Certain American startups do pretty well in Japan, if a report issued today by Nielsen Japan (NetRatings) is to be believed (as with all web statistics providers, take the following numbers with a grain of salt).

The company investigated the traffic Dropbox and Evernote have seen in the past 12 months, and it appears the first five months of 2011 have been especially successful for both services in Japan.

As you can see in the graph below, Nielsen registered 559,000 visitors for Evernote in this country last month (for the website and app) and even reports 637,000 monthly visitors for Dropbox. According to Nielsen, Evernote had just 67,000 users in May 2010, while Dropbox had 325,000 (all data: PC access only).

Both Evernote and Dropbox were launched in the US in 2008. Evernote established an office in Japan, the company’s No. 2 market worldwide, in 2010. Dropbox started offering its UI in Japanese in December 2010.

Tags: Japan, News, Trend by Serkan Toto
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Continued from (Part 1). Middle part of June news which we did not write as a dedicated article. Continued to (Part 3)

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• NTT Plala’s Twitter Promotion To Generate Your Own Anime CM
• Japan’s First Flash Coupon Site Piku Replaces Its Executives
• Kinokuniya/Sony/Panasonic/Rakuten To Interconnect Their e-Book Platforms. Ubergizmo [En]
• 2-channel Founder Hiroyuki Again Criticizes Nico Nico Douga. This time it is how Nico Nico Live official channels featuring celebrities doing non-sense things like TV
• Hatena’s Facebook App For Its Q&A Service Is Shut Down By Facebook via @serkantoto
• Batara Eto And F-shin(Movatwitter) Bullied-style Interview. unique
• Google Social Search Turned On For Japanese
• Yahoo! Japan’s Traffic Analysis Service Yahoo! Logoole Ends On 20th
• Yahoo! Japan Launches Twitter Realtime Search. MyCom writes Yahoo! Japan and Twitter made a strategic alliance for the realtime search. Yahoo! Japan’s release
• Teamlab Body – 3D Human Body Viewer
• 
  Hello Kitty Hatsune Miku via Pouch
• 
  Rakuten’s Energy Saving Style via CEO’s tweet
• LinkedIn Japan Blogger Event Report on Netafull
• Mixi CEO Gives Additional Message Over Ashiato Change. like “eveybody, calm down!”
• Asahi.com Introduces Blog Quoting Button For Several Popular Blog Service. They try to reduce people’s simply copy and paste, to take control
• Gree Market To Be Pre-installed On KDDI Android
• Morpho Inc. Goes IPO (TSE Mothers)
• Namco’s Retro Game Dancing Eye Site Is Made In Japanese Typical Dodgy Design
• Net-Order Curry Appeals Their Ignoring All Indian Advices
• WIRED Re-enters Japan Both On Website And Paper Magazine
• Mobage’s Kaitou Royal Goes Boys’ And Girls’ Manga
• Yahoo! Japan Ordered To Pay For Emotional Distress By Distributing News With A Person’s Handcuffed Photo Of 25 Years Ago
• Domino’s Pizza To Run The World’s First Foursquare Check-in Race
• New Martial Art Threatening Match
• Yahoo! Japan Top Page Down For An Hour From. it was around 1:00 a.m. but still huge traffic as it is Yahoo!
• DeNA Raises Profit Forecast Upward About 20%
• Trendwall – Twitter Japanese Trending Topics Visualizer
• McDonalds Releases iPhone App In Japan
• How Unicode Is Used To Make Weird Emoticons On Twitter
• Android Game To Prevent A Little-Sister From Becoming Net Right Winger via RocketNews
• 2-Channelers Tracks Down A Girl’s Sex-life, Office, Mixi Page, etc. From NHK News. NHK aired a page of her notebook, which unfortunately had a tiny tiny her hand writings on her private life. 2-channellers snoop around everywhere.
  
• Legislation criminalizing creation of computer viruses enacted [En]

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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ex-Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie, aka Horiemon, who had got over 2 years imprisonment, broadcasted his road to jail on Nico Nico Live(Namahousou), but his desire for exhibitionism seems beyond that.

“Horiemon Rasuto Gurabia” (Rasuto=Last, Gurabia = photo sets came from gravure magazine) article was published in Weekly Playboy [J] issued today June 27.

If you want to see it big, click the image…

photo: tenmuss’s twipple

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Rakuten is still the 800-pound gorilla in Japan’s e-commerce arena (70 million accounts are hard to beat), but Amazon Japan is doing pretty well, too, it seems (here’s a case study comparing the two companies). According to a recent report in business daily The Nikkei, big A plans to hire Japanese graduates coming straight out of college for the first time ever in spring 2012.

In other words, Amazon Japan is becoming more of a local company that takes the long-term “risk” of trying to build up talent internally (so far, only mid-career professionals were hired). Details are scarce, but the Nikkei does say Amazon aims at recruiting “several dozen” graduates next spring and that they plan to continue to hire graduates in the years to follow, too.

Amazon Japan was established as early as November 2000, and while the current number of employees isn’t disclosed, LinkedIn lists 142 people currently working for the company (obviously, the actual number should be much higher).

In the past few years, Amazon has been expanding its Japan business aggressively, for example by adding new categories (and products) to their catalog, building distribution centers all over the country to speed up delivery (the most recent ones are located in Aichi and Miyagi), or opening data centers for AWS.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Dentsu, Japanese advertising colossus, released a new Android client with D2 Communications and Bijutsu Shuppan Networks Co., Ltd.

The new client Decotter lets you tweet not only 140 characters text but also Deco Sozai(=decoration materials), colourful images and character letters.

FYI, those “deco moji” are not emoji, which is now part of Unicode.

With maximum 10 decorations, you may tweet up to 100 regular letters in a single tweet.

It’s only available for Docomo and KDDI au. Not for Softbank Mobile.

Same as their successful “deco” business on their mobile web (i-mode/ezWeb), it co-works with a paid decoration selling service, Deco Market, where people can purchase more decorations to make their tweets stand out.

Dentsu’s release [J, pdf]

See Also:

Povie – Purikura For Movie, Knows Your “Kawaii” Points To Decorate

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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