During the interview with Nikkei Business, Yahoo Japan’s president Inoue said that he wasn’t impressed by some of the popular Google services such as Street View, Book Search and AdWords.
He thinks that those services are either in the “gray area (of the law)” or copies of someone else’s services, and Yahoo Japan’s legal department would […]

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The Mobile Marketing Association announced the results of its Annual Global Mobile Attitude and Usage Study conducted in 2008. The markets surveyed in the Asia Pacific segment of the study include: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. It shows the strong market opportunity for mobile marketers in APAC region.
The study’s […]

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It’s a known fact that Japanese are one of the top users of Social media in the world. Japan was the number 1 country by the number of YouTube users for years, and still now, Japanese spend most time on YouTube.
Back in April, Yahoo Japan organized GyaO! as its subsidiary, and started new Yahoo/GyaO! video […]

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According to a report on “Shopping and E-commerce businesses in Japan” by Fuji-Keizai, the market including catalog shopping, TV shopping, online shopping and mobile shopping, will become $5.4 billion market in 2010, a 109% growth from 2008.
The report also predicts that online shopping will take up more than a half of the market with […]

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Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) announced its launch of SEMPO APAC Committee.
SEMPO APAC plans and organizes SEMPO activities in the Asia-Pacific region to educate the market, grow membership and awareness of the Online & Search Marketing Industry, as well as to provide support to working groups under SEMPO APAC. Currently the committee has […]

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The first ad:tech in Japan was held on Sept 2-3 in Tokyo. The agenda had 4 keynotes invited from overseas and a keynote panel by 3 Creative directors and a CEO from Japanese corporations including Dentsu. Innovation was one of the themes of the conference, which had 6 different session tracks including “performance marketing” and […]

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On July 29, GREE (gree.jp), one of the biggest SNS sites in Japan, announced its financial report from June. The report shows that they had 374% increase in sales and 696% increase in profit compare to June of last year.
Since last year, GREE has been promoting the services through TV commercials and partnerships with other […]

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7 organizations such as Internet Associations in Japan are getting together to set up Japanese Internet Domain Name Conference (the final name may change). The main purpose of the conference is to set the regulations and standards for new Japanese ccTLD related issues, and to select contractors in Japan.
In addition to currently available ccTLDs such […]

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Ask.jp announced that they will end the search service on June 25. They ad services has been ended in May. The search services include web, blog, products and category search. Ask opened its beta version in August 2004, and the official version in February 2005. They have been struggling to gain the market share in […]

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Yahoo Japan has been providing the analytic tool for Geocities Plus (paid) Members since March 2009, and just announced that the tool is now available for free to all registered (Yahoo ID holders) users.
This easy to user tool has been improved by listening the feedback from users for the past several months, and they […]

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SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) Asia Tour and Seminars aim to foster awareness, educate, and promote the search industry in Asia by connecting professionals in the regions and Western markets, and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing.
The event consists of seminars, press conferences, and networking receptions at each location. […]

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Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released the latest Internet population data in Japan. According to the report, there were more than 90.9 million Internet users in Japan as of January 2009, which is 2.8 million more than the date from January 2008.
The data also shows there were 82.55 million Internet users from PC, […]

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According to comScore Japan’s access ranking report on entertainment sites for February 2009, 45.7 million Japanese visited entertainment sites during the month of February, which is about 74% of Internet users in Japan. (The data includes the accesses from PC at offices and homes, and doesn’t include the accesses from mobile, PDA, or PC accesses […]

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Chinese research company, iResearch, reported that Baidu had 73.2% search market share in 2008. (72.6% in 2007)
The top 3 engines in China in 2008 were Baidu, Google and Yahoo.

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On February 5, Google introduced its new top page with “Hot new keywords” below the search box. As I reported here before, Google in Asia (not only Japan but also Korea, China etc.) has added links with icon below the search box last year hoping to improve visitor’s experience at Google. Basically, Google realized that […]

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Yahoo Japan announced that they will discontinue Yahoo video-cast services after April 5, 2009. Starting February 16, 2009, they will no longer accept new video uploading through the service. All of the uploaded videos will be deleted on April 5, 2009.
They recommend their partner sites NicoNico Douga and Zoom for video uploading and distribution services.

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Even after mixi, gree, facebook and twitter, BBS sites are still popular in Japan. The biggest BBS site in Japan, “2ch” is where you can hear all the gossip about… just about everything you want to know.
There was a rumor back in late 2007 that the owner wanted to close the site. Instead, Hirouki Nishimura, […]

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According to China Internet Association, there are more than 50 million blogger in China as of November 2008. The number of blogs has reached 100 million.
There are 290 million Internet users in China right now.

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Friendfeed is now available in 6 new languages including Japanese and Chinese.
Friendfeed currently works with 59 services including Facebook, Fricker, YouTube and Twitter, and 1/3 of the users are already using it with languages other than English.
Facebook and Twitter already have Japanese version and gaining Japanese users, but mixi and Gree are definitely the largest […]

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