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Will DeNA Crack The Japanese Code For International Expansion?

DeNA, the company behind one of the big three social networking sites in Japan, Mobage-Town (20m users in Japan), cannot be clearer on its current strategy.

It's called international expansion.

Everyone is abuzz of today's acquisition of Ngmoco, an US iPhone game developer for a staggering USD 400m.

The big tide in social gaming is coming, right now. We’d like to capture it and quickly become the world’s No. 1 mobile gaming platform

says Tomoko Namba, founder and CEO.

Wow. But let's roll back in time for a minute. DeNA Global business initiatives actually started in July 2006 with the creation of its Beijing subsidiary, which launched Jia Jia Cheng, a Chinese Mobage-Town, the following year. In January 2008, the company established DeNA Global, its full-fledged international arm. Its location was not innocent: San Mateo, California.

True to its core business, MobaMingle was released the same year with more than USD 3m investment. A virtual community for mobile phones. Avatars, friends, games, blogging. A Mobile Game Town (i.e. Mobage-Town) for the US and Europe (and India a bit later), in short.

I can't say it was mind blowingly successful, especially due to the lack of those flash-based mobile games that gave it traction in Japan. Or simply because we're talking about markets that never got used to flash-based mobile gaming. Or even more simply since not all handsets were actually supporting Flash in the first place.

150,000 members (March 2009) might not have been braking any record, but it was a good exercise in testing the international waters.

Intelligently sensing the move towards an application-based phone ecosystem, DeNA brought its games and community to the iPhone/iPad last May. Just for its overseas users. An iteration of MobaMingle of sorts, if you want.

And things were going faster on all fronts.

DeNA took a 20% stake in the gaming platform Aurora Feint -a Ngmoco competitor- last year to facilitate distribution. It acquired IceBreaker, a US-based game publisher a few months later. Then bought Astro Ape Studios then Gameview Studios, two US-based game developers, this year. Then set up a USD 27.5m investment fund. And now that 400m deal.

USD 403m actually. 303m to be paid in November, 100m more depending on Ngmoco 2011 earnings.

403m. That makes it the world's largest mobile social gaming platform. Or so they say [full press release in English].

403m for what? Unlocking that elusive international market.

The company plans to integrate Ngmoco's social platform which plays nicely with both iOS and Android phones. Read that again. Or read this from the founders:

ngmoco will lead DeNA’s efforts in the Western world, including launching a new western smartphone version of the incredibly successful Social Games Network, Mobage (we say “Mo-ba-gae”) that we’re building together with DeNA.

DeNA is smart. It's talking about OpenMobage, a platform. iPhone, Android, keitai. That's key. If the company is able to create such a thing on mobile -think how Zynga used Facebook's platform for its growth-, then it has a shot at being very successful.

And remember, the company's revenue estimates for this year are about USD 1bn. That's as much as Facebook. Good firing power, heh?

Becoming the premier [global] social gaming company appears extremely feasible

I want to believe Tomoko Namba, DeNA's CEO. Really. But the list of Japanese tech companies that have successfully ventured abroad is dramatically short. Last time such noticeable investment happened was more than 5 years ago when Japanese mobile content giant Index Holdings bought Seattle-based Mobliss and 123 Multimedia. Or, closer to the numbers we're talking today, when For-side bought iTouch, a mobile content provider.

Right. No one remembers.

Hence, only one name comes to mind. Rakuten.

Its acquisition of Buy.com for USD 250m -with a relatively weaker yen- is too recent to pass any judgement. But it's one story that will allow us all to judge how Japan will do abroad this time.

What will it be?

Tags: Japan by Paul Papadimitriou
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Facebook Sudden Surge In Japan By Notable Web Users

Japan is known as one of the most difficult countries for Facebook.

However, there has been sudden Facebook buzz happening in Japanese websphere now for about a week. Tokyo-based social media consultant company Looops Communications counted that there were over 11.7% Japanese Facebook users increase observed in 11 days last week. According to them, the number of users shown on FacebookAds stats moved up from 1,426,480 to 1,593,440, which now reaches 1.26% of Japanese population, 0.14% up only in 11 days.

As far as I know, this "boom" began by couple of influential Japanese bloggers, including @amachang, @hamachiya2, @yusukebe and @holygrail, who tried to rediscover Facebook around October 6th, with calling their Hatena/Twitter friends back to Facebook and taught how to organize your Facebook home page by dismissing too much information. Many Japanese early-adopters made friends networks on Facebook when it was first introduced, and had had chances to maintain it, which makes the information on their home page overloaded.

Most of those Japanese web-savvy people had Facebook accounts for 2-3 years, but they never returned. After this "rediscover Facebook" day, many people expressed that they are surprised with its changes, for Japanese people, Facebook today is so "fast and light" from the one in their mind since 2 years ago.

After the day, the top page of Hatena Bookmarks, the most popular Japanese social bookmarking service (which also has some social news aspects like Digg/reddit), has many Facebook-related blog entries. Links (all in Japanese) with number of bookmarks. If the number of bookmarks is over 300, that means quite buzzed among Japanese net-savvy, I could say.

Before that, most of hot topics about Facebook were like how Facebook succeeds in U.S. and West translated by online news and analysis by Silicon Valley watcher blogs. But suddenly everyone is writing about Facebook this week.

As there were too many blogs and tweets mentioning Facebook, there were even people who claimed that this must be stealth marketing by a big advertising agency such like Dentsu. But those popular bloggers are the farthest ones who write something in exchange for money.

For me, it is understandable that some people who cannot track down the source of buzz misunderstand this kind of word of mouth storm could be lead by single hidden will. Another points out that the one who claimed that conspiracy theory belongs to Mixi, a direct competitor of Facebook Japan (which seems true, but I'd support that he tweeted that skeptical view as an individual, not by Mixi's hidden will).

There is also an online-meetup on Facebook planned. A facebook event "Facebook Douji on kai"(Simultaneous Meetup on Facebook) which organizer amachang says, "you will not know joy of Facebook without having many of your friends online", will be held on October 15th night (Japan Standard Time). The event already got about 800 Japanese users answering "yes".

Today, a best-selling business book writer Kazuyo Katsuma, who made a huge contribution on spreading Twitter to her book readers, i.e. non-techies, in Japan, said [J] that she has been trying Facebook for a week, opened her official fan page.

Yet I am unsure if this time Facebook boom will continue weeks later. As many newcomers followed influential users still seem puzzled with Facebook interface and complain how they are different from Mixi and Twitter.

But anyway, this is a good chance for Facebook Japan to assist this momentum, by helping those novices, putting their staff as evangelists and let them interact with those re-testing users, having some offline meetings and let media cover them, all such kind of things which Mixi, Gree and Twitter did when they got popularity in Japan.

See Also:

Connection Search: Facebook Japan And Recruit Launch Job Service For College Grads - Asiajin

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up in Akihabara, Tokyo

On Saturday at Ustream Studio Akiba[J], a livecast facility in an Internet cafe in Akihabara, we had a readers meet-up in Tokyo for the first time in approx. 2.5 years.

The meet-up started with Asiajin co-founder Akky's presentation about our current state.   It described Asiajin contributors are always shortstaffed to cover what are happening in the tech and social media scenes in Japan and Asia.   We've been making our effort to invite new contributors as the areas to be covered are getting wider, but basically those who have command of English as well as understand technical and media aspects of  innovative services are usually busy for their money making job.   In order to keep on bringing our readers hot tech news from this region, we need to invite more people.   If you're interested in joining us for write-ups, please drop us a line.

Secondary, bringing you news coverage in good quality requires some expenses.   Asiajin aims at encouraging Japanese and Asiajin start-ups to go to the world arena "by our selfless love", we hope not to ask them to be our sponsor.    Several people says, we should ask the Internet tycoons like DeNA, GREE and Rakuten who became no longer start-ups.   Asiajin stories are often quoted by popular tech blogs and major news resources, as you know, we're proudly one of good exposures for IT companies and services to get a global attention.

Yoski Akamatsu, a Japanese techpreneur who has developed a series of useful and interesting web services, also made an appearance at the event.  He presented what his company is concentrated to and demo-ed his dangerous but funny gadget as he did at our Singapore meet-up.

Some of the attendees suggested that we should have more meet-ups on a monthly basis, a quarterly basis or whatever --- anyway, more frequently.   As Akky mentioned in this announcement, we would like to do more things to accelerate our tech-related activities including community development, but we're unfortunately shortstaffed.   By having new guys for developing new things just like this meet-up, we'll keep trying to find a new way to give our readers what they want.

Finally, we appreciate all your continuous support for Asiajin.

Tags: Asiajin Event by Masaru IKEDA
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Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up in Singapore

I was visiting Singapore in late-September for attending Accelerate 2010 and meeting with great techpreneurs.   Thanks to Bernard Leong from Chalkboard, a Singapore-based start-up providing retail promotion solutions for several smartphone platforms, and Justin Lee from Tech 65, a Singapore-based gadget-focused tech blog, we could have a readers meet-up at the country's geek hub, Hackerspace.SG, which is located at a very convenient location near Arab Street where we can take a variety of Arabian foods at any time and hear the holy Qur'an from a mosque nearby throughout the day.

If you have any chance to visit Singapore, I strongly recommend you to visit Hackerspace.SG to meet attractive people after checking out the event calendar on their website.

Japanese techpreneur Yoski Akamatsu (@yoski), who was visiting the country for Accelerate 2010 and enjoying watching the Formula One Grand Prix night race, also joined the meet-up, and he demo-ed his service TwitCasting with a prototype of a combination of his mobile livestream service with a R/C car equipped with the iPod.

Video image captured with the on-board camera is available live on his laptop.   During his demo, a small dinner party was underway in a room next to our meet-up.   He threw the car into the room stealthily and let it crawl into the group under the dinner table.   We could what happened in that room without coming down to the room.   They were so amazingly surprised and commented that it looked like a scene of a secret agent movie.

The camera of the iPod is laid on the car and faces up to the ceiling, that's why there's a mirror attached to the camera pinhole to change the angle and let you see the car's ahead.   "Without this mirror, I'll get busted", he says with laughing.  (If no mirror, unexpectedly it could be a molester's tool for peeping inside someone's skirt.)

Miss Yan Phun (@yanphun) joined the event, she is a Singapore-based techpreneur and co-founded an event management tool called FlickEvents.   Her service is still in beta test, not opened to the public and I've not tried it out.  But it seems like a combination of Eventbrite, Amiando and Plancast.   She's studying on what kind of additional features attract users more than other competitive services.   If you're interested in using the service, visit FlickEvents' website and ask them for a beta invitation key.

Attendee Mr. Guyi Shen is the founder of Lobangclub, a Singapore-based price comparison portal and now in Beta (available with your Facebook account).   Mr. Shen says, retailers in Singapore would not like to be listed on price comparison portals as well as the other nations, neither they don't like to expose their retail prices of merchandise on the Internet because it may cause a harder competition on discounting among them.   He's interested in how Japan's largest comparison portal Kakaku.com persuade Japanese retailers to be involved and why they have made such a success.   He requested me that Asiajin should have such analysis stories.   We'll try it.   (I just answered him for the question from my point of view.)

The meet-up was an amazing experience for me.   Thank all coming by despite traffic in the city was strictly controlled due to the car race and hard to get to the venue.    Let's keep in touch and see you soon again.

Tags: Asiajin Event, Singapore by Masaru IKEDA
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September 2010 Japan IT Links (Part 3)

Continued from (Part 2). Last part of September news which we did not write as a dedicated article.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

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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