Business daily The Nikkei says it learned that Amazon Japan, the country's second-biggest e-commerce company, is planning to finally offer its e-book reader Kindle to Japanese customers.

According to the paper, Amazon is expected to launch Kindle devices in April this year "for less than 20,000 yen" (US$257). Apparently, the Kindle Touch will be positioned as the flagship model, while there is no word on how or if the Kindle Fire will be introduced, too.

For the 3G connection, Amazon has chosen mobile carrier NTT Docomo as its partner. Just like in other markets, Japanese Kindle owners will be able to download books over 3G for free, provided they decide to go for Kindles offering both 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Rumors about Amazon Japan entering the domestic e-book market have been circulating for a long time. In November/December 2011, for example, The Nikkei speculated that the company was ready to start offering e-books by the end of 2011 (which obviously didn't happen).

In an interview with the paper from November 2011, Yoshinobu Noma, president of major publisher Kodansha, said that he estimates Japan's e-book market to be worth 65 billion yen (US$837 million). Noma also said that 90% of sales in this segment come from content distributed to cell phones - a number that will surely change when the Kindle becomes a hit in Japan, too.

In Japan, the Amazon device will go head-to-head with other e-readers and tablet hybrids like Sharp's Galapagos, Sony's E-Reader, Toshiba's BookPlace, Panasonic's Raboo, or Fujitsu's Flepia.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Mangajet [J] is a new Japanese service which let you make a Japanese manga-comic style illustration with provided characters, background images, baloons with your text.

The generated comic strip can be saved and shared on Twitter.

Following to the Japanese manga standard, text will be written in top-to-bottom direction so Western languages won't fit well, unfortunately.

The service was released as a promotion of a free digital manga material directory Manga Sozai Jiten, which is run by Datacraft.

There is Feel on!, a web service to comicalize your Twitter timeline as well (and that one now supports English).

via INTERNET Watch

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Japan's largest mobile marketing and advertising firm, D2 Communications (D2C), has acquired a 0.9% stake in Tokyo-based Ubiqituous Entertainment (UEI). D2C acquired a total of 400 UEI shares - other financial details of the deal, which was officially announced [JP] today, weren't disclosed.

In April last year, the two companies started a program called 9leap [JP] for young game smartphone game designers (our previous coverage).

With the capital partnership, D2C and UEI plan to continue the program, co-develop HTML5-based web services and mobile ad solutions, and use the latter company's knowhow in the gaming field to create new applications and content.

Founded in 2000, D2C is said to be not only Japan's largest but also oldest mobile advertising company. D2C's parent company is the country's biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo - other shareholders are Dentsu, Dentsu Digital, and NTT Advertsing.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Investment, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Twitter added more choices of cities on its trending keywords in Japan on February 2. There were only all-Japan and Tokyo rankings before.

6 cities, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Sendai are the new ones.

View Twitter Trends On New Japanese Cities in a full screen map

There are many bigger cities than Sendai, but most of them are satellite cities of the largest ones (Yokohama, Kawasaki, Saitama, Chiba for Tokyo, Kobe for Osaka) so they were probably selected to make geographic balance. Hiroshima, which has slightly more population than Sendai, could have been chosen though.

I am unsure if different cities will make much difference on trends. We will report if there are anything interesting observed.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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BitWallet, who runs one of Japan's most successful e-money service Edy since 2011, who joined the Japan's largest e-mall group Rakuten in January 2010, 2 years ago, announced [J] that the e-money brand Edy will be changed to "Rakuten Edy" from June 1, 2012.

Rakuten did similar renaming on companies they bought, like DLJdirect SFG Securities to Rakuten Securities, Aozora Card to Rakuten Card, E-bank Bank to Rakuten Bank, etc.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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