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.

Report: Amazon To Bring Kindle To Japan In April

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

Mangajet Makes Your Tweet Into A Comic-style Illustration

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.

D2 Communications Acquires 0.9% Stake In Tokyo-Based Ubiqituous Entertainment

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.

Not Only Tokyo – Twitter Japan Adds 6 More Japanese Cities On Trending Topics

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.

e-Money Service Edy Rebrands Itself As Rakuten Edy

(@cosme's tag line on the logo is "site of everyone's word of mouth")

Istyle [J], who runs Japan's top cosmetic products review site @Cosme, announced [J] on February 3, 2012, that they will be listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers (Tosho Mothers) planned on March 8, 2012.

The company was established in 1999, and its service @Cosme became the leading beauty information service in Japan. 6.2 million monthly visitors exchange makeup products reviews.

Along with electric appliance review Kakaku.com and restaurant review Tabelog, @Cosme is thought as one of the most successful user generated review service in Japan.

As the reviews on @Cosme sometimes highly influences the sales of cosmetic products, there were rumors that some sellers' review manipulation existed. Last month, after the buzz of Tabelog review manipulation news, one third party agent was reported [J] to ask @Cosme users to post positive mark with rewards. IPO must have been prepared before the Tabelog incident for long, so it is unfortunate for them if their IPO price will be affected by this word-of-mouth reputation troubles.

Istyle(@cosme) Goes IPO On TSE Mothers

Popular human voice synthesizer Vocaloid Hatsune Miku are getting known oversea as a Japanese web phenomenon. Like the global company Google picked it up as a "singer" for Chrome promotion in Japan, where they chose Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga for US.

As the Chrome video shows, there are massive number of generated songs and videos are created, uploaded on Nico Nico Douga and YouTube.

On YouTube, some Miku fans started noticing that some of the Hatsune Miku videos were removed with "copyright violation" recently. Many of the banned videos are English and other subtitled ones made from the original Japanese versions.

Nico Nico Pedia has a detailed history of the issue started in last November [J]. According to it, the users who reported the copyright violation all have a name Junichi Sasa, or slightly modified of it, who are unlikely own the copyright of the removed videos.

Fans made a video to inform this issue. The English subbed one is here,

Chinese,

French,

The copyright holder of the Hatsune Miku's video is each creator, so, on regular copyright report, the original creators are encouraged to claim YouTube to get it back. However, making things difficult is that many of Hatsune Miku videos are re-uploaded from Nico Nico Douga to YouTube by non-authors, and foreign language subtitled versions are usually made another users. In that meaning, those removed videos are not really by the original copyright holder.

Even when the author does not care, or is pleased that their videos are distributed across the web services and the languages, not many of them notice and take countermeasure on those distributed versions.

Many Hatsune Miku Videos Being Removed From YouTube By Invalid Copyright Report

2012 version of annual Tokyo Marathon will be held on February 26, with 36,000 runners who luckily win the lottery from 283,988 applicants.

At the marathon, one of the official supplier Dole Japan is going to provide 96,000 "lucky" bananas, named "Goku Sen"(Extremely Selected) [J], which will be chosen from its over 100 kind of bananas, harvested from its special farm in Philippine in early February.

After arrival at Japan, on its 7-days ripening process, Dole Japan will apply a special treatment for this special occasion, air the Japan's most popular girls unit AKB48's hit number "Heavy Rotation" to let banana listen.

The song was chosen because the research over the member of Toyo University Ekiden club, who won the annual Tokyo-Hakone collegiate ekiden road relay this January, showed that the song is the most favorite in the club members' private and training time.

There was a myth that Japanese stock farmer let cow listen Mozart to make beef tender in English news before. But there is a company who sell Mozart-listening banana [J]. Their page says that another Mozart thing was tried for Tomato and Japanese sake.

Dole Japan opened the special site for this lucky banana, with banana-related quiz and games. The site is also connected with Twitter/Facebook.

On February 8 at Japan’s first banana vending machine in Shibuya, Dole will do this lucky banana give-away for people who check in on Facebook, Mixi or Foursquare.

via Ichigaya Keizai Shimbun [J]

See Also:

AKB48 Now On Google+ – Google’s Marketing Challenge

Popular Idol Group AKB48 Enters ISP Business

Asiajin » tagged "AKB48"

Dole Japan Offers Special Bananas Listened AKB48 For Ripening At Tokyo Marathon 2012

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.

Takeo-city To Force All Employees To Register And Work On Facebook

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].

DeNA Sues Back To Gree And Its CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka