Pixiv: The newest trend in social networking!

You should forget Facebook and Twitter! The latest trend, created in Japan, is the new website on which upcoming and talented artists can post/show their creations.

Welcome to Pixiv, the largest online gallery in the world! Since 2007, this “social illustration site”, is continuing to amaze. The site, which let users’ present self-made drawings and paintings to other users and offers a number of basic social networking functionalities, now counts a whopping 1.5 million members.

The following image shows you how a typical ‘Pixiv-page’ looks like:


Note: Pixiv is a website all in Japanese, but can still be used by speakers of other languages with a little effort and a little help.

The website is meant for the submission of original artworks, but it is also possible to build a social network, along with following your favorite artists and bookmarking the images you love. There is a bulletin board system to post comments on others' boards, and a message system for short notes to other artists.

Let’s show you some impressive numbers: The service was established in September 2007. The user base of Pixiv stood at 100.000 users in March 2008. Furthermore, in June 2009, the website had already 1 million members, which means that they gained a half million people in about six months! Therefore, it took only 838 days to go from zero to 1.5 million members.

Currently, Pixiv racks up 1 billion page views a month, up from 720 million monthly, half a year ago). Members of this website post 18.000 drawings/paintings per day!

Spectacular isn't it...

Picture this: Concert tickets on your mobile Phone!

A new "m-commerce" service has moved to exploit existing bar-code scanning and mobile-handset technology, and the Patronaat Popstage (Haarlem) is the first concert hall which is going to use this service to process payment for their upcoming concerts.

The patented technology, "mobi-tickets," will be exploited in cooperation with Ticketing partner Paylogic. It sends a bar code to a mobile phone as a picture message, which can then be scanned by a typical point-of-sale system. The barcode can be displayed on any handset that can view picture messaging, which accounts for about 80 percent of the market. If the mobile phone cannot display picture messages, a unique number is sent, which is manually keyed in by the staff. Therefore, the customers will receive an SMS containing a bar code, called a mobi-ticket, with confirmation of ticket and event details. At the point of entry, the bar code on their mobile phone will be scanned by the ticket attendant using Denso scanning hardware.

The main advantage of Mobi-tickets is that the tickets can be delivered to the customer within minutes of the booking being made, and can be cancelled and reissued effortlessly. Furthermore, customers do not experience any problems in relation to papered- or e-tickets which they forget or which cannot be printed, because people always have their mobile phone with them!

Although, the possibility for those who would like to continue to receive a papered concert ticket will remain, this technology is set to become mainstream in the ticketing business…