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.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Japan's mobile gaming giant GREE just released [PDF] their financial report for the April-June quarter, and it seems the company is running from one record to the next. Year-on-year, all relevant financial numbers have gone up, as did the number of page views and, more importantly, registered members.

Here's a summary of GREE's financial report, which suggests that GREE, not Mixi, is now Japan's biggest social network.*

Registered members

For most people, this is probably the biggest news item: in the report, GREE says they had 21.25 million members at the end of July. This number puts them above the 21.02 million members Mixi claims [PDF] for the same point in time (we reported). At the end of July last year, GREE counted 13.54 million users.

Page views

Thanks to the introduction of new casual browser games, GREE's page views went through the roof. In June this year, the site saw 35.4 billion page views (plus another 400 million on its PC site), up from 28.1 billion just a month earlier. By way of comparison: In July 2009, GREE registered 21.5 billion page views.

Financials

Sales in the past quarter more than doubled from around $60 million to now $127 million (+113%, to be more exact). GREE made $104 million from collecting fees from users (in the same quarter last year, it was "just" $46.1 million), and $23 million from ads. Operating profit increased 101% to $61.6 million.

For the whole fiscal year (that ended in June), revenue hit $408 million, up 153% from the year before. The operating profit increased 134% to $226 million.

GREE predicts that for the fiscal year ending June 2011, sales will balloon to $629 to $699 million yen and that operating profit will be somewhere between $314 and $349 million.

User data

GREE says 52% of its users are male. 34% are in their twenties, 26% in their thirties, and 22% are 19 or younger. What's interesting is that 18% of users are 40 years or older.

Future developments

In the financial report, GREE also announces a 5-for-1 stock split for September 30 and that the company will open offices outside Japan by June 2011 (the end of GREE's fiscal year).

*Addendum:
We know that some people question if GREE can really be called a social network as its focus isn't necessarily the social element but gaming and as Mixi is the only Japanese service that gives users access to their "real social graph". GREE officially calls itself an SNS (social networking service).

Find all Asiajin articles related to GREE here.

[Update]

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

Facebook is sidelined in Japan as social network battle heats up | The Japan Times Online

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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@kiti_tori (which means "cutting off" in Japanese) is a super simple Twitter bot gives you only one function, drawing time signal on your timeline, made by @okihuran, @icconico and @d3gk.

By following this, when you scroll down your Twitter time line, you can easily recognize how old tweets you are seeing back without calculating small "n hours ago" to your local time.

If you want more marks in shorter periods, you may also follow these variations of the robot.

• @kiri_toru for all *:30 minute
• @kiri_tora for *:15 and *:45
• @kiri_tore for *:20 and *:40
• @kiri_toro for *:10 and *:50

For example, if you follow @kiri_tori and @kiri_tore, you will get the lines every 20 minutes.

They also made a 24 hours notation bot @k0_0t and a mobile version (i.e. shorter line) @k0_0m

This one-idea bot began in April 2010 and the main @kiri_tori got 38,174 Japanese followers only in 4 months.

For people living in another timezone, they offer kiri_tori's localized versions for New York time, Los Angels, London and Central Europe.

[Update] There is an English instrucion made.

via msng.info

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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First of August news which we did not write as a dedicated article. Continued to (Part 2)

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Solve the encryption hidden in floor plan drawings and win a free rent of the luxury condos for a year
• Hakusuisha collects good recipes of soda cocktails using the company's mixture via Ustream and Twitter.
• China-based Social Translation Service Yeeyan Coming To Japan
• Yahoo! Japan CEO Explains About This Time's Search Backend Switch To Google's one. Also on ITMedia
• Local Community Site Pado Starts Groupon Clone Coopa
• Docomo To Provide Oversea Fixed-Rate Data Program
• Ideacross' NEXTTOUCH Felica-IC-card-supported Android Lets Customers Communicate At Store via Nikkei BP
• Following to METI, Consumer Agency Requests Apple Japan To File iPod Nano Overheat Issue
• Japanese Groupon-like Service Aggregator Groupon-Now Launches via Markezine
• Docomo Opens Smartphone Lounge At Marunouchi Business District
• Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Victims Visualized On Google Earth. release
• iPhone Music Composer App LOOPMATIX Lite
• Music artists are complaining about a two-week system outage of a social network website being operated by a music major label. They're moving their home blogs to other blog platforms.
• Japanese Sushi Shop In Estonia - very... Japanese-ish
• NTT DoCoMo takes over PacketVideo.
• Zynga Buys Tokyo-based Startup Unoh - TechCrunch [En]
• New Daily Deal Service Verci To Launch via MyCom
• Japanese Groupon Clone Increase In Graph
• CCC(Tsutaya - Japanese Blockbuster) Invests Online Magazine Company Fujisan
• Japan's First Google Wave Book Coming Just In 2 Weeks. Author Shocked By Google's Announce To Suspend It
• Daily Deal Service Piku Shakes Hands With Big Restaurant Review Service Groumet Navigator
• JapaneseStreets - Japanese Street Fashion Photoblog in English [En]
• Mixi Vice President Makes Interesting Quotes On Facebook-Study Meetup
• Apple Japan fails to report 34 minor iPod nano accidents [En]
• AR Majinger Z To Appear In Akihabara On The Weekend
• Dentsu And Preferred Infrastructure Opens Websites Auto Viewer Service Xappy
• Funny Sapporo Beer Commercial in Canada [En]
• Tokyo Historic Layered Maps iPhone App
• Wierd Feature Implemented To Share Experiences On Anime Porn Game Over Tweets. via Akiba Blog
• First Regular TV Broadcasting "Summer Wars" [imdb] Anime Involved A Lots Of Watchers' Tweets(#summerwars). world trending #2 at peak. Fan's virtual backup call for the battle inside the movie
• Justice Ministry Considering To Enact "Criminal Of Virus Programming"
• Awatwee - Bandai-Namco's iPhone Twitter Client With Avatar
• Korean Pizza Hut Dance Girls Movie [Kr]
• Kanon Rock Played By Ruler From NicoNico Douga Monosashisuto(ruler-lovers) Community
• Favstar Asks Japanese Twitter Users Why One Japanese Tweet got thousands of favorite - answer [En] - background how third party joke service caused it with OAuth
• Fan-Made Twitter Fail Whale Appears On Asagaya Shopping Street in Tokyo
• Mixi Meetup 2010 - Partners Conference - Planned On Sep. 10th
• Oceanize Expanding Free Copy Service in China, adds 16 University in Shanghai
• Takeo City Mayor To Call For Japan Society Of Twitter Study
• (log out bit.ly first if you try) Security Joker Hamachiya runs a demo site to show security vulnerability that your e-mail address registered on bit.ly can be taken if you logged it in
• Sanseido To Begin On-Demand Book Printing Service - fogy idea
• Kyoto Zoo starts lending visitors the iPhone having the guide app called "window to the wildlife".
• Cybird To Release iPhone Barcode Social Dating Simulation Game "Barcode Kanojo"
• Lightweight Handy WordProcessor Pomera Limited Edition Had Misprinted Keytop "Hinagana" Instead Of "Hiragana"(Japanese letter). Maker's announcement

If you want to know any specific news more, but unable to find them in other English blog/media, please let us know.

Tags: Japan IT Links by Akky Akimoto
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Google Japan cerebrated the 5th anniversary of Google Maps with bloggers event and the special logo, which may be the first time custom logo for Google Maps.

The event was held at the Roppongi Hills, to where Google Japan moved from Shibuya recently.

At the event, Google Maps developers made presentations how Google Maps team used Tokyo/Japan, one of the most dense megalopolis, as their guinea pig for their new features. For example, the feature to display shop's photo on the side by the reviews on the searched map, the one to display users photos on the map overlaid and the one you can switch foreign place name in your languages (like showing town names in Paris in Japanese for Japanese users) were firstly introduced in Japan, then applied to other countries.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com

The event's guest, popular animation director Mamoru Oshii, who is known by "Patlabor" and "Ghost in the Shell", both of which depicted near-future Tokyo. He talked around time and clock, map, movie, animation, desire for destruction of fictional Tokyo, etc. [J]

photo by a Japanese A-list gadget blogger Masaki Ishitani

Google Japan's official video of the (part of) anniversary event is on YouTube,

Mamoru Oshii's session,

See Also

Google Japanese Official Blog [J]

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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