As the business environment is becoming increasingly more global, business corporations have to survive in a much more competitive market place than ever before. Under such severe market conditions, it is almost impossible for a business corporation on its own to provide high-quality services and products quicker than other competitors which meet with customer's satisfaction.
It is inter-enterprise networks which enable big business corporations to share resources, to focus their business resources on their core business and thus to achieve good business performance. The medium-sized and small companies, which have bigger constraints on management resources than giant companies, are said to be far behind the large corporations in utilizing IT, building effective systems, and obtaining the required human resources.
In this paper, we are going to examine the Japanese branch of a leading global company. The company has independently built up an inter-enterprise network using open source software without any financial and technical support from its headquarters. We will discuss the merits of introducing open source software from the view point of the user.
This instance presents a particular business model that specializes in one business domain and has a strong constraint on new investment. It also has some characteristics in common with the mediumsized and small companies and the companies with a self-supporting accounting system. We try to show the potential of a network solution for medium-sized and small companies.

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This study compared messages posted on Sina Weibo which is the most popular micro-blog in China, and Japanese messages on Twitter. This study employed two data sets for content analysis: (1) messages regarding “the kelp rumor” and (2) random samples from Weibo and Twitter Japanese messages. The results show that Weibo users are more likely to re-tweet messages vertically from popular users to ordinary users, while Japanese Twitter users are more likely to use the micro-blog for personal communication, showing a higher mutuality of follower relationships. These differences explain why information is quickly and widely diffused on Weibo. Results of Logistic regression indicate that the use of the image and popularity of the users are significantly correlated with the use of re-tweets on Weibo.

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This article is an attempt to consider “Enjo” which happens on Japanese Websites. “Enjo” is the act of blaming and criticizing writings on a Weblog, Social Networking Service or Twitter. This has occurred frequently since Weblogs became popular in Japan. At such times, many reports of this phenomenon appear in the popular media: newspapers, magazines, portal sites and so on. However, there are few discussions of “Enjo” in academic articles. Therefore, I will explain why it takes place using a social science approach. First, I refer to previous research which was conducted within Computer Mediated Communication studies. Second, I discuss the causes of “Enjo” by explaining aspects of Japanese Web culture: one is “2-Channel” and the other is adolescent's mobile communication. Finally, drawing on my discussion of “Enjo”, I argue that the Web is an open public space which makes such phenomena possible.

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Deployment of broadband is now one of the major policy objectives in many countries, including Japan, Korea, the U.S., and across the EU, for example. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical analysis to identify the factors affecting broadband service diffusion in OECD 30 member countries. There are no previous studies containing enhanced empirical analysis of the factors behind broadband services adoption including FTTx in multiple countries. This paper shows by panel data analysis that the number of CATV subscribers as broadcasting in the year of 2000 promoted CATV (BB) adoption, unbundling of copper local loops supported DSL adoption, and business strategies for making investment into FTTx and no unbundling regulation on optical local loops helped FTTx adoption. The paper also reveals that the three broadband technologies are substitute with each other. This analysis will provide an important basis for national broadband policy formulation in individual countries.

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In the Pacific islands, public services such as medical care and education are not sufficiently provided to all residents. However, ICT can enable them to enjoy such services even in isolated islands dotted over a wide area and will bring about development in the region, but because the adverse geographical conditions hinder the bridging of the digital-divide, especially in terms of broadband, there are few examples of successful implementation. With regard to the current situation of the main communication services in the Pacific islands, although mobile phone penetration rates are increasing the broadband penetration rate is still low in the region due to the high tariff rates.
Core ICT networks form a bottleneck. The two network technologies are: satellite technology, which has limited capacity with a high usage fee but can cover a wide area, and undersea cable technology, which has broad capacity but cannot cover a wide area, has high installation costs. In recent years, Kuband satellite communication with small sized and power-saving technology, has become available in this region in addition to the existing C-band satellites. Considering the characteristics of media application and the analysis of a field survey, a solution to the development of the Pacific islands network is provided by the network architecture established for distance learning at the University of the South Pacific, utilizing an undersea cable network between extra-regional countries and the few main Pacific islands, C-band satellite networks between the main Pacific islands, and Ku-band satellite networks for other remote areas.

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