Noda elected as Prime Minister of Japan

Yoshihiko Noda, has been elected on August 30th the 6th prime minister of Japan in 5 years.
What to expect? Not too much except an increase in the consumption tax to go from current 5% to 10% in the next few years. This is a nice way to create a bit of inflation of Japan an reign in the huge public deficit over 200% of GDP. Beside that, I doubt that he will have enough leadership to open Japanese market by signing free trade agreement. This would require to lower agricultural barriers and the farm lobby is too strong in Japan. Impact on our foreign consulting and outsourcing clients at JMC: not much! Business will be slow as usual.

Follow up On Google Plus Second from an article of Washington Post

Google Plus members value their privacy

By Hayley Tsukayama

Circles make Google+ a very private network — reportedly 48 percent of users who’ve never posted publicl (HO - REUTERS)According to an analysis fromdata-mapper Matthew Hurst, new Google+ members may be seeing very little activity from the site’s 20 million users. His analysis shows approximately 48 percent of Google+ users haven’t posted publicly.

One selling point for Google+ is that it gives users the chance to build in private groups from the ground up. Sure, you can make friend groups in Facebook, but I know I have better ways to spend my free time than sorting all the friends I’ve picked up through school and beyond into appropriate groups. But since Google+ has built that feature in, it’s easy to organize people as you move along.

And it seems plenty of people are using that tool.

Hurst, whose visualization was picked up by The Next Web, showed that there is a tight cluster of public power-users on the network, with the rest of the service’s 20 million or so users chiming in less often. But, as a commenter on Hacker News pointed out, Hurst’s data appears to only contain public data.

An earlier report from All Things Digital revealed that approximately two-thirds of the content on Google+ is, in some way, private. I know that I post most often to a Circle or two, but rarely use public posts.

How do you use Google+ and its privacy options? Let us know in the comments.

Follow up On Google Plus

I especially the friends circle concept is well suited for Japanese who do not really mind releasing their identity but also want to keep their privacy. The "circle" function is well suited to keep the necessary privacy and separation between business friends and "real friends".
The relative low performance of Facebook in Japan has been attributed to this aversion of Japanese people for displaying their real name. Actually I think it is an aversion for the lack of privacy of the current Facebook format.

Google Plus Success

I really think that Google Plus will make a big success in the business area all over the world and In Japan thanks to its ability to distinguish between circles of friends. I am definitely going to us it to promote for example my company JMC