Chinese e-commerce giant opens furniture showroom

BEIJING – China's e-commerce giant is stepping up its heated rivalry with bricks-and-mortar retailers with the launch of a five-story home furnishings showroom in Beijing.
Alibaba Group's Taobao, an Internet platform through which an estimated 3 percent of all retail sales in China pass, opened the showroom Friday for customers to try out sofas, tables and other big-ticket items before placing an order online with one of its merchants.
The mall is a new intrusion into the territory of China's real-world retailers by e-commerce rivals that are growing so fast some suggest they could become the country's leading retail force — its version of Wal Mart.
"The dominant retailer in China someday may be an online retailer," said Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Ji.
Taobao says its Beijing mall is aimed at overcoming a hurdle hampering the growth of China's Internet commerce even though online retailers offer significantly lower prices: Customers don't like to buy furniture and other major items without examining them in person.
"It's hard for people to shop for home furnishings if they haven't seen them," said Justine Chao, an Alibaba spokeswoman.
Alibaba Group also includes Alibaba.com, a giant business-to-business Internet commerce platform. The company, in which Yahoo Inc. owns a 43 percent stake, operates Yahoo's China arm.
Global e-commerce outfits have struggled to gain a foothold in China in the face of aggressive local competition. eBay Inc. entered China by acquiring a local company but handed over control to Chinese managers. Amazon.com operates through a local partner, Joyo.
The Chinese industry has produced success stories including bookseller Dangdang Inc., traded on the New York Stock Exchange, consumer electronics retailer 360buy.com and Vancl.com, a clothing outlet.
Industry analysts expect China's online commerce to grow at explosive annual rates of 30 to 40 percent in coming years, defying early fears it might be hurt by low rates of credit card use and rudimentary delivery services.
A key part of e-commerce's appeal is lower prices in a society where many families get by on a few thousand dollars a year. With no need for an expensive chain of storefronts, Web merchants charge 30 to 50 percent less than traditional retailers.
Sales through Taobao alone totaled an estimated 400 billion yuan ($60 billion) last year, according to analysts. Taobao does not disclose its revenues from fees charged to retailers and other income.
Its platform has led to the emergence of a cottage industry of small retailers, many of them lone traders working from home, who sell clothes, shoes, toys, costume jewelry and other goods to a nationwide market.
Taobao says its 25,000-square-meter (250,000-square-foot) Beijing mall will display 22,000 items from some 300 suppliers. Orders and payment will only take place online. Taobao says it plans to open similar showrooms in other major Chinese cities.
Other Internet retailers such as jewelry seller Zbird.com also have opened showrooms to encourage customers to buy higher-priced items online.
Such outlets could help e-commerce sites compete even more aggressively with traditional retailers by boosting consumer confidence in a market where online sellers have an uneven reputation for quality, said Ji.
"By having a display room, it clearly will help raise the seller's credibility," he said.
On opening day Friday, shoppers at the Taobao Mall on the Chinese capital's east side were test-sitting sofas and flipping through channels on big-screen TVs.
"Compared with photos on the Web, I can really touch the things, so I can put more trust in them," said Yu Jingyuan, an engineer for a computer company who was looking at a stall displaying kitchenwares. "I can trust the sellers online."
China has by far the world's biggest population of Web users, with 457 million people online as of Dec. 31. But just 10 percent of them shop online, compared with the U.S. level of about 70 percent, leaving online merchants room to expand.
In contrast to the United States, Europe and other developed markets, China's online merchants enjoy the unusual advantage that they face no entrenched retail giants with decades of market dominance and strong brand names.
After decades of poverty and communist central planning, modern retailing began to replace drab, poorly stocked Chinese stores only in the 1990s. But that was followed just a few years later by the launch of online commerce.
Bricks-and-mortar retailing is fragmented, leaving competitors without the financial might of counterparts abroad. The top 20 account for less than 10 percent of China's annual sales, a far cry from the 50 percent market share of the U.S. top 20.
Alibaba and other companies have developed online payment systems to serve customers without credit cards. In response to concerns about product quality, some release the money only after the buyer is satisfied.
In big cities, delivery services that draw on China's abundant supply of low-cost labor can get purchases from local sellers to buyers the same day.
Taobao says it has no plans to open showrooms to display other goods, but the manager of its new Beijing mall had a warning for rivals.
"In the online world," said Ye Peng, "nothing is impossible."

Article source : http://news.yahoo.com

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MIT develop Wear Ur World, 6th sense hand gesture gadget

MIT researcher Pattie Maes demonstrated a new gadget earlier this week at a technology conference in South California. It is called Wear Ur World (WUW), or 6th Sense and allows you to access information as though you always have a PC in front of you, but controlled by hand gestures.
What the researchers have done is combine a number of standard gadgets including a webcam, projector, and mobile phone, to form a brand new interaction experience. In its current form the battery-powered projector is attached to a hat, the webcam is hung around the neck (or also positioned on a hat), and the mobile phone provides the connection to the Internet.
The wearer uses hand gestures combined with the gadgets to perform actions. So, for example, they could make a circle over their wrist with the fingers of one hand. WUW would recognize this action and project a clock face on to their wrist. Make a picture frame with both your hands and WUW will take a picture as if it was a camera. Stand near a wall and you can get a projected desktop allowing you to open applications, view the pictures you’ve taken, or surf the ‘Net.
At the moment it is just a prototype system, but because it uses off-the-shelf components the cost of creating one is just $300 for the hardware involved.
Patty Maes commented:
Other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report’ it can really let you connect as a sixth sense device with whatever is in front of you … You can use any surface, including your hand if nothing else is available, and interact with the data … It is very much a work in progress. Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant.

 Article source : http://www.geek.com

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Japan, the Twitter nation

By AKKY AKIMOTO

According to Twitter's official blog (blog.twitter.com), when the clock stuck midnight last New Year's Eve, Japanese Twitter users went crazy, recording 6,939 tweets per second—a new record at the time. In fact, globally 14 percent of all tweets are in Japanese—second only to English, with 50 percent—which explains why Japanese was the second language to be added to twitter menus. And according to Virginia-based research firm ComScore, 20 percent of all Japanese are using Twitter, while only 8 percent of people in the United States are users. Twitter has grown so much in Japan that it now has more visitors than Japan's most well-known social network service, Mixi. And last month, Twitter appointed their first international manager outside the U.S—in Japan. But why has Twitter been embraced so rapidly here?

The first wave of Twitter users in Japan was basically limited to influential people/bloggers who knew about the buzz generated by Twitter at the South by Southwest music and technology conference in Spring 2007 in Austin, Texas, who suggested that their readers should give Twitter a try.

Because Twitter was such a simple service and did not have much text (at the time only in English), it was fairly easy for non-English speakers to pick up. In those early days, however, to actually tweet in Japanese script you needed to add two specific characters—one space and one period—at the end of your tweet so it would be accepted by Twitter's system. But rather than being an obstacle, the first Japanese people fascinated by Twitter enjoyed such a silly obstacle. Also, if the people you chose to "follow" were all Japanese, you wouldn't see much English except for a few menu texts like "login" and "submit." All these things made it fairly easy and attractive for people to use Twitter, even though there was no localized Japanese version.

Historically, Japanese web services that are similar to—and sometimes copies of—U.S.-based web services, often end up becoming more popular than the originals because the locally produced ones are in Japanese and designed to fit Japanese culture. Also, many web services wait a few years until they are established before moving into the Japanese market—by then it often too late (e.g., eBay vs. Yahoo! Auction; Google vs. Yahoo! Japan; Facebook vs. Mixi).

At first it seemed that Twitter too would be easy to copy, and there have been lots of Japanese clones by small startups. However, the speed with which Twitter was accepted did not give the competition much chance.

Another factor in Twitter's success in Japan could be that, at first, the Twitter head office in the U.S. didn't seem to know what was going on in Japan. With no Japanese-language support on searches, trends and hashtags (#) the Japanese twitterverse was largely unseen from HQ. Because of that, Twitter became a the place where Japanese Internet users—using pseudonyms—could enjoy saying whatever they wanted. In particular Twitter became popular with 2-channel users despite having less anonymity than that huge anonymous Web-forum service.

This loose control may also have allowed "bot" culture to flourish in Japan. Twitter-bots are small software programs that are designed to mimic human tweets. Anyone can create bots, though it usually requires programming knowledge. Some bots reply to other users when they detect specific keywords. Others may randomly tweet preset phrases such as proverbs. Or if the bot is designed to emulate a popular person (celebrity, historic icon, anime character etc.) their popular phrases will be tweeted.

Not all bots are fully machine-generated, however, and interestingly the term "bot" has also come to refer to Twitter accounts that are simply "fake" accounts, much like the fake Steve Jobs account (see a list of popular Twitter-bots below).

It's hard to say exactly whether bots are more prolific in Japanese than elsewhere, but I would guess that they are—especially as one bot-generator alone serves more than 200,000 Japanese bots, which tell fortunes and tweet proverbs and random quotes. There is even a book published in Japan on how to make Twitter-bots.

Not surprisingly perhaps, the most popular fully automated bot these days is @earthquake_jp which tweets earthquake alerts, and was part of the huge surge in popularity of Twitter just after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake on March 11.

Up until then the Japanese media was really fond of Facebook, which had been gaining ground in Japan as more and more Japanese users signed up. The Facebook movie "The Social Network" released in January assisted that trend. However, at the time of the megaquake and tsunami only about 2 percent of the population were using Facebook.

As mobile phone networks went down after the quake, people turned elsewhere to contact each other, and Japanese TV and newspapers suggested that social media, which by then basically meant Twitter, was a good alternative when disaster cut off other communication channels.

The Prime Minister's Office, the Ground Self-Defense Force, Tokyo Electric Power Co. and many other public organizations opened Twitter accounts after the quake. The government even issued a "social media guideline" for local governments who wanted to join, and the "social media" quoted in the document meant Twitter. In the long run, Japanese will probably jump onboard Facebook, the way people have around the world. But until then, Twitter has established a solid bridgehead in Japan.

article source : www.japantimes.co.jp 

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