世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into mobile phone body types. Previous surveys have indicated the Japanese love for both clamshell designs and skinny models.

Demographics

Over the 11th and 12th of April 2007 300 members of Cross Marketing’s online monitor pool successfully completed a private internet-based survey. All the respondents were mobile phone users living in Tokyo and the surrounding area. As usual for Cross Marketing, there was a 50:50 male and female split, and 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

I was surprised to see only one person say they had a Sharp’s AQUOS Keitai. This is the best selling phone design, featuring a quite stunning hinge that they call the Cycloid, it seems. The phone opens like a clamshell, but then the screen can be rotated 90 degrees around a central pivot to allow the user to watch One Seg television in landscape mode.
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japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into automatic software updating of personal computer operating systems, in particular Windows.

Demographics

Between the 4th and 5th of April 300 members of their online monitor group living in Tokyo and the surrounding area successfully completed a private internet-based survey. As is usual for Cross Marketing, there was an equal split of the sexes 50:50, and of the age bands, with 20.0% in each of the teens, twenties, thirties, forties and fifties age groups.

I do share most of the people’s concern that the reboot dialog is annoying, as once it is there it will keep popping up every five minutes. It really needs a “Please stop reminding me!” check box. My other pet hate is that the background process does slow down my machine a bit when it runs.
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japan.internet.com reported on a recent survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into movie file sharing sites. Over two days at the end of March 300 members of their internet research monitor group completed a private survey.

Demographics

As usual for Cross Marketing, the group was split 50:50 male and female, and 20% in each of the age groups from teens to fifties. In addition, all the respondents lived in Tokyo and the surrounding area.

As well as the well-known YouTube, another sharing site mentioned was ニコニコ動画, nico-nico douga, Nico Video, a new-to-me movie sharing site, it seems. In addition, the article mentions a word-of-mouth campaign on behalf of Sound Portal that was conducted through the release of their promotional advertisement to YouTube.
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With PASMO, a system allowing one electronic ticket to be used throughout almost all the public transport lines operated by many different companies, both rail and bus, throughout Tokyo and its environs, being recently introduced on Monday the 18th of March 2007, japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc on the Friday and Saturday of the same week as it was launched (ie the 22nd and 23rd of March) into the PASMO service.

Demographics

300 internet users resident in the Tokyo area completed the survey. The group was split 50:50 male and female for each age group, with 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties. It is not stated how many were regular train users.

I’m resident in the Kansai area, and although there is a degree of sharing between the ex-public JR lines and the private operators, the main thing missing, which PASMO provides to the capital dwellers, is the ability to carry just one card with all my season tickets gathered together on it. At the moment I have three different ones, and only one is IC-based, as one of the lines I travel on is just introducing its IC commuting ticket, and another has instead of a season ticket a capped pay-as-you-go (actually pay-after-you-go) scheme that offers discounts on frequently-used routes that add up to never being charged more than a standard magnetic-type pass holder. In addition, carrying three active IC chips, plus my work IC chipped ID card, would mean I’d no doubt confuse the ticket gates no end if I accidentally let the wrong card be read.
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japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into the subject of characters, here meaning mainly celebrity or cartoon character items, of the sort you see dangling off every other phone, it seems.

Demographics

Over the 14th and 15 of March 300 internet users responded to their survey. The group was split 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

I don’t think I’d go as far as downloading audio samples from cartoons or movies, but I must admit to liking some of the SAN-X stuff, especially Monokuro-boo, and would love to find some low-cost deco-mail clip art – the only site I found was 300 yen per month. For the time being, however, I make do with copying all the Lisa and Gaspard icons from my wife’s mobile! As I think I’ve mentioned before, Frente Spiral’s web site has a lot of nice free Pinky-Monkey wallpaper and icons for your mobile.
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japan.internet.com recently publishd the results of a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into the use of music playback features in mobile phones. Between the 7th and 8th of March they interviewed 300 mobile phone users from their online monitor group.

Demographics

From the 300 respondents, exactly half were of each sex, and exactly one fifth were in each age group from teens to the fifties.

Music playback is heavily promoted on phones, from DoCoMo’s Napster service and au’s LISMO to the forthcoming Apple iPhone, but how exactly are people using their features? For me, my phone is almost permanently in manner mode, and I actually haven’t downloaded any music whatsoever onto my new phone, nor used its SD Card playback feature.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into digital cameras. Over the 21st and 22nd of February they interviewed 300 people from their internet monitor group by means of a private questionnaire.

Demographics

As usual for Cross Marketing, the sample was 50:50 male and female, and 20:20:20:20:20 of teenagers, people in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties.

Just last weekend I bought a new camera, a Panasonic DMC-FS1 LS1. Yes, in that pictured pink! I haven’t got round to opening it, but I had to get a new one after dropping the old one a couple of weeks ago due to me getting zapped by static electricity when getting it passed from wifey, knocking the lens extension motor out of kilter when it landed on the ground.

I print infrequently, and save the photos to the hard disk. I think the option of saving to removable media implies moving the photos to DVD or CD as soon as possible, rather than just using external media as a back-up for the hard disk.
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With my recent post on mobile phone upgrades being picked up by Mobile Opportunity, I thought it would be interesting to look at a similar topic reported by japan.internet.com, this time a look by Cross Marketing Inc at the Spring 2007 mobile phone models. On the 31st of January and 1st of February 300 people from their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet questionnaire. As usual for Cross Marketing, sex and age groups were evenly divided; 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% in each of the age groups from teenage to those in their fifties.
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japan.internet.com reported on an interesting survey recently conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into news consumption. Between the 10th and 12th of January they interviewed 300 mobile phone users from their monitor group; the sample was split 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% aged 18 or 19, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties. Note that the full survey (available at a fee) covers many genres of news other than just the politics and technology groups featured in this article.

In particular regarding political news coverage, the results presented here have data points that are reassuring and others that are a bit depressing. The good news is that a relatively small one in five uses the internet as their primary politics news source. Whilst there are exceptions, like my favourite, Trans-Pacific Radio’s Seijigiri, certainly in the English-language world the perception I have is that many people gravitate towards the http://www.MyViewIsCorrectAndYouAreWrongWrongWrong.com sort of site. The bad news is that television is the most popular medium. Although I am in no way an expert on Japanese television news, not even a regular follower, I do get the impression that mainstream bulletins have little or no analysis, and there are few in-depth current-affairs programmes to rival, for instance, Newsnight in the UK, although I do hear that that’s gone downhill recently.

Personally, about the only current affairs program I enjoy (even though it is a little celebrity-heavy at times they at least give the lightweights little air-time, but that Kevin guy makes me want to throw stuff at the telly!) is “Bakusho Mondai’s Hikari Ota’s If I Were Prime Minister…”. That’s a login-free New York Times story, and it describes the show far better than I could. It’s worth catching every Friday 8pm to 9pm on NTV.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted towards the end of December by Cross Marketing Inc into the topic of online avatars. They interviewed 300 prescreened people from their monitor pool who were either very or a little familiar with, or had just heard of avatars. The sample was the usual for Cross Marketing equal split of males and females, and a fifth in each age category, from teens to those in their fifties.

Avatars are these wee icons or animated characters that represent one’s person in online spaces; I plan to set up a MyBlogLog community for my site so my visitors can see each other, or at least an idealised representation of themselves. I did plan to try out one or more of the services listed below in order to try to design a little electronic me, but they all seem to choke on Opera. At least that saves you from having to witness my hamfisted art skills…
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