Nintendo and their neighbor in Kyoto, Hatena, who provides blog and other web-based services, jointly announced the new service "Ugoku Memo-Cho" (moving memo) today. With this service, you write/draw doodles or edit photo on DSi, enjoy it on its "Ugo Memo Theater" and share it on Hatena service "Ugo Memo Hatena".
Sharing photos or drawings on the Web is nothing new, but it is considered significant as it involves Nintendo's hugely popular portable game machine, and integrates with Hatena's cloud on the back-end.
Nintendo's creator Yoshiaki Koizumi states that they chose to work with Hatena, because "it takes a special skill sets to maintain the User Generated Contents (UCG) site, and we don't have that skill. We rely on Hatena on that part."
Hatena's founder and president Junya Kondo explains that Hatena's motivation to work with Nintendo is "to expand our user community to non-traditional PC users", as Hatena, despite its cult-like status in Japaenese Web community, is often criticized as "pegeon hole" of Web geeks. Hatena's community is not exactly kids-friendly, so they are planning to employ various filter technology to adjust the contents to younger and wider audience of Nintendo DSi.
The service is provided for free to the user, and Hatena maintains the back-end server.
Personally I am a heavy user of Hatena Diary (blog service) and Hatena Bookmark ("Digg" of Japan) - actually one of the better-known writers on their blog, so I hope Hatena does well in this new attempt. They are both from Kyoto, the ancient capital of 1000 years with a pride, and Kyoto people often feels Tokyo as their "rival". It is nice to see some "diversity" in otherwise pretty homogeneous Japan.
Mich