By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Twitter is huge in Japan, but CyberAgent thinks it has found a niche with Ameba tappie and Ameba tachy. Both services are free, were announced today and essentially offer the same function: they allow users to share “tweets” and communicate with a self-selected group of friends. Up to...
That was quick: GREE, which just acquired California-based mobile gaming platform OpenFeint for $104 million, uses its new property to expand to China. The partner GREE chose is Shanghai-based and NASDAQ-listed gaming company The9. In a nutshell, The9 will be offering a localized version of...
Smartphones are booming in Japan, and now CyberAgent has announced the “Ameba Smartphone Platform”, which will give developers access to an API to use communication channels Ameba users have, Ameba rankings, pictures posted on blogs etc. With the platform, CyberAgent (obviously) wants...
Facebook Japan now has 3.2 million users (3.19 million, to be more exact), if Facebook statistics aggregation service Socialbakers is to be believed. The last time I reported, 17 days ago, that number stood at just over 3 million: In that last report, I speculated about the existence of a glitch...
Mixi today announced it has redesigned Mixi Touch, its mobile site optimized for touch-control smartphones. This isn’t groundbreaking news, but fairly important for Mixi, whose smartphone offering has been growing quickly in recent months. The main change can be seen on the splash page, from...
Big news from DeNA today: just a few minutes ago, DeNA and Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo (58 million customers) announced a partnership that’s nothing short of spectacular. Starting next month, Mobage will be directly linked to Docomo’s i-mode mobile web portal for feature...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry