By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
I went to two web industry/tech events last month (December 2008). The first was organized by Ryo Shimizu, CEO and President of Ubiquitous Entertainment, a Tokyo-based web and technology company. Ryo was kind enough to also invite Tetsuya Mizuguchi, one of my absolute heroes. Tetsuya is a legendary...
Japanese mobile games giant DeNA brings its mega-popular platform Mobage-town (Mobage) to cell phones outside Japan: One of the most recent social mobile networks catching our attention, MobaMingle, comes from Japan. MobaMingle is the internationalized version of Mobage-town, one of Japan’s biggest...
Mobile social gaming in Japan is a huge market. One of the leading companies in that field, Tokyo–based GREE, has scored a big IPO today: The tech IPO is not completely dead. Last Wednesday, Japan’s third largest social network GREE, launched in 2004 by the company of the same name, listed...
Asiajin, one of the very few (and I dare say most successful) blogs in English focusing on the Japanese and Asian web industry, is now 1 year old. 233 blogs were written in 365 days, which is not bad for a non-commercial blog. Details can be found here. It has been very cool working with the...
Silicon Valley hero Jason Calacanis (founder of Weblogs and Mahalo, legendary blogger,VC etc.) is on his first visit to Japan (which lasts until Wednesday) and I had the possibility to meet him tonight. What can I say, it was pretty cool to talk to Jason and also meet Japan’s best-known...
Today and yesterday, Joi Ito’s Tokyo-based Digital Garage held the New Context Conference, an event which (at least for this year) took over the place of a relevant conference for the local web industry (instead of the Web 2.0 Tokyo, which was canceled). The conference slogan was “Open...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry