Our Picks

by Yuh Nagano

Then there is an article about Internet advertising. According to a survey by Dentsu, the Japanese market for Internet advertising (the cost paid by advertisers for creating and placing advertisements) amounted to \6.04 billion, and is expected to rise to \9 billion within a year. Compared to the growth rate of 102.1% in other media (TV, newspaper, radio, and various journals), this figure, represents an increase of about 150%. While this seems high, it is interesting to note that the total cost of advertising in Japan is \6 trillion, which means Internet advertising makes up only 0.1% of the whole market.

The article then lists a number of advertising companies such as Cyber Communications, DoubleClick, Pointcast, Internet Watch and others. It details their business styles, hits to their Webpages per day, and their marketing strategies.

The magazine concludes the article with a forecast: there will be more advertisers who will create communities and offer focused information to members, in order to attract more customers. One good example, says the magazine, is Amazon.com. They involve users in book clubs and even encourage them to write reviews. Similarly, there are computer sites where pro- and anti-Microsoft people have debates. This makes users go back to the sites repeatedly, increasing the chances of ad page views.

Internet Magazine also features an interview with John Sculley, the chairman of Live Picture, who developed the latest image format FlashPix in cooperation with Kodak, Microsoft and HP. Mr Scully is an enthusiastic supporter of network publishing. He predicts that as the resolution of monitors approach that of printing quality (300dpi) in the future, the market for network publishing, that is to "read" online without your eyes getting sore, will rapidly increase. The magazine offers a number of other articles, such as an interview with Ikuko Matsui who went from being a computer programmer to become one of the two computer crime investigators with the Kanagawa Police. Other content includes cool sites, provider news which features recent changes of fees and services, a list of providers, and more. But it saves the best for last. At the very end of the magazine, there are eleven pages comprised solely of graphs showing the "busy" rates of 15 major providers for 15 access points (chosen by readers). These access points were surveyed by the magazine staff by calling up each provider every two hours for two weeks. An admirable effort!

Asahi Pasocon is published twice a month. It is not a technically oriented magazine but instead it introduces recent products, industry news and more "cultural" examples of Internet use. The cover story consists of interviews with five Japanese celebrities, including Professor Tadao Umesao of Kyoto University and Mr Taro Kimura, a TV journalist, asking them about how they sort out their resource materials and filter information from the Internet. The magazine then goes on to talk about Windows CE 2.0, an operating system for handheld PCs. After describing the main characteristics of CE 2.0 the articles compares the prices and features of CE 2.0 PCs: Cassiopeia (Casio), Mobilegear (NEC), Persona (Hitachi), HP 620LX (Hewlett Packard), and the Compaq C series. For those who are more interested in desktops and notebook PCs, there is a list of the 30 most popular computers, complete with their prices and price changes, as sold in Akihabara.

The July issue of Nikkei Science focuses on mobile communications. Most of the articles are translated from English, but there is one Japanese article about the coming start of Iridium satellite services in Japan in September. With satellite services, users can make phone calls anytime and anywhere on earth. Up until now, the only satellite service in Japan was provided by NTT, but geographically, phone calls were limited to within Japan. NTT's mobile phones were nearly the size of a notebook PC, plus its antenna always had to be directed towards the N-STAR satellite. In comparison, Iridium phones are just slightly larger than conventional mobile phones, and the orientation of the antenna does not matter. The only possible problem is the price -- a set up charge/fees of \10,000, plus monthly fees, billed in US dollars, of $50. Rates vary depending on location, but a one-minute call from the US to Japan will be approximately $4.40. Will this high price be a turn-off? Nihon Iridium, the company founded by DDI and Kyocera to launch Iridium in Japan, expects 50,000 mobile phone and 30,000 pager users in the first year, totalling 300,000 users by the year 2002. For now, communications are limited to voice at 2.4KB per second. However, they intend to transmit multimedia content (audio and images) at 2MB per second -- 800 times faster -- and that will usher in the start of the satellite Internet TV phone age.

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