Rakuten just doesn’t stop internationalizing. In May, we reported about the joint venture the Japanese e-commerce giant (market cap at the Tokyo Stock Exchange: $10 billion) entered with Indonesia’s biggest media company, Global Mediacom.

And today, Rakuten announced the result of the deal, an online mall, which will be opened next year and give Indonesian merchants the chance to open virtual shops and offer their products in a collected setting. There are no shops active on the site currently, just some information for merchants with an interest to sign up.

Rakuten proper currently counts well over 30,000 merchants and 60 million members on its Japanese site. The deal it inked with Global Mediacom is worth $4.3 million, with Rakuten saying it will at some point link all of its sites (in Taiwan, China, Japan etc.) together to become something of a global online mall.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Kyodo reports [J] (11:08) that DeNA, who runs one of Japan’s largest mobile social networking Mobage-Town, is subjected to an on-site investigation by Japan Fair Trade Commission(JFTC).

DeNA was rumored to ask their third-party game application providers not to provide games for Gree.

[Update] Nikkei follows [J] (11:13) with more detail. It says that the investigation is for unfair business practices, on forcing third-parties to make exclusive contract with DeNA.

DeNA and Gree have been in severe competition, on number of users, games ideas/themes/copyrights, hiring, etc.

JFTC approved Yahoo! Japan and Google search alliance last week, which had been objected by some of their competitors.

[Update 13:36] Bloomberg followed (12:43) Nikkei news.

[Update] DeNA COO Isao Moriyasu canceled his session in the afternoon at Infinite Venture Summit, Kyoto, Japan. Half a day later, CEO Tomoko Namba appeared on a session at LeWeb, Paris, France.

See Also:

How DeNA Beats Facebook and Zynga – DeNA’s business model is 30 times more profitable than Facebook

DeNA CEO Namba told her interests in alliance with Facebook or Zynga last month to Bloomberg

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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We have just switched to Disqus comment system from another comments service. So this post also serves as new comment system test.

All registered users and Disqus users can write comments. Tentatively, now guest users can post comments, too. Please help our test by leaving any general questions, requests, suggestions, applauds, complaints, whining, etc. for Asiajin staff on this post’s comments.

# article-related comments should be posted on each article

Until now, we intentionally made commenting difficult by demanding Asiajin registration. That was because we wanted to concentrate on writing new articles, though we of course knew discussions with readers would also help us. We are not sure if this change goes better, or regret soon. If this goes really bad, we will turn off anonymous guest comments, but Disqus users’ comment will be kept.

# most Asiajin-s are living in Japan Standard Time so you cannot expect immediate reply during when East Asia is sleeping.

Tags: Announcement by Akky Akimoto
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