By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
CNET Japan wrote a pretty interesting analysis on the success of Rakuten Recipe, a recipe site Japan’s biggest e-commerce company is running. Here’s a short summary: Rakuten opened the site in October 2010. Rakuten Recipe now has 40,000 recipes and a whopping 2 million users. Yahoo...
GREE released one of its hit titles playable on Japanese feature phones, Monster Planet, as a smartphone version (Android, iPhone) earlier this week. I tried it out on the iPhone, and the port is really good. The Pokemon-like monster raising game is playable directly in the smartphone browser and...
I just put up an article on Mixi’s new smartphone functions, “Mixi Real Check” And “Mixi Real Check In” for Android, on TechCrunch. The article explains these functions, which were demo’d to me and just a handful of other people earlier this weekend at...
I attended Startupdating #5 yesterday, an event in Tokyo that connects Japan’s web entrepreneurs with engineers looking for new opportunities. Speakers at the event were Hironao Kunimitsu (CEO of Gumi) and Taisei Tanaka (CEO of Geisha Tokyo Entertainment). Their companies are among the...
Japan’s biggest social network Mixi invited me (and a small group of about 10 other people) to a special event at their HQ in central Tokyo last night to introduce two new services that are unique for social networks worldwide. Mixi CEO Kenji Kasahara, COO Akinori Harada, CFO Fumiaki Koizumi...
Rakuten today announced it has inked a deal with Okinawa to support the Japanese prefecture in its “regional development”.
Okinawa will be allowed to use Rakuten to promote, among other things, special events and seasonal specialties to the site’s 70 million registered members.
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry