First it was “Prirates of Silicon Valley” that set the geek standard for biography films, now it seems that social networks are the next frontier in film inspiration. Aaron Sorkin, has started talking about starting the project to write about the formidable days of Facebook, commissioned by Sony Pictures according to several news sources. Sorkin previously wrote for TV series, “The West Wing” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, as well as writing the screenplays for “A Few Good Men”, “Malice” and “Charlie Wilson’s War”.

The fun starts with the account set up for Sorkin on Facebook where the announcement was apparently first announced. I say apparently, because Sorkin’s facebook account (which you can see listed at the top of a search for his name on Facebook) has the privacy setting set high enough that nobody can see any information about Sorkin or request a friend relationship without knowing a direct email address.

Surprise, surprise, as it turns out, Sorkin is not so familiar with the internets. Via Worst Previews, here is what he had to say on the Facebook page :

“I’ve just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I’ve started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she’s been dead for 33 years.)”

Lets hope Aaron learns a few things about Facebook before he gets too far into the script.

The answer to that question seems to be a resounding yes going by the title of a new Japanese magazine called Shinkansen&Love. The Shinkansen (bullet train) is apparently now the way to see the big city, go shopping and find love.

It is actually a fashion-related magazine with accompanying stylish video minisite to show what a wonderful time you can have shopping in Tokyo. All sarcasm aside, the combination of intercity trains and love, while having its roots in some strong history (The Orient Express for example), is comical even for Japanese.

For the record, the site is a co-production from Studio Voice Magazine and online recommendation site, Tokyobookmark.

Today the Twitter founders and the Twitter team from Digital Garage announced via a live streamed press conference that it is launching its Japanese language version of Twitter. Digital Garage have been working on the Japanese market introduction of Twitter to develop a Japanese language version of the popular microblogging platform. This is the first time that Twitter will be available in a language other than English.

Japan has taken to Twitter at a ferocious rate, with Tokyo being the largest origin city for Tweets in the world (twice that of second placed San Fransisco and New York) using the previous English-only version. The number of Japanese users is growing at an accelerated rate already within the tech savvy community and it is expected that the Japanese version will give an additional boost as it can now support mainstream users. The local language distribution of online platforms has traditionally been a key point to growing larger sites in the Japanese market, with services such as Yahoo and Google blossoming only after they offered the Japanese verison.

The fear however is that Twitter is popular because it is foreign and users feel they are cutting edge because they are using a product that is cutting edge enough to not have been translated yet.

The Japanese Twitter will also have another first. It will be the first time that Twitter displays advertising within the Twitter page. When you switch to Japanese language, you will see an ad panel above your sidebar.

Initial reaction in the Japanese Twitter community is a lot of chatter but a lukewarm response to the advertising and a good dose of criticism about the quality of the translation.

This is a first release though, so I will reserve judgment. What will be telling is how fast the Japanese user base grows from here.

I have written before about how QRcodes are a great way to access websites on mobile phones and how they are already commonplace in Japan. They are used in advertising and in everyday services that allow mobile access.

Cabal recently blogged about another method for locating websites in Japan. The method shows a search box with the search term inside that will help you locate the website in lieu of a URL. Of course this implies you should go home and type this term into your favorite search engine to locate the website.

This system only works if you have the top search result position or the top advertising position on that keyword, but I am guessing these companies have made sure at least that they bought the keyword out so they appear as the top paid search result on all the major search platforms. The thinking is that people can remember a keyword easier than a URL. From doing a quick ask-around of Japanese friends, it seems that most find this advertising annoying and unclear. I am not a fan of it either.

Another method that seems to have a quite high representation in Japan and hasn’t been talked about in western press that much is the menu navigation method.

The Menu Navigation Method

This method of getting people to your website is also aimed at mobile users. Entering URLs on a mobile phones can be time consuming and frustrating, so many advertisers are looking at ways to get users to their pages in simple ways that involve scrolling and clicking rather than typing.

This method is based around one of the sad realities of the Japanese mobile web. Most traffic on the mobile web is funneled through the landing pages of the major carriers (DoCoMo, AU and Softbank). It is changing slowly but it is still the case that most people use these pages just as many PC web users use Yahoo, Google or other portal pages to find their content.

This is an example from the ANA website showing the navigation paths from each of the three major carrier topages. NB. DoCoMo uses iMode, AU uses EZWeb and Softbank uses Yahoo Keitai.

Using this established familiarity with this portal page navigation, a lot of advertising replaces the URL with a path of navigation from the top portal page from the major carriers. The carriers are obviously happy because it keeps people in “their world” as long as possible.

More important though, they also charge money for portal listings. This process allows them to filter for “approved” content and control the economics which is fast moving towards free for connectivity on the mobile phone. As connectivity charges go down, total advertising and listing revenues are growing.

The main flaw to this method is the difficulty in remembering the navigation steps, sometimes there are up to 8 pages to click through before you get where you are going. The negative effects of this are limited by the usage case which usually has the advertising appearing in locations where you can refer to the navigation path while entering in your mobile phone. Places such as magazines, train platforms and PC sites are common locations to see them.

The Menu Navigation Method looks to be here for a while, but only as long as the carriers control the navigation pathways. Once people start to break out from the major portals, you may see the use of this technique drop, but if history is anything to go by, the Japanese people will keep to their safe portals for a while yet.

See here proof and execution of concept a clear month before Kevin and Alex will grace the the city of Amsterdam.

[ And in answer to the question about what the Dutch ladies think of mustaches... it was mixed results, but certainly gets a lot of attention. ]

Via a tip off from one of my staff in our internal office chat here at UltraSuperNew Inc., comes news that Google has updated the interface for its top page for Japanese users.

The new design keeps the position of the main search bar and associated links, then adds a line of quick access icons below that to some of Google’s other services. There is a tabbed menu, then 5 items shown under each tab.

The first tab can be translated as “recommended”, it includes Google Mail, Youtube, Google News, Google Maps, Google Transit.

The second tab can be translated as “all kinds of search”, and provides links to search interfaces for images, blogs, books and the desktop.

The third tab is “convenient tools” and includes Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Toolbar.

The final tab is “more fun” and has links to Youtube, Picasa, Blogger and Google Earth.

One thing to note about the treatment of all these links is that they are all referred to by what you can do or what they are rather than the product name. For example Picasa is referred to as a photo management tool and not by its name, “Picasa”.

The design change seems to be more in line with what Japanese users expect (generally a higher need to see more information on the page) and is a big move for Google moving away from their long standing simple home page. Its nice to see Google treating individual markets in a special way.

I was tipped off via Peter at Bubblefoundry and an article over at CScout Japan about a magazine that is out currently here in Japan that is filled with pretty much only free things that you can download from QRcodes with your mobile phone.

The Magazine is called Tada Gets (site is made for mobile and is all in Japanese), which basically means “get it free”. The pages are filled with a little text and/or image explaining what you can get and then the QR code that will get you to a mobile website where you can download the free content.

I mentioned earlier that the use of 2D codes in Japan was already a reality and this is just one example of how they are tightly integrated into the lives of Japanese people on a daily basis.

If you liked reading this post, you might want to subscribe to our RSS feed to read more news about mobile. Like this cool Starbucks/ iPhone mock-up.

Mixi, Japan’s biggest SNS and blog, has just announced that starting 1st of April they will amend the terms of use (Japanese only) to give Mixi complete ownership and ultimate control over user generated content.

This is big News in Japan with stories on all the biggest Japanese news sites (eg. Yahoo, Livedoor). This may be a game changer in several ways for SNS in Japan.

First we will find out if Japanese users really value the sanctity of their data. History tells us that it is actually not very high on the list of concerns when big companies are involved, but very high when you are dealing with small companies. Mixi being about as big as they come in the SNS world may not cause much of a stir, but if this hits the press enough, they may be in for a backlash and a change of priorities from the users.

Second is what Mixi will do with their new found data dictatorship. Could they start using your friend’s images to advertise to you, integrate advertising into user generated content just as Facebook tried to and received a lot of backlash? Could it be just a first step into censorship as they gear up for a push into China?

I will be keeping an eye on how this shapes up… when someone the size of Mixi makes a move like this it is bound to shape the way all the other players do business.

Yesterday Ernst-Jan Pfauth wrote a story about the use of 2D barcodes as shortcuts to mobile web sites. What a lot of people in Europe don’t realize is that 2D barcodes are already a success story, … just not in Europe.

In Japan a local version of the 2D barcode called QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) has widespread acceptance and a very large user base. All handsets released on the Japanese market these days (and actually for the last several years) have been preloaded with a QR code reader. This makes the QRcodes available to pretty much everyone with a standard handset. The numbers are somewhere around 90-95 million people out of 100 million mobile subscribers. That is a pretty large potential audience for the technology.

[ UPDATE: previously I used some old research data for some of the numbers. The reality now is actually a much better percentage and I have changed the numbers below accordingly based on a 2007 study]

In Japan about 80% 95% of people know what a QRcode does and just over 50% of people in Japan 93% of those people have used them. That may not sound like a screaming majority That is a pretty good majority, but and in terms of certain youth markets, that covers an almost complete coverage and puts the technology in a position where it can be a seamless part of any ad campaign already…. and actually it is already a part of just about every ad campaign.

A standard fashion magazine in Japan will be filled with codes with direct links to the mobile shopping page for the product depicted or an mobile competition form to fill out. The also are found on business cards as a short cut to add someones details to your address book. You can search popular coupon magazine, Hot Pepper, for QR codes you can scan and then show the resulting mobile web site page at restaurant to receive a discount. The system is everywhere and highly successful.

There is even one famous blog that is made entirely of QR code messages.

What many don’t realize is that 2D barcodes have not necessarily been a failure so far because it is a flawed technology, but because the supporting technology (the handset) was not up to scratch and the user base was too small. The biggest difference between Japanese mobile handsets and the European handsets over the past few years has been the camera support and the resolution of those cameras in macro mode. A phone in Europe with a camera is still considered a “camera phone”, whereas in Japan it would be highly unusual to have a phone without a camera as standard sold to you any time in the last 5 years. I have lived in Japan for 6 years now and have never had a phone without a camera and have never had a phone without a QRcode reader.

More recently it seems Windows Live is getting on the QRcode bandwagon (although their official beta page for barcodes seems to have gone offline).

Some of the benefits of QR Codes over other 2D Code systems are the ability to self correct if up to 30% of the code is damaged or otherwise illegible, the ability to use more than the standard alpha-numeric characters (in Japan the JIS character support allows Japanese characters to be encoded) and the ability to read the code from any orientation due to the registration marks that let a reader self correct. The code was invented and the patent is owned by a company called Denso-wave back in 1994, but they are choosing not to exercise their patent rights which means everyone is free to use and make QRCodes as they wish.

On a related note, on a recent trip to London I noticed QR codes on some posters for a Pet Shop Boys album. After getting over my excitement that Europe had finally come t the party I tried out scanning the codes with my Japanese phone, only to be disappointed to find that the content was PC website URLs and nothing made for mobile at all. Such a disappointment, although I daresay the publicity should help the recognition of the code format in Europe a considerable amount.

Today Fon Japan and Livedoor, one of Japan’s biggest ISPs, announced they would start a partnership to connect their free Wifi access points across Japan.

Livedoor is coming out of some hard times after the very public and very dramatic securities fraud convictions that led to sentences for four executives in early 2007. Most notoriously, founder Takafumi Horie (aka: “Horiemon”) was famous for his brash and aggressive business style and bore the brunt of the blame for the charges brought against the company. Even so, Livedoor still has its sights on going public in 2008. The Fon deal would appear to help their expansion. Fon, launched its wireless network in Japan in late 2006 and is currently the biggest wifi network globally.

The deal lets Livedoor customers connect to Fon’s 31,000 access points around Japan (as well as 240,000 globally) and also for Fon users to connect to Livedoor’s network which is primarily centered around the inner Tokyo area and currently has about 2,200 access points. The combined service will be free until at least the 4th of August, 2008, but there are plans to continue the service as free after that time as well.

The catch for the general user is that you have to be a member of either the Fon network or Livedoor. But from my initial checking, it doesn’t seem to be such a big deal to join. To become a Fon network member you need to buy a base station and share a Wifi signal yourself (thus extending the network). However, the simple way to access now seems to be through Livedoor where it looks like a regular login account to the Livedoor portal should get you in.

Some useful links :

• Livedoor Registration form (Japanese)
• Livedoor Wireless page (Japanese)
• Fon in English and Japanese