Two huge Japanese social gaming networks who are working on oversea expansion showed a new move to utilize their accumulated assets on Japanese feature phone world - Flash based games.

On June 30, Mobage company DeNA announced [J] that they had purchased Broadtail, a Tokyo-based tech start-up, who developed a tool named "ExGame" to run Flash Lite 1.1 applications on smartphone(iOS and Android). Flash Lite is a light version of Adobe Flash, which is used on Docomo's feature phone. realized huge variety of Docomo's cellphone app store years before Apple's app store.

DeNA is to provide the ExGame engine to their important third-parties like Kayac, Klab, Crooz, Koei-Techmo, Pokelabo etc.

DeNA says that this engine enables to offer their over 1,000 feature phone games on Mobage into their smart phone platform.

Then today, July 11, Gree announced [J] that they developed and are to provide a Flash-to-HTML5 converter, which makes feature phone Flash applications run on iOS, for Gree partners(their development partners).

Gree also revealed that July 5 released smartphone version of Kurinoppe, a virtual pet raising social game which is one of their most popular games on feature phone platform, was made by using this converter.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Facebook Spot Information is becoming popular in Japan after Facebook had started Check-in Coupon (Check-in Deals) in Japan.

Facebook Japan Holds An New Coupon Service Launch Event In Shibuya

The problem arouse when Recruit[E], Japan's largest coupon business player, registered spot information of restaurants on behalf of restaurant owners without enough notification.

Hitoshi Nakamura(twitter id: hitoshi[J]) , one of the most famous restaurant owner who has a deep knowledge on social marketing, reported on his blog that  Recruit registered spot information of his restaurant without getting agreement from him.

He noticed this when his customer requested to use a deal posted by Recruit on Facebook spot information.

( This photo was uploaded by Hitoshi.)

Recruit is operating a service known as Hot Pepper[J], a free paper media distributed in town like "am New York" [En] or "metro [En]" but only includes coupons of restaurants and beauty salons instead of articles. There is also an web site to search restaurants and coupons on Hot Pepper. Shop owners pay fixed fee per month to get their coupons printed on this media.

With those data of restaurants and coupons, Recruit, instead of restaurant owners, started registering spot information with coupon. Recruit sent this announcement to 40,000 restaurants and registered information of restaurants except those replied to not register. That means when there was no response, Recruit also registered shop information, took an opt-out process.

As a result, duplicated shop information had registered for some restaurants already have their shop information on Facebook. Recruit says, they checked restaurant names to prevent to register another shop information for those who already registered them on Facebook. But if there is a slight change on the name of restaurants, spell, big letter or small letter, with or without hyphen , etc., spot information had registered in additional to the original one.

This had caused troubles. Restaurant owners with original spot information could not publish Check-in coupon since Recruit had already published coupons for another spot information with the name of same restaurant, and Facebook judged it as a break of service agreement. So Recruit jacked the spot information and the right to publish coupon.

Recruit de-registered shop information for those requested to do so but not only restaurants, Recruit also had  registered spot information of hotels on their hotel reservation site, Jalan[J].

This case implies that anyone can register shop information to get more exposure on Facebook Check-in. Yelp, Expedia, or any other player can do similar thing. Although they can not connect directly to their services at least you can get more awareness for your service.

So how Facebook will respond?

Is this going to be another battle field to get a better position on the list of web page like we do for Google search results?

Tags: Japan, Service by Hiroumi Mitani
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"Kyutai Kansetsu Sutokkingu"(Spherical Joint Stocking) is a coterie stocking sold at Bungaku Furima(=literature flea-market), a dojinshi sale dedicated for literature-related things only, by circle Ojosama Gakkou Shojo Bu(preppie school girls section). The stocking has globe joint painted on knees, to make your leg like real figure.

The stockings, 2,000 yen(US$25) seems sold out on their online shop, currently on order.

But why? I guess some people might love figures too much so that now they want to become like that. It is interesting because those joints originally showed their incompleteness of mimicking human beings.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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We just wrote that Japanese made a Google Plus logo homages Nintendo DS virtual dating game Love Plus. Now illustration follows by Pixiv user acea4.

Three girls have Google Map, Gmail and Chrome icons.

The original "Love Plus" illustration,

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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On June 29, one of Japan's largest social network service Mixi introduced a change on a view of your My Mixi(also called Maimiku, = friends on Mixi). My Mixi list page [J, login required] now shows you your friends' full names in parenthesis under their nick names.

Number of their friends were displayed in the parenthesis before the change.

The full name is not necessarily real name, which Facebook requires. That full name is what the user set on their registration of Mixi. It has been always visible if your friends visit your profile page. (Whether it was displayed to non-friends or friends-of-friends depend on how the profile owner limited its visibility) So it is not something Mixi tried to change the rule around registered name visibility. You could set pseudo name there, which could be same as their nickname.

However, by seeing their friends full names on the friends-list page, Mixi users who did not know that their "full name" was visible to their friends. Some might set there their real name, expecting only the nickname is shown to others. Those users got shocked and are blaming Mixi now.

Mixi turned off footprint function last month, and now made people more conscious of friends' full name instead of nickname. Both changes make Mixi steps closer to its global rival Facebook.

See Also:

Mixi's release [J]

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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