Why and How Facebook should come to Southeast Asia – Bernard Leong’s excellent treatise on Facebook in SE Asia. If he wasn’t running his own SNS, Facebook should hire Bernard

Google Losing in China as New Users Go to Baidu – Google losing search market share in China.

Forbes: The Man Who’s Beating Google – Long portrait of Robin Li, Founder & CEO of Baidu.

Japan’s PPC ad market will reach $2 billion by 2013 – Decent, but it could/should be bigger.

E-Commerce Is Getting Chinese to Loosen Their Purse Strings – NYT on ecommerce trends in China. Ecommerce and the related Internet advertising to support ecommerce will be key to a more vibrant web in China.

South Korea Approves Sale of Apple’s iPhone – Channy has been waiting for this day for a long time

South Korea Clears Way for iPhone Sales – No one has still explained how S. Koreans are going to do anything on the iPhone that requires a secure transaction if no Korean web services support SSL.

Vietnam’s rebounding economy – V not yet for victory – Economist on Vietnam’s macroeconomic challenges.

Software piracy costs Vietnam $275 million every year – Vietnam has done well with open source software but could do a lot more.

Want to live like Commons people?
Joi Ito talks about Creative Commons, Twitter, and the White House – Guardian UK interviews Joi Ito.

The Discover Shiretoko site itself showcases four stories which show how both Shiretoko (the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Japan) and Shiretoko (the code-name for Firefox 3.5) have a number of commonalities and, as my colleague William Quiviger said more eloquently than I did,

“aims not only to inform the public about the philosophy, mission and activities of Shiretoko Nature Foundation and Mozilla, but also to make clear that the power of many can change our environment’s future.”

Please visit the site to see the stories about Firefox and Shiretoko.

To promote this collaboration between Mozilla and the Shiretoko Nature Foundation, we worked with the Yasuaki Kakehi Laboratory, of Keio University to create interFORest, a site where participants can receive a banner to promote Firefox and Shiretoko on their own websites and blogs as well as see the other promoters. (Those of you who are keen will note that we worked with Dr. Kakehi’s team last summer to promote Firefox 3.0 as well.)

The interFORest site is pretty interesting so I wanted to point out a number of features of the site that are described on the about interFORest page but that might not jump out at you immediately unless you knew to look for the features.

On the home page of the interFORest site (see image above, also known as “Bird’s Eye View”, it shows a virtual map of the Shiretoko peninsula of Hokkaido, Japan):

Click through to any tree to get to the “Close up view“:

Then click on the tree again:

Also we’ve made a point to build the interFORest site with web standard technologies, specifically Canvas, which is currently unavailable in Internet Explorer. If you visit a site that is hosting a Discover Shiretoko banner with IE, you get a sad Foxkeh who hopes you will visit with a browser that supports Canvas, which would be Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

We’ve already seen a number of Japanese Internet media sites pick up the story:

「知床の自然もFirefoxもボランティアが育てる」—MozillaがWebサイトDiscover Shiretokoを開設

樹が育つ不思議なバナーで広めよう！世界遺産「知床」と「Firefox」の感動ストーリー

Mozilla Japanと知床財団、環境保護を訴える共同サイトをオープン

知床財団×Mozilla Japanによる「Discover Shiretoko」キャンペーン

モジラジャパン：クリックで木が育つ　知床環境保護のネットプロモーションを開始

Mozilla Japanと知床財団は6月23日、共同で「Discover Shiretoko」キャンペーンを実施すると発表した。

Mozilla Japanと知床財団、新感覚のネットプロモーションを開始

Firefox 3.5と世界遺産・知床の関係　樹木が育ち、森になるバナーをどうぞ

In addition to these Japanese media, in the first 24 hours since the launch of this campaign, we’ve had over 500 sites join our promotion, which is wonderful.

This promotion runs through August 31, 2009 but may be extended if the community deems it important to do so.

Please visit Discover Shiretoko, sign up for a banner at interFORest and help us promote Shiretoko and Firefox.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

Slides here on SlideShare

In fact, Doug had stumbled across the work of Satoshi Ueyama (Japanese), a programmer extraordinaire from Japan, who had presented those videos at the Mozilla 24 event in Tokyo in 2007.

Many people were rightly fascinated by watching the process by which a web page is laid out. Being an open source web page rendering engine, Gecko is one of the few platforms where one can modify the source code to do interesting applications such as this.

I asked Ueyama-san to provide additional information on how anyone could do this themselves and he’s kindly provided some instructions and updated his modified Gecko build for anyone to make such a video.

I have rewritten the animation generating program for the latest (FF3.1b3) Gecko / Shiretoko builds.

The updated video is available on YouTube:

First, build Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 with my modified layout module, which can be found under the ‘layout’ folder in the attachment.

Then run the build to output a layout progress log as C:\mozilla-build\log\out.txt.

You can change the destination with a constant in VisualizeLogger.cpp.

This time the log processing program is written in ActionScript.

Paste part of your log file in LogSource.as and compile ReflowAnimation.as with mxmlc to generate a Flash movie.

To make a movie in MPEG format, compile CaptureDump.mxml for Adobe AIR and run it.

This generates PNG files for each frame under C:\mozilla-build\log\frames.

Now you can convert them to a MPEG movie with ffmpeg.

Sorry for my rough explanation!

A big, big thank you to Satoshi for presenting on Gecko reflow back in 2007 and again for providing an update for Shiretoko as well as the files needed for anyone to do this on their own.

If you make your own Gecko reflow video, please paste a link to it in the comments of this post. Satoshi and other Mozilla developers and community members would be interested to see how Gecko reflows your website.

Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, Darick Tong (Google Inc.) and Yasuo Kida, Peter Edberg (Apple Inc.) are proposing to add 674 characters to the Unicode standard in order to support emoji in Unicode.

As of December 2008, there are 110.4 million cell phone users in Japan (about 87% of the population), and about 90.6% of the cell phones are 3G-enabled for internet use. Emoji are widely used, especially by people under 30. However, a June 2007 survey of 13,000 users — 80% of whom were 30 or older — found that even among this older group, 78% “often” or “sometimes” used Emoji in emails. Respondents reported using a wide variety of Emoji, including Emoji for faces, emotions, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals, etc. Especially among younger users, email is mostly or exclusively used on cell phones instead of computers. Among cell phone users, 90% use email primarily on cell phones, and 60% use email exclusively on cell phones. Emoji have been used on Japanese cell phones for 10 years, and there is no evidence that use of Emoji is decreasing.

Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols

I know this data to be true and yet it’s still a stunning fact: 60% of cell phone users in Japan use email EXCLUSIVELY on cell phones and 90% of cell phone users in Japan use email PRIMARILY on cell phones. This is a stunning fact, and the key is that mobile carriers in  Japan do not support SMS. Mobile phone messaging in Japan is email.

It’s interesting to see Google and Apple cooperating here as both Google and Apple have a need with the iPhone and the Android device that’s planned to be launched by NTT DoCoMo this year for emoji support.

via What Japan Thinks.

Before most of popular browsers start to support canvas “3d” context, we JavaScript developers have struggled how to implement to enable 3D by JavaScript without any extensions like Java, Flash, etc. Here is a part of the history of JavaScript’s 3D tech development.

Kawasaki-san also covered Satoshi Ueyama’s recent work on 3D in JS and Canvas back in February, if you had missed it: Incredible JavaScript+Canvas 3D demos from Japan!

Ueyama-san, the programmer who made those 3D demos, is the same programmer who did those Gecko reflow videos (Japanese) that were widely blogged about and discussed at Doug Turner’s blog: What is a reflow?

EDIT: Unfortunately those reflow videos are no longer available at Google Video (grrr). I’ll see if Ueyama-san can upload them to a different video hosting site.

EDIT 2: Gecko reflow videos have been moved to Youtube thanks to Ueyama-san!

Gecko Reflow Visualization – google.co.jp

Gecko Reflow Visualization – mozilla.org

Gecko Reflow Visualization – Wikipedia

Shiretokoのロボをリ～ファ～イ～ン～

One of the key users that Mozilla focuses on in Japan are web developers as they are critical to having websites that work across all browsers, not just the one from Seattle.

Earlier this year, Mozilla Japan sponsored an event, “SwapSkills for the Happy Web Weekend“(Japanese), when John Allsop came to speak in Tokyo. We heard he was bringing his Web Directions conference series to Tokyo as Web Directions East (2008) and made the decision to co-sponsor the event.

In Japan, we still have a significant number of websites that are only compatible with the browser from Seattle. There are web-based services that stream entertainment content on the Internet that only work with IE, the most famous being gyao.jp, which does not deserve a link from me. There are banks that don’t work with browsers other than the one from Seattle.  etc. Thus it is critically important that web developers in Japan understand leading web design, which includes the importance of standards-based design. Thus it was a pleasure for us to sponsor Web Directions East and it was a personal pleasure to introduce Mike Migurski as the final keynote speaker for Day 1, as Jeff Veen was unable to attend.

Thank you to all of the speakers, John himself, as well as Kikuchi-san and his staff and volunteers for what was hopefully the first of an annual series of events on leading web design in Japan.

Flickr photos tagged wde08

Blog posts in English (these are speakers from the event)

Dan Cederholm – Tokyo Express

Adactio: Journal—Big in Japan

web directions east (tecznotes)

Blog posts in Japanese

Web Directions East : 2 日目 | ヨモツネット

WDE: Web Directions East | Fumihiro Kato / 加藤 文彦

Web Directions Eastで講演をしてきました。 | FXB | 株式会社エフエックスビイ

覚え書き@kazuhi.to: Web Directions East

創造マラソンのデザイン更新中◆Web Direcitons East 2008でいい刺激。 | 創造マラソン

monkeyish studio: Web Directions East | Progressive Enhancement

安藤日記 [&] Web Directions East 08 (Eric Meyer)

安藤日記 [&] Web Directions East 08 (Dan Cederholm)

Japanese media coverage included:

「Web Directions East 2008」カンファレンス レポート

Unsurprisingly, the total usage of Windows (from 98 through to Vista) is 96.8%. I know Macintosh has a larger than 2.1% share in Japan so this data is skewed towards business users I think.

The share of email clients is much more interesting and Thunderbird has an 11.5% share. Webmail has a 7% share.

If one was to do a general survey of Japanese Internet users, I’m sure the webmail percentage would be much higher and I’m sure there are many, like me, who use both a client and webmail.

• 江村 秀之(えむら ひでゆき) or Hideyuki (level) Emura who you may know has the most popular Mozilla blog in Japan: えむもじら and was profiled by CNet Japan last year before Mozilla 24: Mozillaの成長を見つめ続ける、クールで熱い老舗サイトの運営者〜江村秀之（level）氏／えむもじら運営
  
• 池田 譲治(いけだ じょうじ) or Joji Ikeda who is one of the leading Mozillagumi members and is famous for his translations of Mozilla-related information. Ikeda-san blogs at Firefox Hacks 翻訳日記 and was profiled by CNet Japan last year before Mozilla 24:心に伝わるテクニカルワードを探求する翻訳のエキスパート 〜池田譲治さん／Mozilla Japan 翻訳部門 和訳アドバイザー
  
• 下田 洋志(しもだ ひろし) or Hiroshi (piro) Shimoda who many of you know is a prolific Mozilla add-ons developer, XUL expert, blogger at outsider reflex, and very talented designer to boot.
• 松澤 太郎(まつざわ たろう) or Taro Matsuzawa, who most of you know as “BTM” or “kumicho” and is one of the key members of the Mozillagumi, XUL developer, and blogs at すめるまん Broken Diary
• dynamis(でゅなみす) or Tomoya Asai, who most of you know as the localization peer in Japan and recently joined Mozilla Japan full-time. dynamis runs his own 7ème Gnossienne blog, but also runs the important Mozilla Japan 翻訳部門フォーラム and the Mozilla Japan L10N Forum where the Japanese Mozilla community discuss l10n issues and solutions.

We’re very lucky to have such active and prolific developers and localizers and authors in Japan. With the previous pocket-guide to Firefox 3, and now this expert’s guide, Japanese Firefox users and developers have a pair of great books to help them enjoy Firefox 3 to it’s fullest.

Emura-san’s blog post about the book has an image of the dust jacket cover which some of you might enjoy: Firefox 3 Hacks 予約可能に.