Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced its plan to introduce Japanese Kanji character domain ".日本" or ".日本国" as early as Summer 2009. Currently, Japanese characters can be used as "郵便局.jp". There are about 1 million ".jp" domains registered and about 140,000 of them use Japanese characters.

comScore, Inc. released a study of music related sites in Japan. It shows that nearly 40% of the Japanese online population visited an entertainment music site such as iTunes in the month of August in 2008. The study also revealed that Japan recorded the highest penetration of users of Apple iTunes software during the month, when compared with US, UK, France and Germany. 25% of Japanese Internet users accessed iTunes in August. Yahoo! Music led the category with 7.

comScore just released its August 2008 rankings of the largest and fastest-growing Internet properties and site categories in Japan, based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service. During a month of August, travel sites had much growth as many planned trips for vacation season. The 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China triggered gains at sports sites, while strong storms in August prompted increases at weather sites.

On July 4th, Overture Japan launched its updated website with both Overture and Yahoo logos. URL is also changed from "overture.co.jp" to "ov.yahoo.co.jp". Last week, they announced the changes with minimum bidding cost, which is currently 9yen )35yen for some categories(. Starting in August, the minimum bidding cost will be adjusted according to the importance & the value of keywords and the quality of keywords & the ads.

iPhone goes on sale on July 11 in Japan, and I heard that there was a short line )not long at all compared to the line forming in front of the Apple shop in New York city( forming in front of the store in Tokyo. As you may know, Softbank won the contract for iPhone in Japan, which means that Yahoo Japan )owned by Softbank( becomes it's official web portal and the search engine. Here , you can see new Yahoo Japan for iPhone. You can click each icon to see the service screen.

comScore just released an interesting data about the search rankings in Asia-Pacific region. According to their data, Google and Yahoo were the regional leaders as "top search properties" followed by China's Baidu. "Because Google and Yahoo! have a strong presence in many Asia-Pacific countries, they account for the majority of searches conducted in the overall region," said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. "However, there are several strong,

The latest report on information gathering in Japan shows that Internet plays a big part in people's information gathering and decision making process. 95% of 500 survey participants said that they use Internet to gather information prior to purchasing products and services. 89.6% of them use "search engines" and 59% of them use "products/services comparison sites".

On May 19th, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Japan. During the interview, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook was different from mixi or MySpace where you can connect with anyone, and believed that they can obtain a good market share in Japan. The majority of Facebook revenue comes from advertising. Facebook plans to sell the ads on Facebook Japan to Japanese businesses as they gain more memberships in Japan.

Yahoo Japan's SiteExplorer tool is now available for webmasters. Below are some of the functions of the tool: - Check the web pages indexed in YST by specifying URL or domain. - Check when the pages are crawled and which language is identified by YST. - Request YST to crawl the site with sitemap. - Check pages linking to the web site and/or pages. - Check the number of bookmarks to the pages, and the mentioning of the pages in Yahoo blog.

comScore's top Japanese property ranking for March 2008 is out. While there's no changes in ranking for the past several months, I'd like to point out that the gap between the #1 site )Yahoo( and #2 site )Google( is getting smaller and smaller. [Top 5 Japanese Websites for March 2008] Rank Property Unique Visitor )K( 1 Yahoo 44,031 2 Google 34,305 3 Rakuten 29,344 4 Microsoft 29,252 5 FC2 Inc. 27,608 Note: The ranking is based on unique visitors to the each property.

According to the research by Xlisting )excite is their major share holder(, 55.6% of pages ranking within top 10 in Yahoo search results are owned by the sites listed in Xlinsting's categories. They also says that 43% of Google top 10 pages and 40% of MSN top 10 pages are listed in their categories. They comment that "being listed in Xlisting category helps pages to rank higher in the search results." I say, "their comment is misleading." Sure,

According to goo Research's report, 85% of teenagers and preteens participated in the survey said that they know )and use( video sharing sites. It shows that YouTube )57%( is the most popular video sharing site followed by NicoNicoDouga )13%(. "Listening to music and watching music video" )44%( were the biggest reason why they use these sites, followed by "watching animations" )30%(. It also shows that 26.

Ok, this is not really a search news, but still a fun news about Google. Google opened "Google Cafe" in Roppongi, Tokyo this weekend. Their "Google Sodas" come in several Google logo colours. They also serve light meals and deserts. The cafe will stay in business till 24th.

NTT Resonant announced it's plan to strengthen its mobile search engine, "mobile goo". With this improved mobile search engine, the user can search more than 62,000 songs from the database, and more than 7 million videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites' data base. NTT Resonant and "goo" used to run one of Japan's original search engine "goo", which is currently powered by Google Japan.

Microsoft's video sharing site, Soapbox, officially opened in Japan on March 12th. It's a mirror image of English site, even to the sub-categories, which means that not many Japanese videos are available, yet. In Japan, YouTube is very popular and they opened Japanese site in 2007. Also, NicoNico Douga is very popular with its unique comment function that comments submitted by viewers show up on video.

Japan's biggest SNS site, mixi, announced its plan to establish a subsidiary in Shanghai, China by May of this year. The detail of its services have not been disclosed. Currently, mixi has 17mil registered users. You need an invitation from existing member to join. They have free membership and premium membership )fee( for additional services. mixi's mobile service has been gaining popularity, too.

One of Japan's top shopping sites, "Rakuten" announced its plan to expand the business in Europe. Their first European office is scheduled to open in Luxembourg in March. They will provide the market place model shopping mall services, and businesses and people in EU countries can sell their products and services by setting up a merchant site on Rakuten. Rakuten currently has offices in Japan and Taiwan. This is a good news.

ImpressR&D's recent survey shows interesting results about mobile commerce in Japan. The most interesting information is that 15% of women in 30's said that they conducted all of the online shopping from their mobile phone. [Top mobile shoppers] - All generations )37%( - Women in 30s )47%( - Women in 20s )44%( - Men in 10s )44%( [Top mobile shopping categories] - Clothing, accessories & fashion )28%( - Books & magazines )27%( - CD,

SBI Robo's social graph engine, SBI Business , is opened for business. When you search for someone's name, it gives you the search results from search engines )MSN, Google and Yahoo(, web and Wikipedia, official profile of the person, and social graph information. Currently, more than 4000 businesses and 25000 people's data have been indexed. The users can create his/her business profile at SBI Business.