Work life balance
If you haven’t been to Tokyo, you would probably think that it’s just another busy and stressful city. When I arrived in Tokyo, I was very surprised by how relaxed people were; slowly walking on Harajuku street, hanging out at bars and cafes with friends, and dad playing frisbee with the sons at the park, it’s just not what you would expect from one of the craziest cities in the world. People there get off work at around 6 (sometimes a bit later of course), compared to other markets (especially in Asia), where people easily get off work everyday at 12am, Japanese has more space to be inspired and have their own life outside of work, they know how to relax and keep themselves productive.

Hardworking
I was rather impressed by how hard working Japanese people are. In many markets, people spend 14 hours in the office with 4 hours of Facebooking and being distracted, the Japanese work 6-8 hours with huge focus, very much like how the French and other European countries work. I think many of us in Asia need to learn from the Japanese that hardworking doesn’t mean physically staying in office for longer hours.

Care about details
It’s the details that matter. Many cities (including Hong Kong) offer products and services that look OK or even great from the surface, but they don’t bother to investigate further to give the best, at least not many of them do anyways. For example, there are Italian restaurants in Hong Kong that look completely authentic for the atmosphere, they have great menu, with above average food, but the authenticity would stop there, while the Japanese would study and investigate the history, speak to the Italians about special dishes, figure out the correct table cloth, the perfect ingredients, the wine that’s best paired with the food, the dish presentation, the background music etc. Asian countries tend to settle to do good and above average, which has nothing wrong with it, but Japanese like to try and make things best.

Master a skill
It’s about their passion, Japanese are not afraid of doing what they love. They don’t stop doing what they love because the skill is not appreciated by school or parents. They master what they love to do and they get damn good at them. This is something many people don’t have the guts/ don’t have the chance to do in other Asian countries.

They don’t give a fuck
We were there during Halloween, and it was the best time to see how they just don’t care about how people see them. Halloween is not the only reason for them to be open-minded, they were born with it and they generally just like to enjoy their lives. When it comes to creativity, I think it’s quite important to have fun in mind to be inspired.

There are always great things to learn from other culture, but I’m honestly quite impressed by Japanese’s way of living, the creative, fun, and friendly people are what make the city charming!

- Tim Ho

Heinz UK recently launched this program of customizing soup cans, users can fill in the information, customize messages on the soup can, and order it exclusively on Heinz UK’s Facebook page. Users have been ordering, sharing the experience on their personal pages, and also back on Heinz’ UK page (see image below).

Fcommerce (Facebook commerce) is not huge in Asia Pacific yet, but in a market where consumers love customized items, fcommerce with clever ideas like Heinz’s could still pick up high engagement, brands should start thinking out of the box and start offering promotions & values other than Facebook photo contests.

This machine allows users to login to the Coca Cola app in real life using the face recognition feature, a very clever way to extend the offline experience to users’ friends and family through Facebook.

Also look at the previous campaign Coca Cola village.

One of the most significate change in this report compared to the previous one is the Internet population in China; In December 2010, China’s netizens reached 457 million, representing an increase of 73 million since the end of 2009; Internet Penetration rate rose to 34.3%! Number of Chinese Netizens has doubled the amount of Internet users in the United States (272 million), and surpassed the population of N. America (348 million).

Click here to see the full report in Chinese

To celebrate the great spirit of the digital culture in the agency, we’ve redesigned the look and feel of Asia Digital Map. We’ve focused on making it easier to share, which we believe can encourage more contributors to post exciting digital content on here. The current version is still on beta, it will become more and more stable in the coming days. So feel free to report to us if you have any feedback.

We will also have a new contributing system soon which we will announce once it’s confirmed. In the meantime, please enjoy this video above taken by ThomasCrampton.com during his holiday in France. 

Internet doesn’t make people stupid, people, make people stupid. It’s very common to see couples going out for dinner these days with them both on their own phones for the whole meal. This is terrible!

Technology is an amazing tool that helps human being learn shortcuts for many solutions, but these shortcuts can never be applied without experience, and experience comes through dynamic environment or channels, not just from a phone screen. Many people underestimate how much they can learn by just observing on the street.

Being a digital strategist (or any other tech focused career), one of the biggest challenges is to keep reminding myself how much I “can’t” learn from the Internet, and the social abilities that we all meant to have.

Watch this wonderful ad by dtac, and never play Angry Bird at dinner again!