By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
There have been various attempts at establishing a business social networking service in Japan in the past years, but none of these have taken off. In September 2007, LinkedIn inked a deal with Tokyo-based web company Digital Garage to bring the service to Japan, but that never happened (LinkedIn...
Currently, it’s 1.5 million people: ;. Facebook translated its UI into Japanese in 2008. For Facebook, Japan is one of the few remaining white spaces on the world map, next to South Korea, Russia, and China (where it’s blocked). By way of comparison: Japan’s homegrown social...
Inception and general approach: You can broadly say that Facebook first copied Friendster (the CEO openly admits this) before going over to Facebook on a regular basis (apps, share function, like function, LBS, real-time elements, feed system, Mixi Connect etc.). Mixi today is Japan’s only...
Rakuten has finally launched its online mall in China. After having inked a partnership with Google’s China, Baidu, “Lekutian” went live online in China today: Rakuten, Japan’s biggest e-commerce company ($10 billion market cap), and Chinese search leader Baidu have today opened a...
-> What is the closest Western analog of their business model? There is not really any Western analog, at least nothing that reaches the scope of Rakuten. Rakuten is *not* like Amazon, and it’s *not* like Ebay either. It’s an online mall which offers a collected setting to end...
Here is the link to a column I wrote on Twitter Japan for the journal for the American Chamber Of Commerce in Japan. Excerpt: The social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter is quite a phenomenon. Created four years ago in the U.S., the site quickly developed into one of the trendiest...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry