Asiajin

Tokyo-based mobile social gaming giant DeNA takes the international version of its super-successful gaming platform Mobage-town [JP, PC version], Mobamingle, to India (find some detailed background info on MobaMingle here and here).

According to a report in the Nikkei, the service will be made available to Indian users in English as early as at the end of this month. Mobile subscribers to three leading Indian mobile phone carriers (the country’s No. 2 provider Reliance Communications is one of them) will be able to access MobaMingle directly through their menus.

Screenshots of MobaMingle:

The service is free to use everywhere, including India (you can’t access it from Japan though). After the launch in September 2008, MobaMingle has attracted around 150,000 members by March 2009 (newer numbers aren’t available).

DeNA also plans to offer some avatar designs especially geared towards their future Indian users (see an example below).

DeNA’s foray into India isn’t really surprising as the country’s mobile subscriber base exceeds 400 million and is the world’s second largest (China has around 700 million/Japan: 107 million).

But what’s really interesting for MobaMingle in India is the number of smartphones. And here Gartner Research estimates that of the 122 million handsets sold in India in 2008, 6-7 million were smartphones.

Author Information  Dr. Serkan Toto is a German based in Tokyo. Like us, he is passionate about introducing Japanese IT to the rest of the world. Serkan is an author for mega tech blog network TechCrunch, covering Japan-related technology and web trends. Follow Serkan on Twitter here.

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