The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) announced Wednesday it will elevate Cookpad, a Tokyo-based recipe web service operator, to the First Section from the Mothers Section effective December 15.

Moving from Mothers or the second section to the first section generally means that the company is evaluated better, stable.

Early this year, I wrote how Rakuten chased Cookpad by paying newcomers to write recipes on The Japan Times. At that point, rapidly increased number of recipe on Rakuten seemed that people changed their service by money, however, even there are enough number of recipes on Rakuten, it was only data but users seemed not to migrate.

Cookpad seems not "growing" but keeps steady.

via ITMedia [J]

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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It is a year-end buzzword ranking season. Yahoo! Japan, Japan's most popular search portal, though the backend search engine has been gradually switching to Google's one (everyday more people report that their search results are the similar with the Google's results), eventually gets the highest number of search volume in Japanese.

Yahoo! Japan just released the most searched keywords ranking both on PC and mobile during 2010 [J].

PC search

Some notable changes

Last year, most top ranked keywords kept the same positions from 2008. However, this time there are some interesting changes as you see above.

Google and Amazon, two world-class services were searched more, whilst the gigantic anonymous BBS 2-channel and the largest e-shopping mall Rakuten stepped down. Rakuten and Amazon Japan are direct competitors so, even Rakuten is leading the market, it may not be a good sign for them. (it is search "volume" so you may also tell that Rakuten became to be so common to make people less search though.)

Another big newcomer is Twitter, ranked at 8th from out of the ranking (top 100). Facebook jumped into the ranking, too (39th).

CyberAgent Ameblo, is also showing their traction. I can tell that their vacuuming all TV talents into their blog and microblog (Ameba Now) platforms goes successful.

Boosted web services:

• Cookpad(recipe site) 14th(20th in 2009, 47th in 2008) (Asiajin)
• Google Maps 22nd (42nd, not ranked)
• Zozotown(apparel mall, recently allied with Yahoo! Japan) 24th (46th, -)
• Ameba Pigu(CyberAgent's avatar social) 30th(-) (Asiajin)
• Ameba(CyberAgent's head brand) 42th(-)
• Gree(No.1 Social Network, 99% for mobile) 43rd(73rd, -)
• Rakuten Travel 47(59th)
• Navitime(cellphone navigation service) 68th(90th)
• Pixiv(UGC drawing site) 40th(-) (Asiajin)
• Gmail 56th(99th, -)
• Mobage Town(No.2? Social Network, mobile only) 75th (94th, -)

Services Losing positions:

• Zenryaku(mobile profile site) 48th (34th, -)
• Wikipedia 52nd (26th, 19th)
• Rakuten Market(full name of Rakuten's shopping mall) 59th (37th)
• Gurunabi(restaurant review site) 76th(53rd)
• Hotpepper(restaurant coupon site by Recruit) 82nd(58th)
• @Cosme(cosmetic products review site) 97th (87th)

"Free Game" went up from 69th to 46th, the word both Gree and Mobage Town used a lot to describe their service on TV CM. Both "Movie" and "Map" downed around 10, but "Weather Forecast" got 21 ranks up (see my article on Japanese weather services).

Mobile search

2-channel lost its popularity on the mobile ranking, too. Twitter comes up also on mobile this year.

See Also:

The 2009's ranking we covered

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Japanese outplacement firm Intelligence [J] released their research of what companies people want to join next [J], done on 5,000 of office workers between age 25 to 34.

On the ranking, Google jumped up from 2009's third position because of good feeling to their "innovation" and "potential".

# Oriental Land is a company who runs Tokyo Disney Land/Sea.

Another software/web companies

The top listed 10 did not change, but at 11th, Apple Japan is ranked up from 2009's 33rd, which is likely by a lot of iPhone/iPad exposure on news and ads by Softbank.

As you notice, Yahoo! Japan, which is much stronger than Google Japan here, is quite unpopular as a working place in compare. Amazon Japan also gets distanced from its rival Rakuten from the point of view of potential workers' popularity.

See Also:

Press release [J]

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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In case you didn't know: Japan is the only country in the world that has a listed recipe site, Cookpad. After going IPO at the “Mothers” section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange last July, its current market cap stands at a staggering $370 million.

Over the weekend, the eponymous company behind the site reported [PDF] some other noteworthy numbers:

• sales doubled to $24.8 million year-on-year
• operating profit grew 2.6x to $11.7 million
• net income grew 2.4x to $6.2 million
• monthly unique visitors: 8.96 million (up 46.4%)
• monthly page views: 424 million (up 39.6%)

Last summer, Cookpad said it expects $18.5 million in revenues and $3.6 million net profit for the fiscal year, but now we know the actual numbers turned out to be much better.

We first blogged about Cookpad back in 2008.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Cookpad [JP], Japan's biggest cooking site, announced today that they will be listed to Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers section on July 17th.

CEO, Akimitsu Sano, started the service on 1998. Cookpad is a recipe sharing site with 558,939 registered recipes. The site has 6.8 million unique users and 351 million page views per month.

Cookpad has 676 million yen ($6.76M) revenue, 319 million yen ($3.19M) operating profit, and 176 million yen ($1.76M) after tax profit on FY2009.

Its sales consists of three segments, which are cooperative-marketing, advertisement, and subscription. Revenues of these segments are 399 million yen ($3.99M), 214 million yen ($2.14M) and 62 million yen ($0.62M), respectively.

Akimitsu Sano holds 69.24% shares of the company, and Yoshiteru Akita, a founder of Kakaku.com, holds 23.02%.

See Also:
* Our previous article: Cookpad The Number One Recipe Site
* TechCrunch article: A Recipe Site Goes IPO, In Japan (Cookpad)

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Shunichi Arai
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