我的開始在这里

The park can be seen from afar thanks to its huge 117m high Ferris wheel, the tallest in Japan.

The Flowers and Diamonds (admission 700yen, open from 10am to 8pm) as it is called carries 68 cars and the full rotation takes 17 minutes. The wheel offers great views on Disneyland, Tokyo Bay, Tokyo and even Mount Fuji on clear days (November to March being the clearest).

The other main attraction is the Kasai Rinkai Aquarium (admission 700yen, open from 9:30am to 4pm), one of Kanto's finest. The aquarium is famous for its gigantic tunas an bonitos swimming like silvery robots around a 360 degree room. Apart from them, there are hammerhead sharks, angelfishes, surgeonfishes, anemones, morays, giant crabs, deep sea fishes, and fishes from all seven oceans. The other stars of the place are the many penguins and other sea birds. --end--
As the park is 15-20 minutes on foot from where i live, everyone was surprised that i never landed in there. Now, My friends can no more make the monkey out of me.
The admission fee for the Aquarium was free today. Pushing through the crowd, i managed to catch few good shots. As i m well trained in 200% congestion degree of Japan's train, such crowd is just a piece of cake for me.


Saturday(5/5)

Going out these day 'idea' does not  impress me at all. Frankly speaking, it is more enjoyable by  staying at home, listening to  music loudly, reorganizing e-documents. Playing basketball is just as fantastic. Unluckily, it requires at least 5 more person. Nobody will stick around with me.

As today was the last practical day( i will definitely get a full rest before getting back to hectic life) of 2007 golden week, i decided to give myself a treat in ANA hotel(http://www.anaintercontinental-tokyo.jp/rest/index.html) which has been in my mind since the buyout by Morgan Stanley. (http://www.reuters.com/news/video/videoStory?videoId=48603)

Umm ... not bad ... steak is well served. You get to choose what you like as far as you are not fasting.  Cakes satisfied my appetite the most. It reminds me of the well served cakes of Silvermine Beach Hotel of LautauIsland(http://www.resort.com.hk/). I swore that i gulped down at least 10 pieces during the stay there. Suddenly, i realized that gastronomic delight serves as stimulus that pleased me.  A new way of refreshing myself? 3rd space promoting has long been a most successful tactic of those big gun of coffee brand like starbuck. May be someday in the future, i will own my 3rd space which i can share it with my lovely friends. Who  know?

Half my advertising budget is wasted, but I don't know which half," goes the old retailer's quip, but this dilemma may someday be a thing of the past. If so, affiliate marketing, a type of pay-for-performance advertising, will get some of the credit.

It is an approach to marketing that is rapidly catching on with companies looking for a new, cost-effective way to reach customers.

Leading the charge are companies like Tokyo-based ValueCommerce Co., whose president, Brian Nelson, explains the idea behind affiliate marketing: "(Clients) don't have to waste money on advertising. You're only paying for the benefit."

Nelson was confident enough in his business model to list ValueCommerce shares on the Mothers market for startups on July 31.

In affiliate marketing, someone might write about a new product on a blog. If someone reads the blog and purchases the product, the blogger, or affiliate, gets a commission on the sale.

ValueCommerce, a pioneer in affiliate marketing in Japan with a 25 percent market share, makes money from commissions it receives by linking affiliates with online shopping malls and other e-commerce firms. Nelson became the chief operating officer in 2001, two years after the company was founded.

Business has been good. The company posted a net profit of 173 million yen on sales of 4.0 billion yen in the business year through December. This year, ValueCommerce expects to make 497 million yen on sales of 5.4 billion yen.

Unlike traditional advertising, where sellers pay a fixed price for space in a newspaper, magazine or Web site, in affiliate marketing the advertiser pays only when a sale is made, assuring the advertiser that its money is well spent.

Nelson, a native of California, said the affiliate marketing industry is underdeveloped in Japan and has huge potential to grow.

"People have only understood affiliate marketing over the last two years," Nelson said in a recent interview. "A lot of companies are starting to understand the benefit they get by using a pay-for-performance model."

According to Nomura Securities Financial & Economic Research Center, the affiliate marketing industry in Japan has grown nearly eightfold in the last three years, from 5 billion yen in 2002 to 39 billion yen in 2005. It forecasts sales of 76 billion yen by 2007.

Although affiliate marketing had already taken off in the United States and Europe when ValueCommerce was founded in 1999, it was slower to catch on in Japan.

"The Japanese market was not using as many credit cards for online payments in 1999," Nelson said. "There were still many bank transfers and postal transfers, so we had to build a system that worked for the Japanese market."

Seven years on, ValueCommerce has some 175,000 affiliates, of which 80 percent are individuals, and 1,650 e-commerce companies as clients. Last year, it entered into a tieup with Yahoo Japan Corp.

Despite the growth, and perhaps because of it, the market has had teething problems. Some shady affiliates, for example, impersonate others to try to cash in on their hard-earned reputations.

ValueCommerce and six other major affiliate marketing companies responded by setting up the Japan Affiliate Service Kyokai in May. The association will draw up guidelines for business practices by fall, monitor unethical behavior and educate the public about the industry.

These challenges have not daunted Nelson, who remains optimistic about his company's future. His next target is to expand into other Asian markets, including South Korea and China.

He noted that South Korea's high Internet penetration makes it easier for ValueCommerce to operate there. China, on the other hand, presents more of a challenge. Although there are about 40 million broadband users and 100 million Internet users in China overall -- mostly cell phone subscribers -- there are only 2 million credit card holders, he said.

Coming up with a payment system for those cell phone buyers is the key. "There is a unique opportunity to think about how to make payments and different ways to advance pay-for-performance models in China," Nelson said.

• 無償
• オープンソース
• クロスプラットフォーム(Unix系、Windows、Macなど)
• ダイナミックなWebサイトを作成できる
• Webサイトの開発、管理をすべてWebブラウザだけで行なえる
• Webによるコンテンツ・マネジメント・システムでもある
• Webサーバ、簡易データベースを内蔵
• セキュリティに優れ、細かいポリシー設定が容易
• きわめて柔軟で、変更や追加に強い
• 拡張性に富む(Pythonによる)

Turbine

Turbine is a servlet based framework that allows experienced Java developers to quickly build web applications. Turbine allows you to use personalize the web sites and to use user logins to restrict access to parts of your application.

Turbine is a matured and well established framework that is used as the base of many other projects (like e.g. the excellent Jetspeed 1 Portals framework.

Turbine is an excellent choice for developing applications that make use of a services-oriented architecture. Some of the functionality provided with Turbine includes a security management system, a scheduling service, XML-defined form validation server, and an XML-RPC service for web services. It is a simple task to create new services particular to your application.

The Turbine core is free of any dependency on a presentation layer technology. Both JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Velocity are supported inside Turbine. For developers already familiar with JSP, or have existing JSP tag libraries, Turbine offers support for the Sun standard. Velocity is the favorite view technology of most users of the Turbine framework; try it out and see if Velocity can help you develop your web applications faster and work more easily with non-programming designers.

Turbine is developed in an open, participatory environment and released under the Apache Software License. Turbine is intended to be a collaboration of the best-of-breed developers from around the world. We invite you to participate in this open development project.

Drupal  

RubyOnRails

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server. Everyone from startups to non-profits to enterprise organizations are using Rails. Rails is all about infrastructure so it's a great fit for practically any type of web application Be it software for collaboration, community, e-commerce, content management, statistics, management, you name it.

Rails works with a wealth of web servers and databases. For web server, we recommend Apache or lighttpd, running either FastCGI or SCGI, or Mongrel. For database, you can use MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, or Firebird. Just about any operating system will do, but we recommend a 'nix-based one for deployment.

A recent JETRO survey shows that a majority of Japanese firms planning to build new manufacturing operations in Europe consider central and eastern parts of the region as candidate sites, Masakazu Tachikawa, director of the Europe Division of JETRO's Overseas Research Department, told the July 19 symposium.

The accession of eight former Soviet bloc nations into the European Union in 2004 has contributed to improved business infrastructure in those countries, where low-cost and highly educated labor remains an advantage over the so-called old EU members, Tachikawa said.

According to Tachikawa, the annual volume of foreign direct investment in Central and Eastern Europe, which stood at around 10 billion euros in the mid-1990s, began to pick up in 1997 as the process for the countries' entry into the EU accelerated, and topped 30 billion euros in 2004 and 2005.

Investment by Japanese firms in the region has also increased since the late 1990s and, despite ups and downs over the years, topped 50 billion yen in 2003, he said.

As of late 2005, the Czech Republic was the fourth-largest destination of Japanese manufacturing firms in Europe -- after Britain, Germany and France -- and two other Central and East European nations -- Hungary and Poland -- were among the top 10 countries, Tachikawa told the audience.

The number of local subsidiaries of Japanese manufacturers in the region has more than doubled during the past five years, he added.

In the 15 years since the end of communist rule, the region has become a major manufacturing base for European, Japanese and other Asian automakers, including Volkswagen, Renault, Fiat, Toyota, Suzuki, Hyundai and Daewoo.

Poland hosts production facilities of European, American and Asian manufacturers of household electrical goods such as refrigerators, washing machines and air conditioners. The Czech Republic has become a key production base for the world's computer industry while Hungary has attracted large amounts of investment from information technology firms, Tachikawa said.

In the run-up to their EU accession in 2004, the Central and East European countries offered incentives to foreign manufacturers to make them more attractive than their counterparts in the west, including establishment of special economic zones, reduction/exemption of corporate tax, and lower tariffs on imports of production facilities, he said.

The foreign manufacturers in turn were attracted by the low-cost, highly educated labor in the region, where wage levels were one-fifth to one-sixth of Western Europe, Tachikawa said.

Under the association agreements signed with the prospective members, the EU basically eliminated tariffs to imports from those countries in 1997, giving investors in the region tariff-free access to the EU market, he added.

How has the investment environment changed since their accession to the EU? As one of the positive changes, Tachikawa pointed to improved logistics efficiency due to simplified customs procedures, including border checks on cargo, between the new members and the rest of the union.

He also cited greater transparency of legal systems due to harmonization to EU standards, as well as infrastructure improvement with the use of EU funds for less developed members.

On the other hand, the accession has obliged the Central and East European countries to either scale down or abolish the investment incentives to conform to the framework of EU competition policy, Tachikawa said. For example, they have had to discontinue the exemption of customs tariffs on imports of production equipment.

Conformity to EU standards resulted in tightened regulations, including those on the environment, he said.

Tachikawa also pointed to the sharp rise in personnel costs in the Central and East European countries, with some estimates showing that wage levels in the region have doubled in the 10 years since 1995.

A JETRO survey shows that labor costs in Budapest, which were one-seventh of those in Dusseldorf, Germany, three years ago, have increased to one-fourth the level, he said. But the figures also show that the new EU members still retain a steep labor cost advantage over the old members, he added.

The rising costs put the new EU members at a comparative disadvantage against non-EU members in the area such as Romania and Ukraine, which has prompted them to shift the target of investment promotion from labor-intensive sectors to knowledge-intensive sectors such as service industries and research and development, Tachikawa said.

Foreign investment in the service sector is in fact on the rise, including the establishment of a shared service center of Philips in Poland, a British Telecom call center in Hungary and regional headquarters of Hewlett-Packard in the Czech Republic, he said.

Investment in automobile sectors has continued after the accession, including the recent new projects by Kia and PSA Peugeot Citroen in Slovakia and Hyundai in the Czech Republic.

Tachikawa also pointed to a series of investments by liquid crystal display TV makers and component manufacturers, many of them in the Czech Republic and Poland.

While labor costs in the Central and East European countries are higher than in China, they still retain an advantage in terms of their access to the European market because many of the products manufactured in the region are for consumption in Europe, Tachikawa said.

Overall, Tachikawa said Central and Eastern Europe will remain a promising region. The lingering huge economic gap with the old EU members to the west means that they have the potential for continued high growth, he said. Average growth rate in the region between 2005 and 2007 is estimated to be in the 4 percent range, compared to 2 percent in Western Europe, he added.

The most remarkable example is Estonia, which created an institutional framework and built a much more flexible labor market, Steinherr noted.

Steinherr also lauded the new member countries for not imitating old Europe in trying to protect national industries, citing the example of Hungary, which decided to allow foreign institutions to take over its financial business as a way to quickly improve efficiency in the sector.

Such reforms would not have been imaginable in old EU members, he said, adding that Hungary and others that followed "got a reasonable, well-performing financial sector much quicker than if they had tried on their own."

What has changed in the EU as a whole as a result of the 2004 enlargement?

Belka noted that the economic impact was limited because despite the addition of countries with a combined population of 75 million, their combined gross domestic product accounted for only 5 percent of the total GDP of the EU.

But he emphasized that the enlargement has redefined the EU's foreign policy agenda.

"The eastward enlargement made countries like Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Turkey immediate neighbors of the European Union not just distant neighbors with whom we could discuss all sorts of partnership relations, but immediate neighbors with which we share borders," Belka said.

He pointed out that the Orange Revolution in Ukraine took place only a few months after the enlargement. "I think it was the Polish accession that prompted immediate EU involvement in an attempt to solve the crisis in Kiev," he said.

The second consequence of enlargement probably more important from an economic viewpoint is the change in policy discourse, Belka told the audience.

"Suddenly the accession of 10 rather tiny economies with divergent recent economic histories prompted discussion on issues like flat tax, pension reforms, labor market flexibility and so on. .EE We became more liberal in a sense," he said.

One of the major topics among the speakers was the so-called "enlargement fatigue" that has spread across Europe following the historic expansion.

Michael Reiterer, charge d'affaires of the delegation of the European Commission to Japan, said it is extremely important to recognize the strategic value of the process of enlargement "especially in the face of recent indications of 'enlargement fatigue' across Europe."

While he stressed that the enlargement that brought the 10 new members was a "success," resulting in positive economic effects to new and old EU members, Reiterer said it was "time to build a new consensus on the process of enlargement, which should enhance the EU's self-interest in extending the zone of peace and prosperity in Europe while at the same time ensuring the EU's capacity to function effectively."

He admitted that the EU "has become more cautious about taking on new commitments" for accession, although he emphasized that it is "absolutely willing to honor its existing commitments already in process" for Bulgaria and Romania.

The 2005 Accession Treaty says the two countries will join the EU in January 2007, although the European Council may decide to postpone the accession for a year.

Despite the growing wariness toward accepting more new members, Reiterer said it would be "unwise" for the EU not to use enlargement as its "most effective policy tool" to promote transformation of the countries involved.

Belka said that the 2004 enlargement was a "success that nobody was really well prepared in Western Europe to consume and digest."

"Many politicians started thinking, 'Well, we have to do something, we have to appease our electorate and we have to say what are the limits of Europe," he said.

Belka said an agreement at a recent Council of Europe meeting Ethat the absorptive capacity of the EU and public opinion will be considered when making decisions on future enlargement Ewill in fact put some brakes on the process.

"But I'm not that pessimistic because Europeans have to digest the two shocks that they have gone through recently the introduction of the euro and the enlargement."

Belka said that the new member countries themselves are also hit by "fatigue" following their accession a fatigue from reforms.

"We are tired, too. We have achieved a lot in 15 years and people think that the stakes are now lower in politics, that the political consensus that was behind the reform process throughout the whole transition period is now broken.

"For populist politicians it's a bonanza. You can say whatever you want, they're not going to kick us out of the EU," he said, suggesting that such sentiments are behind the results of recent elections in some new member states that marked setbacks for reformists.

But Belka said he believes that it is a temporary hiccup "because the positive effects of the (EU) membership will dominate, overwhelm fears and will civilize the most populist trends."