Asiajin

News on the latter half of January 2010 which we did not write as a dedicated article. Part 1 is here.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• METI Lottery In Exchange For Used Cellphone Campaign Collaborates Hatsune Miku
• Chinese Guy In Saitama Arrested By Providing Proxy Servers For Chinese Gamers To Play (and earn by RMT) Japanese Online Game
• Harlequin Novels On Nintendo DS
• Kobe-based sports tabloid Daily Sports to start publishing e-edition.
• “Onsei Ninshiki Fusen ST”, iPhone App to Memo by speech-recognition
• Mekiki’s Patent Lawsuits Against Facebook Explained By American Lawfirm
• Sekai Camera’s Tonchi Dot and 5 companies Runs St. Valentein Day’s AR Event at Shibuya
• KDDI says 10 million cellphone sale this fiscal year will be difficult, at 3Q report
• Transcosmos Sells DART Business To Google, Lawsuit To Be Dissolved
• Twitter Japanese Mobile Site Adds Cellphone-mail-to-tweet function
• Nifty Lanches Cloud Service
• Sending Thousands of Origami Crane to Haiti Project On Mixi Causes controversy on Japanese web
• Over 200km Freekick Machine
• Kakaku.com launches Android app
• Two Fishing Boats In Tokyo Bay Starts To Tweet 1 2
• Mobage Open Platform begins, 92 apps by 40 companies at the launch day
• TV Tokyo’s Documentary Went Too Far On Taking Sony Walkman’s (one month) Takeover Against iPod
• Digital Garage Makes Another Investment To Twitter
• Dentsu purchases Innovation Interactive [English]
• University of Tokyo associate professor complained on Google Japan’s Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) applied to students during the recruitment
• Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications starts the internet contents self-rating experiment
• January Forbes Asia Cover Features Gree Yoshikazu Tanaka
• A blogger counts how many common apps on Mixi Appli and Mobage Appli platforms. 36 out of 86 Mobage Apps are also on Mixi
• CyberAgent CEO admitted (their Twitter Clone) Failed to investors, but he has not given up
• Softbank Continues Free iPhone 3GS Plan
• KDDI, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners and Hokkaido Broadcasting To Hold An AR Event At Sapporo Yukimatsuri
• Docomo President Shows Interest In iPad At 3Q Fiscal Report Meeting
• Thanko’s 80 ports USB Charger
• A new Japanese font Kazuraki fully-proportional in both writing directions
• Asahi writes about Twitter user reports from Stopped Shinkansen train

Please let us know if you think we should write details on any news above.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The largest mobile social network Gree announced [J] that their new GREE Connect (tentative name) platform starting this April 2010.

Mixi Appli, an OpenSocial specification based API was officially introduced [J] on the biggest social network Mixi in August 2009 after a half year closed beta.

Mobage Town by DeNA, the second mobile social network also started [J] their OpenSocial API and game API opened to third party developers in September 2009. As Mobage Town (Gree as well) is the mobile centric service, they implemented Open Social API on the limited Japanese cellphone browsers well.

After the phrase “Mixi Tsukare”(tiresome on Mixi) was said by some long term users and growth slowed, Mixi’s traffic was reported to ride on upstream trend again by their Mixi Appli.

Now, all three competing social network services (none of them has been getting the dominating position if you imagine No.1 is like Facebook in many countries) can tell their developer users that they can make and possibly earn on their platform, instead of learning Facebook platform, which is not predictable to worth supporting in Japanese market at this point. The level of openness and seriousness are different among those big three, but they need to show their fighting pose against Facebook invasion.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Japan’s largest cellphone carrier NTT Docomo and The 3rd biggest social network Mobage-Town’s DeNA announced a joint venture worth 1.6 billion yen (17.7 million USD), which will run an User Generated Content site on cellphone since the first half of 2010.

DeNA’s mobile social network Mobage-Town has a user posting sections for novels, music and illustrations, on which 65,000 contents have been submitted so far. Docomo will utilize DeNA’s know-how.

DeNA and Docomo owns 70% and 30% of the new venture respectively.

There was a huge success by the union of the 2nd carrier KDDI au and 3rd (at that time) social network Gree, which pushed up the looser PC social network Gree to revive in mobile and pass over Mobage-Town, though KDDI au only has 6.89%. Now Gree is aiming the first position against Mixi.

See Also:

DeNA Release [J, pdf]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Facebook, which I think I do not need any explanation what it is to English web users, announced that they would open their Japanese arm in Tokyo early in 2010, ITMedia reports [J].

The branch, which is planned to be formed with developers from US and locally hired Japanese engineers and managers, will make a special version for Japanese cellphone, such like Twitter recently did for Japan market, and Japanese original features both for PC and cellphone.

Javier Oliván, International Manager at Facebook, told that Facebook overtaking the local No.1 like as they did in US, UK, Germany, Spain and Turkey, can be reproduced in Japan market against Mixi, Gree and Mobage-Town.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Mobile social gaming platform GREE’s CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka repeatedly said in the last weeks he wants every Japanese to use GREE eventually (yeah, right). He also said he wants to beat direct rival Mobage-town in terms of user base in six months, and Mixi in twelve months.

That was in September. And today, at the end of October, the Nikkei (Japan’s answer to the Wall Street Journal) reports Tanaka already reached the first goal. As of the end of September, GREE’s user base stood at 15.12 million after the mobile- and Japan-only social gaming platform added 750,000 new members in September.

In the same month, Mobage-town added just 190,000 new members but boosted its number of users to “just” 15.10 million.

So GREE’s aggressive marketing campaign in Japan works. The company has been advertising several games on billboards and on TV for the past couple of months (and spending $11 million per quarter in the process).

And GREE is aggressive in another field, too: Four weeks ago, it came to light that GREE is suing DeNA, the company behind Mobage-town, over copyrights related to a popular fishing game.

GREE also completely changed the concept of its PC offering, which isn’t really earth-shattering now but much, much better than before.

It will take a while to overtake Mixi, the Japan’s biggest social network (which sees about 60% of page views coming from mobile phones). Mixi last officially talked about its member base at the end of June, when it had 17.41 million people (at that point in time, GREE had just 12.6 million).

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subsription]

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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