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Twitter Japan is a go!

In January, my company Digital Garage invested in Twitter and announced plans to work together with Twitter to create a Japanese version of the service. That service just went live.

It's still part of the main Twitter service, but the UI will be in Japanese. One interesting thing that we've done is that we're launching Japan with advertisements. For instance, one of our first advertisers is Toyota which has a Twitter account where they talk about events and products. The ad directs people to their Twitter account where the users can follow that account. Toyota can easily see who their fans are and follow what their fans are saying about them.

Twitter has always been big in Japan. I think it was nearly 30% of Twitter earlier on and has gone to about 13% as the US user base has grown. However, according to Twitterlocal, Tokyo is still the biggest Twitter city.

It's interesting that Twitter is so popular in Japan. It didn't even work properly in Japanese when it launched. (You had to put a Latin space at the end of any Japanese post to make the Japanese appear properly.) Also, Japanese mobile phones don't SMS properly with Twitter as far as I know. Still, it got crazy early adoption in Japan from the beginning. One of my theories is that a lot of services in Japan to be either closed or over-featured portals and simple services with good open APIs are not as common as in the US and it attracts developers and users who are sort of sick of a lot of the bloaty Japanese services.

Hopefully, with this Japanese language version launch, we'll see even more adoption in Japan. Congratulations to the teams at Twitter and DG who worked on this. Good stuff.

UPDATE: ustream of Twitter Japan press conference going on now.

UPDATE 2: Post on Twitter Blog.

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GDP ratios, the industrial revolution and IT

Oki Matsumoto of Monex sent me another interesting GDP slide supporting the idea that IT is equalizing GDP per capita.

Oki

Before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the GDP share of the world was in ratio to the population of each country.

However, due to the rise of ideologies such as capitalism and communism and differences in technology development have significantly influenced the GDP share over the past 150 years.

Nowadays, thanks to IT that allows high propagation of technologies, as well as the commingling of ideologies, the GDP share is moving back to what it had been before the Industrial Revolution.

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Chat with Loic about Creative Commons

I ran into Loic at MIPTV in Cannes where I was giving a talk about Creative Commons. MIPTV is "The World's Audiovisual and Digital Content Market" attended by television and mobile phone content industry people. When we were walking along the beach, Loic did a video interview. I got a bit carried away and blunt in the interview. ;-) Apologies for being a bit rude to the champagne-drinking participants of the meeting.

The conference was focused on commercial content so I was talking mostly about CC in the context of marketing. Obviously, there are many other reasons for CC including free culture, open courseware, research, etc.

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