InfoQ Japan Launches

InfoQ's mission is to be the world's source for tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community.  To maximize the positive impact of all the content we are putting out, InfoQ has been extending its service to communities where English is a barrier to learning.  In April InfoQ China launched, and this October InfoQ Japan has launched and is operating at http://infoq.com/jp. InfoQ Japan is translating InfoQ's daily news & weekly technical articles and will be publishing original Japanese news & video interviews/presentations, building and connecting local community in Japan like InfoQ does for the rest of the world. Since it's launch, InfoQ Japan is already attracting an average of 3500 visits a day.

InfoQ Japan is launched in partnership with, and operated by, Component Square Inc (CSQ), a Japanese consortium aimed at improving software development & software component reuse in Japan. CSQ CEO Nagao-san commented on the motivations behind InfoQ Japan:

Currently in Japan, in order to obtain the latest information about IT, accessing overseas websites directly or gaining information which is published by Japanese media are the only options. However, few engineers can read overseas websites due to the language barrier; the rest have no option but to gain from Japanese media which is often very late and also filtered. Thus we have decided to launch InfoQ Japan because we see the tremendous significance and potential in offering authors’ unfiltered opinions to engineers in Japan in a timely manner, with no language barrier.

Although information may be published without distortion by Japanese media, we can not deny that sometimes information is biased by press’ interests. We believe that it is essential for engineers to be exposed to the information directly and make their own judgments.

Commenting on the need for greater skills & innovation in Japan, Nagao-San mentioned:

Today in Japan the shortage of mid-level engineers is becoming an important issue. Also, the growing shortage of technical architects, mid-level engineers, and project managers is becoming more serious. We believe that InfoQ will play a significant role in resolving these issues. It will not only provide information to Japanese engineers but also offer the potential for engineers to experience ongoing technical revolution in real time, potentially triggering more innovation of their own.

In addition to empowering Japanese IT, Nagao-san also commented on the potential to bring more Japanese innovation to the rest of the world:

As innovation has been triggered with Ruby’s (developed in Japan) encounter with a framework called Ruby on Rails, there is a lot of hidden underlying potential and innovation in Japan that is not yet recognized globally.  For instance, Seaser, the opensource DI container, and openthlogy which is hosted by the Requirement development alliance, could be valuable internationally.

In the meantime, we hope to introduce such innovation emerging in Japan internationally. We find the IT scene in Japan pretty interesting. For example, Kenji Hiranabe’s work on “visualization” has been introduced already on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-kanban-boards

As significant innovation occurs with all this coming together, we wish that the InfoQ community will develop and bring about greater innovation globally, and we feel fortunate to be able to contribute.

InfoQ Japan feature set is technically equivalent to InfoQ.com; it has its own personalized RSS feed system (grabbing the feed from InfoQ.com/jp automatically only has news from InfoQ.com/jp), and also its own thread commenting system - the same news posts in each  language has independent discussion threads and are not mixed. From an English news post, the Chinese or Japanese translations (if translated) have urls that differ only slightly, such as:
 - http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/10/jsr275-units-measures
 - http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2007/10/jsr275-units-measures
 - http://www.infoq.com/jp/news/2007/10/jsr275-units-measures

Even topic-specific pages are equivalent, such as:
 - http://www.infoq.com/spring
 - http://www.infoq.com/cn/spring
 - http://www.infoq.com/jp/spring

When InfoQ launched we had a goal to launch InfoQ China & Japan within the first 18 months and it has been met.  InfoQ China is currently serving an average of 8800 visits a day, and InfoQ Japan is already at 3500.  InfoQ is open to launching additional editions with partners.  In the meantime, InfoQ is  fulfilling its mandate of being a source for tracking change and innovation in the world, and we especially welcome the chance to serve the IT community in Japan.