Drecom is a public company, specialized in making a blog tool. Drecom is viewed as a Web 2.0 company. Because they provide many RSS related services. Also they sponsor ‘Drecom Award on Rails’ which awards good Rails’ applications created by many participated developers.

Recently, Drecom’s financial activities are questioned by bloggers.

Drecom has IPOed with mere 238 million yen ($2 million) sales. And 61.8% of its sales are from Drecom’s share holders. This is not a excellent record.

Gree’s CFO, Aoyagi is publicly criticizing Drecom’s financial activity in his blog. Aoyagi said buying of a Hikari Tsushin subsidiary is very questionable. Also, Aoyagi forecasts cash insufficiency will bring a big trouble to Drecom.

Will it be a scandal? Can Drecom survive the coming year? I will keep an eye on Drecom.

Drecom:

• Type: public (3793)
• Founded: 2001 Nov.
• Public: 2006 Feb.
• Sales: 843 million yen (2007)
• Loss: 114 million yen (2007)
• Employee: 226+
• People: CEO, Yuuki Naito (born 1978)

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
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Mobage town has been started in 2006 by Tomoko Namba, a Mckinsey alumna. “Mobage town” is short for “mobile game town”. So, Mobage provides numerous small games and a social network service for mobile phone users. Essentially users are using Mobage as a social network service.

The service has 7.4 million registered users and 13 billion page views per month. 47% of users are teenagers. 37% of users are in their twenties.

Mobage has a very clever growth/revenue model. Each user has an avatar. Avatar needs to be clothed. Clothings can be bought with a virtual money called ‘Mobagold’. Users can obtain Mobagold by registering to adviterser’s services. Its business model is similar to Korean network game site ‘Han game’.

Namba started a company ‘DeNA’ in 1999 as an Internet auction service company. Soon, Yahoo! Japan became a clear winner in Japanese Internet auction market. Her company experienced a long slump. In 2005, DeNA gained a certain success with mobile commerce services, and successfully IPOed to Tokyo stock market.

Mobage’s huge success boosted the company’s profit. DeNA’s revenue reached 14 billion yen, and a profit is 2.5 billion yen.

See also:

1. Company’s site (in English)
2. Mobage town article with screen shots (in Japanese)

DeNA:

• Type: public (JP:2432)
• Founded: Mar. 1999
• Went public: Feb. 2005
• Sales: 14 billion yen ($129 million)
• Profit: 2.5 billion yen ($23 million)
• Employee: 415
• People: CEO, Tomoko Namba

Tags: Japan, Service by Shunichi Arai
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via atmark IT

At Rakuten Technology Conference 2007, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, a Rakuten fellow who also designed Programming Language Ruby, told about their projects “Roma” and “Fairy” to let Rakuten have its own Distributed Processing System (Web OS) like Google, Yahoo and Amazon have.

“Roma” is a on-memory distributed hash storage which “concept is similar to Amazon Dynamo” as he said. “Fairy” is a Ruby implementation of MapReduce argorythm.

Rakuten-group is now holding about 1,100 developers and aiming 3,000 developers in 3 years, told by Akio Sugihara, Chief Produce Officer.

[related]

TechCrunch: Amazon Takes Another Step Towards The Web OS With Dynamo (the word “Web OS”)

Tags: Technology by Akky Akimoto
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via Mainichi Shimbun newspaper

Mainichi Shimbun reported that Overture Japan, online-advertising subsidiary of Yahoo! Japan, spilled its 28,157 customers information including address, phone number, e-mail address, etc. via P2P file sharing software Winny during March to August, 2007.

Although Yahoo! Japan had found this issue on its other research before and notified to Overture Japan, Overture Japan did not tell those customers over 1 month until the data loss was reported. After the news reported, Overture Japan seems to send e-mail to customers, however, there are no release or comment on their website yet.

Overture Japan explained the reason they have not disclosed the leak as “We feared that publication might cause further distribution of the leaked customer information.”

Winny is a P2P file sharing freeware which once was the most popular one among Japanese. The update of the software was ceased for long time, which leaves security holes help and accomodate viruses. Some users moved to the newer tool “Share”, but many people are still using it to exchange movie/music/etc. (as same as other countries, most of those exchanged data are claimed as illegal copy). There have been a lot of private data compromise
happening by companies, goverment agencies including police.

Tags: News by Akky Akimoto
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According to Nikkei IT-Pro, Evan Williams, co-founder of twitter had a talk session with Tim O’Reilly at Web2.0 Expo 2007 in Tokyo and told localization plan.

In the session, Williams disclosed that the 20% of twitter users are from Japan. He also said that localization to different languages is “the first priority task”, and that is being achieved by its API usage.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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