Asiajin

A Japanese popular gadget blogger @masakiishitani and others reported that Brands For Friends ran a advertisement campaign to let commuters take free iPhone case posted in metro station in Shibuya, one of the biggest terminal station in Tokyo this morning, about an hour ago.

The twitter timeline tagged with #b4f shows that those iPhone case coloured gold, red or purple were given out at least two different concourses in Metro Hanzomon-line and Ginza-line. All cases had been quickly taken around an hour.

German based Brands4Friends [De] has entered Japan [J] on March 8th. Brands4Friends is a invitation based e-commerce service to sell discounted brands. The original site holds the largest user base (over 2.5 million) and sales in Germany. (info by Veritacafe [J])

In Shibuya, giving away type ads are seen recently. For example, in 2009, there were bitter gourd seeds [J] and Bayonetta’s fragrance [J] (game character) distributions reported.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Corseka [J] by Enigmo Inc., blitzed into Japanese digital magazine publishing system by a service “to buy and scan your buying paper magazine for you” named Corseka in October 2009, who immediately got bashed by traditional publishers who had never consulted beforehand and was forced to withdraw most of magazines in days, announced to close the service.

There was a similar case in Japan with CD and mp3. Livedoor, before The Livedoor Shock, tried to run a service which receives users’ music CDs and make the ripped mp3 downloadable to the user, which also ought to stop by copyrights holders claim. In Livedoor Encoder case, user had to send their CD first, but Corseka got orders and keep the original magazines on their storage.

The termination of the service will be on March 25th, but there seem to be no digitized magazines available on the site already. Enigmo Inc. is known by a personal shopping buyer agent matching service BuyMa and a blog pay-per-post agency PressBlog.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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One of Japan’s major television network Fuji TV announced and called for beta testers for their new online community site “Kimi to Fuji TV” [J] (“Kimi Fuji” in short) on March 15th. “Kimi to” means “with You” in Japanese.

At beta, the site offers few social games which themed on their popular TV programs like “Nepu League” and “Idoling”.

On FAQ, it is explained that the virtual point “Gold” will be introduced at the official launch, which you can purchase for some paid games and virtual items.

There are not much games at now, and it is only for PC so it cannot be a serious contender of big 3 (Mixi, Gree and Mobage-Town). However, terrestrial TV networks still have huge influence and drawing-power in Japan, then this needs to be watched how much Fuji TV will give priority this web activitiy.

via Famitsu.com [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Mixi, GREE, Mobage-town – Japan’s top three social networking services have either already opened or decided to open their platforms to third-party developers in the last few months. And a handful of foreign application providers, such as RockYou from the US or Rekoo from China, already managed to successfully launch localized social games on Mixi, Japan’s biggest social network.

Both companies now have offices in Japan, but Tokyo-based (and listed) mobile contents provider Index now wants to make the move into Japan’s social gaming market easier by offering support for foreign makers of social games that want to enter Japan’s lucrative mobile market in particular.

One of the problems most foreign social game makers have is that their games are usually tailored for use with the PC. GREE and Mobage-town, however (each with about 16 million members), are more or less mobile only. And even Mixi sees more page views on its mobile site than on the fixed web site, which means that making social games mobile-friendly will get providers a lot more Japanese eyeballs.

Index says they will not only translate in-game texts, buttons etc. but also provide help in re-designing games to make them more appealing for Japanese customers. In addition, the company will also take care of the “technical” side of things so that the games actually run and can be properly played on Japanese mobile phones. Another problematic factor is billing and collecting money from local users, but Index says they will cover this area as well.

The first game that received the Index treatment is a Chinese pig-raising game that will be released on Mixi Mobile later this month. Index hopes to generate 1 billion yen ($11.1 million) in sales per year with the new business.

Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

Tags: Cellular Phone, China, Japan, New Service, News by Serkan Toto
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On March 10th, Tokyo District Court broke into a flat of ex-Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie, a fallen IT entrepreneur star whose arrest caused so-called “Livedoor Shock” in 2006, distrain upon his golf bag, wine cellar appliance, television and shamisen(Japanese guiter) by valued them as 330,000 yen ($3646) in total.

Horie is appealing his alleged securities fraud to the higher court. After bailed out, he publicly said that he won’t get back to web business, and rather chase his space development business. He moved his popular blog to Ameblo blog hosting, which is run by his close ally Susumu Fujita’s CyberAgent. He also gets huge number of twitter followers, and is writing some articles on magazines.

Blog, Twitter and recently started paid newsletter are frequently updated with thoughts, including politics and his court case. Probably because of disbelief to mass media who bashed him, he has been building up those direct channels. Although English Wikipedia on Horie seems to stop update for years, he still keeps influences on Japanese websphere.

On his blog, he wrote that those irreconcilable plaintiffs (1700 of 3300, Mainichi reports), who can get money by reconciling from Livedoor Holdings, to whom Horie had agreed to pay 20.8 billion yen($230 million), are just harassing him by law abuse.

He pointed out that the plaintiffs thinks he lives in luxury, as this time’s claims 8 million yen shows, which image is manipulated by mass media. However, it turned out that 330,000 yen seizure unexpectedly revealed his simple lifestyle.

He also wrote that his recently purchased Shamisen, which was evaluated as 100,000 yen ($1000) by bailiff, was just 19,800 yen, by showing link to an online shop.

Livedoor Shock, which directly lowered whole stock market and Livedoor’s stock price, discouraged IT entrepreneurship (which was already far weaker than the one in US) a lot in Japan, which is blamed by both pro- and anti-Horie.

See Also:

Tokyo Broadcasting System Television(TBS)’s movie report by taking Horie’s back from lunch without knowing his flat was intruded [J] – The TV station Horie tried to take over in 2005 was Fuji TV, TBS is the one escaped from Rakuten takeover. It is not unknown yet how TBS became to knew this happened.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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