Feedster will launch the Japanese version of its RSS and blog search engine soon, according to Feedster President Chris Redlitz. Feedster recently received funding to do so from Japanese investment firm Mitsui and Co., and the move will also help another future transition into the Chinese market by the end of the year at the earliest.
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Announcement of the Japanese launch is expected to come within the next few weeks. Redlitz said the Feedster team is working with some of the more intricate nuances of Japanese characters. In Japan there are three separate written forms of the language. Two of them are phonetic alphabets of 46 sound symbols, all based on an older system of Chinese script known as Kanji, which holds thousands of characters.
The difficulty can lie in how those three written forms are commonly mixed and building an engine that reads it correctly. Those difficulties in translation however will aid the company when it decides to move into the Chinese market, which uses many of the same characters.
Reditz told murdok moving business operations into China will be a difficult chore, but a necessary one as China has “one of the fastest growing markets with user-generated content.” The first requirement to move into China, said Redlitz, is to set up a data center in the country.
When asked about other search engines’ (like Google) troubles in China over censorship, Redlitz agreed that there are drawbacks to doing business in the communist nation, but Feedster would have to abide by Chinese law.
In addition to that news, Feedster is also working on a ranking system similar to Google’s PageRank system. Redlitz said the Feedster team would be fine tuning it over the next 120 days.
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