世論 What Japan Thinks

As usual, a Yahoo! service dominates the rankings, this time when JR Tokai Express Research Inc looked at PC-targeted free email services in a report published by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

On the 22nd of August 2008 333 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel employed in the public or private sector completed an online members-only questionnaire. 86.8% of the sample were male, 3.3% in their twenties, 34.5% in their thirties, 53.2% in their forties, and 9.0% in their fifties.

In Q2, I wonder why almost half of the sample use free mail services to subscribe to newsletters. Is it to protect privacy or anonymity, to keep one’s main mailbox clean, to take advantage of high-quality spam filters, to allow access from multiple locations, or what reason? Sadly, this issue is not addressed in this report.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, debito.org is taking money from ambulance chasers and other dubious sources, despite a statement on http://www.debito.org/donations.html that:

I also do not wish to clutter the site with sponsored advertisements.

Such links would certainly not be acceptable on What Japan Thinks (I’ve refused a couple of lucrative but unethical offers), and Google takes a dim view of participating in link buying and selling for PageRank schemes, so he is risking his second ejection from the Google index.

Of course, I recognise his right to make money to fund his activities or to pay his server bills (the domain name is owned by HobbyLink Japan, which is surprising and curious, as is the hosting location), but there has to be a more ethical way to raise money, and what impression does such an advertisement leave the average reader with?

Talking of ethical behaviour, I see his blog theme is WP-Andreas09, about which the designer says:

The original template was released as open source and free to use for any purpose as long as the proper credits are given to the original author. This theme is released under the same conditions so please respect this and leave the credits in place to Andreas and myself as we have both put a lot of time and effort into the design and the theme. Other than that you may change the included files as you want.

I don’t see the credits left in place on Debito.org, although he (or his site maintainer) may have done the right thing by making a payment to the designers to allow him to take such a course of action.

With most phones now crammed full with the latest features, most manufacturers are putting more effort into the design aspect of their phones as the differentiating feature. To see how consumers perceive the look of their mobiles, MyVoice conducted a survey into mobile phone design.

Demographics

Over the first five days of September 2008 15,502 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 1% in their teens,l 15% in their twenties, 36% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 19% in their fifties.

The first phone that I felt was stunning in design terms was the Sharp Aquos with the rotating screen that could change from portrait for standard email use to landscape for One Seg television watching. That phone first came out on SoftBank, but it’s now offered by all three major carriers. To my overseas readers – have Sharp licenced that technology to any foreign manufacturers? I seem to remember hearing that Panasonic’s push-button opening for clamshells has been licenced overseas, but Panasonic seem to keep that feature to themselves as a differentiating factor for the domestic market.

In the graph, I kept Sony-Ericsson separate as some of their hardware is worldwide, some domestic only.
Read the rest of this entry »

I looked at RSS feed usage yesterday and expressed surprise at the relatively low level of usage, but this new survey from JR Tokai Express Research Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into web site viewing habits reveals perhaps that there is not much need for RSS.

Demographics

On the 4th of September 2008 331 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor pool who used the internet at home completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.6% of the sample were male, 3.3% in their teens, 11.8% in their twenties, 30.5% in their thirties, 24.5% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, 8.5% in their sixties, and 5.7% in their seventies or older.

I was going to quote similar figures on site usage from the UK or USA, but I couldn’t find anything useful through Google! If someone knows of a “What the UK/USA Thinks”-like web site, please let me know.

Although there are few people performing their regular site checks through RSS, with the majority having no more than five places to visit, RSS is perhaps not that necessary. However, do people start checking more sites once they learn about RSS, or do they keep the same number but just do their checks quicker? That would be an interesting topic for a survey.
Read the rest of this entry »

I get the impression that iShare’s monitor panel is relatively web-savvy, but the results from a recent survey into RSS (Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary) indicates that there is still relatively little use.

Demographics

Over the 4th and 5th of September 2008 309 members of the CLUB BBQ free email service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.3% of the sample were male, 12.9% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 32.4% in their forties, and 11.3% in their teens or aged fifty or older.

One of the most powerful ways to use RSS is through Google Blog Search and Google News; after typing in the search you want to make, look at the left-hand column and find the “RSS” link. This gives you a link that can be pasted into a suitable RSS reader (I use Google Reader) and every time a new blog post or news story that matches that search appears the results appear in your reader.

Finally, you can get both this blog and the latest comments through RSS.
Read the rest of this entry »

Following up on Coke versus Pepsi, this time iShare looked at mayo versus ketchup, although this time there wasn’t a direct match-up!

Demographics

Between the 2nd and 4th of September 2008 412 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.2% were male, 17.5% in their twenties, 48.5% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 8.7% in their teens or aged fifty or older.

My least favourite thing about mayonnaise is trying to spell it, and my favourite is the Kewpie advertisements.

Let’s look at my readers’ favourite condiment:

Read the rest of this entry »

With five candidates standing for leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, it should be quite a battle for…what am I saying, Taro Aso is a shoo-in. As to what policies he might enact, goo Ranking asked members of the goo Research monitor group what matters of policy they would like to see realised.

Demographics

Between the 25th and 28th of July 2008 1,072 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.3% of the sample were male, 5.7% in their teens, 14.4% in their twenties, 31,0% in their thirties, 28.1% in their forties, 10.5% in their fifties, and 10.4% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

I must say they are mostly reasonably sensible, but also very inward-looking. I’m surprised there wasn’t anything about North Korea, however, and disappointed but not surprised that taxing ciggies did not appear.
Read the rest of this entry »

This recent survey from Marsh Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into Windows security – “an oxymoron!” I hear you all yell – showed that the Japanese too are well aware of Microsoft’s reputation in this regard.

Demographics

Over the 11th and 12th of September 2008 300 home computer-using members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female and 20:20:20:20:20 between people in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and sixty and overs.

In Q1 the survey is referring to Internet Explorer security settings – the Settings dialog from Explorer, then the Security tab, and then the slider at the bottom for the strength of the security checks. However, Q1SQ then talks about firewalls, which is not part of the security settings! I also find 65.9% of people using a pop-up blocker hard to believe, unless the figure was obtained primarily from people reading the settings straight out of the said security dialog box.

Adding up Q2 and Q2SQ results, just about one in four of all Windows users are actively checking for security holes at least once a week!
Read the rest of this entry »

The vast majority of Japanese phones use the 3G network, but is that enough for the average user? This survey from JR Tokai Express Research Inc (actually, japan.internet.com forgot to mention who conducted the survey, but looking at the sample size, age demographics and the high concentration of respondents from the Tokai area, it has to be from JR Tokai!) tried to find out with this survey on mobile phone speed.

Demographics

On the 9th of September 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.5% of the sample were male, 3.0% in their teens, 11.8% in their twenties, 31.7% in their thirties, 23.0% in thier forties, 15.4% in their fifties, 9.1% in their sixties, and 6.0% aged seventy or older.

I’m satisfied with my current mobile transmission speed, although the most I ever as from it is sending a 20 or 30 kilobyte photo attachment. Speed of operation, however, that’s a different matter altogether and something I do have strong opinions about!
Read the rest of this entry »

Only two months after the most-hyped mobile phone launch in Japan, with people queueing round the block to buy it and journalists spilling thousands of gallons of ink in praise of it, the consensus now seems to be that Apple’s iPhone has failed in Japan, with boxes piled high in many stores and sales predictions being halved from the initial one million units in a year. But why, in a country that has embraced the iPod, relegating all bar Sony to a single-digit percentage share of the MP3 player market? It’s an easy question to answer.

Emoji.

Yes, emoji, and emoji alone. It’s missing a FeliCa RFID smart card, but most people use them embedded in credit cards, not phones; everyone talks about wanting One Seg but most people don’t actually watch television on their mobiles; there’s no QR code scanner but there’s a free App Store program to download for that; SD memory cards are popular add-ons, but the iPhone has lots of built-in storage; there’s no place to hang a strap, but an after-market slipcase can be decorated instead; there’s no emoji, yet having a lot of text emoticons and smilies in the dictionary does not paper over the chasm.

Emoji, these small icons (pictured in the top right) that almost every Japanese phone has, for expressing happy and sad faces, hand gestures, weather symbols, sports and hobbies and star signs to name but some of the kinds available, are the killer application, and their absence from the iPhone has killed its sales. One unfamiliar with the Japanese market might think that such a seemingly trivial feature would appeal only to children, but over a third regularly use them, and another two in five sometimes use them, making them second nature to the vast majority of Japanese. For instance, if you’re emailing an invite to go for a beer, on beginning to type “beer” up pops a graphic of a pint mug as an auto-completion option, so why not? That is how emoji have become second-nature to most phone users. For the poor iPhone user on the other hand, on sending the message there’s no nice graphic to add, and on receiving, if they are lucky they’ll see something like “Fancy going for a ¾?”, the dreaded moji-bake corrupted character, if they are unlucky (which is most of the time) the iPhone will relegate the whole of the message into an attachment, requiring an extra step before the reader finds out they cannot.

The not one but two drops in price for light users by SoftBank illustrate that they recognise there are people not really that interested in surfing with the Safari web browser (remember, public WiFi is the exception rather than the rule in Japan) but instead are mail-centric, but without full suppport for both reading and writing emoji, the iPhone is useless. When the iPhone first launched, a review in Nikkei Trendy Net described it as a foreigner with excellent Japanese, noting that although it can handle technical aspects of Japanese very well (the pop-up kana input for instance is a very clever solution that can only work on a touch panel) it fails to understand the culture.

Until Apple realises emoji are the key element of Japanese mobile culture, the iPhone will not sell.