Background
Nishimura was born in Sagamihara, Kanagawa but raised in Tokyo.
西村 博之
Nishimura was born in Sagamihara, Kanagawa but raised in Tokyo.
Chuo University; University of Central Arkansas.
Until February 2013, he held a position of Director at Niwango Incorporated., known for its service Nico Nico Douga. On the Internet, he is usually known by his given name, hiroyuki. He founded the company Tokyo Access in 1998 while he was at Chuo University.
In May 1999, he opened annel while he was studying at the University of Central Arkansas.
As of January 2007, Nishimura is an advisor to Skip-Up KK, Chief Executive Officer of Tokyo Plus KK, Director of Mirai Kensaku Brazil (Future Search Brazil) Limited., and also a Director of Niwango Incorporated., the company that launched Nico Nico Douga. Nakao is a server specialist, and has been managing most of the annel servers since the Neomugicha incident, a case in 2000 in which a 17-year-old posted messages threatening to hijack a bus, and then went on to kill one person in the hijacking.
The event caused a huge wave of user access, and the old servers went down. During 2008, generated an annual revenue upwards of ¥100 million for Nishimura.
The site was also run by 300 "volunteer administrators" who receive no pay.
Nishimura justified this with the comment, "I don"t think that"s all that different from some dude who opens a convenience store in front of a train station. They can make a million yen a day."
In August 2013, an accidental leak placed the cr card details of thousands of annel users into the public domain, and this event resulted in a series of lawsuits against the website. Around the same time, the anti-matome movement took place throughout annel, a controversial community development involving users protesting against "matome blogs" (まとめブログ) specialising in summarising annel threads, which were taking away site traffic.
Later it was revealed that the website was suffering from financial setbacks, and as a result, the chairman of North.T. Technologies (a key stakeholder of the website) and ex-United States Army officer by the name of Jim Watkins assumed full control over annel, stripping Nishimura of all power.
In response, Nishimura created his own clone of annel at sc, and organised a series of distributed denial of service attacks against annel. Following the debacle, many former annel users have migrated to other anonymous posting websites, or have completely abandoned anonymity altogether and have moved to websites such as Reddit (with subreddits such as /r/NewSokuR dedicated to the annel diaspora).
Although Nishimura has lost some number of libel lawsuits with a considerable amount in penalties, he is quoted in some number of interviews that he has no intention of paying. "If the verdict mandates deleting things, I"ll do it," he says.
"I just haven"t complied with demands to pay money.
Would a cell phone carrier feel responsible when somebody receives a threatening phone call?".
Nishimura, Ichirō Yamamoto, and Yoshihiro "Yakin" Nakao, President of Zero Company.Ltd. were the early central management members of annel, but Ichirō Yamamoto left the group in 2002, and Nishimura resigned from his company.