Takeo city, in Saga prefecture in Kyushu island, has been known by its net-savvy mayor Keisuke Hiwatashi. As a mayor, he switched the city website onto Facebook page, which gets 50 times more page views according to Asahi [J], and let the Facebook page sell the local products on Facebook. he also called for Japan Society Of Twitter Study.

(photo from the mayor Keisuke Hiwatashi's blog)

His love for social media now makes another step, to utilize Facebook as the city’s internal communication system, explained on his blog [J]. On the blog, he ditched the current system which costs 6 million yen annually, praised Facebook as it is “Free”. 101 out of all 390 staff already have Facebook account, and the city will let all staff register Facebook by April.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »

DeNA, who runs Mobage, announced today [J] that it instituted legal action to demand Gree and its CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka an apology and compensation for the loss caused by Gree’s press release and Tanaka’s comments, which stated that DeNA did illegal business activities.

As we reported in December, DeNA expressed [J] the possibility of counter action against the legal action filed by Gree and KDDI (Bloomberg). Tanaka has been making comments around the case on many media, opinion ads on national newspaper and his Twitter [J].

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »

JKT48, the Indonesian sister band of ultra-popular Japanese girl group AKB48 (Asiajin), is promoting Rakuten Belanja Online, Rakuten’s joint venture with Jakarta-based media powerhouse PT Global Mediacom, on Indonesian TV.

In the 30-second commercial, various members of the group can be seen wearing different clothes and accessories and using gadgets – and apparently all items can be bought on the site.

Rakuten Belanja Online was first announced back in December 2010 and began operations in June 2011.

Here’s the JKT48 TV spot:

Tags: Indonesia, Japan, News, Video by Serkan Toto
1 Comment »

Pixiv, the most popular of Japan’s many social drawing services, announced [ENG] it hit an amazing four million registered users last Saturday (January 28).

It took the site, which launched on September 10 in 2007, exactly 1,602 days to reach that milestone. That’s about 2,500 users per day – not bad at all, especially for a niche site, over such a long period.

Pixiv got its first million users in June 2009, reached 2 million users in May 2010 and hit 3 million users in March 2011. With 4 million users, roughly 4% of Japan’s online population have now registered for the service.

Users are generating 2.8 billion page views per month and have submitted a staggering 24.5 million works so far.

You can read more about Pixiv in TechCrunch.com’s recent article, on Asiajin, or over on Wikipedia.

Registration in English is possible here.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
No Comments »