Newsletter was fantastic, espacially those news about Makoto's efforts !
Respect from Finland
Agreed. I did not know Makoto was in Japan. I am as well. Bitcoin has not caught on at all here yet and cryptocurrency is by and far completely unknown here. This is a great opportunity for NEM to become the biggest crypto in Japan. But, if we want that to happen then a mobile app is absolutely a must. Japan is still so, so far behind in terms of PC use. There are still many households here who do not have a PC, and many people here have no clue how to use one. Japan is a strange place, because it is fairly technologically advanced but it is very behind the times in terms of utilizing the power of the Internet in my opinion. Public schools still do not teach a single computer class even in junior high and high school, and are not even required for many college degrees here. Most things here still operate on paper, and the FAX machine is still king of the hill for the most part, but nearly everyone here has a smartphone these days.
So, tl;dr if we want NEM to be a success in Japan we need to corner the mobile market and have information readily available in Japanese, with simple instructions and a very easy to use product, if we want NEM to be big here.
I recently went to a Monacoin conference and they are very big here, even though it is not a technologically interesting coin. The Monacoin community is really great and the plethora of information in Japanese really helps drive it. They also hosted 3 conferences in Japan so far this year, so they are really making a great effort.
You are right that we have a great opportunity here. People in this forum always talk about NXT, but no one at the Monacoin conference even heard about NXT. They knew about Bitcoin and Monacoin, and now they know about NEM (I gave a one-page summary of NEM in Japanese to everyone at the conference). So if we play our cards right, we could expand here very easily.
BUT, as you said, the key is a mobile app. Everyone here has a cellphone, though relatively few have/can use a regular computer.
In addition, we need to make materials for NEM available in local languages around the world. NCC is now in Japanese and will soon be in Chinese, Russian, and Portuguese. That is great and all, but we also need articles like
https://medium.com/@xtester/the-new-economy-movement-fb9bb67eb9fe to be in local languages. Translating a huge article like that will take a lot of time, though.
Everyone, please check out:
http://forum.nemcoin.com/index.php?topic=2337.msg4107#new for talk about our mobile and other plans.