Asiajin

On Tuesday, June 30th, two people from Twitter USA had an user meeting [J] with 200 Japanese users at Omotesando.

signboard

“t” and “tsu” (the first letter of “twitter” in Japanese) hat receptionists welcomed Japanese twitter fans.

Newly recruited Japan Country Manager Yukari Matsuzawa (@yukarim) and Head of Mobile Kevin Thau (@kevinthau) came down from San Francisco.

With @f-shin, who runs the most popular cellphone twitter front end service movatwitter, which must be thought as an important third party app for Japanese users, is also promoted on the Twitter Japan’s top page sidebar frequently, I asked Kevin if Twitter is thinking an official mobile site/app for Japanese cellphone. His answer is no. He explained to us that device specific sites/apps are expected to be made by third party by utilizing API, instead of Twitter themselves. That is somewhat disappointing for me because in Japan, many sites have more traffic on mobile than PC and there are a lot of things you can add by making cellphone specific apps and/or career official menu.

By the way, movatwitter obviously includes the trademark “twitter” in its service and domain, recent “tweet” trademark news reminds me.

Also, some users questioned to Yukari if the current search function which is simply broken and not working with Japanese language would be fixed in near future.

Current Twitter search takes keywords by using white space as a splitter, which makes no sense with languages like Japanese (and Chinese, Korean, etc. I guess). So the search results on twitter often becomes blank. Yukari said that they are working on the issue and it would be fixed soon in this summer by introducing tokenizer algorithm for Japanese.

Joi Ito’s speech as a board of Digital Garage, collaborating on Twitter Japan with Twitter

See Also:

Popular blogger @kengo’s report [J] has more photos.

Tags: Event Report, Japan // Add Comment »

Solid Alliance announced its new concept USB memory with 1 million yen price tag, which is about $10,000 US dollars.

The 16GB Aluminium Mirror Finish USB memory is designed by Milan-based Italian Desig Studio Toshi Satoji Design, professionally hand-crafted by two Japanese manufacturers, can be made to order.

You need to disassemble 6 parts to get the USB memory part inside.

via Mycom Journal

See Also:

Solid Alliance Press Release [J]

Tags: Japan // Add Comment »

When your mail have phrases around website marketing or search engine optmization, Japanese gmail users recently see interesting SEO consultant advertisement, which offers you an inexpensive link-building service, by 20,000 yen (US$200) per one satellite-site.

(click to enlarge)

The ad says “Site for inbound links by 20,000 yen” - “We create mass sites for inbound links by Movable Type. 20,000 yen per site.”.

The advertiser’s site does not have an postal address nor phone number, which Google usually requires advertisers to show.

Screening this kind of advertisers is not an easy task, as they try to pretend they are not what they are. But I personally feel that lots of lousy ads are displayed on Google Ads on Japanese pages/apps in compare with English ones on English pages.

In Japan’s case, Google ad network is the No.2 behind Yahoo! Japan’s, same as their search share, and recent economic crisis may be making big companies, conservative advertisers, think to cut No.2 network, if they ought to crunch budget. Google may lead reduced reproduction with crummy advertisers if they keep being generous to this kind of ads.

Tags: Japan // Add Comment »

EC-Navi[J], a Shibuya-based tech venture running several web services such as price comparison site for e-commerce users, tied up with Japan’s second largest mobile company KDDI, and plans to launch a nationwide cellphone service as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator). The service will start on August 3rd, and it targets females in their 20s and 30s.

EC-Navi has an original point system allowing users to exchange a variety of the third-party’s frequent customer program points to other program points or cash as you wish to have. Based on market research, the company learned that one of the most effective aspects when consumers choose a service was customer reward program. By developing a combination of the point exchange system and an MVNO platform provided by Inphonix[J], EC-Navi can provide potential users with a new cellphone subscription menu allowing to switch the points earned from your cellphone usage to your favorite frequent flyer mileage program.

EC-Navi installs an original application on the phone before it is shipped to customers, which leads them to the company’s several web services.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Company, Japan, New Service, News // Add Comment »

Recruit (on Asiajin) announced their R25’s mobile site shutdown on July 30th.

(Mobile version of R25 has not been closed yet but may give you an error page. It seems to limit visitors by browser user agent and/or IP address, which is common to Japanese mobile sites. The PC site is here [J].)

Their PR answered to ITMedia [J] that this is because more advertisers want PC ads than mobile sites.

R25 started as a free weekly magazine in greater Tokyo for young train commuters since July 2004 and distributed 550,000 copies every week [J]. They also have a website and both the PC and the cellphone sites were renewed last year.

According to them, the mobile version of R25 is getting 130 million page views per month, which is not bad and as they continue the PC site they keep creating contents anyway. It sounds strange to give it up like this, but Recruit sometimes stops businesses which seemed promising from outside in their history.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan // 1 Comment »

CBS Interactive, which is the parent company of CNET, and Asahi Newspaper announced the two companies had agreed that the ownership of CNET Networks Japan[J] would be completely handed over to Asahi Newspaper on September 1st.

CNET Networks Japan owns and runs several Japan-based tech websites including CNET Japan[J], ZDNet Japan[J], GameSpot Japan[J] and Tetsudo.com[J] (a website for trainspotters.)

Reportedly, Asahi will take on all 50 editorial and sales employees working with CNET Networks Japan.

IT news media Ascii says on the website[J], Asahi used to be relatively stronger on IT news compared to other Japanese news media.   In 1990s, the company set up a bureau in Silicon Valley and dispatch IT news correspondents there to keep updating IT news category for all day.  It launched a corporate website for the first time in Japanese news media history, and was publishing several popular PC news magazines.

However, unlike other publishers such as Nikkei BP and IT Media[J], Asahi has no in-depth IT story on the website.   Unlike Mainichi.jp, Asahi has no ability to attract website visitors.   Just as New York Times(NYT) enforced its web business by takng over About.com, Asahi may have good ad sales revenue, especially from IT industry, by taking CNET Japan.

But there used to be rumors that many editorial staffs have quit CNET after Lehman Brothers’ shockwave hit the world market.

Ascii ended the story with an interesting comment quoted from Asahi’s market survey report.

NYT paid as much as USD45M for taking over About.com, but it boosted NYT’s web business sales for as little as 2%.   It tells us how difficult web business is, and we need to keep our eyes on NYT’s further steps to improve revenue.

How about the case of Asahi and CNET Japan?

Tags: Announcement, Company, Japan, News // 1 Comment »

It seems that GREE’s [JP] success story won’t come to an end too anytime soon. The performance of the 99% mobile social network/gaming platform is becoming scary, as in bubble-type scary. Stocks are rising and rising since the company went IPO in December last year and the financial situation keeps on improving, too.

And as a result, today marked the first time GREE’s market capitalization stood higher than that of competing mobile social network operator DeNA. DeNA is operating the social gaming platform Mobagetown whose business model (and almost everything else) was “inspiration” for GREE back in 2006, when the company completely overhauled the service and moved from the fixed web to mobile.

As far as the market cap is concerned, GREE is also beating Japan’s biggest social network Mixi [JP] whose number is nearly half as big currently.

At the Tokyo Mothers Stock Exchange for start-ups, the current situation (market cap-wise) looks like this:

• GREE: $1.66 billion
• DeNA: $1.65 billion
• Mixi: $0.91 billion

Granted, this is not too big of a difference, but still (data: July 1, 2009 at 3pm JST).

To bring things into perspective a bit:
Mobile- and Japan-only GREE’s market cap is now significantly higher than LinkedIn’s $1 billion valuation (LinkedIn has 42 million members - Gree has 12 million - and is said to be profitable, too).

Does something smell just wrong here?

Tags: Japan, News // Add Comment »

SoftBank seems to be pretty bullish about the growing Chinese web market, which is no wonder as there are about 300 million web users in that country (China has the biggest Internet population in the world).

The Japanese technology behemoth formed two strategic alliances with high-profile Chinese partners in the last few days.

Alliance with Shanghai Media Group

Yesterday, Softbank announced a cooperation with media conglomerate Shanghai Media Group [CN] (SMG) under which they will provide the Chinese side with digital content (games, movies, anime, TV shows etc.), marketing support and copyright management consulting.

SMG, on the other hand, is supposed to teach SoftBank how web business is done in China. The Chinese company has over 5,000 employees and controls dozens of TV and radio stations, newspapers and various web services.

Alliance with Alibaba/Taobao

But that wasn’t all for SoftBank aspirations in China yesterday. The company also shook hands with the Alibaba group, the operator of the famous e-commerce platform of the same name. Alibaba is a B2B market place, but they also run Taobao, China’s biggest shopping portal (120 million registered users).

Here is Taobao’s top page:

Now SoftBank and Alibaba plan to to make it easier for Japanese businesses to sell their products on Taobao. After an order is placed, Alibaba takes care of exchanging yuan to yen and then transfer those yen to Japan once shipping is completed. SoftBank not only handles the payment in Japan but also offers support in Japanese to companies having to deal with product inquiries or customer complaints.

This potentially sounds like good news for SoftBank (and Alibaba). Incredible but true: Google Trends says China-only Taobao is even bigger than Amazon.com traffic-wise.

Tags: China, Japan, News // Add Comment »

Tokyo-based animation studio FanWorks[J], which is well known for a famous title “Yawaraka Sensha ” or “Soft Wartank”, tied up with animators and TV broadcasters in Toyama (a Honshu island’s prefecture facing the Sea of Japan), and launched a project to promote the prefecture’s sightseeing business by creating original animation titles[J/E/F/C/K] which are intended for potential tourists living abroad, in association with Toyama-based animation studios, Berich[J] and P.A. Works[J].

The project is a part of the business boost plans which have been arranged by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and are aiming at cheering local economies.   The production partnership authored several animation titles featuring famous sightseeing spots in the prefecture.

The titles will be broadcast on LNTV[C], a public satellite TV broadcaster in Mainland China’s sister city for Toyama, as well as Toyama TV[J].   Furthermore, the title’s Internet distribution is also available at YouTube[J], NicoNico Douga[J] and Crunchyroll.   (Crunchyroll videos are accessible only outside Japan due to international licensing limitations.)

All the titles are available with subtitles in English, French, Mandarin Chinese and Korean.

Via Business Makoto[J] and IT Media News[J]

Tags: Company, Japan, News, Society, Trend, Video // Add Comment »

(Following to the part 1)

5. Livedoor (Asiajin articles)

Tomo Tsubota, Livedoor Blog [J] Business Department, opened and shared their user demographics and billing method.

Livedoor Blog started in 2003 and became black ink in Sep. 2007. 30% of sales come from premium service, which is used by 17% of active users. (60% revenue is from advertising)

The provided billing methods are credit card, payment at convenience store, BitCash [J] (pre-paid e-money), bank transfer and e-money(both Edy [J] and iD [J]). Ratio by sales amount are,

80%	credit card
10%	convenience store
6%	BitCash
3%	bank transfer
1%	edy/iD

When seeing ratio by generation, 54% of teenagers use convenience store, then 13.2% use BitCash. This is easily explained because they usually do not have credit cards. For users over their 60, 34.1% uses convenience store with less credit card usage, he explained that credit card is not a friendly payment method for elders.

6. Mixi (Asiajin articles)

By Mixi Nengajo, why Mixi went with the new year greeting snail mail project, was told. It was intended to charge users communication.

Mixi is frequently asked “Why do not you to go e-commerce and sell things to its 17 million users?”, and Mixi’s answer is they try to think users’ value first. As Nengajo can effectively use social graph, and encourage communications.

7. Hatena (Asiajin articles)

Hatena’s Yuichi Kawasaki told their goods, Hatena Star (virtual applauds), premium version of their social bookmark service, blog book publishing and new kids-users introduced by cooperation with Nintendo DSi (all [J]), with comparing their service with newspaper, Facebook and mobile social network services.

photo by Shiraber

See Also:

Sessions memo of Monetize Hacks #3 by Shiraber [J]

ITmedia News [J]

Tags: Event Report, Japan // Add Comment »