By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Major Japanese publisher Kadokawa and Nico Nico Douga operator Dwango are deepening a business alliance they entered in October 2010. The two companies have announced a capital alliance under which Kadokawa acquired 16,800 shares (8.48%) of Dwango for US$37.1 million. At the same time, Dwango...
Digital Garage, Twitter’s business partner in Japan (among others), has announced it will help LinkedIn enter the Japanese market. Details are scarce at this point (see below), but the partnership was actually announced four years ago. In fact, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman has been a member of...
Facebook Japan, now with a 3.2 million user base, has closed a nice distribution deal today. KDDI au, Japan’s No. 2 mobile carrier, has announced it will feature Facebook prominently on (almost) all future smartphones from the company (I actually expected this announcement to be made by...
I had my doubts about Facebook Japan‘s growth recently, but now Javier Olivan (Head Of International Growth at Facebook), confirmed that Facebook is growing quite nicely in Japan indeed. In an interview with Nikkei Trendy, Olivan said that Facebook’s growth in Japan has been “very...
Good news for Dwango: in its latest financial report, the company says that Nico Nico Douga has counted 21.03 million users at the end of March 2011 (the end of fiscal 2011). 6.23 million users are using Nico Nico on cell phones. Dwango also says that the number of premium members in Japan (who pay...
Japan’s biggest social network Mixi started offering the official Mixi app for Android in December last year. And today the company announced the release of the Mixi Android SDK kit for developers. The SDK is supposed to make it easier for social app providers to create Android apps using the...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry