Lawmaker's office in Second Life

Resonant Solutions co., the Oita, Japan, ICT company, will launch a service that helps open an office of lawmaker in Second Life on January 13.

Resonant Solutions says that the office will appeal to younger people who are familiar with the Internet and cellphone, as well as save resources like paper and fuel.

Google Japan is getting closer to Yahoo! Japan in search share

Google Japan Inc. unveiled on Monday that in the category of online search, the page views it gained accounted for 41%, although those Yahoo! Japan Corp. gained accounted for 44% in November 2008, quoting the survey conducted by an independent research company,

Google Japan also showed the ranking of keywords retrieved on its search site google.co.jp―topping it was “yahoo,” followed by “youtube,” “wiki,” and “mixi.”

Can over-the-counter drugs get over the Net?

Japan's Internet shopping mall operators, such as Rakuten Inc. and Yahoo! Japan Corp., filed an appeal with the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare on Thursday.

The appeal was about selling the over-the-counter drugs.

The ministry will begin to limit the drugs that they can deal in on the Internet in June 2009.

Japan's SNS giant opens its door to wider range of audience

The leading SNS provider in Japan, mixi, Inc., announced on November 27 that it will change the system for user registration next spring.

The SNS currently requires the applicant for user registration to be invited by the existing user.

However, the user registration will be done without the invitation from spring next year.

Will mixi catch up with Facebook or MySpace?

Japan's local government asked Google for privacy consideration

Suginami City, Tokyo announced on November 21 that it had made a formal request to Google Japan Inc. for more proper privacy consideration about the Street View on August 12 and on November 7.

Google Japan answered it addresses the specific requests one by one on its website.

The City has received a lot of opinions from the inhabitants who feel threatened that the Street View will invade their privacy since the launch of it in August this year in Japan.

Yahoo! Japan can be searched for auctioned/mail-ordered goods

Yahoo Japan Corp. on November 20 finished improving its search site so that the goods on its online auction/shopping site can be found and shown with picture in the results.

Yahoo Japan expects the improvement will boost the sales on the sites.

Search for moving images with livedoor's service

One of Japan's net companies livedoor Co., Ltd. announced Monday that on its portal site it has begun to provide a search service for moving images.

The search service allows you not only to search the Web for moving images globally but also to view the images on its own player and to post the played images on your livedoor Blog page.