A Japanese popular gadget blogger @masakiishitani and others reported that Brands For Friends ran a advertisement campaign to let commuters take free iPhone case posted in metro station in Shibuya, one of the biggest terminal station in Tokyo this morning, about an hour ago.

The twitter timeline tagged with #b4f shows that those iPhone case coloured gold, red or purple were given out at least two different concourses in Metro Hanzomon-line and Ginza-line. All cases had been quickly taken around an hour.

German based Brands4Friends [De] has entered Japan [J] on March 8th. Brands4Friends is a invitation based e-commerce service to sell discounted brands. The original site holds the largest user base (over 2.5 million) and sales in Germany. (info by Veritacafe [J])

In Shibuya, giving away type ads are seen recently. For example, in 2009, there were bitter gourd seeds [J] and Bayonetta’s fragrance [J] (game character) distributions reported.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Corseka [J] by Enigmo Inc., blitzed into Japanese digital magazine publishing system by a service “to buy and scan your buying paper magazine for you” named Corseka in October 2009, who immediately got bashed by traditional publishers who had never consulted beforehand and was forced to withdraw most of magazines in days, announced to close the service.

There was a similar case in Japan with CD and mp3. Livedoor, before The Livedoor Shock, tried to run a service which receives users’ music CDs and make the ripped mp3 downloadable to the user, which also ought to stop by copyrights holders claim. In Livedoor Encoder case, user had to send their CD first, but Corseka got orders and keep the original magazines on their storage.

The termination of the service will be on March 25th, but there seem to be no digitized magazines available on the site already. Enigmo Inc. is known by a personal shopping buyer agent matching service BuyMa and a blog pay-per-post agency PressBlog.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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