Hello. Hope you had a good weekend.
My daughter Laura studies Japanese at high school and part of the course is visiting Japan next year. The school has an exchange thing going, where Japanese students visit here and our students go over there.
This Thursday we are having a Japanese student stay with us for 12 days. Should be a bit of fun.
I was thinking about that when I read some research today. The research showed that Japan has had 3 successive months of increasing Internet usage growth. That is, more and more Japanese are now getting online. Something like 33,000,000 users.
That’s a big market
That’s a big market. And a big market that businesses with web sites can access.
You see, business doesn’t just come from a 5km radius these days. Business comes from all over the world – if you’re smart. Could your business sell to the Japanese? Could you set up a Japanese language web site?
Think outside the square (or the country) and you’ll achieve success. 33,000,000 potential customers. That’s a big, big market.
Cheers
Aaron says
You make a good point. If you could get your hands on a page translator to convert languages, and maybe know a person who can speak Japanese (or I believe there are a few sites that can convert english < > Japanese) You may be able to reach more people needing the services. By the way, where do you aquire such statistics that shows what percent of people have internet access in differnet areas? Is there some main statistics website?
Also, I meant to tell you that I read your first edition of the SitePoint Tribune and it was just fine. Though I did notice some was from your blog, I believe you expanded it a little and spiced it up a bit. Very well done Brendon.
Anonymous says
I had an prospect once who had been attempting to crack the japanese market for her artwork.
Her problems included getting decent translations of her pages and getting access to the japanese search engines – apparently they only index .jp sites, it being inconceivable to them that a Japanese person would expect to find Japanese language sites anywhere else
HIH
Lea