Added by Scott Murphy on February 15, 2012 at 6:30am —
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Back in 2008, Techhui had a discussion around the use of CSS variables in the discussion post, Are CSS variables the future?
Since then the web has come a long ways and Sass and Less are pretty commonly used in web design today.
The W3C also has a…
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Added by Scott Murphy on February 8, 2012 at 8:30am —
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Along with everyone else who's moved onto HTML5, I've spent significant time looking at the possibilities of the next generation of HTML.
One frustration that I ran into was seeing the state of web storage being in transition with the W3C taking webSQL off its spec and moving to indexedDB. That itself if fine but the problem is that indexDB isn't fully supported by any browser vendor at the…
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Added by Scott Murphy on February 17, 2011 at 8:45am —
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Both Twitter and Facebook have seen a lot of coverage in Japan so I thought I would share some of the things that I've learned about these two services and how they are doing.
Twitter in Japan
Twitter seems to be all over the place in Japan. Just recently, Fuji Television made "Twitter" the center piece of one of it's newest TV series called, "
Sunao ni narenakute". The TV…
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Added by Scott Murphy on May 3, 2010 at 1:24pm —
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I just learned that So-net SNS, one of the largest user generated social networking services will be
closing it's business this year. It seems that So-net and other So-net like 'create your own SNS' services haven't succeeded in Japan.
The problem is that the players of the user generated SNS scene in
Japan are all modeling off of how Mixi…
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Added by Scott Murphy on February 24, 2010 at 10:00am —
6 Comments
With 37% of the world's blog posts being in Japanese, its surprising that few people outside the country know it has the
largest and
most active blogging culture in the world. Blogging has also become a crucial social media tool in Japan, as in the US, for individuals and businesses to promote their services and products. Blogs in Japan take on different shapes and…
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Added by Scott Murphy on May 20, 2009 at 12:30pm —
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Mixi is the largest social network in Japan. With a lot of my friends in Japan, I can't help but use Mixi, but if I had a choice, I would convince my friends to switch to a different social networking platform like Facebook. Here is why.
Mixi Acitivity/Visited Log
Mixi has a feature that displays exactly who visited your page or blog. It sounds cool and you might think it encourages activity but to me, it's annoying because when I read my friend's blog, it leaves me…
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Added by Scott Murphy on April 17, 2009 at 1:22pm —
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A while ago, I watched a TV program on how incorporating Indian Mathematics in Japanese schools increased overall achievement in children. Indian Mathematics introduces cool shortcuts in math. The subject really interested me and I started to look into Indian Mathematics methods. Not all of them are easily explained but here are a few that I've learned. Note: This post won't be of interested to those brilliant mathematicians and techies on TechHui who can solve 8 digit problems in their head.…
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Added by Scott Murphy on April 15, 2009 at 4:30pm —
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I just read this post in USA today -
New Web Address endings could be start of turf wars.
The article is talking about the possibility of opening
Top Level Domains to anything from .a to .z. I could get scott.murphy. Or TechHui could change from TechHui.com to Tech.hui.
I'm not sure the benefits of an open TLD name space…
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Added by Scott Murphy on April 7, 2009 at 12:30pm —
6 Comments
If you just got out of a long relationship and plan to burn all those photos of your partner, Recruit in Japan just released an AIR application to do just that. The program is called
失恋ゴミ箱 (Brokenhearted Trash Can). After installing the AIR application, you select the photo you want to burn and the program will actually light the photo on fire. You watch it until the photo turns to ashes (w/ sad background music) and the program will permanently…
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Added by Scott Murphy on April 6, 2009 at 8:30am —
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Here is an interesting case of music technology making history.
Last week the number 4 album in Japan's billboard charts (oricon chart) was by
a virtual singer. The album called 'supercell' was released by Sony Music as a compilation of songs created using a software called 'Hatsune Miku'.
Hatsune Miku (初音ミク)is a music software released in later 2007 that uses
vocaloid technology developed by Yamaha. Using Hatsune…
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Added by Scott Murphy on March 21, 2009 at 12:00am —
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Social business cards called
Poken seem to be spreading in Europe and now they are expanding into
Japan. Poken is a little usb key chain that stores your social media informaton. At social events, you can quickly share this information with other Poken users by touching each others Poken. You can then go home, plug in the USB and you are…
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Added by Scott Murphy on March 18, 2009 at 9:30am —
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In my daily read of Japanese blogs, I come across some pretty cool blog widgets (or 'blog parts' as they are called in Japan). Here are some that I thought were pretty nifty:
Two Essential Widgets for Japanese Bloggers These first two widgets are very common and are used by many bloggers to analyze/promote their website. If you plan to start a blog in Japanese, I would highly recommend them.

Awasete… Continue
Added by Scott Murphy on March 5, 2009 at 11:09pm —
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One of Japan's largest cellphone carriers, Softbank Mobile just announced a new iPhone campaign called 'iPhone for Everyone'. With this new offer valid until late May, you can get an 8gb iPhone for
free (yup, 0 yen) or a 16gb iPhone for about $100 with a 2 year contract. The iPhone was released in Japan in July of 2008 and although it generated a ton of buzz, shortly after its release I started reading about …
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Added by Scott Murphy on February 25, 2009 at 9:30pm —
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I came across a pretty interesting stats program called
user insight in Japan that was recently released by UserLocal who are also the creators of Japan's cell phone analytics program
ugokuhito and
nakanohito.
At first glance, user insight looked pretty normal. Heat maps, page views, gender analysis...wait gender analysis? Yeah, apparently this product…
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Added by Scott Murphy on November 24, 2008 at 10:30pm —
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Lately I've been reading a lot on
Drecom's ad4u targeted ad technology in Japan. Ad4u has been somewhat on the Japanese web radar for its controversy over invading user privacy.
So what is ad4u? Drecom is currently keeping the exact details of this technology a secret (awaiting patent in Japan) but the concept is very simple. Ad4u uses javascript to analyze user's browsing history and then displays relevant ads based on this information. For…
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Added by Scott Murphy on October 29, 2008 at 10:00am —
3 Comments
I just learned about a new image search technology called
TinEye and it reminded me of the things I heard about ilovephotos.com so I thought I'd share it here. (*I know very little about both companies so I'm not sure if these two technologies are really comparable)
If you watch the video on the TinEye site, you can see that it is a brand new way to search for images on the net. It doesn't search for images based on tags and file names but rather uses…
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Added by Scott Murphy on June 28, 2008 at 1:30am —
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