DeNA just announced a “business alliance” with Mixi under which the Mobage operator and Japan’s biggest homegrown social network will share the same game development platform starting as early as January 2013. DeNA explains: Beginning January 2013, developers can create their games on a single development platform and distribute them to both social graphs in…
Coupons, horoscopes, social networking features, music, movies, maps, shopping, news, comics, games: NHN Japan is ready to throw everything they can think of at LINE‘s current 75 million users. It seems like NHN Japan is trying to see what will stick. And today the company announced it has made LINE Play available to its 33…
Mixi has released its financial report for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, and it looks like the company’s actual situation is better than its current image in Japan. Sales and profit have gone up year-on-year as follows, but most of the key financial numbers went sideways or south quarter-on-quarter: Mixi says that for the…
What I have always found extremely weird about Mixi was that Japan’s biggest home-grown social networking site never offered a decent chat function. For years and years, they never seemed to care. But it seems that the meteoric rise of Facebook and chat app LINE in Japan has put so much pressure on Mixi that the…
In a somewhat surprising move, DeNA announced “comm” today, a new voice call and chat app for iOS and Android. The app is available worldwide, for free, and in English and Japanese. To make a long story short, comm is a LINE clone. DeNA’s app offers not only the same core functions, it copies LINE’s killer…
Messenger app sensation Kakao Talk is the clear winner in its home market of Korea (65 million users worldwide) but hasn’t been able to win over users in Japan where LINE is the undisputed king. Kakao Talk has been available in Japanese for quite a while now, but now maker Kakao Corp. is ready to take…
It looks like the number of active users for Facebook in Japan is now higher than that of Mixi. In March this year, Facebook caused a splash when the Tokyo office revealed its number of MAU doubled to 10 million from September 2011. Back then, I wrote: “If Facebook can keep this growth rate, they…
LINE, NHN Japan’s super-popular social app, is getting another push in Japan. KDDI, the country’s second largest mobile carrier (around 35 million customers), announced it will take LINE into its so-called “au Smart Pass” service. That service makes it possible for subscribers to access a pool of about 500 Android (paid and free) apps that were…