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KDDI Promotes Brand New Products And Collects User-Generated Parody Songs


Japan’s second largest mobile operator KDDI’s au introduced several new lineups for their design-oriented feature phone series last month, and they have been running a promotion campaign collecting user-generated parody songs via Twitter.

When you post a set of lyrics consisting of five-seven-five syllables (which has a similar rhythm to Haiku or Senryu) via Twitter with hashtag #iidacalling[J], using a vocaloid synthesizing technology, it will be remixed with a melody of a new song by the faces of the campaign and popular female technopop trio Perfume[J].   Your song will be published on the campaign website[J].

Try it and enjoy listening.   You’re required to enter lyrics in Hiragana or Katakana.

What Are Japan’s Top 5 Social Services? Here’s A Quick Overview.


Following yesterday’s news that Japan’s mobile social gaming giant GREE now hit 21.25 million users, our very own Akky Akimoto has done some research and created the graph you can see above for his Japanese blog. And as you can see, in Japan’s “social services” realm, Mixi (“Japan’s Facebook”), GREE and Mobage-town (another huge mobile social gaming platform) are head-to-head regarding user numbers.

Here’s the breakdown:

GREE (21.25 million members at the end of July 2010) – via the latest financial report [PDF]

Mixi (21.02 million members at the end of July 2010) – via the latest financial report [PDF]

Mobage-town (20.48 million members in July 2010) – via DeNA’s latest monthly report [PDF]

Twitter (5 million+ members in February 2010) – via CNET Japan

Facebook (1.33 million members currently) – via CheckFacebook.com

Digital Garage, the Tokyo-based company that runs Twitter’s Japan operations, doesn’t disclose newer numbers. But given the incredible hype over the service in Japan in recent months, the current number of users should be much, much higher.

What’s also interesting to note is that Yahoo Japan, the nation’s biggest website, says it had 24.11 million active user IDs in July 2010.

Hangame Japan, the Korean online game giant (background on its position in Japan), last summer disclosed it even had 32.39 million accounts (needless to say, this number has to be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s much easier to register multiple times on Hangame than on GREE or Mobage-town).

CyberAgent’s Ameba has ten million registered members. Most of the members are blogging on the platform, but it’s also possible to sign into Ameba’s virtual world Ameba Pigu (which had a respectable four million users [PDF] in June) with an Ameba account or use their Twitter clone Ameba Now.