As we mentioned last week 37 Japanese publishers are working together on the J Manga Portal, a joint portal site for North American anime fans this year. A way to get titles, and of course news.
This is something Bonnie and I have been talking about for months: that Japanese companies and any manga company is best off going to the web and going electronic to both reach people faster, provide content, and to provide competition to scanilations. After all if they don't want people scanilating, then they need to get stuff out fast and cheap (or free).
However this goes beyond my predictions – it's a gigantic group effort by a large number of companies, some of whom I'm quite sure don't necessarily like each other. This isn't one company here or one company there, this is basically major representatives of an entire industry making a universal shared content and news portal. This is huge.