CyberAgent [J] has announced that they will transfer their iPhone camera social network app “My365” over to Sirok, a subsidiary company they set up for developing smartphone applications.  From now on this new company will manage the service.

“My365” is an iPhone camera app that was released on October 26th of 2011.  Based on the concept of “When you look back at every casual day, lovely memories are made,” each day you store a photo of what you feel is an impressive moment  and upload it into your calendar.  By word of mouth, downloads have spread out to reach 300,000 at present.  Not only in Japan but also in Thai, Hong Kong and elsewhere it has ranked among the highest for free apps in the App Store photo category, and currently about 30% of access is from overseas users centered in the Asian continent.  This time Sirok, established as a subsidiary company, will take over as developing team for “My365” and continue to manage the service.  From here on they are plotting to expand “My365” functions and will proceed to develop an Android version.

Translation authorized by VSmedia

Tags: Social game by Chiho Komoriya
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CyberAgent [J] announced on December 30th of 2011 that the number of users of their “Ameba” [J] community has topped 20 million.  To commemorate this momentous development of the “Ameba” service, they held the 20 Million Member Breakthrough! Thank You Campaign [J] between January 10th and 23rd.

Since the Ameba service opened in September of 2004, focused on blogs, they have expanded their various service develepment and features such as the virtual space “Ameba Pigg” and the miniblog “Ameba Nau,” and they have been steadily expanding their base of users.  Particularly their “Ameba Pigg” service, which opened in February of 2009, reached 10 million users in November of 2011.  Also in 2011 use from smartphones increased, and in one year, monthly page views grew by more than 10 times, continuing their rapid growth.

As for the “20 Million Member Breakthrough! Thank You Campaign,” plans in the works for various services offered by “Ameba” are being developed for PC, mobile and smartphone.  For “Ameba Pigg,” limited items are on sale for 20 Ame-Gold, and for 4 popular “Ameba Mobile” titles, each are giving away limited campaign items.  Also, during the campaign, 20 Million of the virtual currency “Ame-Gold” is being uniformly returned and distributed to all users who have purchased “Ame-Gold,” and various other plans are in effect.

Translation authorized by VSmedia

Tags: News by Chiho Komoriya
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2011 is over - reason enough to take a look at some of the key trends that shaped Japan's web, mobile, and gaming industries last year.

I could think, in no particular order, of five major developments that made a significant impact last year:

March 11 Triple Disaster
The triple disaster that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, highlighted the power and importance of social media and the web at large when it comes to communicating and sharing information with others - especially as the phone networks went bust immediately after the earthquake and made voice communication impossible.

Challenges remain, such as the digital divide (young vs. old people, users who are web-savvy vs. those who aren't, etc.) or the danger of mass-distributing false information through social media, but the web's "reputation" has clearly risen in Japan.

Internationalization
The list of Japanese web, mobile, and gaming companies that started expanding across borders (or bolstered their efforts) in 2011 is long: Rakuten, DeNA, GREE, Dwango's Nico Nico Douga, and CyberAgent are just the most prominent examples.

Quite a few startups are now creating services that are multi-lingual from the get-go (i.e. Sumally, Beatrobo, Crowsnest, etc., etc.).

The tech industry is maturing, Japan's population is greying, and entrepreneurs need to deal with saturated markets: expect internationalization to only pick up speed in the next years.

Android Revolution
The smartphone revolution started earlier than 2011 (mainly driven by the smash success of the iPhone), but it was during the last year that Android really started gaining a foothold in Japan. Just one example: SoftBank's winter 2011 cell phone line-up includes just one feature phone - but nine Android handsets.

Feature phones are still king in Japan, but market research companies like Tokyo-based MM Research are expecting smartphone shipments to outnumber those of traditional handsets next year.

Americanization
2011 is the year that Facebook started to become popular in Japan even though it will take at least another year to determine how sustainable the growth really is - not too few people think it has the potential to eventually throw market leader Mixi off the throne. Twitter has seen another massive boost in popularity after March 11 (see above).

In mobile, Google's Android and Apple's iOS are set to dominate the market in the next years - local mobile platforms have no chance in the foreseeable future.

• the removal of sim-locks in Japanese cell phones
• the termination of analog TV (and rise of connected TVs) after 58 years
• major Japanese video game makers going social,
• or ebooks slowly (but surely) gaining popularity in Japan.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Serkan Toto
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CyberAgent [J] has released the latest addition to their PC social game enterprise, “Animal Land” for Facebook.
“Animal Land” is a game where you enjoy building a town where animals live, by reclaiming land, building houses and shops, and decorating trees and vehicles.  You can level up by building the town, and as well as being able to increase the variety of animals living in your town, you can get special decoration items by helping your Facebook friends’ towns, so it’s possible for you to build an all original town.  Currently this game is offered in English, but moving forward, the company will be offering multilingual support service.

Translation authorized by VSMedia

Tags: Japan, Social game by Chiho Komoriya
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Cyber Agent's Ameba, one of Japan's largest blogging service with thousands of celebrity blogs and virtual community around Ameba Pigg, announced on its staff blog [J] that Ameba services got illegal access, and some of its users are seeing trouble that they can not log in and look withdrawn the service since December 24 night.

The blog said that there are no data loss both on blogs and Pigg. They have been working to recover the troubled IDs. They also reported that there were no invalid usage of its virtual currency Ame-gold or leak of members privacy information.

Ameba is to run an emergency maintenance by stopping the whole service for 6 hours, from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. December 26.

Asahi reported [J] that the number of members affected by this attack was 50,000. The total number of registered Ameba ID is said around 20 million. CyberAgent consulted the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.

Tags: Japan, Security by Akky Akimoto
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