Twitter, my favorite micro blogging platform is now available in Japanese. Why Japanese? According to AFP, about one quarter of its existing users are from Japan, albeit that Twitter is not likely to report its actual number of users cumulated until today. In matter of fact, Twitter is doing really well there. Visit the Twitter Public Timeline will tell the frequency of Japanese Twitter messages appeared on the page.

According to Twitter blog, Twitter Japan was a project jointly created with a partner called Digital Garage. Users will find the advertisement on this Twitter Japan from day one, and Japan market will be the first testing ground for Twitter’s money making business plan.

Microsoft Japan is seemed to be heavily promoting Windows Vista series of products in Japan. Two weeks ago, they launched Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, and now it’s the Windows Vista Home Premium upgrade edition. This upgrade edition will only offer 2,500 set, which will be included at no additional charge for existing Windows XP or Windows 2000 Professional to upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium. It has a special Sakura CD box, for those who purchase this upgrade edition will also entitle to a one-year Windows Live OneCare and a special designed Windows Vista user manual.

Tomorrow, Microsoft will unveil its Japanese version of Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 to the Japanese market. This new product, with a special name called Σ(SIGMA) will made available on this Saturday in 秋叶原, i.e. Akihabara, Japan. Akihabara is known as one of the world’s largest market for electrical appliances, and also a symbol of Tokyo.

There will be a big event tomorrow in that area, starting from 1pm. To know more detail, you can go to this site.

One of the Internet startup that I admired its ideas has launched in Japan. This startup was namely as Zopa, originally established in the UK with vast experience especially in the Internet banking industry. With now the expand to Japan market by launching the Zopa Japan site, Zopa completes its presence in three continents that are North America (US), Europe (UK & Italy) and Asia. Zopa was indeed a P2P lending platform, in particular it was a social lending platform that allowed users concerning a lender and a borrower to deal with each other without having to go through the bank services. Of this business model, Zopa has experienced exponential growth since its first inception on 7 March 2005, and now there are more than 20 P2P lenders around the globe.

Zopa has a solid base in the UK alone, amounted to 190,000 members and they are confidently targeted to the second largest Internet market, i.e. Japan now. As part of its Japan plan, the startup has named Internet financial services veteran Takeshi Yoneda as chairman and Tatsuya Kuboi as CEO.

Baidu Japan has finally relaunched its search engine that mainly focused on the Japanese. If you want to know the progress on how Baidu ventured into the Japan market, you can read the review on my March 2007 post and the most recent one, the January 10’s post. The relaunched Baidu Japan search engine, as shown in the below picture comprised of four (4) main search services, i.e. Web page search, image (photo) search, video search, and lastly, the Japanese blog search. On this landing page of Baidu Japan search engine, these four main services are listed from left to right, with the top three favorite searches highlighted in orange colors. Their desire to attract more Japanese in using this search engine can be viewed by the redesigned of the search engine, and this is a speculative piece, in order to attract Japanese, it’s imperative that one must heavily focused on the design, you can’t just provide a tiny search bar on the search engine’s landing page, and hope that other people will fall in love with the would-be Yahoo! Japan’s competitor (Yahoo! Japan controlled over 60% of the Japan search market).

Apparently, this is a typical example on how competition in Japan market will increase pressure toward rearchitecting a new search engine to meet the needs of the majority Japanese.

Baidu appears to have decided that they’ll never abandon the Japan market with the forthcoming new Japan search engine. Its new Japan search engine will be launched on 23 this month. This revamped search engine will included three main services to the Japanese, i.e. video, travel and gourmet. I believe this revamp is much to do with the response of competitive pressure from the continual growth of Yahoo! in Japan market. Yahoo! Japan still leading the search engine market and any new entrants do not seemed to threaten its leadership position there.

Baidu Japan, first launched in February last year, is very much motivated by the Japan market, its first overseas market other than its home base, i.e. China. Rumors also suggested that Baidu was looking at South Korea and the U.S. market as well, and no surprise that they’ll launch their own Korea and English search engines in the future.

Friendster, who already conquered the Southeast Asian countries in online social network activities, is launching the Japanese and Korean version of its site. The initiative is another example of Friendster moving aggressively into the Northern side of Asia, Japan and Korea since it launched its Simplified Chinese version in October this year. With these two new additions, Friendster is now available in English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

This type of language venture of Friendster is something sets it apart from other successful social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Friendster is focusing on Asian countries, and each different country represents different types of markets. For example, China is developing and very competitive, whereas Japan and Korea are two developed countries, while Singapore is competitive, Philippines and Malaysia are relatively stagnant, and Indonesia is a huge market waiting for them to tap in. They knew if they can make it big in all of the Asian countries, they can avoid to face tough competition in the U.S. market, and if they lose out in one single market, it’ll not affect their total market share in Asia at all.

From the recent tactical move of Etology, it seems that they’ve aimed to become the new industry leader in Internet advertising services. In October, Etology has hit major milestone and passed competitor AdBrite in daily ad-impressions, with over 1 billion Ads served daily (Jessica H., thanks for sent me the press release. Sorry I did not published this news at that time). And early this month, they also secured a multi-year mutually exclusive agreement and replaced AdBrite to power AVN Media Network’s new enhanced ad-platform. However, a more exciting news is that Etology has officially launched Ad-Butterfly in Japan with the strategic partnership of CGM Marketing and an alliance with Technorati Japan.

With a strong focus on bloggers in Japan, and blogs are the most favorite communication channel in Japan, Ad-Butterfly recognized that the value of targeted online advertising would be substantially increase if the bloggers can decide which Ads will run on their blogs. The plan of Ad-Butterfly is to provide bloggers a flexible “do it yourself,” and thus we saw Ad-Butterfly Ads has an extra built-in feature that allowed bloggers to add their own comments next to the Ads. Besides, bloggers that publish Ad-Butterfly Ads only need to add a snippet of Javascript code inside their blogs. Meanwhile, Ad-Butterfly has prepared a demo page that showed users how easy they can add the code to some blogging engines such as Livedoor, FC2, Blogger, Yaplog! and etc.

Currently, there are more than 2,000 bloggers signed-up for Ad-Butterfly, shortly after the three-month test run of this platform. However, Ad-Butterfly hopes to reach 10,000 bloggers by next spring and the market outlook of Ad-Butterfly looks bright as several major brands such as Toshiba, All Nippon Airways, BMW, and Nike have participated in the test runs, reported by ZDNet Asia.