By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Years after setting up a base in China, Japan’s biggest real-identity social network Mixi has announced it will open a subsidiary in the US as early as next month. Aptly named mixi America, the new unit is registered in Delaware, capitalized at US$5 million and wholly owned by Mixi in Japan...
The Sparxup Awards 2011 event for Indonesian startups in Jakarta has ended over the last weekend, and I was lucky to be chosen to hold the keynote presentation. My presentation’s topic was “Innovation, Imitation & Hyper-Localization In Asia”, and here are the slides (direct...
Mixi announced it added a new feature to Mixi Pages, its version of Facebook pages for individuals, companies or celebrities to broadcast information and promote themselves (Mixi introduced the feature in September). Owners of sites can now track the number page views, unique users, followers...
LinkedIn may have under half a million Japan-based users, but that didn’t stop the company to offer their user interface in Japanese. The new version went live on Thursday. LinkedIn’s managing director of Asia-Pacific and Japan Arvind Rajan said Japanese is the 10th language the site...
GREE has announced it bought a 8.3% stake in Mind Palette, a Tokyo-based startup that was established just in November 2010 (and is backed by CyberAgent Ventures). Mind Palette is focusing on one product at the moment: Snapeee, a picture-based social network that lets users add cute and funny...
Mega-popular Japanese girl group AKB48 is getting a social game: GREE announced that the 48 members of the band will be the main characters in a social card game that will be released on October 25 on GREE for Japanese feature phones. The title, dubbed AKB48 Stage Fighter, will offer 48 different...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry