Elaine speaks Japanese and it suits her pretty well.
Okay, now who is Elaine? Elaine is a web-based email and RSS marketing tool developed by artegic AG in Germany. Elaine offers the freedom to develop new possibilities in the creation of mailings, segmentation of target groups and client profiling. It offers transparent reports and analysis as well as a series of other well thought-out functions that make life easier such as a powerful developer API which allows quick and easy content management system integration.
Since I have been already using this tool in non-Japanese projects to my satisfaction, I decided to evaluate Elaine’s capability for delivering Japanese multibyte content in a production environment at Ashley Associates.
After numerous difficulties starting up and installing a few bug fixes, finally everything runs smoothly without any further garbage characters (so called mojibake). Yes! If you’re familiar with the problems that arise when looking for a web-based tool that fits your needs AND supports Japanese character sets, you know what I’m talking about.
Now that content delivery works, I tried translating the user interface into Japanese (see screenshot). Very nice.
I am happy to announce that the website of The Bank of New York Securities Company Japan Ltd. finally went live today based on the all new Zend Framework.
As I reported earlier, I have been assigned to manage this project for our client, the Bank of New York Group, which consists of two entirely separate entities here in Japan - the Tokyo branch office as well as the securities servicing company. The former already got deployed a couple of days ago.
The Bank of New York is the oldest bank in the United States and just recently entered the Japanese market offering finance and security services.
As JanRain announced yesterday, Pibb, the OpenID enabled communication platform received a slight face lift and feature upgrade. I took this as an opportunity to give it a try and must say that it so far seems to be a nice alternative for classic forums, although it still appears to be a little bit buggy (my profile did not update as expected).
Pibb brings together the familiarity of forums, power of blogs, flexibility of email and convenience of instant messaging in one browser window. All messages are delivered in real time and then archived automatically for later search/viewing […].
The first candidate of Zend Framework has finally been released this weekend. Great stuff!
Zend Framework has come a long way, and evolved into a professional PHP class library that is already used to run many web sites around the world.
Hello to my tens of readers out there!
I have finally spent some time updating my About page (check the Trivia section) and some of the links. The photo album is next on my list. Also, I’m not yet satisfied with the layout, but unfortunately the theme of my choice does not support Wordpress’ new widget system.
However, please be patient. Its coming together…
It was recently announced that Japanese model and actress Chiaki Kuriyama, probably best-known for her appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s film “Kill Bill Volume 1″ as a crazy fighting schoolgirl, has become Montblanc Japan’s new face for their jewellery line.Chiaki Kuriyama will be featured in the new “Strong & Sexy” special soon published on the Japanese Montblanc Magazine website as well as in the upcoming issue of fashion magazine Vogue Nippon.Montblanc Japan, needless to say, is our fellow client and one of the projects I’m involved in. Definitely well worth seeing.