In Japanese news, picked up randomly:

Niconico Douga, the Japanese video-sharing website akin to YouTube, has gained HTML5 video-playback support, which means Apple’s Flash-less iPads can now play videos on that website. It doesn’t seem to work on iPhones, and also: signing in is still required to view videos.

Love Plus, the Konami NDS game and prime example of Japanese strangeness, was announced for the upcoming Nintendo 3DS. Love Plus is a dating sim released in September, 2009, where the playable character is a male high school student.

Fuji Xerox scored first place in a J.D. Power Asia Pacific-run customer satisfaction survey for users of color printers in Japan, Fuji Xerox announced yesterday. The survey examines customer satisfaction using four markers: product (Fuji Xerox scored 27%), cost (21%), sales response (24%), and maintenance service (37%); Fuji Xerox scored first in three of the four factors. The company scored second last year, behind Ricoh.

Just my personal opinion, but are those numbers something to crow about? The best bad company is still a bad company.

Hitachi Information Systems‘ new iPhone app HYPERDIA by VOICE (声でハイパーダイヤ), released today, uses speech recognition to search for train routes on Japan’s huge and complicated network of public transportation. The heavy dependence of the country’s population on trains, as well as our cultural tendency to plan out our lives down to the minute, means businessmen and students alike are always looking up the fastest, or the cheapest, or the most efficient, route from point A to point B. The app is free to download but after the thirty-day trial costs 230 yen a month to use.

Apple’s Remote application on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad was updated to version 2.0 today, and got a new icon remeniscent of the new iTunes 10 icon. It gets eyeball display support and support for Shared Libraries on the new Apple TV, which we won’t get in Japan. Get it in the App Store now.