On Thursday, Softbank had a briefing on the first quarter financial result of FY2010, and unveiled they would invest in Zynga Game Network and launch a joint venture called Zynga Japan.   Softbank and Zynga will make capital contributions on a 50-50 basis.  Softbank’s CEO Masayoshi Son says, it is expected to launch a social game service for the iPhone/iPad users and to set up that for PC users in partnership with Japanese social networks such as Mixi[J], Gree[J] and Mobage-Town[J] by the end of this year.  Zynga’s VP Robert Goldberg unveiled they would launch new services designed for feature phone handsets which are also popular among Japanese consumers.

In February 2009, Softbank founded a joint venture[J] with U.S. major social network provider RockYou, it has been distributing social games which target players in South Korea and Mainland China.

See Also:

• JIMS On The Plane: What They Learn From SV Tech Start-ups

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Can you think of a great mobile or web application that’s either made in an Asian country or specifically geared towards users in this region? Or have you developed such an application yourself?

Then you should nominate and/or vote for your favorite app in the “Top 50 Apps In Asia” program that e27, a startup community from Singapore, have set up. The goal is to identify the coolest mobile and web apps in Asia and give them some serious airtime and other perks (more in the FAQ below).

The Top 50 Apps page is already pre-populated with apps from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, India, and the Philippines. But there should be room for many, many more.

The program is part of Accelerate 2010, an apparently huge technology industry event that’s going to be held in Singapore from September 22-23 (register from here/early bird info in the FAQ below). South East Asian telecom behemoth SingTel and venture fund Neoteny Labs are the other organizations behind the conference.

Here’s a quick “Top 50 Apps In Asia”-FAQ that e27 has put together:

Tags: China, india, Japan, Korea, News, Singapore, Taiwan by Serkan Toto
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According to Kyodo News, Tokyo metropolitan police department security division arrested three members of the company which ran online mobile gambling sites. It is the first time arrest ever over mobile gambling website across the nation.

One of their site, Kensyou Jankenpon (“rock-paper-scissors rewards”. the site already suspended), operated by Seeds Style Co., Ltd. [J] since October 2009 as a carrier official site on KDDI au and Softbank Mobile , No.2 and No.3 cellphone carriers in Japan, let customers bet 315 yen ($3.6) to win 1,000 yen ($11.5) for 3-Janken game win streak, 10,000 yen ($115) for 5-game win streak.

The chance to win 5 games in row is 0.9%. Only 1.43 million yen was paid back to customers whilst they sold 130 million yen from 27,000 users. 9 customers are also filed to prosecutors.

KDDI and Softbank Mobile stated that the 5 mobile sites by Seeds Style did not have such illegal features when they were initially applied to their official menu (and payment system). Both carriers suspended the contracts in May and say to take preventive steps.

Asahi Shimbun reported on the same news and KDDI answered to them that there are about 10,000 official sites on their platform. Both carriers say that there are not enough resources to watch those official sites after release.

No.1 Docomo not approving those sites was probably the Docomo’s screening was more strict, which comes from the situation that they do not have to be desperate to catch more contents providers like other chasing two.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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The Japanese subsidiary of a Korean online game service operator, NHN Japan[J] announced at the briefing event held on Monday that they would enter the arena of social game business.  The company’s game new platform enables to change the progress of games according to where/when you’re playing, how the weather around you is, and expects to encourage you to communicate with another players.    NHN has been presenting only the games they have developed, but from now on they invite 70 game developers such as Square Enix to the platform in order to gain the variety of game apps to be presented.  The platform is intended to distribute games to PC, cellphone and Android handset users.

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Google Asia Pacific and Japan vice president Daniel Alegre announced [J] on official Google Japan blog that Google’s search technology is again provided to Yahoo! Japan.

According to the article, Yahoo! Japan uses Google’s search engine as a backend, is able to customize frontend in any way. Google emphasizes that Yahoo! Japan has freehand on how to display search results, what original experiences to offer.

Google also provides search advertising platform to Yahoo! Japan. It is said that the data of advertisers and ads are not shared between Google and Yahoo! Japan.

In return, Yahoo! Japan gives its popular contents such like Auction, Shopping and Chiebukuro(Answers) to Google’s search index.

[Update]

Yahoo! Japan also announced it [J, pdf]

Yahoo! Japan shows how much this change will affect on their search results page. “Only”(the release said so) the blue squares – organic search results and the red boxes – search advertising part on the new one, right side, are influenced by this time change. Yahoo! related keywords, links from Yahoo! Chiebukuro(Answers) and other Yahoo! contents will remain.

The Google’s side announcement on the blog was mistakenly opened at 14:16, then withdrawn until the originally planned 15:10.

See Also:

Is Yahoo! Japan Switching To Google Search? – Our comments in this morning

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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