Japancast.net features lots of videos and podcasts to help you learn “real” street Japanese.  It’s an interesting idea and a very good niche so keep you eyes on this one.

If your Japanese skills don’t go beyond arigato and konichiwa then JapanCast may be perfect for you. The site teaches Japanese you’d hear on the street, the type you’d learn from watching Anime all day—in fact the site uses Anime in its lessons. Hitomi, your sensei, will teach you Japanese via podcasts.

via killerstartups

iRead, is a Facebook/MySpace application for organizing your favorite books.

It looks like a great niche social network done right using Facebook app as the piggyback method.

Great job guys, keep up the great work!  They are also making apps for other social networking sites, maybe it’s time that they create one of their own under their domain name.  (That might be the killer revenue for them and also build a brand…)

iRead is an application and online community for book lovers. Once registered, you list, rate, and write reviews about books you are reading or what you have read in the past. Based on your reviews and preferences, you can find other readers with similar tastes, and check out their reading lists and recommendations to find more books you might enjoy. You can also browse randomly through other users’ reading lists and reviews. The iRead application for Facebook has already become very popular, with over one million registered users.

via killerstartups

Here’s an impressive open-source Twitter Desktop Client that was just launched called Spaz.  I do love open-source platforms and soon SiteHoppin will be going open-source too.

For what I can tell, this site has potential to grab some “free” developers for its open-source platform as it supports Mac, Windows, AND linux.  Great stuff guys, keep ‘em comin’.

Newcomer Spaz is a cross platform desktop Twitter client based on Adobe Air. Not only is Spaz open source, it’s also quite slick. It simply looks good. Users will appreciate its simple yet elegant design. They’ll notice that it’s ad-free too. Spaz is completely customizable as well. Users can design their own themes with a little CSS. There are several views—you can see your own tweets and also the tweets of your followers, along with direct messages and the public timeline. Users can add favorite messages and delete old messages. You can be notified of new messages via Spaz’s Tokyo Train Station sound set. Spaz is free to download—you will of course need to load Adobe Air first, if you haven’t done so.

via killerstartups