By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
The answer to the question is that the mobile web is huge in Japan (90 million mobile web subscribers), and it has always been. Japanese people basically grew up using the web not on PCs but rather on cell phones. Growth began when NTT Docomo, Japan’s biggest cell phone carrier, introduced a...
The term coworking is known over here (for example, there is a Wikipedia entry in Japanese on the subject: ;), but there is definitely no scene at this point. More information and pictures on coworking spaces in Tokyo in particular can be found here: Due to space limitations and high rents, there...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry