William Auckerman

Japan’s Sega Enterprises Ltd. has announced that it will team up with Iomega Corp. to jointly develop a Zip drive-based external data storage device to enhance its Internet-capable Sega Dreamcast home game system. Sega’s Dreamcast, which features advanced 3-D graphics and sound capabilities, is the first home gaming system to include Internet functionality. Via a […]

The typical Japanese user accesses the Internet about 11 times per week, visits six Web sites per online session, and spends an average of 1 minute 48 seconds per site, according to a survey by Japan’s first independent Internet usage rating service. Integrated Systems Technologies Inc. (IST), a Tokyo-based Internet software developer, on Monday released […]

Sharp Corp., top player in Japan’s personal digital assistant (PDA) market, has launched a new information service to help reposition its popular Zaurus PDAs as “anytime, anywhere, by anyone” mobile Internet computing devices. Sharp has dominated the Japanese PDA market since the release of its first Zaurus model in October 1993. Since then, more than […]

Responding to a rapidly growing demand among Japanese enterprises for IP (Internet protocol)-based visual collaboration solutions, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and U.S.-based PictureTel Corporation have announced a significant expansion of their four-year-old business alliance. PictureTel will work with a newly formed NTT-affiliate, NTT-ME (Multimedia Engineering), to develop localized, IP-based conferencing systems that can […]

Crosswave Communications Inc. (CWC), a telecommunications joint venture formed in October 1998 by Internet Initiative Japan Inc. (IIJ), Toyota Motor Corp., and Sony Corp., will begin providing low-cost, high-performance backbone services later this month. As its first commercial service, CWC will offer 1.5M-bps (megabits per second), 45M-bps, 150M-bps, and 600M-bps point-to-point data line connections. The […]

In a significant boost for the nation’s domestic multimedia infrastructure, KDD Corp. has brought online its high-capacity optical-fiber submarine cable, dubbed the Japan Information Highway (JIH). The undersea JIH cable extends for a total of 10,300 km and links all the main islands of the Japanese archipelago. It became operational on April 1. KDD invested […]

The Japan Electronic Book Committee has developed a new electronic publication format that it will actively promote as a national and international network publishing standard. The group’s proposed Network Electronic Book Format (NET EB) is based on the XML Web browser specification, a next-generation document formatting standard that eliminates the proprietary tags of current HTML […]

In anticipation of the scheduled government deregulation of brokerage commissions later this year, Japanese securities firms are increasingly looking to the Internet as a means of decreasing stock trading costs and increasing revenues. Last week saw reports that two major securities firms and electronics giant Sony will each launch a joint-venture Internet brokerage, joining the […]

Softbank Corp. has announced the formation of a joint venture with Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo! Japan Corp. to create a Japanese version of MSN CarPoint, Microsoft’s popular US-based online automobile purchasing service. The joint venture company, CarPoint Japan KK will be capitalized in April at about 840 billion yen (US$7 million). It will be owned […]

Japan’s largest Internet service and proprietary online content provider, NIFTY-Serve, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu Ltd. beginning in April. Nissho Iwai Corp., one of Japan’s leading general trading companies, has announced that on March 31 it will sell its entire 50 percent stake in NIFTY Corp., operator of NIFTY-Serve, to information technology […]

Japan’s domestic Internet advertising market grew by 89 percent in 1998, according to a survey by the nation’s top advertising agency Dentsu Inc. Based on data obtained through its third annual survey of Internet advertising expenditures in Japan, announced on March 16, Dentsu estimates that corporate spending for ads on major Japanese sites reached 11.39 […]

Several recent surveys reveal that, while the Japanese Internet continues to expand at a significant pace, the rate of growth is slowing. In terms of infrastructure, the Japan Network Information Center (the association responsible Japanese domain name and IP address assignment) listed 59,494 *.jp domains connected as of March 1, 1999. While this is an […]