Asiajin

Japanese Social Network Giant, Mixi Inc. announced that they will establish its 100% owned subsidiary in Shanghai, China, to break into Chinese market in this April or May, 2008.

Most revenue of Mixi is now from its social network service for PC and cellularphone browser. Mixi says they think China is promising because of its spreading internet users and growing cellularphone market.

The name of the company is planned to be “mixi Shanghai, Inc.” (上海明迅網絡科技有限公司).

via livedoor news [J]

See also:

Markezine - Mixi goes into Chinese Internet market [J]

Tags: China, Company, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The Osaka prefectural police is investigating ‘Orben‘, a public company, for securities fraud. Orben acquired 16 companies in two years from 2004. Orben executives allegedly reported false income and revenue for their subsidiaries. Supposedly, owners of Orben had sold their stocks at very high prices.

An industry expert says Orben is well known for Yakuza involvement.

Daisuke Enomoto, Ex-Livedoor executive, was allegedly involved in the plot. Livedoor is one of the earliest Internet company in Japan, and was accused with securities fraud. Livedoor scandal was the biggest news in the history of the Japanese Internet industry.

See Also: (in English)

1. A Wikipedia article about Livedoor
2. Orben stock quote

Tags: Company, Japan, News by shunichi arai
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The market capitalization of Yahoo! Japan stands at $28 billion (as of Feb. 2008). Telecommunications conglomerate Softbank is the largest shareholder, holding 41% of the company’s shares. Yahoo! owns 33.4% of Yahoo! Japan’s shares. Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! is $44.6 billion while Yahoo!’s share of Yahoo! Japan is worth $9.3 billion.

Tags: Company, Japan by shunichi arai
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Japan is known as the world’s No. 1 producer of high quality video games. After all, companies such as Nintendo, Sony (Playstation) or Sega are rooted in this country. In the light of this, it seems strange that the leading online game service in Japan comes from Korea: Hangame (only accessible with IE). At certain times, over 100.000 users are logged in simultaneously!

One reason for the success might be the very early entry into the Japanese market in 2000 just after having established Hangame Korea in 1999. Since then, the service became very popular through cooperations with various Japanese Web companies and constant upgradings of its site.

Hangame slowly evolved into a huge gaming platform. Now the provider offers over 160 games from various genres. Hangame basically distinguishes “casual games” (featuring puzzles and easy to understand games) from “hard core games” (like RPGs or strategicals).

Pictures: Some selected game screenshots

Games are connected with avatar offerings. The site also features clubs and communities in which players of certain games can interact with each other. In the so-called Link Link Town, they can even do so by using avatars. Users can also communicate via the bulletin board or blog and chat on the site.

Picture: Hangame avatar in Link Link Town

Company and Business model
NHN is Korea’s biggest Internet company featuring Hangame Korea (also No. 1 in Korea) and the country’s biggest search engine Naver in its portfolio. NHN Japan was formed thorugh a merger of Hangame Japan and Naver Japan in 2003. Hangame Mobile Japan naturally exists as well.The company currently employs over 400 people in its Tokyo headquarters.

Hangame has millions of users all over the world and claims to be the world’s biggest online game portal. In Japan, NHN makes the most revenue by selling special avatars to customers (i. e Nike or Louis Vuitton wearing avatars) while choosing basic avatars is free. Also, many games feature in-game shops in which real money must be spent to obtain items such as more powerful weapons, armor etc. Some features in games (like saving high scores) can only be accessed by premium account holders/subscribers.

Opinion
The quantity, variety and quality of games is very good if not outstanding. Most of the games are localized from Korea. While the casual game section does its job some of the offerings in the hardcore game section are surprisingly good in terms of graphics, audio, playability and depth. They can in no way be compared to the simple flash-based games we know on other gaming sites.

Users can try and play the basic version of games before deciding to spend money to access the full version. This approach makes sense and is fair towards customers. Maybe this is also the reason Hangame won a number of Japanese Internet awards in the past.

Also I personally like the wild design and structure of the Web site - much like a video game itself. The level of activity in the blog and community sections is suprisingly high.

The premium plan with its “Han-coin”, premium point and premium ticket systems is too complicated however.

Also it is very annoying to be forced to use Microsoft Internet Explorer to play games. Moreover, Hangame’s service is not browser based so that time-consuming software downloads are required (i.e. 60 MB for the initial download). Given the high quality of graphics and audio in some games, this has to be regarded as unavoidable. Thankfully the registration process is quite simple yet Japanese only.

See Also: (in English)

1. NHN Korean HQ site

Tags: Company, Japan, Korea by Serkan Toto
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Newsing is a social bookmark service similar to Digg. The big difference is a coloured circle beside the bookmarked news title. It’s a graphed circle with red and gray and “circle” means thumbs up and “cross” means thumbs down.

newsing.jp

Users can express their attitude to the bookmarked news by clicking either a red circle or a gray cross. You might not familiar with this expression but it is quite general and familiar in Japan.

In western countries “check” is a sign for correct. But in Japan “check” usually used as a sign for wrong.

The sign for correct is “circle( Maru in Japanese)” and the sing for wrong is “check” or “cross( Batsu in Japanese)”.

You can see how it’ s used in Japan by watching a famous quiz TV program during 80’s in Japan. It was kind of a reality show. Thousands of people joined to the quiz contest to travel from Tokyo, Japan to New York, U.S.A.. By answering correct answers certain numbers of participants could survive to travel further. First, 100 people can go out from the main stadium to Narita Tokyo international airport. And finally only three people survive to reach New York and fight final quiz battle to be a champion of quiz.

Trans America Ultra Quiz: YouTube

Well “circle” is a shape that means a lot in Japan.
If you make a circle with your thumb and forefinger that means “money”; representing a coin. And the circle is of course even used in a national flag.

You can find “circle” and “cross” also in buttons of playstation controller. “Cirle” is normally used to accept the commnad and”Cross” is used to cancel the command for typical Japanese games.

Kotonoha is a unique service collecting comments to the questions posted by users.

Kotonoha

Various type of questions are posted by users from silly one to the serious one. You can see how people react to each questions by reading the comments posted for “Circle” or “Cross” of that question.

So how was your day today? Maru or Batsu?

Tags: Company, Japan by hiroumi
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January 18th, Tokyo - DeNA, a company which runs Mobage town, will establish a subsidiary in the states. “DeNA Global,Inc.” will be located in California, supposedly San Francisco Bayarea. They will launch a US version of their very profitable mobile business there.

Also they revised upward their net profit forecast from 4.5 billion to 6.3 billion. The revenue and operating profit forcased was revised from 25.5 billion to 29.0 billion yen, and 9.0 billion to 12.5 billion yen, respectively.

See Also:

1. Our Mobage Article

Tags: Company, Japan, News by shunichi arai
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On Tuesday, the monthly Tokyo2point0 event in Omotesandou/Tokyo was held for the 8th time. The venue was really packed. Andrew Shuttleworth (the organizer) told me he would love to see more people to RSVP before coming. Also, companies can contact Andrew directly for sponsorship to help the volunteers currently running the event.

You can sign up directly on the Tokyo2point0 site itself, go to Tokyo2point0’s Facebook group or get some information on Mixi.

Besides the (very important) networking part, the event mainly focused on three presentations. Two of them were English only. Judging from what I have seen, the Japanese people present were able to follow the speakers without problems though.

1) HTML 5
Michael Smith from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) delivered a detailed speech about HTML 5. Mike talked about the changes the fifth major revision of the Web’s main language will bring.

(all pictures in this posting courtesy of my friend Professor Ichinohe)

The core issue HTML 5 addresses is the problem of interoperability between browsers. The W3C is working to determine conformant user agent/Web browser behavior to overcome one of the biggest obstacles Web developers are faced with nowadays.

The new HTML version is still a draft. Michael was expectedly not able to predict precisely when all advantages HTML 5 delivers will come into effect.

(This presentation was off-the-record so the video will not be published.)

2) ONGMAP
Yuki Naotori from Open Associates/7ns presented his Award-winning Google maps mash up “ONGMAP”.

ONGMAP is thankfully also available in English. The service is describing itself as being the sum of “Google Maps+Web API+Tons of Geo Data”. Yuki said he wanted to create a very easy-to-use Web site.

Users can click on an area of interest on ONGMAP and the service scrapes various info about that particular place from external sources. Depending on the country, this info may include:

- weather
- WiFi spots
- local events
- hotels, restaurants, schools, convenience stores, beauty salons (!) and much more
- videos
- etc. etc.

Yuki also talked about his new project called “Japaaan”. In essence, Japaaan is a social network for people interested in discovering Japan’s “hidden” and cool tourist spots. Moreover, members will also meet offline and actually travel to selected sites. Gaijin and Japanese people are invited to join.

You can view Yuki’s presentation slides here.

Watch his presentation here.

3) Trendmap
My Swiss friend Oliver Reichenstein from Information Architects caused a great stir last year in the Web world with what inititally was a joke. His company basically used the Tokyo metro map as a design background to display the relationship between Web services worldwide. Oliver told me he wanted to use this idea for the company name cards and later was overwhelmed by the huge international interest in his concept!

The map illustrates popularity, success, importance and other factors of about 200 Web sites from all countries. You can download the second version (from July 2007) here for free (PDF).

Oliver explained the yet-to-be released third and updated version of the Web trendmap. This time, Information Architects decided to go for an isometric approach.

Watch his presentation here.

Tags: Community, Company, Japan, Person, Technology, Trend by Serkan Toto
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There is an impressive number of search engines specializing in blogs. Internationally speaking, Technorati and Google’s blog search are the most prominent examples. There is also a localized Japanese version of Technorati.

Kizasi (pronounced “kizashi”) is a Japanese blog search service which was started in January last year by kizasi Company, Inc.

This is kizasi’s translated top page (click to enlarge - accessed January 8th, 2008, Japanese time):

Under “Tools” on the top row you can find a kizashi widget, information about the kizasi API, RSS etc. “Lab”means applications by kizasi which are still in beta-phase.

The container on the left features the following topics:
All, society, sports, stars, entertainment, life, fun, moving/impressive news, surprising news, sad news, scary news and hateful news.

Kizasi crawls Japanese blog texts for words and analyzes connotations and usage patterns in order to point out structures and frequently used terms. As of today, kizasi takes into account blogs from 5,816,944 people who are ressponsible for a whopping 139,229,585 entries.

The service ranks key terms by genre and also analyzes pictures related to the words in question. Kizasi refreshes rankings every 10 minutes.

After clicking the current No. 7 search term which is “F2008″, the following page appears (click to enlarge):

The frequency of the word “F2008″ appearing in Japanese blog texts over the past year is shown as a graph on the top right, along with a tag cloud on the left which corresponds to the term. Kizasi also previews the newest blog entries containing the word “F2008″ and retrieves videos from Youtube related to the search term.

The use of a time scale and frequency of site updates distinguishes kizasi from its competitors. Current consumer tastes, general trends and the buzz in the Japanese blogosphere can be spotted in a structered way and at an early stage.

Kizasi is mainly owned by the CAC group (88%). Yahoo Japan bought a 5% stake in kizai in summer 2007.

Kizasi’s successful penetration especially in the Japanese mass media was followed by Blogwatcher, Inc., launched by Recruit and Titech. The company established a blog analysis service called Shooti in July 2007. Wadaino is another domestic player in the Japanese blog search market mimicking kizasi’s ranking concept but based on different categories.

Tags: Company, Technology by Serkan Toto
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Mixi is the biggest social network service in Japan. It has 11 million users so far. It’s a phenomenon. Before Mixi, the Web was not attractive enough for non-techie people. Mixi changed that. Mixi changed the daily social life of Japanese people.

Batara Eto - an intern from Indonesia - proposed the project to clone Friendster in 2003. He developed the site in the next few month. The site was named ‘mixi’. It’s quite a remarkable example which shows the diversity of the workforce is the key to success.

Mixi is not very different from Friendster, but there is a small but significant difference from Friendster or Orkut. Mixi has a blogging feature. It really helps to keep users visiting the site. Mixi is actually a social blogging tool.

The company’s name is ‘mixi’ too. Its former name was ‘e-mercury’ but the name was changed to ‘mixi’ after the huge success of the service. Initially, the company was founded as an Internet job agency. The job agency service, ‘find job’, is a quite profitable business too.

The founder Kenji Kasahara is a young quiet person. He looks like an introvert ‘Otaku’ kind of person. Probably he’s a much more acceptable role model for the younger Japanese generation than aggressive Livedoor or Rakuten founders.

See also: (in English)

1. A Mashable article about mixi
2. FY2007 Q1 Earnings Results Briefing Session(April-June 2007)
3. A Financial Times article - September 14 2006

Mixi (as of Oct. 2007)

• Type: Public (2121)
• Founded: Jun. 3rd 1999
• Went public: Sep. 14th 2006
• Sales: 5.2 billion yen ($45 million)
• Profit: 1.1 billion yen ($9.6 million)
• Users: 11 million
• Page views: 11.75 billion / month
• People: CEO, Kenji Kasahara
• People: CTO, Batara Eto (born 1979, formerly known as Batara Kesuma)

Note: Batara Eto will resign from the post in December 2007.

Tags: Company, Japan by shunichi arai
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Niconico douga is a rapidly growing video sharing site in Japan. Site’s feature is not very different from Youtube, but one cool difference gained big attraction. The difference is a comment feature which enables users to write timely comments on the video screen itself.

The feature allowed users to share ‘experience’ with other users.

Niconico douga attracted many users quickly. At a start, they superpose comments on streaming videos from youtube servers. Resultingly, Youtube started to refuse accesses from Niconico servers. They were forced to set up their own video servers.

Their own video servers are heavy burden to company’s balance sheet. The company, Dwango is its name, has spent about 600 million yen for servers.

Dwango changed the problem into a revenue. They limit peak time usage, and allow unlimited access only for paid users. 144,000 users are paying the fee and, the sum is 68 million yen per month. Advertisements and affiliates are making 18 million and 15 million yen accordingly.

Niconico douga’s success is backed by a powerful team. Lead developer is Akihiko Koizuka, a very powerful programmer. 2ch’s Hiroyuki is doing an advisor.

Currently Dwango is earning most revenue from ringtone services.

See also (in English):

1. Dwango company site
2. Tokytronic’s detailed article

Niconico douga:

• Page views: 59.5 million page views per day
• Video plays: 15 million plays per day
• Comments: 3.2 million comments per day
• Revenue: 101 million yen per month
• People: Developer, Akihiko Koizuka

Dwango (FY 2007):

• Founded: August 1997
• Revenue: 22.2 billion yen
• Loss: 1,408 million yen
• People: Chairman/CEO, Nobuo Kawakami
• People: President/COO, Hiroshi Kobayashi
• People: Managing Director, Hideki Mori

Tags: Company, Japan, Video by shunichi arai
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