Today is my last day as staff writer for TechCrunch.com. Thank you to everybody at TechCrunch, first and foremost Michael Arrington (now a venture capitalist), Erick Schonfeld (now editor-in-chief), and John Biggs (editor of TechCrunch Gadgets) for the last four years. I also thank the people at TechCrunch Japan, Ryuichi Nishida, Yasushi Okue, and the entire team of translators…
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,…
Earlier this month, I was lucky to spend a few days in Indonesia where I was honored to give a keynote presentation at the APAC Mobile Leaning Conference 2011 in Bandung (Indonesia’s third largest city and, as it turned out, quite a tech hotspot, too). The presentation centered on Japan’s mobile learning industry, and I…
Nice day for online train timetable service Ekitan: after announcing their IPO in January, the company got listed today at the Mothers Market (for high-growth and emerging stocks) of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (code 3646). The stock’s opening price stood at 5,530 yen, which is 98.9% higher than the IPO price of 2,780 yen (at…
Facebook, Mixi, Twitter, GREE or Mobage? This is an anecdotal list of social media usage in Japan by brands, but it’s interesting. Tokyo-based ad and marketing company Agile Media Network, showed the following graph during the company’s Social Media Summit (via Internet Watch). The graphs lists up which social media 50 “top brands” in Japan…
Japan’s telecommunications giant SoftBank has partnered up with China Mobile, Bharti Airtel (India) and Vodafone on Monday to set up the so-called “Global TD-LTE Initiative”. The goal here is to reduce development costs for TD-LTE-based mobile software and hardware by streamlining standards. The three companies boast a combined subscriber base of 1.1 billion people. SoftBank…
How many smartphones are there in Japan, who is offering them and what are the specs? The following site provides a good, up-to-date overview of the smartphone situation in this country. The site shows that Android is rapidly popularity in Japan: Link (Japanese only) Link (same site, under Google Translate)
You want to track Japanese Internet Stocks in English, and Rakuten, DeNA (Mobage), GREE, Mixi, Kakaku, Yahoo Japan, Digital Garage, Dwango are among the listed web companies you follow? Then you should check out these sites (both are available in English, next to Japanese): Netindex Japan MarketGeek Both sites are probably too amateurish for professional…