Mixi, one of Japan's largest social networks and a direct competitor to Facebook, announced [J] a new alliance on January 20 with German company Vznet Netzwerke.

Mixi says that both companies will standardize their social
application platforms to enable third-party social application
providers to run their applications on both networks.

Mixi announced the same type of alliances with China’s Renren and Korea’s CyWorld last September.

According to a Mixi press release [J], Vznet is the largest social
network service in Germany, and the Vznet official blog [De] makes the similar claim for Mixi as the largest social network service in Japan.

The accuracy of both these claims could be challenged depending on how you count the size of the respective networks, against Facebook in Germany and Gree/Mobage-Town in Japan.

(proofread by Adam Walls)

Mixi Partners With German Social Network VZ

Rakuten has just announced [J, pdf] that they bought 100% of French E-commerce company PriceMinister S.A.

The purchase is planned to done in July 2010 for 200 million Euro (22.5 billion yen).

Rakuten established their European branch S.a.r.l. in Luxembourg in 2008. That company will handle this acquisition.

Rakuten has been actively adding its oversea companies in USA, Europe(S.a.r.l.), China, Taiwan, Thai and planning to go Indonesia.

Rakuten Subsidizes French No.1 E-Commerce Company PriceMinister

Hatena, known by a million geekiest loyal users and the most popular social bookmarks service in Japanese [J], announced that their joint project with console game giant Nintendo "Flipnote Hatena" launches in North America on 12th, in Europe on 14th August (both in local time).

Flipnote Hatena is a CGM service on where users draw and share flipbook-like animations. Asiajin covered its first Japanese release before.

Worldwide Challenge

Although Hatena did make English version of few their services, this is their first challenge for other European languages and regions. FLipnote Hatena site has 6 language selections (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Japanese) and 4 regional choices (Japan, Americas, Europe and Oceania and All).

If you chose "All(Worldwide)", you see a lot of Japanese created and starred (=voted) over thousands flipnotes at the top, some includes Japanese languages, but if you filter by America or Europe, there are already many flipnote animations drawn by local users.

See Also:

Hatene's release for North America

Hatena's release for Europe

Flipnote Hatena Strikes Back To USA, Plus Europe Assisted By Nintendo Fame