Scott Murphy's Blog (17)

It's said that…

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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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Along with everyone else who's moved onto HTML5, I've spent significant time looking at the possibilities of the next generation of HTML. 

 

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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… Continue

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… Continue

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… Continue

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… Continue

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.… Continue

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… Continue

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… Continue

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… Continue

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… Continue

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

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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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… Continue

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… Continue

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… Continue