The machine is nicknamed Milky Way 2, but is formally known as Tianhe-2, (the word translates literally as “Sky River”), and was built at China’s National University of Defense Technology. In taking the top spot, it knocked Titan, a machine built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, off its perch.

Now, before any of you reading in the U.S. get all bummed about the decline of American technical superiority, consider this: Its main computing engine was made in America. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each containing two Intel-made Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, bringing the total number of computing cores to 3.12 million.

Its total performance is 33.86 petaflops, which means it can conduct 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second. I’ll write that number out so you can see all the zeros: 33,860,000,000,000,000. That’s almost twice — but not quite — as powerful as Titan, which can do 17.59 petaflops. Titan runs on 560,640 processors, of which 261,632 are Nvidia-made accelerators. The rest are Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices.

This is the second time that a Chinese machine has topped the list, which is updated twice a year. The first was in 2010, when the Tianhe-1A system at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin took the crown, and did so with a relatively quaint — by today’s standard — 2.57 petaflops.

China’s dominance was short-lived the first time around: Japan nabbed the title with a Fujitsu-made machine in late 2011.

American machines have dominated on subsequent Top 500 lists, until today. A year ago, an IBM-made machine called Sequoia, at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, held the top spot. It’s now No. 3. Titan took the title in November.

A few more facts about the new list: There are now 26 machines that have a computing capacity north of one petaflop, up from 23 on the last list. Some 54 machines are using graphical processing units from the likes of Nvidia, AMD and Intel to boost their computing oomph, down from 62 on the last list.

And while it may not have the fastest computer in the world, the U.S. leads the world in total supercomputing capacity: Of the machines on the Top 500 list, 252 are in the U.S.; 112 are in Europe, with 29 in the U.K., 23 in France and 19 in Germany; 66 are in China; and 30 are in Japan.

The Top 500 list (which you can see in full here) is compiled twice every year by Hans Meuer at Germany’s University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

It hasn’t been a great week for Zynga. The company has been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, with 18 percent of its workforce laid off, three offices shut down, lowered guidance for the second quarter and a precipitous stock drop.

Certainly, many of Zynga’s ills come from the fact that it is a big company in a volatile industry that is reorienting around mobile games.

But it’s hardly the only one, which is why I asked executives at some of Zynga’s top competitors to compare themselves to the company, and to explain what, if anything, they think they’re doing better that will help them avoid similar troubles.

Perhaps the most thoughtful response came from Kixeye CMO Brandon Barber, who correctly pointed out that his response (and others’) could only say so much, because audiences and distribution strategies can vary wildly, despite similar end products. Barber credited the fact that his company “zigged when everyone was zagging” a few years ago. The zaggers, he said, followed Zynga’s strategy of making games for a low-monetizing mass audience, as opposed to Kixeye’s niche of combat/strategy gamers, who spend a lot more on in-game purchases.

One of the companies that — to borrow Barber’s word — zigged is CrowdStar, which was founded in 2009 and also focused on the Web and social games at first. Chairman Peter Relan said the company has spent the past two years refocusing around mobile, although data from App Annie suggest that its biggest mobile successes were back in early 2012.

Indeed, a troubling facet of Zynga’s planned/ongoing mobile transition is that it’s already doing far better than most in the arena. As recently as three weeks ago, again according to App Annie, the Zynga game Running With Friends held the overall No. 1 spot in the Apple iOS top-downloaded charts. Kixeye’s Barber speculated that Zynga is facing the “classic scaling problem” of having a mobile growth strategy, but not a sufficiently built-out infrastructure to support and sustain that growth.

DeNA West CEO Clive Downie cited his company’s mobile-first stance as the key to its successes, particularly on Android. Since last year, Downie has also been the CEO of Ngmoco, which DeNA — a Japanese company that thrived by making games playable on feature phones — acquired for its expertise in the American smartphone market back in 2010.

Curiously, Zynga’s nearest competitor in the social-mobile space — King — declined to answer the question. PR representative Paul Brady said, “It’s a policy at King not to comment on other company’s downfalls” (ouch! Update: Brady later clarified that this is not an official company line, but rather his own “poor choice of words”). Never mind the fact that King PR has sent no fewer than three email pitches in the past two months contrasting the success of their games against Zynga’s declining numbers.

Mobile game studio Gameloft also declined to comment.

Salesforce shares closed at $43.25 a share, down $2.44, or 5.25 percent. Yesterday the company said it earned 10 cents a share on a non-GAAP basis on sales of $893 million. Both figures were short of consensus forecasts by analysts, which called for 12 cents in EPS and revenue of $935 million. Gross margins fell slightly, while operating expenses rose by 29 percent. The company said it expects full-year non-GAAP earnings of 47 cents to 49 cents per share and sales in the range of $3.84 billion to $3.88 billion, up slightly from prior guidance. CEO Marc Benioff has been saying the company is getting close to recording its first $4 billion year.

Most analysts today, including those at Stifel Nicolaus, Lazard Capital, Oppenheimer and Barrington, looked at the price drop as a buying opportunity. Most but not all. One analyst, Steve Koenig of Wedbush Securities, took the opportunity to cut his rating on Salesforce. Salesforce is a sufficiently large company that it can now be affected by overall shifts in the IT spending budget, Koenig argued.

One problem the company said it experienced was currency headwinds, specifically regarding the Japanese yen. As he does every quarter, CEO Marc Benioff appeared on CNBC’s “Mad Money with Jim Cramer.” The deflationary trends on the Japanese yen are hurting payments to Salesforce when they get converted to U.S. dollars, and Benioff said during the segment that Japan has become Salesforce’s largest customer. Previously that distinction had been held by Hewlett-Packard.

And Animoca couldn’t be happier about that.

Co-founder Yat Siu calls them “fast food apps.” His 150-person company, a conglomerate of 12 smaller studios, has developed and published more than 350 apps, he said, currently at the rate of about four every week. Its goal is to one day crank out a new app every day as it expands its reach further into Asia and beyond.

Siu, who is also the CEO of Animoca’s parent company, Outblaze Ventures, said as much in a recent interview with AllThingsD. But he also had a lot more to say about the advantages of working outside of Silicon Valley, the maturation of Google’s Android ecosystem and why quantity is sometimes better than quality.

AllThingsD: What’s the difference between being based in Hong Kong and being based in Silicon Valley?

Yat Siu: In terms of our [Android] ecosystem, it is the dominant marketplace, whereas in the Valley, there’s a lot of focus on Apple. We don’t have that much venture capital available to us, so we have to focus on profitability and the bottom line very, very quickly. Our games aren’t all profitable, but our business is. And we’re just a small island city, so we do not have a domestic market. It’s go global or die.

How do your games fare in different regions?

When we first started [in 2011], the U.S. was our biggest market, but just because it had a larger ecosystem. That’s changing today. North America as a continent is now in second place to Asia because Japan and Korea are driving a lot of the revenues. … The people who are buying iPhones or Android phones in the U.S. today are not the first movers, whereas in Asia, a lot of the marketplace still has way under 50 percent smartphone penetration rates. In Japan, at the start of this year, it was under 30 percent.

Is Android fragmentation a problem for you? Putting most of your eggs in that basket means you’re dealing with phones that range from the very low end to the very high end, right?

Two years ago, we had a testing rack of 600 devices. Now, Samsung is outselling basically everyone else, except in China and Japan. The second thing that’s different now is that “low end” is no longer really “low end.” You used to have really poor devices with poor resolution and processing power. Even the so-called “cheap” devices that are sold in China today are quad-core or dual-core devices; they just cost $100, is all. And they’re all standardizing around Jelly Bean (the most recent version of the Android OS). The whole Android philosophy was, “Here, take the operating system. Do what you want. Good luck!” We had weird memory issues because people would be coding stuff on top. Now, with Jelly Bean, most of the stuff that’s going on in the operating system is going on in the application side.

Pretty Pet Salon is one of the more popular games Animoca has published, and started a “Pretty Pet” franchise.

Tell me about your games and how they perform. How do you evaluate success?

We look at every product as a gateway to another product. The key driver is popularity. Monetization will come, we think, once people are in there, but the ability to cross-promote to other games becomes important. We want to make sure that the user always has at least a few of our games to play, because we don’t believe that there is such a thing as a person who can play a game for years and years and years. It’s “fast-food apps.” People just want to consume quickly, move quickly and go on to the next thing. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come back to it, but they’re not prepared to invest console-style, sitting down and playing for four hours.

And if you spent $60 on a game, you’re probably going to invest a lot more time than if you spent nothing or spent 99 cents.

That’s true, too, definitely. But also, with mobile, whether it’s in trains or one-handed game time, sometimes it’s just when you’re lying in bed, the behavior that we’re seeing now is that a person is playing a game, and then after five minutes, he wants to move on to another game. He’s not necessarily playing the same game for an hour. He’s like, “I feel like something else.” It’s no different than people switching TV channels every once in a while, except they’re switching games.

So it’s not as much of a “hits-driven” business for you as it might be for others?

It’s all relative. What is a hit? Because it’s a global audience, a niche segment is pretty large. And yet, if you have a five-million-user niche, is that a hit? It’s probably a hit for an indie studio, but it’s not a hit for us because of the scale we operate in. Typically, we call anything a hit if it has over 15 million downloads, but as a franchise, as a series. We might have one app, and then if it does well and has a few million downloads and reasonable revenues, then we put sequels and additions on top of it. Out of the series, we may wind up having something like 20 or 25 apps.

For those games that aren’t sequels to existing games, how do your studios come up with new things to publish?

We have studios that are as small as six people. The producer is empowered to have his own budget and his own creative vision. There’s a weekly meeting where all the producers come together and talk about what they’re doing, and then go off and do their own thing. The advantage for the business is, if you start off with a studio of six people and it bombs, who cares? It’s not great for them, but the business can afford to do it. If they do well, they have a platform.

The independence of our studio is also attractive to our staff. They have the chance to be a startup without the startup risk. They don’t have to worry about payroll or finance, they can focus on the product and build their own team. The additional unintended advantage is that, in Hong Kong, we’re unique. So, if you want to do games and you want to publish your games, then, frankly, there’s nowhere else to go. People come to us because the other option is banking or finance — which is a good career, just not if you don’t like it. If we were in the Valley, we might end up getting slaughtered by the amount of recruitment and loss of staff. Who knows?

But it’s worth noting that you do also maintain an office here in San Francisco for non-game development roles like partnerships and PR.

In the past, the meccas of the global gaming space used to be different. They used to be Sony, Nintendo and, at one point, Sega. But it was never centered around Silicon Valley. That changed with the smartphone. Now the new mecca is the Bay Area, because Google Play is here and Apple is here. We have an office here because we have to pay homage to the new temples. Even though we’re not in the Valley, it’s absolutely required for us to go in. Every other app company that’s international that wants to succeed must do the same.

Almost all of your revenue, about 95 percent, comes from in-app purchases. Are you looking at other business models?

Advertising will come, but it is not dominant yet. Primarily, the buyers for that now are other app companies, and we’ve got our own network. If we focus more on our cross-promotion, we get more out of that than necessarily opening up inventory to everyone else. Right now, ads are generally low-quality, and they’re also spammy, so it’s a bad user experience. But that will change. The experience is there already — think about how much time you’re spending on mobile versus PC — but [ads] have to deliver value to the user. Facebook has the right idea. People who like casual games, you should really only show them other casual games. Today, the targeting doesn’t exist.

What does your conversion rate of non-paying to paying players look like? The typical curve has a lot of people at the bottom paying nothing or almost nothing, then a long tail with a bump at the end, composed of a small number of players who pay a lot.

That is the hardcore type of model, where basically you have a very low conversion rate, something like 2 percent, and a very high consumable model where people can spend thousands of dollars. That’s not our model. If you look at games like Pretty Pet Salon, you’d be hard pressed to spend more than 20 bucks, just because of the game play. We are expecting to have more volume of titles with a larger frequency of players coming in from outside. So, for instance, Pretty Pet Salon has an 8 percent conversion rate. Now, when we start working with Forgame (Animoca recently accepted a “strategic minority investment” from the Chinese hard-core game maker), that is different. We will listen to their suggestions, and it does appear that that will be the strategy, because people are prepared to spend that kind of money. It’ll be a learning experience for us.

After a miserable past few years, marked by the rise of Samsung Electronics Co. and the dominance of Apple Inc., Japan’s once-powerful electronics manufacturers are grappling with outside investors and fed-up creditors looking to break the cozy and insular bonds that were once a hallmark of the country’s corporate sector.

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SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan said they had created an unusual $20 million fund to help U.S. startups break into the Japanese market, while also upping a presence in the U.S.

The partnership between Japan’s largest Internet company — which is also a joint venture with Yahoo — and the venture arm of the giant SoftBank Corp. will invest in companies from early-stage funding to later-stage expansion and focus on mobile applications, social media, e-commerce, online advertising, gaming and cloud computing.

The new funds for that are being put into SoftBank Capital’s $100 million Technology Fund ’10. As part of the deal, Toshiaki Chiku will become head of U.S. operations in Manhattan. SoftBank Capital also recently announced a $250 million PrinceVille Fund, aimed at growth-stage startups in Asia.

Among the firm’s recent exits: Bluefin Labs went to Twitter, Buddy Media to Salesforce.com, Huffington Post to AOL, Hyperpublic to Groupon and OMGPOP to Zynga.

Now, it will be focusing even more on helping U.S. startups in Asia.

“Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank Corp., we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed,” said Chiku in a statement.

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo Japan used performance display advertising company Criteo as an example of a successful investment, in which it also helped the company enter the Asian market (although, technically, Criteo is HQed in France).

Fast forward to today: The battle for the living room is already over, and the overall war for the consumer is on. Key players in this big war? Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung and LG. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp and Nintendo? By and large on the outside looking in, wondering how the vision for living room dominance blew up.

When do we stop calling them phones or tablets or TVs?
Thanks to Moore’s Law, the advancements in storage, battery life, screen display, processing power and improved networks in the past 10 years have allowed numerous “screens” to become pervasive in a consumer’s daily life. These screens are ubiquitous, and not typically locked to a location, except TVs. Consumers spend time on phones, tablets and notebooks both in the home and while mobile.

We are rapidly iterating devices to simply be powerful screens connected to the Internet, connected to clouds. The main question for a consumer will soon be, “Which size screen will I use in the car? On the train? In rooms in my house?” That answer will be driven by which hardware vendors have aggregated the best services for consumers, coupled with a compelling user interface (UI), frictionless commerce opportunities and social and communications layers built in.
The reality today is that consumers can do nearly the exact same things on a device with a 4-inch, 8-inch, 12-inch, 15-inch or 20-inch screen. There will naturally be some functions that will be more appropriate on one screen size over another, but interchangeability is already here.

So who is leading in the war to control the consumer?
The single biggest key to everything? Control the UI on the connected screens. Companies who control the UI will then dictate how software is accessed, and which software. Making a compelling, fun, friendly UI is considered to be a very special sauce — rarely made and hard to do.

As shown in the chart above, most of the leading companies for controlling consumer interactions have at least a decent UI. Apple clearly leads the way, but Amazon and Google have made strides with improved UI. Microsoft took a big step forward with the Windows 8 UI, and Facebook has worked on improving its UI on both laptops and mobile.

If you take the same chart and substitute the companies for the countries of origin as shown in the second chart, the subtle trend of UI success becomes clear — companies based in Silicon Valley and in the greater Seattle area are dominating, and Japan-based companies are seriously lagging. While the hardware manufacturing base may still be in Japan and Korea, UI and software development are still based in the U.S.

To this point, efforts have been made by both Japanese and Korean companies to build a presence in Silicon Valley. Nintendo moved many of its operations from Redmond, Wash., down to Silicon Valley in an effort to become more in touch with connected companies and potential partners. Earlier in February, Samsung announced plans to open up a research and development (R&D) center in Silicon Valley as well, largely focused on software — with an assumption for UI development, too. For all Samsung’s dominance in phones, memory, TVs and appliances, UI has not been a strength.

While much of the focus today is on phones, tablets, laptop and TV screens, part of the connected consumer idea will soon include connected appliances. Remote management of the oven, inventory management for food in the refrigerator, or remote management of home security or heating systems are going to become more mainstream. It’s not quite a Star Trek-type leap of faith, but software solutions will have to be built for the TV and the fridge. Samsung, given its pole position in many hardware solutions, would have great potential in these expanded connected devices, but it is still early. Hence, the investment in a Silicon Valley lab could prove hugely strategic over the next 10 years.

How do TV manufacturers change to stay competitive? How does Japan stay relevant in a connected world?
Partnerships are going to be more critical than ever because software development and UI are not core strengths for many Japanese-based consumer electronics companies. However, partnerships with non-Japan based companies are rare, and a huge challenge is to change the corporate culture of many Japanese companies. Many of these companies are engineering-driven cultures with long-standing histories of making successful products over the past 50 years. Unfortunately, the analog age of standalone devices is over, and the connected, digital world awaits. For many companies, it’ll mean partner or perish.

P.J. McNealy is founder of consulting firm Digital World Research and has conducted research in the technology and gaming sectors for 15 years. He authored “Early Days: The Market for Social Gaming and Facebook’s Potential Achilles’ Heel,” in May 2013; it is available on Amazon.com.

Outside the U.S., iMac shipping windows remain at a week or more. In France and the U.K., they’re five to seven business days for the 21.5-inch models and one to two weeks for the 27-inch models. In Germany, the window is two weeks for both models. And in Japan, the 21.5-inch models ship in two to three weeks, and the 27-inch models in three to four weeks. So, overseas, iMac availability clearly remains somewhat constrained.

Why the intercontinental disparity in shipping windows? Simple: Apple has amassed enough North American inventory to meet expected demand. But this is true only of the iMac’s four standard models. The addition of any customization, even if it’s simply swapping in a trackpad for a mouse, pushes the device’s ship time back out to two to three weeks. Outside the U.S., the story is the same as it has been to date. IMac supplies still aren’t at the level Apple wants. As CEO Tim Cook noted on the company’s last earnings call, “We left the quarter with significant constraints on the iMac. … We are confident that we are going to significantly increase the supply. But the demand here is very strong, and we are not certain that we will achieve a supply-demand balance during the quarter.”

That remains the case today, as these varied shipping windows demonstrate. Which is not to say that Apple isn’t making headway. It is. As I noted here recently, Mac sales rose 31 percent year over year for the month of January, according to NPD, and the reason was likely improved iMac availability. But again, that was in the U.S. To reach supply-demand equilibrium overseas, Apple has to ramp up iMac production even more.

For Sony, it was a much-needed vote of confidence for one of the company’s most important new products in recent memory. The Xperia Z, which went on sale in Japan on Feb. 9, is Sony’s first smartphone developed from the ground up by its engineers and designers since a pricey divorce from its mobile phone partner Ericsson last year.

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To do so, the Japanese-based company acquired San Francisco-based OpenFeint and established a U.S. headquarters in the same city. It then purchased Funzio, a mobile game developer, to help make hit games for the platform. In all, it spent $300 million.

But now the company is pulling back on its plans — just a bit.

While Gree is a massive entity in Japan, with $2 billion in annual revenue, its efforts in North America so far have produced much less. The company does not always break out revenue, but in August, it reported that sales in the U.S. totaled $16.9 million in the second quarter.

In the conclusion of a two-year spending spree, Gree announced in December that it was rethinking its platform ambitions and laid off about 25 members of its platform team to focus on mobile game development. I caught up with Anil Dharni, Funzio founder and Gree’s SVP of its studio operations, in San Francisco last week, to better understand where the the company is headed.

Here are some highlights from the conversation:

Why did Gree shut down OpenFeint in the U.S.? Does it no longer believe in the ability to build a network where players can discover games and other people to play with (a.k.a, a mobile platform like Facebook)?

Anil Dharni: We acquired OpenFeint two years ago, when Gree wanted to get into the U.S. It was working with a slew of indie developers, and over the past two years, we learned about the publishing business and the platform business. We’ve solidified our position with developers, so we didn’t need the platform team [in the U.S.] and moved production back to Japan.

So, what’s the status of the platform in the U.S.?

Dharni: It’s just being developed in Japan. It’s in beta [in the U.S.] today. Our learnings from the process is that we don’t want to have a me-too publishing strategy. We have to offer more, like game analytics, consulting, push notifications, game mechanics, etc. We are not ready to release those capabilities today, but we think we can bring it altogether.

The transfer of the platform development to Japan led to the elimination of 25 jobs in the U.S. How many employees do you have today?

There are 400 employees in the San Francisco offices, Dharni said, which are directly across the street from AT&T Park. The company has also opened a Canadian studio in Vancouver, where it has 10 employees. Both offices are hiring.

Crime City is one of the company’s oldest titles (launched in August 2010), and it continues to be in the Top 50 highest-grossing apps today. How does it continue to attract players?

“A lot of people talk about shorter lifespan of games on mobile than on Facebook,” Dharni said. But by working with his Japanese counterparts, they’ve been able to learn how to retain users for longer periods of time and increase the user base. It has required them to release more content and new mechanics inside of the games to keep people coming back.

How is hard-core being defined on mobile?

The more strategy-based the game is, the more hard-core it is, he said. “It means a smaller audience that monetizes better.” Genres may include first-person shooters, role-playing and card games (a popular category in Japan that challenges players to collect a deck of cards by completing a number of mini games). Dharni said that more developers have become focused on hard-core as the cost to acquire a player on mobile has gone up, since they can deliver a return on investment over a longer period of time.

As games become more hard-core, is the cost of developing a game going up?

No, it hasn’t, Dharni said, but the amount of time it takes to launch a game has gotten longer. “We used to launch games without events and other mechanics and then layer them in later. Now, they are included from the time of beta, which means testing the games out for a long time in either Canada or Australia.”

Is Android catching up to the iPhone in terms of revenue?

It is, if you aren’t successful on the iPad, Dharni said. But if you are, then Android is not competitive yet.

Confirming news first reported by the Nikkei, a BlackBerry spokeswoman told AllThingsD Thursday that the company is indeed pulling out of the Japanese market — at least for the time being.

“We are in the process of launching BlackBerry 10 globally in key markets, and we are seeing positive demand for the BlackBerry Z10 in countries where it has already launched. Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry, and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 devices there at this time,” spokeswoman Amy McDowell said. “However, we will continue to support BlackBerry customers in Japan.”

The company declined to comment on its plans for other non-critical markets.

A surprising move for BlackBerry, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. Over the past few years, BlackBerry’s market share in Japan has suffered a decline so precipitous that it no longer even ranks by name on comScore’s survey of the top smartphone platforms in country. As of June 2012, BlackBerry was lumped into the research firm’s “Other” category which itself claims only a 0.4 percent share. At the time the survey was conducted, 24 million people in Japan owned smartphones. So, while the country may not be a major market for BlackBerry, it is very much a major smartphone market.

Developing …

While profit slid by 0.4 percent for the three months through December, the Japanese camera and printer maker said it expects a 14 percent increase in net profit to ¥255 billion ($2.81 billion) in 2013 and a 27 percent growth in operating profit to ¥410 billion.

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Sources with knowledge of the situation tell AllThingsD that Kodansha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa are among the publishing houses to whom Apple is talking. Conversations are said to be going well, and the company expects to have agreements hammered out soon — though not as soon as the Nikkei, which first reported news of the talks, claims.

“Later this month,” we’re told, is far too optimistic a date for launch. Remember, the Japanese e-book market is a notoriously difficult one to break into, and this is essentially Apple’s second attempt at it. When the company first brought iBooks to Japan, back in 2010, it failed to negotiate the necessary deals with Japanese publishers. So its virtual shelves ended up being filled entirely with public domain content, and have remained that way ever since.

That’s going to change this year, but probably not in January. And when it does, it will be good for Apple, and for Japan’s burgeoning e-book market, as well. The iPad is enormously popular in Japan, so it’s conceivable that the device could give the e-book market a nice boost, particularly after an October 2012 update to the iBooks application that supports Japanese-language e-books.

Apple declined comment on its plans for the Japanese e-book market.

But this newfound pragmatism, necessitated by a sobering reality of multibillion-dollar losses in recent years and strained finances, may be hindered by a mismatch of what they are willing to sell and what potential buyers want.

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As part of what is beginning to feel like a global takeover, the Huffington Post Media Group said it will be launching a Japanese-language version of the service in that country.

The AOL-owned content arm will be partnering with the well-known Japanese publisher, Asahi Shimbun, in what will be its first Asian effort. The Huffington Post currently has versions in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Spain and Italy.

As in previous efforts across the globe, the site will include news, blogging, community, video and social tools. The Huffington Post Japan joint venture is currently looking for an editor in chief, and is still formulating how the arrangement will work.

The partnership with Asahi is key, said Jimmy Maymann, CEO of the Huffington Post Media Group, in an interview yesterday.

“One of the things is that the Japanese market is one of the largest newspaper markets, and they are still doing well,” he said. “So, big media companies have not had to think about the next iteration of new media, and that’s a huge opportunity for us.”

Right now, he said, the Huffington Post Japan’s main news competition would be Yahoo News from Yahoo Japan.

Arianna Huffington, president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, noted that the site would be up soon, even as she looks for more markets. Next up: Latin America.

“International momentum and global presence is a big win for us,” she said. “It’s a great model for us to partner with great media companies, so we can move very fast.”

The companies said Tuesday that they also will work together to develop displays using a new Sharp liquid-crystal-display technology and Qualcomm’s emerging low-power-display technology.

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Weighing in at 7.5 pounds, it is an ambitious, jaw-dropping effort helmed by former Time, Life and National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan — he of the “Day in the Life” series of photography books, as well as “America at Home,” “America 24/7” and “24 Hours in Cyberspace.” Smolan’s new book attempts to demystify — largely successfully — the nebulous concept: What is big data?

It was exactly the question that Smolan was asking when he first hit upon the idea for the book while attending the D9 conference in 2011. Hearing the phrase “big data” uttered in so many conversations, he had no idea what it meant. Asking at first yielded unclear answers, yet he persisted, eventually landing on the idea.

Today, the book is landing on the desks of world leaders, dignitaries and other notable people around the world: Among those on the list: President Obama, the Dalai Lama, Pope Benedict XVI and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and also Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey; Daniel Tunkelang, chief data scientist at LinkedIn; and actor Robin Williams. Among the images they’ll see upon opening it is the blended image of 1,400 different shots of New York’s Times Square taken across 15 hours. Big data is about people: What they do, where they go, who they know and so on. The stories about how data, once harnessed, solves problems and in some ways creates new ones, is its overarching theme.

There’s also a smartphone app for iPhone and Android that is launching today. It’s an interactive viewer app from Aurasma that aims to bring the book’s content to life, accessing videos and animations by pointing the camera at images on certain pages flagged within the book. On top of that, there’s a $2.99 iPad app that enables readers to take a deeper dive with some of the stories, using videos, charts and animated infographics.

I talked with Smolan about the book yesterday by phone, after spending more than a few hours perusing an advance copy over the weekend. Here’s a little of what we talked about:

AllThingsD: So where did you get the idea for a book on big data? It’s a phrase that doesn’t necessarily jump out at me as part of the title of a bestseller.

Smolan: I was at D: All Things Digital in 2011, and I kept hearing the phrase big data, and I kept asking people what it meant, because I felt stupid and because it sounded like one of those marketing phrases. The first person I talked to said, “It’s so much information it won’t sit on your personal computer.” Well, that wasn’t very interesting. The next one said, “It’s taking information from one place and overlapping it with information from another, and finding these patterns.” And that wasn’t interesting, either. The third person said, “It’s like watching the planet grow a nervous system.” And that sounded interesting. Basically, we’re seeding the world with low-cost sensors, and we’ve all become sensors with our cellphones. And instead of doing random samplings, we can almost survey every single person on the planet in real time — where they are, what they’re doing, how fast they’re going, what they’re spending money on. The ability to gather that information, process it, visualize it and then respond to it while it’s still happening is something we’ve never had the ability to do before.

Some of the material in the book I’m familiar with. The first image I saw when I opened it was one I recognized from MIT’s Sensable City Lab, and I also recognize big data anecdotes from IBM, like the one where they harnessed medical data to detect infections in premature infants. In this way, it seems it’s a little different from your previous books.

It’s sort of a combination of original photography and curation. I think that putting all the information in one place and weaving it together, with these wonderful essays that I think are just as strong as the pictures. I’ve been getting notes from people like Marissa Mayer and Jack Dorsey saying that this is the first time they’ve had something that helps them explain how important this is. Amazon called last week to say they sold out of copies of the book on the first day and people were ordering 50 or 60 copies at a time, which has never happened ever to any book I’ve done in 25 years. They were dumbfounded. The hard thing about the book world is that you never know whether 10 people or a million people will find it interesting. A lot of people have never heard about big data and the ones who have, have a lot of trouble explaining it to other people. So I’m hoping that this will become the thing the people who know give to their parents or their family as a way of saying “this is why what I do is important.”

Obviously you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about all this during the last year, and you’ve probably been asked a million times if you think this is all creepy or intrusive in some way. Is it?

I’m an optimist. Every new tool can be used for good or evil. The whole point of doing this project is to start a conversation about it all. The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments. I’d like to broaden the conversation and I hope the book makes some kind of contribution. I’m worried that the only ones profiting from it right now are corporations. As individuals we have very little say about how our data is being used. I’m not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that as an individual, if I’m the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it’s going to be used.

Did you have a particular favorite anecdote or photograph?

I just came back from Australia, and they have this expression down there: Gobsmacked. I think a lot of the pictures in the book convey that feeling. There are some that are funny, some that are just thought-provoking. There’s the case of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) that creates these incredibly detailed satellite maps for governments. They found there were villages in Nigeria, which has the highest rate of polio resurgence in the world. There are villages there that have never shown up on any map, no one in the government knew they were there. ESRI can recognize the shape of huts and pathways. The Gates Foundation has been trying to eradicate polio in places like Nigeria, and they have a very big effort there. They took the satellite maps and handed out 10,000 GPS-enabled cellphones to polio workers. They could see where they were in real time, and make sure they got to each of the houses. We spent a week travelling with the polio workers watching them do their work. I think the idea of using satellites to help cure polio is a pretty interesting concept.

You have a lot of examples where understanding of big data is saving lives, which I think will surprise some people who don’t initially see it as having direct benefits for real people. What are some others?

There’s the case of the recent earthquake in Japan. I heard a fascinating story by Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace Radio about how 43 seconds before the shaking actually began, all the bullet trains and factories in Japan stopped running. It was all automated. That country spent 15 years and half a billion dollars to build the system that automated all of this. Obviously the devastation was horrible, but the system worked. Then I read about a group of engineers in Palo Alto that had created a program called Quake Catcher that uses the accelerometer in your laptop. Its the part in your laptop that detects when it’s been dropped and quickly moves the head on the drive drive before it smashes to the ground. It uses the same acceleromter to detect earthquakes. If it senses vibration and sees the same pattern over a 30-mile area, that’s an earthquake. On one side of the page, you have this huge half-billion dollar project, hardwired, dedicated parts that have to be replaced, lots of engineering time. And on the other you have this free ubiquitous crowdsourced mobile sensor system that has no profit motivation, and no cost. I love it. It’s a delightful story of people doing this to help each other. And the data just underpins it all.

Is there anything in the book that has some practical, everyday value?

Yes. There’s the example of Shwetak Patel, he’s a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at the University of Washington. He found a way to detect every device in the home and measure how much power it’s using. Every month we get a bill from the power company and we just pay it, we don’t even ask what it’s about. He’s created a sensor that can be plugged in anywhere in the house that detects the unique digital signature of everything that’s drawing power in the house — your computer, your toaster oven, whatever. I asked him if there was anything he had learned that would surprise the average American. He said it’s the DVR. The average American spends 11 percent of their monthly electrical bill on their DVR. It was designed in such a way that the hard drive never spins down, so even if you record only one show a week, it’s running the entire time and consuming power. So instead of drilling another oil well or burning more coal you could reduce America’s power bill by 5 percent just be redesigning the DVR. So many stories have this sense of delight: The data has been there all along, it’s just that no one was paying attention to it.

You’ve also done iPad and smartphone apps to enhance the book. What can you tell me about that?

I don’t know that anyone has ever done this with a book like this before, but there’s a free app you can download to your smartphone. Some of the pictures in the book have this little yellow key symbol in the corner. When you have the app, and you point the app at the page, it launches the page in the app. There are videos, there are Ted Talks. I think there are 22 or 23 videos. There’s an animated version of a story about pizza delivery guys in Midtown Manhattan. There’s also an iPad app, the profits from which go to charity: water, which is a nonprofit that’s working on bringing safe drinking water to people in developing nations. My goal here is to keep people turning the pages.

What do you want people to be left with in the end?

There’s an essay toward the back of the book called “Data Driven” by Jonathan Harris that has a really interesting thought. It’s that there is a relatively small group of people who are living in cities like San Francisco and New York, are mainly between the ages of 22 and 35, who are having an outsized effect on the rest of the human species. The kinds of societal changes that used to be the result of wars and famines are being brought about through software. …What I like about the essay is that EMC, which funded the book, had no right of review. I told them that this book wasn’t going to be all about cheerleading big data as the solution to all our problems. I said it was also going to sound a cautionary note because I think that right now governments and corporations are the ones having conversations about big data and that the average person isn’t. But it can have an effect on so many things in our lives, from our credit rating to our ability to get hired and our ability to do lots of things. I think it’s really important that we have this conversation now.

Does this signal a comeback for Sony, the brand once synonymous with the coolest gadgets?

Probably not.

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