Welcome to the first edition of what will be a seasonal newsletter for us. If you're receiving this, it's because you've had some kind of direct contact with a fusionbureau staff member or you're someone we'd like to keep in touch with. If you'd rather not get this, please unsubscribe. We know you probably receive a lot of email already so that's why we'll keep these brief and hopefully useful.
2011 is sure shaping up as a memorable year. Obviously not for the best reasons, but there's a definite mood for change, so it'll be an interesting ride ahead.
In this summer edition, we'll cover
- Tokyo Garden Party
- Forestone Japan - a recent e-commerce project
- Using the Google +1 button on your web site
- facebook in Japan, beyond the hype
Tokyo Garden Party
2011 marks the third summer for this event. Conceived as a way for networking within and with the creative industry in Tokyo, 'TGP' takes place at rooftop beer gardens throughout the summer. A balance of business and social networking, events attract from 50 to 250 participants.
The 2011 season kicks off with an event on the roof of the main Tokyu Department Store (the one not so close to Shibuya station) at 7:30pm on Thursday, June 9th. RSVP on facebook or to tokyo@fusionbureau.com
Forestone
fusionbureau has produced a bilingual showcase and online store for innovative Japanese musical instrument reed maker Forestone.
The site is built on the Magento ecommerce platform and is divided into an English shop accepting US dollars and a Japanese shop which accepts yen.
if you're interested in your own bilingual Japanese/English online store accepting multiple currencies, get in touch.
Using the Google +1 button on your site
On June 1st Google opened up their '+1' social recommendation tool to the entire web. This is basically Google's version of the Facebook 'Like'. The idea is to improve the search experience by adding a crowd sourced element to the search results page. The +1 button is displayed next to every search result and can also be placed on any web page using a widget.
After you get the widget from Google, go here for some tips on how to improve the load time - at present it's quite laggy.
Facebook In Japan, Beyond The Hype
Recently there has been a lot of hype over the growth of Facebook in Japan. However, it would appear that a lot of this is just hype. In the 4 weeks to June 7th, Facebook added an average of only 5,200 new users a day. Sounds like a lot, but that's less than 2 million new users a year which means it will be a long time before Facebook overhauls the 22 million registered users of Mixi. Despite all this, we might be looking at the wrong metrics. While the user base of Facebook is small, they would appear to be much more engaged than their Mixi counterparts - site ranking service Alexa ranks Facebook in 10th place in overall popularity in Japan and Mixi at 14th.
Contacting fusionbureau
Feel free to call or email us to discuss web or design projects.
email: tokyo@fusionbureau.com
tel: 03-3407-7873