By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
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...
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...
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...
Messenger app sensation KakaoTalk 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. KakaoTalk has been available in Japanese for quite a while now, but now maker Kakao Corp. is ready...
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...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry