By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
CyberAgent, online fashion store operator Start Today and venture capital firm Globis Capital Partners have invested 350 million yen in Kayac, a web startup based out of Kamakura, Japan. According to reports in Japanese media, the stakes will add up to around 10% of the entire company. Kayac was...
According to Socialbakers.com, usually a reliable site that tracks Facebook usage worldwide, and Facebook itself, Facebook Japan now counts just over 3 million members. Here is what Socialbakers says when you look up country statistics for Japan: As you can see the stats service shows that Facebook...
Major Japanese video game maker Square Enix announced (and already released) Traveling Fairy today, a new fantasy adventure for Mobage for feature phones. As you would expect from Square Enix, the social game looks pretty slick. Traveling Fairy contains location-based elements and lets the player...
NHK, Japan’s only public TV broadcaster, has started airing Connect earlier this week, a new TV show covering the latest news and trends in tech. The show naturally has a website on NHK Online, and I am lucky to be one of the columnists for Connect’s dedicated blog for the show. Here is...
CyberAgent quietly inked deal with Disney Japan to license some characters for Ameba Pigg (Ameba Pico outside Japan), CyberAgent’s wildly successful virtual world. To be more specific, CyberAgent created a “Disney Town” within Ameba Pigg, which looks like this (pictures via...
DeNA and CyberAgent today announced they will jointly launch an ad network specifically for the smartphone versions of Mobage (DeNA’s mobile social game platform) and Ameba (CyberAgent’s blogging and social networking platform). It’s one of the biggest alliances in Japan’s...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry