Technorati and Digital Garage just announced that we will work together to set up Technorati Japan, which will distribute Technorati services in Japan. Digital Garage is a leading Internet company in Japan, and they're not novices to search - they were the first to bring over a Japanese internet search engine as a partnership with Infoseek, and they are creators and significant investors in the leading price-watching portal in Japan, Kakaku.com (which means literally, “price dot com” in Japanese). Our VP of International and Mobile Devices, Joi Ito, has a long history with the company as well, as he describes on his blog, and it has been a tremendous pleasure getting to know DG's cofounder and CEO, Kaoru Hayashi.
With Technorati Japan, we're going to be bringing Technorati's scale and expertise in understanding the World Live Web to the Japanese. I used to live and work in Japan, and have warm memories of the people and culture, and I'm looking forward to working with DG to build and grow the business there. There's a shift that's happening, as more and more people are connected via broadband and mobile phones and their use of the web becomes even more a part of the social fabric of their lives. We aim to capture and help people make sense of that real-time world of conversations.
So, in real terms, this means that we'll soon have a Japanese Technorati site for all of the Japanese bloggers. We hope to get the service running sometime next year, but we're going to get started right away trying to get people to understand what this real-time web and conversation stuff is all about.
Obviously, Japan is just the first step in our international strategy, and I'm quite pleased that this is Joi's first major international deal for Technorati - it most certainly won't be his last. And last but not least, I'm excited to have Gen Kanai leading up Technorati Japan. Gen is the perfect bridge for us - a veteran blogger with a foot firmly planted both in the US (he grew up in NY) and in Japan, he previously led internet efforts at Sony and Toyota. I'm really looking forward to be working more closely with Gen, and with the folks at Digital Garage.