By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Did you know that GREE and DeNA spend millions of US dollars to promote their social games on Japanese TV? In the July-September 2010 quarter, for example, both companies have invested around US$35 million each in TV advertising. GREE and DeNA were practically absent from the television advertising...
Rakuten keeps hiring employees from China to drive its internationalization efforts, even though overall numbers are still low. Japan’s biggest e-commerce company added five Chinese students in fiscal 2009, another 15 more in 2010, and aims at adding an additional 15 this year. Most of...
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...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry