Koei Tecmo [J] has made a contract with Taiwan’s Cayenne Entertainment Tchnology and have announced that they will develop their currently offered social game “Nobu-nyaga’s Ambition” for Yahoo! Mobage and Mobage in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao.

Koei Tecmo has also until now been developing joint service under management license contract for “Age of Discovery Online” and “Dynasty Warriors Online” with Cayenne in the same regions.  This time Cayenne will handle the management of “Nobu-nyaga’s Ambition” on location.  Already a Teaser Site [C] and a Facebook Page [C] have been opened, and the cat generals appearing in the game and game system are introduced.  Furthermore the Chinese version title of “Nobu-nyaga’s Ambition” has been adapted for language using Chinese characters only as “信猫之野望.”

Nobu-nayaga’s Ambition walkthrough guide Cat Book of Heraldry [J]

Translation authorized by VSmedia

Tags: China, News, Social game // Add Comment »

2012 version of annual Tokyo Marathon will be held on February 26, with 36,000 runners who luckily win the lottery from 283,988 applicants.

At the marathon, one of the official supplier Dole Japan is going to provide 96,000 "lucky" bananas, named "Goku Sen"(Extremely Selected) [J], which will be chosen from its over 100 kind of bananas, harvested from its special farm in Philippine in early February.

After arrival at Japan, on its 7-days ripening process, Dole Japan will apply a special treatment for this special occasion, air the Japan's most popular girls unit AKB48's hit number "Heavy Rotation" to let banana listen.

The song was chosen because the research over the member of Toyo University Ekiden club, who won the annual Tokyo-Hakone collegiate ekiden road relay this January, showed that the song is the most favorite in the club members' private and training time.

There was a myth that Japanese stock farmer let cow listen Mozart to make beef tender in English news before. But there is a company who sell Mozart-listening banana [J]. Their page says that another Mozart thing was tried for Tomato and Japanese sake.

Dole Japan opened the special site for this lucky banana, with banana-related quiz and games. The site is also connected with Twitter/Facebook.

On February 8 at Japan’s first banana vending machine in Shibuya, Dole will do this lucky banana give-away for people who check in on Facebook, Mixi or Foursquare.

via Ichigaya Keizai Shimbun [J]

See Also:

AKB48 Now On Google+ – Google’s Marketing Challenge

Popular Idol Group AKB48 Enters ISP Business

Asiajin » tagged "AKB48"

Tags: Japan, Joke // Add Comment »

CyberAgent [J] announced on December 30th of 2011 that the number of users of their “Ameba” [J] community has topped 20 million.  To commemorate this momentous development of the “Ameba” service, they held the 20 Million Member Breakthrough! Thank You Campaign [J] between January 10th and 23rd.

Since the Ameba service opened in September of 2004, focused on blogs, they have expanded their various service develepment and features such as the virtual space “Ameba Pigg” and the miniblog “Ameba Nau,” and they have been steadily expanding their base of users.  Particularly their “Ameba Pigg” service, which opened in February of 2009, reached 10 million users in November of 2011.  Also in 2011 use from smartphones increased, and in one year, monthly page views grew by more than 10 times, continuing their rapid growth.

As for the “20 Million Member Breakthrough! Thank You Campaign,” plans in the works for various services offered by “Ameba” are being developed for PC, mobile and smartphone.  For “Ameba Pigg,” limited items are on sale for 20 Ame-Gold, and for 4 popular “Ameba Mobile” titles, each are giving away limited campaign items.  Also, during the campaign, 20 Million of the virtual currency “Ame-Gold” is being uniformly returned and distributed to all users who have purchased “Ame-Gold,” and various other plans are in effect.

Translation authorized by VSmedia

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Takeo city, in Saga prefecture in Kyushu island, has been known by its net-savvy mayor Keisuke Hiwatashi. As a mayor, he switched the city website onto Facebook page, which gets 50 times more page views according to Asahi [J], and let the Facebook page sell the local products on Facebook. he also called for Japan Society Of Twitter Study.

(photo from the mayor Keisuke Hiwatashi's blog)

His love for social media now makes another step, to utilize Facebook as the city's internal communication system, explained on his blog [J]. On the blog, he ditched the current system which costs 6 million yen annually, praised Facebook as it is "Free". 101 out of all 390 staff already have Facebook account, and the city will let all staff register Facebook by April.

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DeNA, who runs Mobage, announced today [J] that it instituted legal action to demand Gree and its CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka an apology and compensation for the loss caused by Gree's press release and Tanaka's comments, which stated that DeNA did illegal business activities.

As we reported in December, DeNA expressed [J] the possibility of counter action against the legal action filed by Gree and KDDI (Bloomberg). Tanaka has been making comments around the case on many media, opinion ads on national newspaper and his Twitter [J].

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