Manga Cafe in Bricklane

You can visit the Manga cafe in Bricklane which opened last year. not like the ones in Japan, the one in England has the cafe underground and art gallery and Sushi bar on the ground floor. Moreover the interior is more fashionable. Including free drink, the prices are:

1 hour - ￡4
3 hours - ￡9
5 hours - ￡15

I've looked for an average salary in England which was£23,024≒\470,000（!?!?）
I guess it was not a suitable number to compare...In Japan you can stay over night by ￡7.

I was wondering why Manga cafes don't spread just like in Japan? The main reason is probably due to the difference of the structure of cities as well as the lifestyle. Japanese people tend to use these places to spend over night after missing all the transportation to return home at night. Moreover, we simply love Mangas to start with (though I personally don't like them).
On the otherhand in England, buses are available from early morning and not many people wonder around at night. I wanted to check the financial data from Manga cafes in Japan, but they don't seem to announce such information.

Will Manga cafes bear the trend of free contents due to the spread of internet? I don't think these cafes will popularize outside Japan. I guess it only works in high population density areas.

Service targetting for those who are 35 or over

I guess the construction of the "Matrix" by age division is beggining to materialize. Get Back Media Co. from the U.S. began the new SNS targetting users who are 35 or over from 23rd this month.

SNS now is more likely for those who are under, say around 30 or so. Students are the main players in SNS world. Since we started to use the internet, applications which are not designed for business are only used among young users. I wonder how will the people who use internet as just for business affect Social graph. From the advitisers point of view, business users are obviously welcomed at any cost. Yet how will they gain merit in commiting in Social graph?? There are so many aspects that must be comsidered...

A rolling stone gathers no moss

Recently temporary staff agencies in Japan are ahving a difficult time due to the increase in full-time employment. One of the bigest among world, Adeco group made a research giving the number of temporary worker to gross labour force. While Europe and the U.S. average 2.5%, Japan has only 1-1.4%.
The president of Japan branch, Mark Du Ree sees more temporary labour opportunity in IT and finance fields in Japan. He manifests to work on raising operation profit in this 2nd largest labour industry in Japan. To gain descent position in Asia, the most effective way is to work on Japan's labour market rather than countries such as China or India where unit prices are cheap.
Tempstaff Co. and People staff will intergrate this year and Recruit Co. will takeover Staff service holdings. Now it is foreign firms' phase to utilise the fundamental possibility of temporary staff in various fields.

What I feel strange is, why then Japanese companies never do what the foreigners do? Why don't they promote temporary worker in IT or finance industry? Recently I often talk with my friends who are job hunting about foreign firms. We all have an image of foreign IT or finance firms never hire workers for more than 10 years. Many Japanese companies have life-time employment system. I am thinking about this since high school that the Japanese tend to show loyalty to where they belong. However nationalism can not be seen as much as in Europe or in the U.S. Among students we always have local topic, club activities, societies or old school talks(Which I couldn't even translate with the right nuance). We all love the places where we belong. Off course I am one of them too.
Then can Du Ree use his knowledge and experience from the western countries in Japan?? Labour market works with controlling people, not machines and computers. In this case, I believe its important to create an achievement in Japan and search for the right human resource management that suits the Japanese workers.

Wii and SEO

On business week's "The world's most innovative companies", Nintendo has risen to 7th from ranking 39th the previous year. Without a doubt, Wii must have contributed to gain this result.
The ranking are as follows:

①Apple
②Google
③Toyota
⑦Nintendo
⑨Sony
⑯Honda

The ranking result from presidents' votes and financial data.

Now we are able to watch TV via Wii. The "Wii TV" provides you the time table to check the programs you want to watch, and it sends notice email to your mobile phones a few minutes before it starts. You can make a check on the programs you enjoyed. This information will then be organized on the web and creates program ranking. This system really realizes us that TV is no longer a passive devise.

Therefore TV stations must make some movements too. They will need to pay attention on various new features. On "Wii TV", you can search programs by key words, just like on the present internet. Celebrities, Products, places, trendy words...perphaps it "is" the internet itself. I've posted about in the past, but IPTV enables us to watch programs from all around the world. Moreover, Programs' names will appear on the web searched result pages. If so, then TV stations and program producers must think of SEOs and all other search engine knowledge. TV programs might compete among other types of media on the same battle field. TV programs have to think of how effectively can it be searched on the web. Will it include the longtail viewers? or will it try to fit as many trendy objects, places or people in the screen as possible??

In Japan, 5 million Wii have been sold, meaning 1/24 Japanese own one. Assuming that an average family consists of 4 people, you see Wii one every six house. What will the TV stations do next?

IPTV and nation control

The ITU(International Telecommunication Union) will transform IPTV into global common standard. This means you can watch any channel around the world no matter where you are.

One segment broadcasting is now spread in Japan and devises such as internet TV enables us to watch TV outside living rooms. If so, how will the prime time be interpreted? Not only programs that broadcast from 20:00 acquire the most audience rate. I presume that we will be able to watch programs when ever you want, and programs spend more money on advertising itself. Basically TV programs turn into Podcast system and mobile devises with high quality screen become common.

Then what will the mass media and the government do? News programs need to be extremely reliable or much more interesting. This measure will become more important to control the nation. There will be less programs being watched by all the family members everyday in the dining room. For instance I'm only subscribing to interesting news programs on podcasts. The reasons are that the quality of visual images are good, or it has powerful impact.
Now, there are movies showing Olympic torch being blown away on youtubes and many other video sharing sites. It could be seen in different directions depending on who and how the video was taken, or edited. In this age of multimedia with multi choices of information sources, you must ce cautious how to manage them.

Tourism in Japan

Kinki Japan Tourist plans to have the brand new A380s for their tourist plan from 16th this month.

NIKKEI NET (15th April)

The only plane that has the "Aerial Casino" plan start to make a flight from Japan.
Although Casino has not been realized yet, it is for sure that the plan is for wealthy customers. This tells that these days, people who afford to take a rich journey can be seen a few in Japan.

In Tokyo, with Haneda airport being internationalized, Hotel construction advances among Yokohama. Many new Hotels are opening and existing hotels are being renovated. As far as understanding from this news, There are latent demand in Japan for expensive tours. Moreover, South east asia is the most popular area to visit. This is for the reason that these places could be enjoyed with low prices, and completely different environment compared to Japan. To me, Japan seems to put effort on tourism recently too and I wonder when A380 will take its destination to Japan.

Merits + Demerits for "anytime, anywhere" devises

Cell phones might be available on flights in EU. Many countries are bordered to each other, so there is going to be a struggle with train services to gain users.

Not only the business person, but most of today's communication hardly need to think about where you are. Whether you are working in the middle of a city, or relaxing on a beach, you can talk to almost anyone you want to. Few of my friends even send emails from bathtubs and unluckily sink them dead...So these people today tend to avoid places where mobile phones are unavailable. For students, bars or clubs underground are checked if they can use mobile phones or not. From now on, these places will feel more difficult to gather customers.

Yet in the article on "Business Media 誠", places that are out of reach of mobile utility is a shelter for some of business man from repeating calls from the office. If so, communicating manners concerning local time will become more important as mobile devises popularize. I guess there will be more inventions to sort out this problem.

Forgetting the existance of your pocket money??

Japanese consumers are familiar with point card system. Recently I noticed that including these point cards or the CO2 emmission trade, intangible currencies are beginning to show its value since last year or so.

There are many types of point card utilities. In other words, point system varies depending on the publishing company. Forexample, "T Point" is given every 100yen spent at TSUTAYA, Family Mart or Book off. "ANA's Milage" could be exchanged into Yamada Denki points. Moreover, on web sites such as "G Point", you can exchange points into companies that do not affiliate or cooperate.

I presume that these points will be used in exchange rate bases in the future.　Financial agency and Ministry of economic agency are now discussing on this topic, but how are they going to interpret bancrupcy and change of the point system without any warnings? From the company's view, the point system is just an additional gift to customers. It is nothing to be controled under law. Nevertheless, if this culture grows into a global business, "prize ticket" concept must be reconsidered. For companies, the amount points that are not yet used, are appropriated as sales promotion cost. Points work as currency but it can also be forgotten that it does actually work like that. I bet hardly anyone forget the usage of notes or coins. Here is an interesting case: Card published by Starbucks can not gain points everytime you drink coffee, so it just work as a cash card. However on the annual report in 2007, the expired card had a value of little less than a hundred milion yen all together.

I guess the point card (Electronic money) market in the future can be expected by studying the present world wide financial system.

One convenient store per house

Rising appraised land value is a crucial problem for convenient stores. Seven eleven Japan co.,ltd. is now seeking for new branches by moving in to tenants for rent. The choices are those inside universities,hospitals or factories. All comodities are selected carefully to meet each area's demand and they are planning to open 100 stores in 2 years.

I often compare this kind of business strategy with the internet sales market. I realized that products that consumer need to use straight away can not be handled via internet. Unlike record stores or cinemas, there must always be many business that may not be overtaken by the internet revolution. Another fact I noticed is that consumer traffic is a very important factor in selling daily products in real life world. Places such as universities, hospitals or factories gather consumer demand on a regular basis...It goes without saying how "Convenient" stores make satisfactory sales.
Off course the opening hours are adjusted to each store. For instance, if stores inside universities are still open after the last train has gone at night, bunch of unwanted drunk students might come every weekend, or rather no one will come. In factories, hardly any customer will be seen after operating time. Large factories that need convenience stores are thought to be built in the industrial area where no residents exists.

However, the annual report presented on february 2007 tells us that they opened 425 new branches
,so 100 stores by 2 years could be seen as a weak manifest. There is a rumor that Seven eleven in Waseda university records highest sales in Japan...
Its exaggerated to say there will be one convenient store per house, but utilising these type of stores as a sales agent is an effective plan.

International financial authorities to jointly monitor large banks

1. Monitor banks that operates globally under stronger joint of each countries' authorities.
2. Check various areas such as on liquidity risks of each banks.
3. Disclose the assets that back the securitized products each bank hold.

The proposals are expected to be endorsed at the meeting between the G7 and the central bankers at Washington D.C on 11th April.

This is discussed in the Financial stability forum that consists of Japan, U.S. and Europe. This plan came up in order to make objective vision to monitor large banks, due to the worldwide finance complexity. These countries are the top three players among the key currency that I have posted earlier in this blog. Although the U.S. subprime mortgage fallout influenced mainly the developed countries, this proposals gave me an impression of weak recognization on developing countries.
If CO2 emission right turned out to be the key currency, countries such as China, India or Russia play a large role in the global finance market.

By the way, I wonder how China or India manage the balance between increasing CO2 by inviting foreign firms, and decreasing unemplyment rate by doing so. At the moment, they are against setting CO2 emission limits because it prevents economic growth. This shows that they don't see much problem increasing CO2.

I know this is a dream, but is it possible to create a key currency that does not interfere the economic difference?? I think there must be some kind of organization to manage it. Moreover, if the economic difference free key currency exists, the demand of the objective vision will lead to inviting other planets to the FSF. The planet must have equal financial market level to earth, or higher...

Organization management

The first class after the spring holiday.
...This term, I've only chosen classes that intrests me rather than seeking for ones that I can easily pass. I believe that people can not show their fundamental ability unless they belong to some kind of organization or a community. Therefore I've decided to take "The Organization management"straight away. Today's lecture was on the development of America. The main topic was the "Scientific management" by Frederick Taylor. This theme was pretty much related to the book I was reading last night by Heizo Takenaka, "経済ってそういうことだったのか会議"

Anyway, so how did the settlers from europe created the new country by themselves??

Back in the 17th centry, America was rich with resource but had no proffession to use them. Improvement in productivity was their key factor to turn their resource into their advantage. Inorder to improve economy, they had to standize all the tools with letting no exceptions. Mass production was the base idea. For it was rare to have professional worker to make product by themselves in factories, assembling process was shared to make one able do the same move again and again. If someone makes a mistake, there was always a replacement to make up the matter. However it's not just the producing method they were checking on, but also the paying system as well. Fire the ones who were behind, and pay more to smart workers. What one should work on, when and how were always under investigation. Rules, manuals, law and regulations were made one after the other.

I guess this idea was brought to Japan after the second world war? Unfortunately this is why someone like me feel uncontent, with the awkward atmosphere made by the difference between American style "rule" and Japanese style "tacit understanding".

AIR with its value

The key currency is now the "Air" we breath. Starting from gold to note, then pound to dollar, the worldwide currency has chaned. Today, we have something similar to the first key currency used in this world.

All the work to protect the environment resulted in making this money.
Although the U.S. dollar is used in today's key currency, the world seems to be heading for the new currency lead by the EU. This is from the idea that Carbon dioxide emissions trading could develop into a worldwide standard in the near future. I am a little afraid of what the EU is aiming for, which to control the world with itself on the pivot.What I think is that some countries might begin to trade on the security of their own resource. Then what is going to happen is the 21st century version of colonization.

Lack of study makes me write just an imagination with no pursuation...