By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Yahoo Mobage, the PC-based social games platform run by Yahoo Japan and DeNA (Mobage on mobile phones), has been off to a good start after the launch in the fall of 2010: in January 2011, DeNA reported that Yahoo Mobage crossed the 2 million mark after 104 days. If data coming from Nielsen Japan is...
More mobile social games in the US: GREE has just switched on the English website of their San Francisco-based subsidiary, GREE International, Inc. This comes after the opening of the US office last month. GREE International also posts news via a new Twitter account and a corporate blog. 2...
I just stumbled upon this thread on Quora in which someone claims he has seen Facebook Japan’s country growth manager Taro Kodama saying on TV his company is aiming at 50 million users in Japan. While I cannot confirm this statement (I haven’t seen the interview), I can offer a link to...
What’s the difference between Facebook and Mixi? That’s a big question many regular (non-geek) social media users in Japan ask themselves and a challenge for Facebook Japan: if they think Mixi is basically the same as Facebook, there is no point in changing sides. While I could easily...
Social media, mobile and the web in Japan is a field not too many people living outside this country have an understanding of. I am honored to moderate two Japan-related panels at this year’s SXSW event in Austin/Texas to help spread the word in the US and elsewhere. Specifically, I will be...
Will Cookpad win or Rakuten Recipe? Japanese A-list blogger Akky Akimoto has written an article worth reading on how Japan’s biggest sites for recipes are battling it out currently. It looks like Rakuten Recipe is on its way to overtake Cookpad, a company that’s listed at the Tokyo...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry