According to goo Research’s report, 85% of teenagers and preteens participated in the survey said that they know (and use) video sharing sites. It shows that YouTube (57%) is the most popular video sharing site followed by NicoNicoDouga (13%). “Listening to music and watching music video” (44%) were the biggest reason why they use these […]

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Ok, this is not really a search news, but still a fun news about Google.
Google opened “Google Cafe” in Roppongi, Tokyo this weekend. Their “Google Sodas” come in several Google logo colours. They also serve light meals and deserts.
The cafe will stay in business till 24th.

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NTT Resonant announced it’s plan to strengthen its mobile search engine, “mobile goo”. With this improved mobile search engine, the user can search more than 62,000 songs from the database, and more than 7 million videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites’ data base.
NTT Resonant and “goo” used to run one of Japan’s original […]

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Microsoft’s video sharing site, Soapbox, officially opened in Japan on March 12th. It’s a mirror image of English site, even to the sub-categories, which means that not many Japanese videos are available, yet.
In Japan, YouTube is very popular and they opened Japanese site in 2007. Also, NicoNico Douga is very popular with its unique […]

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Japan’s biggest SNS site, mixi, announced its plan to establish a subsidiary in Shanghai, China by May of this year. The detail of its services have not been disclosed.
Currently, mixi has 17mil registered users. You need an invitation from existing member to join. They have free membership and premium membership (fee) for additional services. […]

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One of Japan’s top shopping sites, “Rakuten” announced its plan to expand the business in Europe. Their first European office is scheduled to open in Luxembourg in March. They will provide the market place model shopping mall services, and businesses and people in EU countries can sell their products and services by setting up a […]

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ImpressR&D’s recent survey shows interesting results about mobile commerce in Japan. The most interesting information is that 15% of women in 30’s said that they conducted all of the online shopping from their mobile phone.
[Top mobile shoppers]
- All generations (37%)
- Women in 30s (47%)
- Women in 20s (44%)
- Men in 10s (44%)
[Top mobile shopping categories]
- […]

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SBI Robo’s social graph engine, SBI Business, is opened for business. When you search for someone’s name, it gives you the search results from search engines (MSN, Google and Yahoo), web and Wikipedia, official profile of the person, and social graph information.
Currently, more than 4000 businesses and 25000 people’s data have been indexed. The users […]

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DeNA, who owns Japan’s biggest mobile SNS and gaming site “mobaga town”, announced its plan to set up a company in California. This is the first step of their plan to expand the market globally. The detail of the plan (services, opening date, etc.) was not announced.
Mobaga Town (mbga.jp) is currently one of the most […]

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According to Aun Consulting’s report, SEO market had 9960 mil yen sales in 2007 (25% up from 7970 mil yen in 2006).
5710 mil yen: “In-House” SEO marketing
2600 mil yen: Out-sourced SEO marketing
1650 mil yen: Tool, etc.
They think that the SEO market will continue to have a healthy growth in Japan, and become 17.6 bil […]

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Baidu has announced that their Japanese site would officially open on January 23rd. On a current Japanese site, it provides “web”, “video” and “image” searches, but from the promotion page, it looks that they are going to provide “travel” and “Gourmet” searches as well.
Baidu’s spider has been crawling aggressively to index Japanese pages since […]

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I just saw an interesting data of mobile sites access in Japan (by BeTrend). It shows that Japanese access mobile sites the most on Thursday of the week, and from 9pm to midnight of the day. It’s a well known fact that people browse mobile sites on their spare time, and it’s no surprise that […]

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Export-Japan’s latest survey results show that more than 70% of Japanese top manufactures have English web site in addition to Japanese site. 1,684 top manufactures in Japan responded to the survey.
Honda offers the most language sites (36 languages) followed by Nissan (33), Sony and Mitsubishi (31 each). The most popular second language is the […]

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Overture Japan and DeNA have agreed to introduce Overture’s paid ads to one of the largest Mobile gaming and SNS services in Japan, Mobaga Town (www.mbga.jp).
The sponsored search mobile’s ads appear on “moba search”, and the content match mobile’s ads appear on news and other pages on Mobaga Town web site.
Mobaga Town opened in February […]

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According to Net Ratings’ “Ad Relevance” report, the banner advertising on web had 6.2% decrease in August from July.
The decrease was not just in the amount of money spent on the advertising, but also the number of advertisers (-4.1%), number of campaigns (-4.8%) and number of banners (-6.5%), all had decrease in August.
The report also […]

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Japan.Internet.com and goo Research announced the results of their survey about the Second Life in Japan. The survey was conducted against 1087 Internet users in Japan. While Second Life has been receiving many media attentions, it seems that not many people are fully aware of what the Second Life is. See some of the data […]

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NetRatings announced the results of its “August Internet Usage” report. According to the report, NicoNicoDouga (nicovideo.jp) gained the total usage minutes by 52%, and had higher “average use time” and “average number of visits” per person than that of YouTube in August.
Since it’s opening in March with an unique feature that visitors can post comments […]

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NetRatings’ report on Japanese main portal sites usage shows interesting facts.
It reports that people visit Yahoo Japan site spend most time on Yahoo Auction site (26%), which is much higher than Yahoo’s top page (15%). It also reports that people visit Google Japan site spend most time in Search (74%), and many people come to […]

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On August 31, Yahoo announced that they acquired 100% of Overture Japan’s stock. With this acquisition, Yahoo aims to become the largest share holder in the search engine marketing industry. (200 stocks, US$13,426,000.00)
The announcement included no particular changes in services, but I’m sure there will be some expansion in the advertising services and the […]

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