■ The first-ever joint tech event hosted by LINE and Yahoo! JAPAN ended in great success, with 54,054 participants

■ Through 86 sessions, LINE, Yahoo! JAPAN and six other Z Holdings Group companies shared insights into technological challenges and innovative solutions 

 

LINE Corporation and Yahoo Japan Corporation completed their business integration in 2021, but this year marked the first time the two companies cohosted their tech conferences, teaming up to create Tech-Verse 2022! The livestreaming event was held November 17 and 18, with over 50,000 people joining the successful livestreaming event.

 

United under the umbrella of the Z Holdings Group, LINE and Yahoo! JAPAN presented 86 sessions on a range of technology-related topics, focusing on challenges and solutions regarding data/AI, server side, mobile apps, and infrastructure.

 

 

Tech-Verse 2022 kicked off with an opening session featuring LINE CTO Tomohiro Ikebe and Yahoo! JAPAN CTO Masahiko Kokubo. The two CTOs discussed the need to solve important challenges such as data growth, security and privacy protection, as well as the obligation to ensure information reliability, which has steadily grown with the rise of the “information age.” The session was followed by presentations on the technology-related strategies and visions of the two companies as they seek to fulfill their responsibilities and continue to grow. 

 

 

Ikebe also introduced Information Universe (IU), LINE's data platform specially designed to manage large amounts of data efficiently and safely, and presented an update on LINE Blockchain. 

 

Information Universe (IU)

 

LINE, which started its service in 2011 and currently has nearly 200 million global monthly active users (MAU), has built a data platform designed to manage large-scale data workloads and democratize data analytics, which we call the Information Universe (IU). In addition to IU, the company has also built and utilizes MLU (Machine Learning Universe), a proprietary platform by LINE for utilizing the accumulated data for machine learning.

 

 

Furthermore, Ikebe announced that LINE has invested in Federated Learning with Differential Privacy — Federated Learning being a type of distributed machine learning that reduces information from individual devices, while Differential Privacy refers to a statistical approach to privacy that protects privacy by injecting noise.  Together, these approaches allow for the development of machine learning and improved convenience in protecting user privacy. 

 

LINE Blockchain and the Launch of a Third-Generation Mainnet

 

In the opening session, Ikebe also announced the release of the third-generation mainnet at the end of this year. LINE has been researching and developing its blockchain since 2018, and today operates a variety of related services and NFT platforms such as DOSI and LINE NFT based on LINE Blockchain, its proprietary blockchain. The newest mainnet is being released and developed as an open source project, and it will provide a smart contract function using WebAssembly, to improve the performance of web applications.

 

 

Yahoo! JAPAN CTO Kokubo then continued the session, presenting cases of new technologies introduced in data/AI and security, so services can be used more conveniently and safely. AI recommendations were given as a representative example of how AI technology is transforming longstanding services, automatically generating category recommendation lists and grouping.

 

Kokubo also talked about how Yahoo! JAPAN is building data/AI platforms and introducing a password-free identity-confirmation process based on the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) protocol to provide a better user experience and security. Yahoo! JAPAN joined FIDO Alliance in 2014 to strengthen security and became the world’s first case of applying FIDO2-certified authentication to commercial services for consumers.

 

After the opening sessions, developers from LINE, Yahoo! JAPAN, and several other Z Holdings Group companies — including dely Inc., Demae-can Co. Ltd., Ikyu Corporation, ValueCommerce Co. Ltd., Z Lab Corporation, and ZOZO Inc. — shared insights that each company has acquired through its operations and R&D initiatives.

 

LINE and Yahoo! JAPAN plan to strengthen their partnership to address the technical challenges both face and to provide more convenient services. Expect them to share their insights and case studies in future Tech-Verse events. 

 

Videos and related details of Tech-Verse 2022 can be found on the official website and the following social media channels.

 

- Tech-Verse official website: https://tech-verse.me/en

- Twitter account: https://twitter.com/techverse_en

- Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TechVerseEn/

- LINE Engineering:  https://engineering.linecorp.com/en/

- Yahoo! JAPAN Tech Blog: https://techblog.yahoo.co.jp/  (Japanese) 

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