Japan’s biggest business daily The Nikkei is reporting that the country’s leading mobile carrier, NTT Docomo, is to unveil a a new app store of sorts on Monday, December 6. The portal will offer 1,200 apps from the get-go, in addition to 1 million music titles and a total of 30,000 e-books – exclusively for feature phones.

The app (or rather: content) store will only be accessible through i-mode enabled handsets, with Docomo pocketing 20% of all revenue from content providers. That’s significantly more than the current 9% the company charges for serving as a sales and billing agent for third parties.

Docomo customers have been able to download special apps on their mobile phones since 2001 (needless to say, downloading music, movies or any type of digital content has been possible on all Japanese mobile phones for years).

This new store gives individual developers the chance to offer apps to the 55 million customers Docomo boasts in Japan, just like in Apple’s App Store. This was impossible before – all of the around 20,000 providers currently offering apps for Docomo phones are “registered businesses”.

The Nikkei first reported that Docomo was preparing a new app portal in August this year.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Yahoo! Japan announced [J] their entering application platform competition with new Yahoo! Application Platform (Yahoo! Appli). The release was done on November 25th and it launched on the same day with 10 third-party applications.

You might already know that Yahoo! Japan, No.1 website in Japan, is not really identical with U.S. Yahoo!, who has been having hard time these years. Yahoo! Japan is primarily owned by Softbank, and has free hands on their strategy. Taking Google’s search technology instead of Bing is a good example to show it.

Yahoo! Japan did not enter the platform competition, though U.S. Yahoo! had been running PC application platform for two years now. Like Y!J having independent account system (Yahoo! Japan account) from U.S. Yahoo!, this time’s platform is purely Yahoo! Japan only.

The initial 10 applications, which seems few as Yahoo! Japan’s launch, are two fortune-tellers, Bijin Tokei (beautiful girls photo clock), Karaoke, two face-photo morphing apps, house architects search, horse racing bloggers sentiment analyzer and Hello Kitty photo decorators (free and paid – enhanced version).

5 out of all 10 apps are free, 1 is 105 yen per month and the other 4 cost 315 yen per month.

Yahoo! Japan Opened social gaming platform Yahoo! Mobage with DeNA(Mobage Town)’s help since this October. Yahoo! Appli should be able to host social games, but if they do so, Yahoo! Japan and DeNA alliance will be into the air. All 10 first apps on Yahoo! Appli are non games, so Yahoo! Japan may be thinking to divide their PC application customers into game under Mobage brand, all but games under Yahoo! Appli.

Yahoo! Japan has been failing to construct social network among their users, but it is true that Yahoo! account is the largest account system in Japan. If Yahoo! Appli has a lot of applications networking their users, Yahoo! will be a social platform competitor against Mixi, Twitter and Facebook.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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On December 2nd, Japan’s first (maybe the world first? do you know?) cellphone social game application magazine “Appli Style” has been released in Japan.

The magazine, costs 680 yen (US$8), published by a publisher Eastpress, are sold at bookstores and convenience stores around the nation. (-> “>purchase from Amazon Japan)

On top of the cover of the initial issue, there are Gree, Mobage Town and Mixi logos.

There are popular mobile social game titles taken up.

• Kaitou Royal (Mobage Town’s flagship game) Asiajin
• Gundam Royal, Mobage’s new game themes Gundam
• Tsuri Star (Gree’s own breadwinner fishing game)
• Monster Planet (Gree’s Pokemon)
• Sanshine Bokujou(Ranch) (Mixi’s No.1 game by Rekoo Japan, a subsidiary of Rekoo, China) Asiajin
• Monhan Nikki Mobile Airu Mura (Monster Hunter Diary Mobile Airu Village, Mobage Town’s game by Capcom)
• 100 Man Nin no Nobunaga no Yabou (Nobunaga’s Ambition For Million People, social game version of the popular feudal lord strategy game by Koei)
• Evangelion Meguriau Kizuna (anime-based social game on Gree by Entersphere)
• Hatsune Miku Bokaro(Vocaloid) Live (not a game. see Asiajin)

I guess that most of regular users of those mobile simple games do not search or share the game info on PC web, and it is unlikely that people use multiple tab browser on mobile (latest feature phones are multi-task supported though). All mobile social gaming platform provide users communities to share the information to play those game better, I do not think that majority of the users discuss on how to solve the game there.

Those players (who should also be players paying couple of ten thousands yen every month on them) may need this kind of handy guidebook besides their ketai.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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