Mochio Umeda lives in the Bay Area but he is very influential in Japan. His best selling book, 'Web Shinkaron', was excitedly accepted by business people.

His word is straight-forward and impassioned. He describes what is Google, what is the Web 2.0, what is open source. Those things were not well understood by the Japanese older business populations.

Joi Ito is the best known Japanese visionary and blogger in the world but Umeda is a much more well-known visionary inside Japan.

Umeda is doing some consulting and also runs a VC firm. Umeda is a board member of the Japanese web startup 'Hatena'.

Tags: Japan, Person by Shunichi Arai
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Rakuten is a giant. Rakuten group has an Internet shopping mall 'Rakuten', a hotel reservation site 'Rakuten Travel', 'Rakuten Securities', 'Rakuten Credit Card' and so on. Rakuten has $1.72 billion annual sales.

The mall and the travel agent has the biggest share of their markets like Amazon did on the book market.

Mikitani started his business as a normal Internet shopping mall. His strong selling team made Rakuten adopted by many small and medium sized companies.

Rakuten travel is the most popular Internet hotel reservation service in Japan. It was formerly called Tabimado and owned by a ship building company 'Hitachi Zosen'. Tabimado made a huge success of it. Rakuten bought the service in 2003 with 32.3 billion yen ($276 million) and changed its name.

Before starting Rakuten, Mikitani was working for a big bank, and has a Harvard MBA. Now he owns a baseball team and a soccer team. Very very Establishment, isn't he?

See also (in English):

1. A Rakuten's company information site
2. Rakuten Travel in English

Rakuten:

• Type: public (JP:4755)
• Founded: 1997 Feb. 7
• Went Public: 2000 Apr. 19
• Users: 37.2 million
• Sales: 203 billion yen ($1.72 billion)
• Profit: 30 billion yen ($255 million)
• Employee: 3200+
• People: CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani (born 1965)

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
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Hatena started its business in 2001 with Jinriki Kensaku Hatena (similar to Yahoo! Answers). They have released 16 services so far (as of 2007) and became a famous role model of a geek company in Japan.

As a private company, their financial statement is veiled. Their announced number of users reached 400,000+ in April 2006. Monthly pageviews are over 400 million as of August 2005. Their other popular services are Hatena Diary (Japan's first blog service), Hatena Bookmark (social bookmark), and Hatena Antenna.

In 2006 the founder, Junya Kondo, moved to the Silicon Valley and opened a company branch. The following year they released Hatena Star and Hatena Message as their first services in English.

Hatena

• Type: private
• Founded: July 2001
• Employees: est. 20+
• People: CEO, Junya Kondo
• People: CTO, Naoya Ito
• People: Board member, Mochio Umeda

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
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