Mozilla in Asia

Mobile and PC Internet usage is about equal in Japan. It will tip towards mobile I am sure. The rest of this is pretty obvious stuff. As non-PC Internet usage grows everywhere in the world, we’ll be going back to the walled gardens of the AOL-era PC Internet. Not a good trend.

The study estimated that 53.6 million people are using a mobile device to access the Internet, a figure nearly equaling the 53.7 million who accessed the Internet from either a home or a work computer in June 2007. The study was conducted among 3100 people age 15 and over.

Checking email is the most common Internet activity from mobile phones, used by 75 percent of those surveyed. Forty-one percent checked email at least once a day. Accessing news and information was next most popular with 52 percent doing so. Search and navigation queries were close behind at 51 percent.　

Time spent web browsing on mobile phones is still much lower than that spent on desktop PC’s. Internet usage on mobile phones averages 8.1 hours per month versus 18.9 hours by PC.

Adoption of web usage on mobile phones skews young. People under 34 years old account for 64 percent of mobile phone web users versus 45 percent of PC web users.

Despite these significant usage figures, consumer satisfaction remains low. Only 12.6 percent of respondents accessing the Internet via a mobile device stated that they were either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied”, with 52.1 percent stating that they were either “very dissatisfied” or “somewhat dissatisfied”.

Mobile Phone Web Users Nearly Equal PC Based Internet Users in Japan

This is a bit old but the Comscore numbers for June 2007 are in for Japan. I didn’t realize that Comscore has an office in Tokyo. Mozilla is listed in the “Top 10 Gaining Properties by Japanese Unique Visitors, Age 15+*” but that is driven by downloads of updates to Firefox.  It’s nice to see us in that list though.

· There were a total of 53.7 million unique visitors online in Japan in June, or 49 percent of the country’s population, age 15 or older

· Yahoo! was the most popular property, with 41.5 million unique visitors. Yahoo! now reaches 77 percent of the total Japanese online population, and averaged 33 visits per visitor in June

· The average Japanese Internet user spends 15 days per month online

As the 2007 Adobe Max Japan website has just been updated, you can see that John Resig will be speaking on “Tamarin and the Browser Scripting Revolution” on September 1st here in Tokyo. The session description is as follows:

Adobe releasing their ActionScript Virtual Machine as open source software to the Mozilla Foundation has sparked a browser scripting revolution. In this talk we’re going to look at all the new features being developed on top of the Tamarin JavaScript engine, including ways to embed Tamarin in other browsers. We’ll also look at the new JavaScript 2 language and how that’s being used in Firefox 3 to create some impressive applications.

I believe this is the first presentation on Tamarin in Japan and I think John will be covering some of the exciting new efforts like ActionMonkey, IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey. John writes more about all of these at his blog.

The Japan Times reports that the Japanese Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications, Yoshihide Suga, has announced an 8 billion yen ($70 mil.) project to “develop the next Internet.”

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, who developed TCP/IP in the early 197os have yet to have their protocol replaced with something better. 8 billion yen is either way too little or way too much for something to replace TCP/IP.

Count me skeptical.

On the other hand, I’m very interested in which businesses will be getting the bulk of this cash outlay from the Japanese government. This seems to me to be merely pork to pass out to willing “research” agencies who have no serious plan or ability to create something that would eventually replace the Internet.

via httpAsia

I’d prefer to see the study first-hand but it ‘feels’ accurate to me. Japanese youth spend more time on their cellphones and less time on PCs.

Chinese youth spend nearly five hours a day on a computer, double the amount of computer-use for Japanese youth, reports Beijing Youth Daily quoting data from China’s Tsinghua University and Japan’s news agency Nikkei Inc (Japan Business News). The data is based on Tsinghua University and Nikkei’s joint survey of 1,200 youths in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo and Osaka. According to the survey, 92 percent of Chinese youth use search engines and a 65.8 percent chat online.

Pacific Epoch - Study: Chinese Youths PC Usage Double That Of Japanese Counterparts

The Foxkeh August wallpapers are now available for download from Foxkeh’s blog.

Bob Lord, who works for Red Hat and is one of the module owners for the NSS module (which is responsible for the security functionality of Mozilla products) of Mozilla, writes about how NTT has worked hard to add the Camellia cypher to Firefox. While I only stood on the sidelines watching the patches go in, testing, etc., it was a great lesson to me and all involved for how to get new cryptographic code added to Firefox. Bob says it best:

Camellia also represents a great open source partnership. The Camellia team went to great lengths to publish their technology and to seek reviews. They provide royalty-free licenses to their patents. They worked through the IETF process to create RFCs for the TLS, IPSec, and CMS protocols. They wrote code to implement the cipher. They contributed this code to the NSS crypto libraries under the standard Mozilla tri-license. We were then able to incorporate Camellia into NSS, and then activate it in Firefox. That process took them years of hard work and diplomacy.

I am very impressed at how well the Camellia team was able to work through all these matters leading up to today’s announcement. They have been a pleasure to work with! I look forward to more Firefox uptake in Japan as a result.

New symmetric cipher added to Firefox: Camellia

Bug 382223 – Add support for Camellia to PSM

Shin from from the inside, looking in points us to a recent survey by NetRatings Japan which shows that despite growth by Google in Japan, Yahoo! Japan clearly holds the mainstream of the market in Japan. I hope Shin doesn’t mind if I copy his whole post, because it’s succinct and each sentence has critical information about the mainstream of the Japanese Internet.

Netratings have published Japan PV and user numbers for May 2007, and Yahoo! Japan again comes top with 31.8B pageviews/month. Yahoo! Japan has retained the top spot for 85 months, since the first Japanese statistics were compiled in April 2000.

Uniques for Yahoo! Japan have surpassed 40 million for the first time ever, and reach is estimated at a staggering 88%.

y/y growth provides solace for Google, which is up 58% which appears to be poised to rise to #2 web property in Japan imminently. Google is currently behind Rakuten (25.8M users), NTT Communications(24.5M) and Microsoft(24.3M) at 23.8M users, but competitors are showing negligible growth (2~3% y/y) or in the case of Microsoft, a decline (-6%y/y). The domestic total internet user base grew 8% last year, so the #2~4 players’ reach has actually declined. Yahoo! Japan showed 10% growth in y/y user numbers.

Yahoo! Japan’s 31.8B pv/mth figure puts it (just) ahead of the most viewed site in the US, which is the original Yahoo! at 31.6B pv/mth. When you consider that Y! Japan, because of the Japanese language nature draws its user base almost exclusively from the Japanese internet population which is approximately 1/3 that of the US, and Yahoo! US has greater overseas exposure on top of its larger domestic base because its content is in English, the lingua franca of the global internet, the page view numbers are even more impressive.

Yahoo! Japan is now distributing Firefox with the Yahoo! Japan toolbar, (Yahoo! Japan has been distributing Firefox for some time but only recently with their toolbar.)  The dominance of Yahoo! Japan in Japan is a great example of how markets in Asia are quite distinct.

Back in May, Chris Messina, who used to volunteer with Mozilla, posted a video rant which got a lot of attention. # 3 on the list of constructive criticisms about Mozilla Chris discussed in the video was, “I know something is happening in Japan with Joi Ito… but that’s about all I know about.”

Well, Chris, what is happening in Japan is a vibrant community around Mozilla Japan and Firefox with over 165 attendees for this past Saturday’s Firefox Developers Conference Summer 2007. In fact, I think we can say that we broke a number of records:

• 29 presentations
• first-ever streaming video of an entire Mozilla event
• maybe the largest number of attendees (166) for a developer conference
• maybe the first time we’ve had a remote presentation (Basil Hashem on Mozilla Labs) at a Mozilla developer event.

We we honored to have presentations from Mark Finkle, Mike Shaver, Justin Scott, Dan Mills and Basil Hashem in addition to presentations from 25 other members of the Mozilla Japan community.

The Japanese press covered conference including the updates to Firefox 3 including Places and the potential for microformats.

• 米モジラ、Firefox次期版の新機能を一部公開 ブラウザーを通したマイクロフォーマットの活用事例も紹介
• 米モジラ、Firefox次期版の新機能を一部公開

There are a number of comments up already in English:

• Mark Finkle’s blog
• Fligtar and his photos
• Shaver’s photos of Tsukiji Fish Market and Shaver’s post on the event
• Mossop (who stayed up all night watching the webcast- thanks Dave!)

We also have a lot of comments about the event in Japanese including:

• Piro’s report
• Gomita’s presentation
• the popular えむもじら blog
• btm-san
• Ikeda-san
• ZIGOROu-san
• kozawa-san
• simonetta-san
• mukaken-san
• Cai-san
• ginga-san
• TakamiChie-san
• Premier-san & part 2
• gf-tlvkanri-san
• mukaken-san
• nanto_vi-san
• KOMOREBI-san
• YAMAGUCHI-san
• deegg-san

As for photos of the event, there is

• Lonely Bob’s photos
• Gen Kanai’s photos
• level’s photos.

A number of people have asked about the streaming video and whether it will be published. We’re evaluating this request based on the additional cost (copyrights) and will report back soon.

I’d like to thank everyone who made this event a success: the vibrant Mozilla Japan community who gathered 160+ strong for an all-day affair, the presenters who spent lots of time and energy preparing for their presentations, the conference staff who worked on the network and video capture and streaming, and finally my colleagues at Mozilla Japan who pulled together to produce a great event. Thank you everyone!