Tokyo-based Internet-enabled consumer electronics developer Cerevo[J], who is known for having introduced a series of Ustream encoder products for streamcasters, fundraised approximately USD3M (=JPY250M) by allocating new shares to Enova[J], Inspire Corporation and Neostella Capital.   Enova is a venture fund founded by several semiconductor manufacturers/retailers, Inspire is a VC-firm owned by Mr. Makoto Naruke who is the former president of Microsoft Japan, and Neostella is also a VC firm co-founded by Japanese three major life insurance companies.   Cerevo keeps USD1.5M (=JPY125M)  as a reserve capital and became worth about USD2.5M (=JPY204.6M).

Mr. Takuma Iwasa, the CEO and founder of the company, says, it intends to accelerate the development of new products and international marketing by using the fundraised money.

Via: TechCrunch Japan[J], CNET Japan[J]

See Also:

• Giving Characters To Camera Fits Anime Fans’ Taste?
• Cute Girl Duo Gets A Higher Attention Than What They Promote
• Cerevo’s New Encoder Box No Longer Requires PC For Ustream Livecasting

Tags: Company, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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At 17th night, British band Radiohead's official Twitter account tweeted "in Japanese" just with,

渋谷 ハチ公広場 金曜日 １８時５９分

"Shibuya Hachiko-square, Friday 18:59"

# The tweet seems removed now.

It was quickly and widely retweeted among Japanese rock fans, made them expect the band may be secretly visiting Japan, and may do live performance at Shibuya crossing, one of the busiest pedestrian crossing around the world.

The Japanese promoter agency of Radiohead, Hostess Entertainment announced that there are no plan of live performance early in the Friday morning. Although they had planned something smaller (of course no Radiohead themselves involved) in Shibuya, and the strange Japanese tweet must be for that, the company gave up running the event as it was too much buzzed with uncontrollable expectations over Twitter.

Even though they told there would be no events at the night in Shibuya, many people who might not know it visited the crossing road, made the place even busier.

Eventually, Radiohead did not show up there. It must have been a part of their new album promotion. The first single "Lotus Flower" from the album has been publicized on YouTube few hours ago.

via RO Rock [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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NHN Japan, the local arm of South Korean web giant NHN and operator of online gaming portal Hangame, is planning to seriously step up game development for smartphones, especially on Android.

Japan's biggest business daily, The Nikkei, is reporting that NHN in Korea has set up a 100-people team that's supposed to create the titles, for example action and puzzle games (see below). Japan is expected to see 10 new titles from NHN as early as spring this year, but the company is planning to have a whopping 100 games on the Japanese and Korean markets by year-end.

According to the Nikkei, the company is also planning to add social networking functionalities to the games, including multi-player options.

NHN has been offering games on the iPhone since summer last year, for example this one (Puchi Puchi Same Puzzle):

Tags: Company, Japan, Korea, News by Serkan Toto
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It's no secret that in recent years, quite a few foreign (mostly American) web brands have made it big in Japan: Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Amazon etc.

But what about startups that don't have huge budgets to internationalize, no staff in Japan and - in some cases - not even a Japanese user interface (usually a dealbreaker for most local web users).

Here's a recent (yet surely incomplete) list:

• Instagram (we just recently reported about the silly printed how-to-use-Instagram book available in Japan)
• Foursquare (KDDI wants to help Foursquare to become bigger in this country)
• Bump
• Hootsuite
• Jimdo
• Tweetdeck
• Tumblr (official data submitted from Tumblr to Quantcast shows Japan is their No. 5 market worldwide)
• Seesmic

In 2010, Evernote established an office in Japan, the company's No. 2 market worldwide, so it can't really be part of this list - even though the app was already very popular before that.

Which foreign web and mobile startups flying under the radar in Japan have we forgotten?

Tags: Japan, Service, Trend, USA by Serkan Toto
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The Japanese love books (the book market over here is worth $23 billion annually) and cool mobile apps, for example the popular photo sharing app Instagram. Combine these two phenomena and you get a book on Instagram (dubbed: An Introduction To Instagram In 140 Characters).

It's totally silly (why should you get a printed book on an app that's so easy to use and is documented everywhere online already), but the book will go on sale in Japan tomorrow for 998 Yen/$12 (Amazon link).

There are tons of printed how-to books available on Twitter, YouTube, iPhone, Facebook and others on the market already - a truly Japan-only phenomenon.

Via Modern Syntax

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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