Tokyo University of the Arts students released a shot animation movie depicts college students’ job hunting activities in Japan.

In Japan, most companies uniformly runs recruiting program around 1 or more years before college students graduates schools. It is so called shu-katsu (SHUshoku KATSUdou, job hunting activities). Many people, both workers and students, think, believe and make that the newly graduating timing should be the one and only chance to let you walk along the standard carrier.

via Rocket News 24

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Facebook Spot Information is becoming popular in Japan after Facebook had started Check-in Coupon (Check-in Deals) in Japan.

Facebook Japan Holds An New Coupon Service Launch Event In Shibuya

The problem arouse when Recruit[E], Japan’s largest coupon business player, registered spot information of restaurants on behalf of restaurant owners without enough notification.

Hitoshi Nakamura(twitter id: hitoshi[J]) , one of the most famous restaurant owner who has a deep knowledge on social marketing, reported on his blog that  Recruit registered spot information of his restaurant without getting agreement from him.

He noticed this when his customer requested to use a deal posted by Recruit on Facebook spot information.

( This photo was uploaded by Hitoshi.)

Recruit is operating a service known as Hot Pepper[J], a free paper media distributed in town like “am New York” [En] or “metro [En]” but only includes coupons of restaurants and beauty salons instead of articles. There is also an web site to search restaurants and coupons on Hot Pepper. Shop owners pay fixed fee per month to get their coupons printed on this media.

With those data of restaurants and coupons, Recruit, instead of restaurant owners, started registering spot information with coupon. Recruit sent this announcement to 40,000 restaurants and registered information of restaurants except those replied to not register. That means when there was no response, Recruit also registered shop information, took an opt-out process.

As a result, duplicated shop information had registered for some restaurants already have their shop information on Facebook. Recruit says, they checked restaurant names to prevent to register another shop information for those who already registered them on Facebook. But if there is a slight change on the name of restaurants, spell, big letter or small letter, with or without hyphen , etc., spot information had registered in additional to the original one.

This had caused troubles. Restaurant owners with original spot information could not publish Check-in coupon since Recruit had already published coupons for another spot information with the name of same restaurant, and Facebook judged it as a break of service agreement. So Recruit jacked the spot information and the right to publish coupon.

Recruit de-registered shop information for those requested to do so but not only restaurants, Recruit also had  registered spot information of hotels on their hotel reservation site, Jalan[J].

This case implies that anyone can register shop information to get more exposure on Facebook Check-in. Yelp, Expedia, or any other player can do similar thing. Although they can not connect directly to their services at least you can get more awareness for your service.

So how Facebook will respond?

Is this going to be another battle field to get a better position on the list of web page like we do for Google search results?

Tags: Japan, Service by Hiroumi Mitani
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Japan’s market for daily coupon services is heating up. It has been pretty much a two-horse race for months now, with Groupon Japan as the top player in the market and Recruit’s Ponpare as a close second.

In April, for example, Groupon Japan was estimated to have racked up $18.6 million in sales, while Ponpare is said to have generated $14.5 million in the same month.

But according to coupon search service CP4U, Ponpare has made about as much money as Groupon Japan last month. In fact, the difference between the two sites has never been smaller, after Ponpare doubled it sales from 858 million yen to 1.64 billion yen from May to June.

Groupon, however, still sits on the No. 1 position in Japan daily coupon market (sales in June: 1.65 billion yen). Compared to Groupon and Ponpare, other players barely play a role:

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Japanese flash coupon vertical search Coupon-JP has just released an April version of sales estimation of major social coupon services [J, pdf] after March report skipped by the quake.

Groupon Japan, which started by US Groupon purchasing a local clone last summer, has been leading the market but got damaged by terrible osechigate at the beginning of 2011. Coupon-JP’s January and February statistics showed its stagnation involving many other clones, and an ads-aggressive follower Ponpare’s catch-up.

By seeing it, there were people (including I) saying that Groupon model may not work for Japan like in US. I also heard some people in industry told that Recruit, who is said to run Ponpare with much lower commission than Groupon Japan, does not really want to succeed on Pompare, but tries to devastate the flash coupon market itself.

However, the April report gives good uptrends of Groupon Japan, 172% of February sales. Recruit Ponpare also recorded 190%. Their day-to-day sales chart gives you an idea how the big disaster affected first, then both gained a lot more sales even before that.

Nationwide jishuku(restraint and thrift) mentality arose after the disasters refrains people from spending money on anything expensive. That should work positively on coupon sales.

About other players, Ikkyu Coupon passed Toku and Sharee but none of their sales threaten the top 2 by numbers.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Daily deal coupon search service Coupon.jp released [J] their February research on Japanese daily deal coupon service sales by calculating each site’s coupon prices and number of sold tickets.

On their chart, No.2 Pompare, run by Recruit, shows 30% growth to be about 70% of No.1 Groupon Japan’s sales.

It was about half in January stats by the same coupon.jp.

Osechi trouble damaged most players’ business, but Pompare and some others are quickly recovering from it. They may get some potential customers from Groupon Japan because of media bash.

Both companies have been said to spending a lot on promotion. Many of targeting ads on Japanese websites are occupied by either of them, which shows hard competition is happening between them.

Many bloggers wrote about an image of a lady who showed on the Pompare’s banner ad [J], which must be one of the most seen and remembered banner on Japanese web recently.

Some tried to identify who this girl is, but it turned out [J] to be a image from a stock photo service, who answered that even they could not find her name.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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