi has IPO’d in Japan to a tune of $1.9 billion. And remarkably, as I mentioned before, there hasn’t been much coverage overseas. For the second-fiddle Facebook, in Japan we have Gree.

The video-sharing space has been interesting to watch as it is perhaps the first time a U.S. service has become dominant in Japan. Typically the language barrier has been a stop-gap for many businesses trying to enter this country, but YouTube’s ease of use and multi-lingual support (in the comments, for example) has been a boon for its popularity here and an example of how one might succeed without investing time and resources into localizing the interface. As long as the need is great – and for YouTube in Japan’s case, it was very much so – the Japanese and their rather hilarious mastery of English can overcome any obstacles. We likely will not be seeing a viable competitor sprout from Japan for legal and political reasons, so expect YouTube to gain exposure here as we move forward.

I’m personally not all that familiar with podcasting services, but for the Odeo and Podcast Alley users out there, Japan’s very own ZapZap may be of interest – especially since it’s one of the few web 2.0 services aspiring to appeal to both the English and the Japanese community. If nothing else, at least the design seems to indicate an appreciation for “web 2.0-yness” :P

37signals’ Ta-da Lists is mentioned as a productivity-enhancing web platform, and from Japan the article mentions Orchestrate – which is a fun implementation, but the author isn’t exactly sharing objectively (Orchestrate is his personal project). There is however a fascinating project in beta form (what isn’t?!) called CheckPad. You can tell CheckPad is clearly targeting the Japanese market with their focused integration of mobile devices.

The U.S. / Japan web 2.0 services comparison gets interesting as we enter the blog-buzz aggregation arena – from the U.S. we have Technorati, and from Japan, Kizasi. Kizasi is less encumbered by senseless adds and provides a clear, focused representation of its purpose – to show what’s hot in the blogosphere, now. Technorati does a better job of promoting the blogs, while Kizasi is more focused on the subject matter across them.

Lastly, there’s a dearth of comparable news aggregation sites provided by the Japan web-centric community. While the U.S. has Digg and TechCrunch, TechCrunchHQ apparently caught a waft of opportunity and has opened their own service here – TechCrunch Japan. Japan Entry is a big challenge for most industries, and usually requires partnering with a Japanese firm in order to build reputation and respect with the client base. But the web-space may prove to be different as it’s a younger domain and new services are more quickly experimented with and adopted by a younger demographic.

The PingMag article never mentions web 2.0 poster-child photo-sharing site Flickr, but team Japan has its own contribution to this space with Zorg, which aspires to be more for the professional demographic (although I think Flickr appeals to them quite well already). Zorg is still relatively new and actively hiring!

Read/Write Web

… has a more recent article in the style of an interview with Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners). There are some good statistics throughout on some of the services mentioned also in the PingMap post, and a good discussion to give readers a sense of the unique challenges web 2.0 projects face in growing in Japan. Overall Yahoo’s dominance is felt very strongly here as culturally the Japanese are wary to try new things, but Masashi notes that recently Yahoo is struggling as engineers move to develop newer and more entrepreneurial services such as social bookmarking site Hatena and SNS Gree.

There’s a good discussion towards the end on the maturing of Japan’s web-space, its strong online advertising market, its hot IPO market, and the reasons behind the dominance of mobile platforms.

Technorati Tags: japan, web2.0

William Gurley writes about a “digital hand” in reference to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. This has been an incredible nuisance challenge for Sony, but I think if Apple is any proof, a strong army of industrial designers will be key.

And to continue on the Mac thread, if you’re in Tokyo this weekend and were saddened by lack of a 2003 Mac Expo, there’s the Mac-iTokyo gathering happening this Sunday and Monday. Monday is a holiday — yay! (anybody know what for?)