After having drawn 15 million members to the site (or approximately 1 in 6 Internet users in Japan), Nippon’s biggest social network Mixi now thinks the time has come for some offline cross-promotion.

What you can see above is Mix Fruits & Calpis, a special version of Calpis, a popular Japanese soft drink that normally has a milky, yogurt-like flavor to it ( the brand name is Calpico outside Japan).

But the collaboration between Mixi and Calpis Co. Ltd., the company behind the soft drink, isn’t just an ordinary example for cross-promotion in Japan. Mixi actually established a Calpis project community on the site (which doesn’t exist anymore) and asked its members to come up with ideas for flavors for the drink.

Mixi also let users decide which catchphrases would be used to promote sales. Even the final design of the bottle was determined this way. Not a bad idea to boost customer and user involvement.

A 500ml bottle of Mix Fruits & Calpis costs 147 Yen (1.50 USD / 1.20 Euro) but there is also a 1.5l bottle available for 347 Yen (3.60 USD / 2.80 Euro).

Mixi also tied up with Osaka-based noodle maker Acecook [JP] to get its brand name on a number of noodle cups (see picture above). The Mixi noodle community [only accessible if you are a Mixi member] currently boasts over 4,000 people who contributed ideas that resulted in four different products. Mixi noodles with bacon, egg and vegetable flavor, for example, cost 190 Yen (2 USD / 1.50 Euro).

PS
Yahoo Japan also seems to have a soft spot for the noodle industry [JP].

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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18th November 2008, Japanese web hosting company Paperboy (J) (JASDAQ:3633) announced that the company will be listed to JASDAQ stock market on December 19th. Paperboy runs services like Lolipop (J), Heteml (J), and Jugem (J). Kazuma Ieiri started the business in October 2001 in Fukuoka. Paperboy is providing hosting services for consumers with very low prices.

Web hosting service ‘Lolipop’ offers a web space for 263yen ($2.6) per month. Domain name reseller ‘muumuu domain‘ (J) is providing dotcom domain with 950yen ($9.5) per year. Paperboy is a subsidiary of a global registrar GMO Internet.

In March 2005, Paperboy raised 128 million yen (1.28 million USD) from GMO Internet group with a 597 million yen (6 million USD) post-money valuation. GMO Internet group is one of the biggest Japanese Internet companies. In 2006, Ieiri sold 10% of Paperboy stocks to the GMO group.

Paperboy reported a revenue of 1.7 billion yen (17 million USD) for a FY2008. Its post-tax profit was 200 million yen (2 million USD). [1]

GMO Internet is the biggest shareholder of Paperboy, and has 59.6% of its shares. Ieiri has 38.4% share of Paperboy.

Kazuma Ieiri is known as a very funny person who is doing many funny projects. He released some web gadgets, including a Flash gadget which introduces items from his shopping site by a computer generated voice. Also Paperboy is operating a cafe called HI SCORE Kitchen (J) in Shibuya.

[1] FY2008 pre-tax profit was 356 million yen (3.56 million USD).

See also:
* A prospectus (J) (PDF)
* Kazuma Ieiri’s blog (J)

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
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