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,…
Big news from Japan’s search engine market: Yahoo Japan has landed a deal with Twitter that makes it possible to integrate real-time search pulled from Twitter in Yahoo Japan’s results pages. Twitter is huge in Japan, and Yahoo Japan is not only the country’s biggest website, but it also gets the most search queries (even…
Yahoo Japan, the country’s biggest website, and major convenience store chain Lawson have signed a deal under which the companies will promote each other’s products and services. First, Lawson will establish a virtual shopping mall selling many of their own products plus items listed on Yahoo Japan Shopping from August this year. In the real…
Japan’s biggest website, Yahoo Japan, has announced a new location-based service called Yahoo Loco yesterday. It’s actually not an entirely new site, as Yahoo Loco mashes up a total of seven different existing Yahoo Japan services, for example Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Coupons or Yahoo Gourmet. Yahoo Japan says their new LBS is Japan’s biggest, whatever…
Japan’s biggest e-commerce company Rakuten has announced it teamed up with Google Japan to bring Google Adsense to various Rakuten properties. Under the deal, the Google ads will be placed: in the Rakuten toolbar on the PC (from May 10) on Infoseek on the PC, Rakuten’s web portal (from May 10) on certain Rakuten member…
Japan’s biggest search engine, portal and site, Yahoo Japan, has posted some pretty good financials yesterday. Net profit for the January-March 2011 quarter grew 4.3% from 2010 on a continuing increase in advertising sales, which means even the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 was able to stop the company. Yahoo Japan’s…
Google offers it, now Yahoo Japan offers it, too (on smartphones): voice search. Yahoo Japan Labs today released an iPhone app [iTunes link] on the Japanese App Store that lets users access the site via voice controls. In this video (not embeddable), you can see the user “asking” for the current weather in the Minato…
Online fashion mall Zozotown (background) is seeing a rapid growth in traffic, if a new report by Nielsen is to be believed. According to Nielsen Japan [PDF], Zozotown’s PC site saw a total of four million unique users, up from slightly over 2.5 million in November. Nielsen identifies three main reasons: the spectacular partnership Zozotown…