Japan’s largest e-mall company Rakuten today announced [J] that they would shut down its Chinese e-mall Lekutian(rakuten.cn) planned in May, 2012.

Rakuten jointly established Lekutian with China’s search engine giant Baidu in January 2010, and began the mall in October 2010.

The reason is explained as Lekutian did not show the growth they had expected, which is because the environment of e-commerce in China has been becoming too competitive.

Tags: China, Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Sumitomo Corporation announced on March 7 that their online pharmacy Soukai Drug (soukai = briskness in Japanese) is going to expand into China and Indonesia this year.

Their Shanghai and Jakarta subsidiaries are already set up. Trial in Shanghai is planned to begin in late April, Jakarta service will start in late August.

Tags: China, Indonesia, Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Taito [J] has released the Android social game “特工大戦” (SPY WARS), for the smartphone “Tencent Wireless Open Platform for Community” through business partnership with GREE [J] and the Chinese internet portal Tencent.

“特工大戦” is the first segment of a social game in China for the “Tencent Wireless Open Platform for Community.”  It’s a Chinese language version of the popular social spy game offered in Japanese as “SPY WARS,” where players become an intelligence organization’s agent.  To save the world from a series of crises, they must join with partners to carry out various missions; to prevent conspiracies laid out by enemies, players order subordinate intelligence operatives, execute missions from their organization, and challenge foreign agents to battle in order to snatch their confidential information carried undercover.

Since Tencent and GREE’s business partnership in January of this year, they have been offering business support and localization as a collaborative development of each other’s platforms .

Translation authorized by VSMedia

Tags: News, Social game by Chiho Komoriya
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GCREST [J] has opened service of their avatar community “Selfy Channel” (USA: Tinier Me) for China’s largest SNS “Sina Weibo” [C] as “Xiaotiandi” [C] (Small World), via development and management by a major Chinese social game developer FiveMinutes Inc.

GCREST’s support base FiveMinutes will oversee development and administration of “Xiaotiandi,” and they will provide service expansion using their Chinese SNS social game management know-how.  In the same way as in the Japanese version “Selfy Channel,” you can decorate your avatar and room and enjoy communication with other users in areas within the game.  They are also planning to provide a Chinese customized version of the restaurant game “Selfy Restaurant” for “Sina Weibo.”

FiveMinutes is already working on a localized Chinese version [J] of CyberAgent’s [J] 2D virtual space “Ameba Pigg.”

＠games official guide book: Selfy Town No Arukikata (How to Get Around in Selfy Town) (Famitsu’s  walkthrough book) [J]

Translation authorized by VSMedia

Tags: China, Japan by Chiho Komoriya
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Japan’s second biggest telco and mobile carrier KDDI is planning to bring a set of made-in-Japan apps to Android users in China, in cooperation with China Mobile, the country’s biggest telco (over 600 mobile subscribers).

Under the deal, KDDI will start offering an initial 22 apps, for example manga or games, in China Mobile’s Android market as early as from the end of this month. KDDI uses apps made by a total of five Japan-based companies, i.e. Cybird, Acrodea or G-Mode.

The company says services like billing or fee collection for these app developers will be handled by Hong Kong-based DMX Technologies, a firm KDDI acquired a 51% stake in back in 2009.

The Nikkei is reporting that KDDI is only the 10th company to be given the right to sell apps in China Mobile’s Android market (which has 90 million customers).

Tags: Cellular Phone, China, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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