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Will Japan ever go .mobi?

Jim Atwood — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:03:43 +0000

To me I am not so optimistic that the Japanese will turn to .mobi websites. You don’t have to look far in “Japanese only” websites not run by foreign expats or “maniac” tech enthusiasts to see that mainstream sites are not on the .mobi domain yet. Most companies go for the .co.jp domain because it has the highest quality and brand image in Japan. The .jp domain is secondary and much cheaper without all the red tape required for .co.jp domains. There is also a .net.jp domain too. When you factor in the .com and .net domains, it quickly becomes crowded for the Japanese to determine what would be the best domain to put a mobile site on.

Force is as strong word perhaps, but I think it’s going to take some clever marketing in Japan to get small and mid-sized Japanese companies or even individuals to purchase and develop .mobi websites when they can just as easily do it on their .co.jp or .jp domain.

In fact, here is a Japanese only website which is a popular publishing company that distributes a trendy young Japanese gal magazine called Ranzuki. This magazine is very big among young Japanese girls. If you notice, the website only has a mobile version. It has no parent desktop website. For some reason they feel young girls will only want to use their mobile phones, so a traditional site is not necessary. Second, you will notice that the website is a .com domain. Third, you will notice the website is also an ecommerce solution. Mobile shopping is critical in Japan. Finally, the website is encoded in Shift-JIS which is the defacto standard for Japanese computers and character input..not UTF-8 or EUC-JP. Incidentally, this website is built on Oscommerce Mobile version developed by a Japanese web developer.

My point here is that you have to dig deep into the heart of Japanese websites and developers. Most of the foreign expats I know in Japan are all on iPhones, buying .mobi or other special domains, and mixing with the trends. If I walk into a Japanese high school down the street, I won’t find any iPhone or equivalent. Around me here it’s all about fashion, making friends, and socializing over the phone via messaging, mixi, gree, or something similar entirely in Japanese. Many of these kids have no idea what’s going on in the States or other countries with respect to mobile technology or websites.

The idea that Japanese create two websites as I see it may help to contribute to the prospect that one day .mobi may become a viable solution for a mobile website. It also just might be that the Japanese kick the can on their main website and just go mobile entirely. In that case, I don’t think .mobi will fair well against the mightier .co.jp or .jp domains.

The golden nugget here is how will Japan convince people to go .mobi. I feel exclusive features may be the answer. The Japanese love being exclusive and are very image conscious. We all are perhaps. If the .mobi domain can provide something that .jp, .com, or .co.jp can’t, then perhaps .mobi will prevail.

Right off the bat though, .jp and .mobi differ by two characters. That’s a disadvantage in Japan at the moment.

These are just my thoughts and am very aware I could be wrong. I welcome any other insight into this as I myself am trying to predict what might happen in Japan.

As a final thought, there are three “main” groups of consumers in Japan. They are in my experience as follows:

1. Young students

2. House Wives

3. Businessmen

All three are totally mobile these days. House Wives and the young are shopping more and more online with their mobile phones. Check out the new Ageha Fashion site for the latest trend in mobile shopping http://ageha-shop.com/index.html

Note to mention QR codes are plastered on everything in sight here.

Geez, I could go on and on here. Sorry….laugh.

In any event, hopefully .mobi will catch on more here. After 17 years in Japan I’d say anything can happen. We’ll see.

Regards,
Jim Atwood

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Will Japan ever go .mobi?

Flickr Japan New Look

Jim Atwood — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:23:17 +0000

Flickrjapan.com has a new look from this week sporting a brand new theme and some additional custom features. FlickrJapan includes photography, videos, and Jim Atwood Photography updates from Flickr.

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Juitter Plugin Rocks!

Jim Atwood — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:52:32 +0000

I found this Wordpress Plugin that when tweaked can add Live Twitter Feeds to the end of your posts. You can tweak variables such as Keywords, User To, and User From. You can also adjust the look, color, and number of feeds that can be pulled. Like the title says, it rocks! Check it out below.

Live Display of Twitter Feeds

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Jquery Carousel Slides for Wordpress

Jim Atwood — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:56:24 +0000

I just “finally” finished up getting a JQuery Carousel Slide Feature up on Ricochehost. You can see it on the front bpage of Ricochehost.com at the bottom until I find a new home for it. It was a bit challenging to get the JQuery code working with this but I finally got it to show correctly on my Firefox and IE browsers. I also managed to get it integrating well with Wordpress posts so that I can feature them. The customization possibilities for this are unlimited and I’m looking forward to exploring this JQuery stuff further. In fact, I’ll have to create some custom pages to highlight these JQuery projects I’m getting involved in. Great fun although it’s still difficult to find stable working examples to draw from.

Custom Jquery Carousel Slide Feature

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Video Box and idTabs on Ricochehost

Jim Atwood — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 09:07:28 +0000

I’ve seen some people on the web creating a video box using idTabs so I thought I would make one too. Again this is nothing new but it was cool to get it working and have it displayed nicely on the front page. The CSS was the tricky part in trying to achieve a particular look for the site, but ultimately I got the look the way I wanted it. My next little project will be creating a smaller version for some of my other sites. I am a big fan of large video since I am a photographer and I want my videos to be HD and “BIG”, but a small Video Box with idTabs would be cool for the sidebar.

New idTabs box on Ricochehost.com

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New idTabs Box added to Ricochehost

Jim Atwood — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:44:08 +0000

Yesterday, I finished custom coding an idTabs Box to the Geometric Wootheme used here on Ricochehost.com. Now this is nothing new, but it was a bit tricky to figure out how to get in there. Probably the most trying task was getting the CSS right, but I think I got it. I now need to create some options in the admin area so that I can enter additional Social Sites and other info.

I also had some JQuery conflicts with MooTools when using Slimbox, but since I upgraded to Slimbox2, everything has been smooth sailing. Perhaps there is something better, but for now idTabs is pretty cool and the possibilities are endless. Today I created idTabs boxes for all the other sites deployed by Ricochehost.

The cool thing about the idTabs box setup is that each tab is can be a PHP file and you can really do some neat things by adding additional code. It will also be cool to tie that PHP code into the admin panel and have the options updated on the fly. I’m almost done with that. If you are into tabs, do give idTabs a look.

JQuery Tabs Box Addition

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Registering JP Domains in Japan

Jim Atwood — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:17:51 +0000

For those familiar with Japan, Onamae means “name”. Recently I just registered my own name domain http://jimatwood.jp for use in Japan. The price was pretty good I thought at $56 for two years. The domain was registered at http://www.onamae.jp which is a Japanese discount domain service. You need to understand how to read Japanese to navigate the site which I do, plus you have to have a Japanese address to order the .jp or .ne.jp domains. Of course you need a registered business in Japan for a co.jp domain.

I highly recommend Onamae as my experience thus far has been very good. Note that the control panel and everything is in Japanese. We’ll see after two years whether they ramp up the renewal cost, but since it’s a Japanese company and I reside in Japan, I don’t think that will happen. The domain extension .jp is extremely popular in Japan and for those wondering where to grab your .jp domains, be sure to check out Onamae for specials.

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Slimbox2 Plugin for Wordpress

Jim Atwood — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 07:55:41 +0000

The theme I use here on Ricochehost is called Geometric by WooThemes. One of the features tied to the Portfolio section was the use of a Wordpress called Slimbox. The version I installed originally was 1.3 that used MooTools v1.2dev according the JS file. While custom coding the idTabs sidebox on Ricochehost, I noticed that MooTools was causing idTabs to not work. Thus I had a conflict going on between MooTools and JQuery.

Well, after searching around the internet I discovered an variation of the Slimbox plugin called Slimbox2 that uses JQuery. However, there was no Wordpress plugin. However, after reading the notes on the download site, I found that you simply had to copy over the existing Slimbox files and have it point to the JQuery JS library. After getting Slimbox2 up and running on Wordpress 2.8 I discovered that “presto”, my idTabs box worked like a charm along with the Portfolio feature. Slimbox2 also has some customization features which I plan to check out as well to make the user experience more intuitive. Right now I’m missing a “close” button and need to add that on there. Stay tuned for additional info about the Slimbox2 for Wordpress.

Note that after copying my files over the original Slimbox and adjusting the JQuery path and plugin info, I was able to effectively have a plugin that I could transfer across multiple installations. Works well.

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Jim Atwood Photography New Look

Jim Atwood — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:30:11 +0000

Jim Atwood Photography has a new look over at http://www.jimatwoodphotography.com. The website is running on a premium blog setup by Jim from Ricochehost. The site sports all of the plugins found on the front page of Ricochehost and so far everything works really well. The theme variation from WooThemes. There is a lot of customization in the backend and so far it has been a dream to use. Not that it’s done, I’ll be able to head out this weekend with the camera and take some new pictures. I need a short break from coding and design work. Happy shooting!

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Ricochehost New Look

Jim Atwood — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:21:45 +0000

Ricochehost is up and running with a clean new look. Over the years, Ricochehost has gone through a few theme changes and I think the new result today looks pretty good. I’ll be adding more content and information more this week along with a possible forum section again. I have quite a few vBulletin licenses I need to use. In addition, Ricochehost is running pretty much all of the Wordpress plugins listed on the front page. As always there are a few like “simple tags” that has yet to fully function with Wordpress 2.8, but that will change. Stay tuned for updates which I’ll either post here on add to the comments. Thanks!

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