On Friday, GMO Venture Partners[J], an investment arm of Shibuya-based web juggernaut GMO Internet Group, launched a private equity fund specializing in investing in start-ups who are developing e-commerce and ad services to be provided on the Facebook platform (a.k.a. F-commerce), which is called Social Ad & Commerce Technology Fund.   It has a JPY57M(=USD670,000) volume as of its launch and can be grown up to JPY2B(=USD23.8M) in the future.

As their first portfolio, they invested in Aratana, a tech start-up based in Miyazaki, a southern coastal city of the Kyushu Island.  The company has introduced an easy-to-use shopping cart system integrated for Facebook, which is called Social Gateway, and has installed more than 1,000 on-Facebook commerce pages for Japanese SMEs in partnership with social commerce integrators such as Sakuragaoka Works Inc. (previously known as Arcarna)

Example: A “F-commerce” page developed by Aratana for Rice-made cosmetic manufacturer Rice Force.

See Also:

• GMO Co-Launches New Project To Incubate Social App Providers

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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February? Yes. I am sorry for big delay. The earthquake made me forgot this. March version will come late, too.

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

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Taisho, a Taiyaki (Japanese fish-shape cake) shop in Kichijoji, suspended accepting the Groupon deal because fablicated coupons have been used and the payment terms are long.
• Rikkyo Univ. Student Bashed By His Tweet Saying Rape Is A Problem On Victim Side
• Tokyo Univ. Student/TV Talent Tweets Her Valentine Gift Was By Her Grandma, Saying Bad How It Was Cooked
• A3 and Enjoy Japan jointly launches a translated collection of blogs by amateur models from Japanese fashion magazines for Chinese young female consumers.
• Mixi Registration Is Now Available From Android
• M-Out launches a social network service focusing on start-ups and new business development, Bizna.
• WillVii invites former Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei as the company’s advisor.
• [not new] Quaint HUB Created Based On Gundam Episode
• PC Egg launches a new service that allows to post your voice to Twitter and Facebook by recording it on the phone. using Asterisk
• Follolin, an ad network focusing on gaining followers for corporate Twitter accounts, reached 100 million impressions per month.
• Rakuten Ichiba App for iPhone.
• Consumer Agency Warns Groupon Japan And Bird’s Cafe Company On Osechigate
• 10-yo Girl Steals Password From Junior High Student On Ameba Pigg
• Japan Police Agency Reports Children Victims Over Community Site Increasing Especially On Gree
• Penisbook – Porn Sharing Social Network by Mac Soccerberg(Soccerdaisuki)
• Shinjyuku Serial Kill Threatner Boy’s 19yo Elder Brother Tried To Accomplish The Threat [En]
• Rakuten’s Buy.com Opens Japanese Site via Markezine
• Fukuoka-headquarted cab operator Daiichi Kotsu and its subsidiary introduced the quadlingual iPhone app for foreign visitors. (available for free until 27th. For 700 yen after 28th.) – It’s named “Natto”, meaning fermented soybeans. strange.
• Ooyala And Yahoo! Japan Allies. Ooyala’s release [En]
• Rosetta Stone Japan Offers Free Coffee If You Order In English For 3 Days In Shinjyuku
• GREE Platform Forum 2011 ＆ GREE Platform Award 2011
• “Moe” English word learning application “Moetan”
• Digital Manga Magazine “COMICLOUD” – it claims the world first, but Kodansha began manga magazine “Morning Two” distribution in Jul 2009
• Japanese Packed Iced Cafe Latte’s Lid Was Designed To Be A Tray Preventing Dew Drop

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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On April 1, Kyoto-based web service company Hatena released a new microblog service Hatena Now, which restrict users’ message at most 3 characters. Hatena called it “The world smallest nano blog” [J].

In 2009, we reported a nano blog chuitter.jp, which limits message by 14 letters, 1/10 of Twitter. However, Chuitter ceased after one year (probably domain expired).

Hatena Now got 7,000 users and 25,000 messages in a single day, however, they decided to close the service at the end of 1st, “to make the running time of the service the world shortest as well” [J].

Hatena has been running another microblog service Hatena Haiku, so I guess that there might be internal confusion of product management like Google has, seen on Google Wave/Buzz and Android/Chrome OS.

The last tweet by Hatena was “おわり”(O-Wa-Ri = end), which could have been 3 letters in English, too.

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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