CyberAgent yesterday announced it has set up the so-called “International Mobile Marketing Division” that aims at providing “overseas companies with smartphone and mobile promotion opportunities in Japan”. The devil is in the details, but given that this country is a black box for many foreign mobile companies, the idea – coming from a major local…
Rakuten makes another step into selling digital content. The company has announced the launch of the website for their e-book store “Raboo” two days ago: http://ebook.rakuten.co.jp/ So far, only buyers of Panasonic’s e-reader UT-PB1 were able to access Raboo from their device, but now anybody can purchase books through the website. What’s weird is that…
And yet another investment from CyberAgent subsidiary CyberAgent Ventures: this time, the Tokyo office decided to pump an undisclosed amount into Retty, a social restaurant guide. The investment is one of the first coming from the so-called CA Startups Internet Fund I that CyberAgent set up earlier this month. The fund is focused on startups…
Here’s quite an unusual tie-up for a social game maker: DeNA today announced they partnered up with major online restaurant guide service Gourmet Navigator (Gurunavi) to promote usage of a social restaurant management game on Mobage. Under the campaign, players of “Bistro World” can collect virtual in-game dishes by waving their e-wallet-equipped feature phones over…
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation on Japan’s web, mobile, and social gaming industries during an event in Tokyo (on search engines, e-commerce, social networks, mobile web usage and the basic structure of the social gaming industry in this country, to be more exact). Companies and services discussed include Yahoo Japan, Mixi, GREE,…
Amazon Japan is set to expand its business: the company started offering software (for download) today, anything from games, to anti-virus programs to office applications. The selection (or prices) aren’t terribly exciting, but this is actually a quite big move for the site. Amazon Japan currently offers just around 1,300 pieces of software but is…
GREE isn’t the only service that gets pre-installed on the Fujitsu-Toshiba IS12T, the world’s first Windows Phone Mango handset that will be distributed in Japan starting next month. Restaurant service and Tabelog competitor Gourmet Navigator announced that buyers can expect a dedicated Gourmet Navigator app on the phone right out of the box, too. Gourmet…
Last month, Rakuten inked a deal with Panasonic to distribute e-book titles to buyers of Panasonic e-book readers. The service, dubbed Raboo (Rakuten Books), was initially limited to Panasonic hardware only, but now The Nikkei is quoting a Rakuten representative that his company will expand it to other platforms, too. Rakuten launched Raboo on Wednesday,…