In a 36kr interview with Frank (no last name was provided) who is in charge of Line expansion into the Chinese market, we got to learn that Line has 16 million users so far in Taiwan. That number is astonishing because two years ago when I was studying in Taiwan, US-based Whatsapp was the dominant chat application. Surely Line’s cutesy stickers (which I personally believe are very compatible with Taiwanese culture) and TV commercial must have done the trick. 16 million users in Taiwan also means that Line has about 70 percent of its population to use the chat application. Taiwan has about 23 million in population according to Google’s data.

This also means that Line has attracted four million Taiwanese users in the past four months. Its last Taiwan user count recorded on Tech in Asia was about 12 million in late January this year. That’s the same time that Line reached 100 million total users. Now it has 150 million around the world.

In the interview, Frank also said that he did not see Tencent’s WeChat as a competitor. He meant it in a polite way in which he says that while WeChat is aiming for the entire market, Line is only looking for “valuable users.”

In my recent interview at NHN headquarters in Seoul, Korea, we got to understand that Line’s plan in China is to target working women who are aged 20 to 30 in ‘tier one’ cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Frank also said that China, being such a huge market, could possibly have two to three social messaging players. In the same interview, we also got to understand from Kang Hyunbin, who is the head of the business office at Line Plus Corp, that Line’s cutesy stickers are catching on in China as well.

Frank was also the same person who was in-charge of Line’s impressive growth in Taiwan but is now putting more focus on promoting Line in mainland China.

(Source: 36kr)

I think no one likes to be censored, and that includes me. But sometimes, you can’t have total control over everything, especially when you are doing business in another country. When it was uncovered that Line is ready with filters to prevent the sending of politically sensitive words for the Chinese version of Line (branded “Lian Wo”), the natural reaction of most people was that it is a bad thing.

I thought so too. But when you cover or work in the Chinese internet industry, censorship slowly becomes the norm. It’s common practice in China, across the internet and all offline media, that you self-censor first so that you don’t even trouble the censors. If you don’t want to follow this rule, then get the hell out of China. Run far away.

Now, let me repeat that I’m not a fan of censorship. But at the same time, after complaining about why the hell China blocks certain websites and has certain restrictions, I’ve grown to understand that every country has its own rules and you have to obey them to conduct business there. Period.

So would Line be wrong if it were to really censor politically sensitive words in China? That word filter within the Line app is not yet switched on, but it’s ready to be activated. I personally don’t think Line is wrong because the company has simply followed the rules of the country and the censorship will only apply to its Chinese app. I’m sure there are people who disagree. If you are one of them, kindly share your thoughts in the comments.

A few months ago we spotted that Tencent’s WeChat app was censoring certain ‘sensitive’ political words. That turned out to be temporary, but the company was clearly capable and ready to implement such blocking. Today it emerges that Japan-made Line app is primed and ready to censor users of its social messaging service as well.

Line app contains a string of code that looks for “bad words” and connects back to a server to cross-check those terms with a list of politically sensitive words. That directory contains a lot of inconvenient truths that Chinese authorities would like air-brushed from history, such as recent revelations about the personal wealth of Party leaders, and historical incidents such as a certain something that happened at Tian’anmen Square.

The Line censorship machine was found by Twitter user @hirakujira and detailed by TheNextWeb this morning. The word filter is currently not activated, but as with WeChat’s it seems all ready to be turned on at any moment. If it were turned on and a sensitive word were to be sent via the app, it would be blocked and the user would see an error message saying “Your message contains sensitive words, please adjust and send again.” @hirakujira was able to hack the app to replicate that scenario:

This is what the code looks like within the app (and here’s the current list of banned words):

Watching you chat

Made by NHN (KRX:035420) by teams in both Japan and South Korea, Line currently has just over 150 million users worldwide. Line launched officially in China in December last year with the Chinese name ‘Lian Wo’, but there are no statistics available for its progress in the country. On the plus side, this bit of censorship shows that NHN Line is serious about succeeding in China, because that kind of suppression is a fact of being an online or offline media business in the country.

The findings seem to suggest that Line app is monitoring all of its users around the globe despite the filter not being turned on. That’s likely the case with WeChat as well. So while WeChat and Line are not technically censored at present – not even in China – it’s clearly ready to do so. Note that in both apps it applies to Chinese text only.

For users in China who have signed up for either Line or WeChat via SMS, it means that authorities can easily piece together your full identity. That’s because purchasing a SIM card in the country can only be done (in theory) by showing your national ID card or passport, which is then recorded.

China’s most heavily censored social network is undoubtedly Sina Weibo, which is hit with directives from authorities almost daily on what it should erase from the Twitter-like service.

(Source: TheNextWeb)

It’s a fierce battlefield for chat apps in Indonesia. Today, Japan-based Line is going to roll out new ads featuring Indonesian celebrities Agnes Monica and pop group Nidji on TV in Indonesia. Those two celebrities are very prominent here as they are among the few who have represented Indonesia globally. But this latest move means a lot more in the Indonesian chat app battle, especially with regards rival KakaoTalk.

Let’s look at Line’s two newest marketing stars. The first is Agnes Monica, who has the biggest Twitter follower count for a celebrity in Indonesia. Which celebrity has the second biggest Twitter account here? None other than KakaoTalk’s TV ad star Sherina Munaf. Agnes now has over 7.5 million Twitter followers while Sherina has close to 6 million.

Indonesian pop group Nidji is also very famous here. Their hit singles have gained them huge popularity amongst teenagers and children, so much so that the band’s involvement with a cigarette campaign generated complaints from the national commission for child protection a few years ago. The band’s Facebook page has 465,000 likes.

Harnessing K-pop power

Those two stars will complement Line’s two other promo stars, Maudy Ayunda and K-pop singer Siwon. And yes, it is interesting to see a Japanese company choosing a Korean celebrity to star in its Southeast Asian ad campaign, with the latter celebrity being used to counter the K-pop fever brought by KakaoTalk’s Korean stars BigBang.

Today, Line representatives pointed out that its messaging app has gone back up to the number one spot for free apps in Indonesia on Android. But on iPhone, KakaoTalk is still ahead of Line in the country. The new TV ad starring Agnes Monica and Nidji will start airing today.

Mr. Kang Hyunbin, head of business office at Line Plus Corp

Popular mobile messaging chat app Line was created by NHN Japan, with Japanese and Korean team inspired by the tragic earthquake that happened in Japan in 2011. When SMS and calls were unreliable during the disaster, data messaging became the primary mode of communication.

As Line’s popularity grew, the app was spun-off in February this year into the Line Corp subsidiary. Besides facilitating chats between users, it has truly become a mobile platform incorporating different digital content including games and manga. Growing to 150 million users in less than two years hasn’t been easy. One of the reasons why Line has been able to grow so rapidly was because it has listened closely to its users’ needs. At NHN’s headquarters in Seoul, Korea, Kang Hyunbin, who is the head of business office at Line Plus Corp, told me:

I think users in Japan and the users in the world actually provide us the reason why we develop Line and what [way] to develop Line. Our users are kinda our co-founders.

Line characters and content

Hyunbin also believes that Line’s success hinges hugely on its rich content and user interface. For example Line users can express themselves with more than just words – there are the stickers that I would call an upgraded version of emoticons, and they have been hugely popular in Asia. Line has been extremely smart in developing different personalities for each of its sticker characters.

Starting with Cony, Brown, Moon, and James, these characters, who each represent different personalities, have been a huge hit in Asia. In Japan, Line’s kawaii characters are broadcast on TV in cartoon form and can also be found for sale as plush toys, T-shirts, and other merchandise. Take the pictured screenshot as an example. Expressing our sincere goodbyes to friends using stickers can be that fun.

Line also has games to entertain its users. One of its more popular games, Line Pop, is popular not just in Japan but also Thailand and Taiwan. So much so that it even has tutorial videos on tips and tricks to get more points.

Hyunbin told me that Line’s recently released manga content has been successful in Japan and the company has plans to bring it to other parts of the world.

Line outside of Japan

Line Japan focuses on the local Japanese market while the Korean headquarters focuses on international expansion. The ambitious chat application has been aggressively expanding to China, Vietnam, and Indonesia recently using both online and offline marketing tactics.

Chatting up China

Hyunbin says that Line’s China user base has grown rapidly despite early days. He explained further:

So far, we have established the basic infrastructure that we can do some more in the mainlaind China market. For example, Google Play doesn’t work in mainland China. So we have [to work with] a lot of third-party Android market. We have to modify our ‘apk’ files to suit into these third party markets […] and attract more users to download [Line].

Besides making adjustments to its Android distribution in China, Hyunbin says that Line’s cute stickers are getting many Chinese users on board. Line even introduced customized panda stickers to suit the local tastes and has also worked with local partners like Tmall and Mogujie to set up official accounts on Line.

Line’s plan in China is to target working women who are aged 20 to 30 in ‘tier one’ cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Hyunbin explains that the characteristics of these users are very fashion sensitive. So it is only natural to work with Chinese e-commerce sites with fashion products such as Tmall and Mogujie. Hyunbin also said that Line hasn’t started to do any large scale promotion in China as the company is still trying to understand the market better such as the media structure and user requirements.

The user-base number isn’t big in China but we have a growth trend plus our own effort, which we are going to plan in the future. I have confidence that we do have more aggressive numbers coming soon that we can reach in the future.

Tencent’s WeChat – called Weixin in China – is the clear market leader there.

Thailand, Indonesia, Spain, and more

Unlike China, Line dominates Thailand with more than 15 million users from the country. In Thailand, Line noticed a familiar trend: Users simply love their stickers. “Again, the one big phenomenon in the Thai market is that users can express themselves really well using Line’s stickers,” said Hyunbin.

Line acknowledges that Thailand is a big market for them. In the future, it is looking to introduce Line branded merchandise in Thailand and also more localized content including Thai-language content such as news, manga, and celebrity accounts. Hyunbin is also open to work with local Thai-based game developers who are able to build games with a regional vision.

Besides China and Thailand, Line has been very active in Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines, and also the Spanish-speaking markets. Hyunbin explains that the popularity of Line in Spain has helped Line to organically grow in South American markets which mostly communicate in Spanish. In Spain, Line already has more than 12 million users.

Hyunbin highlighted that Indonesia is a key market for Line in Southeast Asia, stating the rapid growth in smartphone usage could signify that more people will be consuming mobile applications and content in the future. Based on Line’s internal data, it claims that it is the most popular chat application by user count.

The company declined to reveal user numbers for country-specific breakdowns, but said that out of 150 million users, 45 million of them are from Japan. So 70 percent of Line’s users are outside of Japan.

“We have no time to be worried about IPO.”

As Line grows into a giant mobile platform, there is more and more content on the mobile chat application. Hyunbin acknowledges that there could be a case where Line users (just like Facebook is experiencing now) may find the service complicated and overloaded with content. The team is careful with that and is constantly trying to simplify its features. On content selection, Line picks content to suit the local market, ensuring that they are relevant for its users. Hyunbin gave me a case in point:

For example in e-commerce there are global big players. But in each market, there are also local key players. In some ways, we [would like] to partner with the local companies to bring the best experience to users in specific markets.

When I asked when Line will go public, Hyunbin says that the company has no plans for that, saying that users are still their top priority. Jin-woo Lee, head of Line’s Southeast Asia team added:

A lot of people think that Line is quite big already. But if you take a look at the growth rate, in a year or two, we can be two or three times bigger than now. It all depends on expansion first. We need to create a bigger user-base then everything will be quite natural for an IPO. We have no time to be worried about IPO.

In Line’s first quarterly financial results that came out last week, the subsidiary revealed that it recorded $58 million in revenue in Q4.

Let’s take a look at the highlights from the infographic (the full thing is embedded at bottom) and the newest statistics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, and Line.

Facebook in Thailand

Zoning in on Facebook, the ZocialInc crew finds that the peak time for posting is 11pm. These are the demographics within Thailand:

Twittery Thais

There are now two million Thais on Twitter, who on average tweet 5.5 times each day. Like with Facebook, the country’s Twitterers are night owls, tending to post more between 10pm and midnight. 66.7 percent of Twitter posts in Thailand are made on mobiles.

YouTube boom

YouTube is still seeing great growth in Thailand, and is now up to 630,000 channels within the nation, adding up to 5.3 million videos uploaded by Thai users. The top video cateogry for these guys and girls is music.

Snapping up Instagram

With the most stellar growth in Thailand in the past year, Instagram is now up to 600,000 users in the country, up from 150,000 this time last year. In the first four months of 2013, they collectively posted 21.38 million photos. One of the most liked users is @aum_patchrapa, the beauty queen turned actress Pachrapa ‘Aum’ Chaichua.

Checking out of Foursquare?

Foursquare, the location-based service, saw a nine percent drop in check-ins in the past year in Thailand, but the number of venues grew. The best growth figure for Foursquare was that 55 percent more people checked in via Instagram.

Line up

There are no Thailand-specific numbers from WeChat for Thailand, so let’s focus on rival app Line, which has a pretty spectacular 15 million Thai users. It’s also an important new platform for social marketing and brands outreach, with the top Thai brand on Line having 4.6 million followers already.

Here’s the full slideshow presentation:

(Source: ZocialInc blog)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

For the first time since NHN debuted its popular chat app, Line is publicly announcing its quarterly earnings – and it’s a whopper.

Line’s earnings climbed 92 percent from the last quarter to hit JPY 5.82 billion (US$58 million). And a breakdown of where those revenues come from, you ask? Well, 50 percent is from in-app purchases across its 24 different social games, and 30 percent from the 191 stickers that are sold in the chat app. 80 percent of that $58 million came from Japan. That underlines Line’s strength in Japan – but also its reliance on the Japanese market.

Worldwide, Line has over 150 million registered users right now. Most of those users, despite the revenues, are not in Japan. Line has recently been making aggressive moves in Southeast Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, and even the US. But given the numbers, Line will need to work hard on monetizing outside of Japan.

Line’s financial numbers are interesting when compared to its key competitor up in South Korea, KakaoTalk, which reported $45 million in revenue and $7 million profit for 2012 at out Startup Asia event earlier this year. Although the startup KakaoTalk is still catching up to Line, those numbers are hard to ignore. WhatsApp, as tight-lipped as ever, has never revealed its revenue numbers but that hasn’t stopped users on Quora from speculating that its revenue figure must be around $45 million. Over in China, Tencent has been in no hurry to make money from WeChat, and will only start to monetize it later this year with a new social gaming platform.

I’ve been doing a lot of chat app news in Vietnam lately – the reason is mobile is in a very important growth stage and a lot of foreign and domestic companies want to get in. Just to refresh your memory, let’s go over the latest numbers that I’ve announced so far: KakaoTalk and Line both have one million users in Vietnam, first-mover Viber has 3.5 millions users, WeChat is functionally out of the game, and Whatsapp is unknown.

Now Zalo, the homegrown contender, has hit two million users. It’s a huge coup for VNG and one of the fastest growing periods for a domestic mobile app in Vietnam. According to Vuong Quang Khai, who manages web and mobile at VNG:

Two million users is an important milestone for Zalo. Of course, the mobile internet in Vietnam is just starting and the opportunities are still fresh for mobile services. Our next goal is five million users, which would account for 50 percent of the smartphone market.

Zalo’s breakneck pace can be strongly attributed local support and more significantly, advertising. This has allowed chat apps like Zalo to puncture the market and access smartphone users that may not even be accustomed to using apps on their phones. In many ways, VNG is doing the hard work of educating the smartphone market, a market where many smartphone owners buy smartphones for the novelty more than for the apps and services.

The interesting thing you’ll find in the infographic is Zalo is also getting users abroad, this in part can be attributed to the large population of overseas Vietnamese and, strangely enough, Vietnamese wives of Korean husbands. The app will come out with an English version in the next few months, which will position Zalo in a more global setting. The app is also now in a closed beta testing a calling function.

For more insights on Zalo’s growth, check out the infographic, which has some interesting insights into mobile growth in Vietnam.

Far from nearing a saturation point, the messaging app Line is actually growing faster than ever. Having previously taken nearly seven months to go from the 50 million to 100 million milestones, Line then rocketed up to its current 150 million in a little over three months.

As noted by our buddies at Startup-Dating, that’s remarkable hockey stick growth. Line even made a cute graph (a line graph, naturally) to show this acceleration.

With just over half of its users being outside of Japan (where Line is made by NHN), it means Line is doing enormously well on the world stage. Admitedly, it’s way behind Whatsapp’s 200 million monthly active users (as opposed to registered users), but it’s doing a lot better globally than its key Asia-made rivals. KakaoTalk’s user-base is largely in South Korea, while WeChat’s vast 300-million cohort is mostly in China, and only 40 million of them are scattered around the world.

As I’m under a self-imposed ban to not use any numbers larger than those taught to me by Sesame Street, I can’t figure out when Line will hit 200 million. But if you’re some kind of numbers wizard ¹, you could probably pin-point, based on the accelerating growth rate this year, precisely when Line will reach 200 million users. It’s plausible it’ll be just two months later.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

120 million users ain’t enough for Line. Together with Takaratomy, the popular mobile chat application is targeting kids with its upcoming Line toy smartphone. Rick from Startup Dating reports that the phone is not a functional smartphone but will have NFC to allow kids to exchange stamps and messages when two toy Line phones are in contact. The toy is scheduled to launch on August 8 and will cost around $70.

It’s an interesting strategy from Line and probably the first of its kind among mobile chat apps. Japan-based Line Corp also recently launched its own cartoon series which probably has the same target group in mind. It’s perhaps fair to speculate that manga or kids-only games will be developed along the way to serve this audience if it proves to be profitable.

[Source: SD Japan via Impress]

In Vietnam, the chat app battle is fearsome. Western competitors Whatsapp and Viber face serious opposition from Asian rivals like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and domestic apps like Zalo and soon to be released Wala. Arguably, there’s no real leader right now.

Line, probably one of the sleekest apps in the space is headed and designed by NHN. I sat down with JB Park, the CEO of NHN Vietnam, to talk about where NHN is headed next in Vietnam and was surprised to learn some interesting moves for the coming year and facts about NHN in Vietnam.

Currently in Vietnam, NHN has 70 staff, mainly engineers, and over 250 servers in the country dedicated to Vietnam. The Line chat app has had over 1.5 million downloads so far, although Park did not reveal monthly active users. But what is really interesting is that the 70 staff that NHN has up in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, are not working on features for the chat app (that innovation happens back in Japan and Korea where Park says there are teams of Korean, Japanese, Russian, and American engineers working together), but they’re actually working on bringing a new search engine into the Vietnamese market, one of NHN’s other fortes.

That means in Vietnam, NHN is going to be competing in two very significant spaces: chat apps and search.

A quick look at the history of search in Vietnam

If you’ll remember, I recently reported that Coc Coc, a Russian-backed search engine, is looking to pump $100 million into defeating Google in Vietnam, and there’s also another Russian-backed search engine called Wada, who hasn’t gotten as much traction in the market yet. Historically, Vietnam has seen its fair share of search engines that want to be Google:

• In 2006, DFJ VinaCapital invested $2 million on timnhanh.com, which has now shifted into newspaper content crawling.
• In 2007, the Nguyen Hoang Group invested $500,000 in monava.vn, but has since closed down.
• In 2008, Tinh Van company invested $2 million into Xalo.vn, but hasn’t made much headway.
• In 2008, Socbay.com also debuted to great fanfare but also hasn’t gained much traction.

It’s been difficult. Since 2008, no significant players except perhaps Coc Coc have really stepped up to face Google, and Google remains the dominant search engine with over 80 to 90 percent of the search engine market share – and it’s by far the top website in Vietnam. So it’s interesting that NHN is jumping into the Vietnam search war as well. According to Park:

In South Korea, Naver has long been the king of search, soundly dominating Google, which has only had around five percent of market share. So in the next few months, we’ll be releasing our own search engine on the market.

In order for NHN to succeed on the search front, it will have to be proactive in building up its own content. That means coordinating with local companies and organizations that produce information.

The only way that we could be better than Google in South Korea was in working with content distributors and publishers locally, so that’s what we’ll be doing here. The problem in Vietnam is that content is very weak. So we have to look at helping to produce it and get it online.

It’s going to be an interesting journey for NHN’s search in Vietnam. Park didn’t say if the name of the engine would be Naver like in South Korea, but he did say they’re look at building a search app in addition to a website. The challenge moving forward will be if the team of Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese engineers can crack Vietnamese search better than the Russian-Vietnamese teams at Coc Coc.

Line Corporation popular messaging app, Line, has launched Line Manga yesterday (h/t: SD Japan). Line Manga is an extended service and a separate app from Line messaging app which allows users to read manga while on the move available both on iOS and Android. The launch brings 30,000 comics to Line’s 120 million users with popular titles such as One Piece and Dragonball available for downloads.

Users can choose to share comics on their timeline to receive 10 Line Coins per day. As far as I know, Line Manga is only available in Japan. So English manga reader apps like Manga Storm and Viz Manga are safe for now. If manga works well, I’m pretty sure Line will be going after general books and magazines which will officially eat into Kobo and Amazon’s pie. And if Line can sell books, I’m sure music should do fairly well too.

On a related note, KakaoTalk has also recently launched Kakao Page a new digital publishing platform which helps companies create a magazine/book looking content on mobile. Though KakaoTalk’s platform isn’t directly working with major publishers, the idea is similar to Line Manga whereby it sells digital content through its network and splits the revenue with the content creator.

As messaging apps slowly become our defacto mobile social network, we can expect more extended services and content to be part of the network too.

(Source: SD Japan)

NHN Japan’s Line mobile messaging app has hit over 120 million users so far. You may or may not agree but I do think its cutesy characters played a huge role to get people downloading the app.

Asiajin reports that its characters, featuring Moon, Coney, Brown, James, Jessica, and Sally, now feature in an animated TV series titled Line Town. Aired on Tokyo TV Channel 6, the first cartoon was broadcast last week on April 3 from 6.30 to 7.00pm. Though I can’t find any publicly available complete video of Line Town, I did find a snippet recently uploaded on YouTube which I embedded below.

Besides now being social media and TV stars, Line’s mascots are also found on mobile games and merchandise. To me, Line has done brilliant marketing of its chat app with its kawaii culture which, if I may generalize, works well in Japan and most parts of Asia.

Line has been very aggressive with its expansion across Asia. It has reached over a million users in Vietnam, is wildly popular in Thailand and Taiwan, and has made the messaging app available on Nokia Asha phones to target emerging markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Cambodia. Late last year, Line also launched its Chinese brand, Lianwo, in mainland China in hope of breaking WeChat’s stranglehold in the middle kingdom.

(Source: Asiajin)

Across the region, telcos are in a quandary as to how to deal with chat apps like Line, Whatsapp, and KakaoTalk. These messaging apps offer a free and fast alternative to SMS and have the potential to obliterate SMS returns for telcos. Especially with smartphones on the rise, this trend is inevitable. And telcos are feeling the burn.

Effective on April 1st, Vietnamese telcos Mobifone and Vinafone hiked up the prices of mobile 3G internet for their customers. Data packages went from VND 10,000 ($0.50) per month to VND 40,000 ($1.90), and student packages went from VND 15,000 ($.72) per month to VND 35,000 ($1.67). They also cut their data plan speeds from 7.3 Mbps for users back to 256 Kbps after they’ve exceeded their data plan by 100MB.

Vietnam had one of the cheapest 3G rates in the world, but these new price hikes will be a blow to that record.

All of this makes a lot of sense from a business perspective as most Vietnamese telcos are either owned by the government or closely associated with it. So they have a strong agenda to get as many users on board as they can since that’s the government’s vision. But such low prices can’t be sustainable – telcos can’t offer such rates and still grow, and chat apps have especially underlined this.

With the number of smartphones in Vietnam set to go over 30 million by the end of this year, it’s a real concern. The more people buy smartphones, the more likely they’ll use messaging apps, and the more likely SMS profits will plummet. So of course, the telcos are panicking and hiking prices. On the other hand, I think this is a much better response than Indonesian or Chinese telcos, who decided to build their own chat app competitors.

(Source: VNExpress)

Yes, South Korea now has 19 million daily active users on KakaoTalk, and Japan has 36 million active users on rival app Line. That’s according to the compiled statistics from social media agency WeAreSocial. When we looked at the overview from the same agency back in October last year, Cyworld was leading in Korea, and Twitter was top in Japan. But not any longer. WeAreSocial’s Simon Kemp explains to us that he decided to focus on active users on the social sites to give a clearer view of what people are using. He explains:

The (previous figure of) 26 million was total registered users on CyWorld, but we’re becoming increasingly aware that this does not represent active use. Also, the figures for KakaoTalk are daily active users, so the monthly active users (i.e. the figure Facebook reports) are likely to be much higher. Given that, we’re confident that KakaoTalk is now the most active network in South Korea.

Here’s the infographic map:

Overall, Asia now has 874 million social media users, according to Simon’s calculations. Despite the recalibration to active users, that’s still an 18 percent larger figure than was seen in last October’s data.

Of course, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is still growing in Asia, despite the rise of messaging apps and its recent clean-up of fake accounts. Nonetheless, some drops in Facebook active usage have been observed in Singapore, Brunei, and Hong Kong.

Aside from Line and KakaoTalk, the China-based WeChat app is still one to look out for. As we reported last night, the makers of that app, Tencent, are planning to test a social gaming platform within WeChat this year. When that eventually launches it’ll make the app an even stronger rival to Line and KakaoTalk, which are already benefitting from gaming integration.

On the whole, social media penetration remains at an average 23 percent across Asia:

(Source: WeAreSocial Singapore)

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

American mobile chat app MessageMe has been generating a lot of buzz since its launch just a couple of weeks ago, and with good reason. TechCrunch reports the app has already garnered more than a million users and sent more than ten million doodles. Why? TechCrunch writes the app is setting itself apart in the crowded mobile chat market with its features:

While the messaging space is incredibly competitive with apps from Facebook, Apple’s iMessages plus the big Asian clients like Tencent’s WeChat and NHN’s Line, MessageMe thinks it can carve out a space because of the way it quickly pulls in rich media like doodles and videos [...] Basically, they think it’s a lot more expressive than standard messaging and silly as it seems, those doodles will differentiate them from the very large field of competition.

And in MessageMe’s own press release, the company compares the way its app changes communication to “[the] way email revolutionized old school mail.”

But is MessageMe really all that revolutionary? Does it really offer features that set it apart from the pack? After checking it out, our answer is a resounding “no.” Yes, it’s a very well-made app, and it deserves the success it’s getting. But it really isn’t innovative at all; nearly every feature MessageMe offers was already available in Asian mobile chat apps that have been around much longer than the American app. Here’s a quick breakdown of the feature list for MessageMe and four popular Asian chat apps; pay special attention to the launch dates:

As you can see from the chart above, music integration is the only area where MessageMe really really sets itself apart, and even that has been available in Weixin (the Chinese version of WeChat) since last fall, albeit via a third-party plugin. Most of the other features TechCrunch says MessageMe is hoping to set itself apart with have been available for years on other apps; I was sending doodles to my wife using Xiaomi’s Miliao mobile chat app all the way back in 2010. Plus, many of the Asian apps also offer features MessageMe doesn’t have yet, like WeChat’s ability to exchange digital business cards, Cubie’s “secret” disappearing messages, or Vietnamese chat app Zalo’s pictionary-style doodle game. MessageMe isn’t blazing a new frontier, it is playing catch-up.

None of this is to say that MessageMe isn’t good; it is. Personally, I found it to be a better user experience than some of these Asian apps, and if my friends adopt it, I’ll probably start using it in addition to WeChat. But let’s not kid ourselves. If the geography was reversed so that Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and Cubie were Western apps and MessageMe was an Asian app, MessageMe would be getting called a copycat and you’d see phrasing like “Asia’s WeChat” in the headlines on tech news sites.

Of course, none of these Asian apps invented the concept of mobile messaging either, but they did pioneer and popularize the multimedia-based vision of mobile messaging with things like stickers and doodles that MessageMe is now following. That’s a big part of why all of these apps have been so successful. WeChat boasts more than 300 million users, Line has more than 100 million, and KakaoTalk has more than 70 million.

It would be great if Asian apps like Line and WeChat got some recognition for their innovation, at the very least, the folks at MessageMe stopped pretending their app is revolutionary. By creating such a smooth and lightweight app, the MessageMe team has definitely given us one of the most evolved versions of the mobile chat app we’ve yet seen, and that’s great. But for anyone familiar with Asia’s popular chat apps, there’s definitely no revolution here.

I’ve been watching the messaging app battle for a few months now and it’s really hard to say who will win out by the end of the year.

There are just too many players. It reminds me of the battle between Altavista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, and others in the early days before Google arrived. One I haven’t taken a close enough look at yet is Cubie. The made-in-Taiwan messaging app has about eight million users to date, which is a humble but compelling beginning for a small bootstrapped team of 12. 40 days after launching in March 2012, Cubie already had over one million downloads, with only organic growth.

Just last week, Cubie got featured on Google’s Play Store for the customary nine days on the front page and I wanted to find out what Google saw that I’ve been missing. I talked with James Hill, Cubie’s “international messenger” about getting onto Google Play. It basically comes down to focus and design.

Are you guys basically competing with Line and WeChat?

No. We don’t want to become a platform like them. We’re not focused on China. And we’re particularly focused on being a messenger app.

What James means is all the design decisions are focused on the chatroom. This comes out of lessons the team learned from 500Startups and Dave McClure who they ran into at Echelon in 2012.

We were lucky to learn from 500Startups and some of the team even came out to the Valley to get some tips. They taught us which metrics to look out for. At the time, we weren’t looking at very useful metrics. They told us, one app can only have one or two main functions because more will be distracting for users.

Thus, Cubie, unlike Line, KakaoTalk, and Zalo has not moved in the direction of gaming platforms and timeline microblogging. Features like disappearing texts and drawing all happen within the chatroom only. They’ve stayed small and stayed lean.

When Google contacted them, they had already satisfied three of Google’s top four criteria: an app that competes globally, a high consistent star rating, favorable user comments, and design criteria. For the final aspect, Cubie had to adapt to Google’s requested design restrictions before being let on the featured section of the Play store.

Before we got on Google Play, our total downloads across iOS and Android were averaging between 15,000 to 20,000 downloads per day. After being featured on Google Play, we were getting over 50,000 downloads per day on Android alone.

So yeah, it’s helpful to get featured by Google. James’ final tip for startups trying to get lots of downloads might be useful for some readers:

We found that it was always better to have the app description in the local language, even if our app was in English. So if you want your app in France, it’s good to have it in French. Users appreciate it.

Next up for Cubie is adding the ability to share YouTube videos in the chatroom, sending pictures that can disappear (they already have text that disappears after ten seconds), and adding the ability to listen to music in the chatroom. And of course, they’re working with local artists to get localized stickers on the platform.

Personally, I think Cubie’s a pretty interesting chat app. I’m especially jazzed by disappearing texts (like Snapchat) and I like that it’s not turning into a platform like its competitors. Now whether or not this will entice users or not, is anybody’s guess. Recent growth indicates that it could, but there’s a reason the feature-packed Asian apps have tens of millions of users.

If you want to grab a download, there’s iOS and Android.

More good news for VNG today – after announcing record sales revenues – as its Vietnam-oriented Zalo messaging app has reached one million users earlier this month.

That’s a particularly strong showing for an app that got out of beta just late last year to compete with serious foreign messaging app rivals who’ve been here for much longer. Line and KakaoTalk, which have both been marketing their apps strongly, including on TV, have hit one million users each. While Viber, a slightly different app that’s a bit more like Skype, has steadily grown beyond 3.5 million users.

The Zalo team has also hinted at a few cool features on the horizon – they tell us in less than a month – including making online calls, upgrading mobile chatrooms and giving Zalo’s microblogging and photo interface a redesign.

Of course, this market is still very nascent and much of the potential lies in smartphone users who have yet to make the transition over from SMS. With more than 20 million people using smartphones in Vietnam, this market is still largely untapped.

Two issues remain for all these competing social apps: who will win over the smartphones and minds of the Vietnamese consumer; and how will they partner up with local mobile telcos? That’s something Line is already working on. I certainly think Zalo – being a Vietnam-made product – is better equipped to understand consumer minds, and it’s possible that VNG will be able to make nice with Vietnamese telcos to offer BBM-like data packages for free messaging in the future.

Japan-based app Line announced today that the company has reached another milestone by hitting the 120 million users landmark, an increase of 20 million users since January. During this opportunity, the messaging company also shared its gaming app Line Play’s progress, which has gathered around six million users worldwide since its global launch last month.

Still on Line Play, the app managed to climb its way to the top two free apps spots in several countries and platforms like in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia. The same success can’t be said about the game’s reception in Vietnam, with Line having only one million users there. Looking at the nature of Line Play’s cutesy avatars and gameplay, surely most of its six million users are female.

As we’ve said before, compared to rival KakaoTalk, Line’s key differentiator lies in its social games platform. Cho Simeon, general manager of Line Business Office, echoes that thought when it comes to Line’s push into Indonesia, saying that the gaming industry in Indonesia is growing very fast with mobile internet penetration reaching 57 percent. There are quite a few game lovers here too, with around 12 million Indonesians playing web-based games every day.

Thanks to Line’s TV ads in the country, Line for iOS and Android are now the top two chatting apps being downloaded in Indonesia; WhatsApp is another major challenger. But rival WeChat – reaching an impressive growth rate this month – is another strong contender to the title.

Messaging apps are cutting into telco profits across Asia. They allow users to forgo SMS fees and chat and call for free over mobile internet. In Indonesia, telcos want to gang up on messaging apps like Line, WeChat, and KakaoTalk. In China, telcos are equally fearful of services that piggyback on their data packages. So in Vietnam, Line wants to pre-empt the telco attack by getting into bed with them and has confirmed that a number of talks are in progress.

Recently, Line has been flooding Vietnam’s social media and TV ads with marketing for its messaging app. This has contributed to a huge surge in users outside of Japan, hitting one million just last month in Vietnam alone.

Nguyen Phong Loc, a representative from NHN Vietnam, said that they are currently in talks with Vietnamese telcos like Viettel, VinaPhone, and MobiPhone to turn Line into an add-on service for their usual 3G services. It is not clear yet what the nature of the deals will be; it could possibly be like BlackBerry’s packages for unlimited BBM messaging within a 2G/3G data deal.

The move would serve not only to warm telcos to Line so it’s not viewed as a threat, but also to give Line an even bigger advantage over its local and foreign rivals. If the deals go through, Line’s competitors could be in trouble.

(Source: ICTNews.vn, article in Vietnamese)

The China-based messaging app WeChat is seeing explosive growth in Indonesia right now. WeChat has reached the number one overall position on the country’s iOS and Android charts a few days ago. The WeChat team then said that its number of downloads increased by a factor of 30 since the TV advertising campaign began a couple of weeks ago.

WeChat is also quite popular on the nation’s number one smartphone platform, Blackberry. The app recently reached the second overall position over there as well. Back then the Tencent WeChat team told us that the app is adding 90,000 new users per day thanks to its TV ads. If the growth number is still consistent, then according to our math, WeChat should have at least one million users in Indonesia by now.

WeChat’s number one position on Android effectively kicked rival Line into second place in the overall app category. The Japan-based app is now placed at sixth in the country’s iOS apps rankings. The only messaging app rival that hasn’t launched any TV ads yet, the Korean-based company KakaoTalk, is positioned in the top 50 and top 80 in the Android and iOS app charts respectively.

Note that Line or WhatsApp could be the country’s number one messaging app due to their earlier pushes into the market here.

WeChat’s partnership with media giant MNC Media seems to be paying off in Indonesia so far – especially with its TV ads. And through the newly formed joint-venture company, MNC Tencent, the Chinese company might be able outgun Line when it comes to TV ads and public visibility in the long run. Indonesians who are looking forward to the new Blackberry 10 platform will also get a chance to use WeChat there in the near future.

Here is WeChat’s TV ad in Indonesia:

Line app has not just got people talking – it’s got them spending as well.

Regular readers will know that Japanese smartphone owners are great for spending money on apps. Now we have new data from AppAnnie, released this evening, that shows how the app monetization situation is developing in Japan and around the world. The report paints an interesting picture of amazing smartphone growth in Japan and Asia, along with some huge successes for Japanese social apps and games. Some world-beating achievements, in fact.

Cashing in on social

First up, AppAnnie notes that the social app category is third in terms of revenues around the world; social apps accounted for 30 percent more downloads in January 2013 compared to the previous year. Japanese app buyers are now spending nearly as much as those in the US on their iPhones and iPads:

Line app and the messaging explosion

The hit messaging app Line, made by NHN Japan, was the top social app for iOS revenue in Jansuary 2013, pipping Whatsapp to the post. With over 100 million registered users (just under half being in Japan), Line is the most downloaded social app in Japan – plus it’s the top grossing app Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Line is also crowned the top non-game app in terms of monthly revenue on both iTunes and Google Play in January. It is the only Asian creation on the iOS apps list that’s dominated by American apps. Apple’s Pages app is second; Pandora Radio is third.

KakaoTalk comes out fighting against Line in the chat app battle, proving itself to be the third-best app for revenue on Android.

GungHo for gaming

As for gaming developers, Japan was once again on top. GungHo Online, with its 14 games, was the outright top publisher by revenue on iOS anywhere in the world. Its Puzzles and Dragons title was a particular hit, helping to push GungHo’s market cap to US$3.3 billion – higher than that of Zynga, or compatriot gaming rival GREE. As GungHo’s own financials point out, it made $92 million in gaming sales in January 2013 alone – a figure that’s already 30 percent of its 2012 revenue total. GungHo also sells PC games and console games, but the company recently pointed out that it’s now making more from iOS and Android.

Indeed, the report points out that Puzzles and Dragons was the top monetizing game on both iOS and Android across the globe.

Seventh on the top iOS publisher’s list is NHN (which is spread over Korea and Japan), boosted by the huge success from Line app and its social gaming platform. That’s shown with games like Line Birzzle, which rocketed to the top of iOS and Android store rankings across Asia. Let’s look at the scene on the iTunes App Store:

Asian Android domination

Even more Asian developers rocked the Android platform. GungHo was top publisher in Google Play too, with NHN popping up in second place. In fact, all but one of the leading ten publishers by revenue on Android are from Asia – it’s pretty amazing. It also shows why gaming is the best way to bring in the cash:

Other famliar names on the list include the rival social gaming platforms DeNA and GREE. Plus there’s a remarkable performance from Korea’s SundayToz team to make it into the top ten with only one game – that’s Anipang, which has been a huge hit especially on KakaoTalk’s own social gaming platform.

Anipang pops up as fourth in terms of gaming revenue on Android, just below the similar Line Pop title.

Game on for Asian developers

Ultimately, it’s a remarkable performance for Japanese and South Korean developers on both iOS and Android – breaking into social whilst also building up huge expertise in casual mobile gaming.

Japan recently passed the US to become the top country for Google Play revenue, so developers in the region can prosper among their regional audience – and break out across the globe. Well, in terms of monetizing power, if not necessarily worldwide market reach.

Japan-made chat app Line announced today that the company has released two new games onto its social gaming platform, called Dragon Flight and Wind Runner. These now work with the app in several countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore. Interestingly, rival app KakaoTalk also has the same Dragon Flight game on its platform, but Line beat its Korea-based company in making the popular game available on many of those countries first.

Dragon Flight is a shooter game which lets you use skills, magic, and items while flying with your choice of dragon. Wind Runner is a side-scrolling running game. Both games’ objective is to stay alive as long you can while dodging or fending off enemies that come at you.

In a very short time, the games have gotten quite popular here in Indonesia. Dragon Flight is ranked fifth in Indonesia’s iTunes App Store overall games category while Wind Runner is ranked ninth.

Line up for games

In the intense chat app battleground, support for mobile games like these can play a crucial part in determining the winner. KakaoTalk currently has three games available in Indonesia, while Line now has launched 12 games here already.

Line’s thirteenth game will be made available soon in the form of TinyFarm. The minus side of having lots of games is that users get an increasing amount of social game requests from all their buddies on Line (remember how infuriating that used to be on Facebook?).

The Japanese company is playing it very aggressively here. Last month the company aired its national TV ads campaign and has so far taken the lead in Indonesia’s messaging chat app battle according to Arbitron Mobile.

Here are the links for Dragon Flight on iOS and Android. You can download Wind Runner for iOS and Android too. A Line representative tells us that Wind Runner is available worldwide except for Korea.

Credit: BlackberryCool.com

A lot of my friends have had their fair share of complaints about the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) service in Indonesia, especially about the service’s lagginess. But still, a lot of them are wired into using BBM every single day, despite strong competition from apps like Line, Whatsapp, WeChat, and KakaoTalk. How deeply rooted is BBM in the Indonesian messaging ecosystem? The answer might lie in its importance in people’s professions.

I asked a few of my friends from four different professions for a layman’s take on Blackberry and BBM. They’ve got some insights on how important BBM has become integral in their life and work, and yet how frustrated they are about it.

BBM at work

Blackberry is well known as the phone for enterprise and it is very true here in Indonesia.

A journalist friend of mine uses BBM every day, mainly because of the journalist’s BBM groups. Inside the group, they can get the latest news tips and other helpful information like sources’ contact info from colleagues and other journalists. A salesperson and an online merchant use it every day to communicate with their customers, as well as for advertising their products through BBM. Another friend of mine who works in an office uses BBM for business communication purposes.

They all tell me that their friends inside the same profession are using Blackberry phones for work. Even those who did not use Blackberry at first would eventually be forced to buy one to support their job.

It’s also quite normal for all of them to restart their Blackberry phones – running things like BB OS6 or OS7 – when the devices crash every now and then.

Interestingly, quite a few of my friends who use their Blackberry phones for work are also using an Android smartphone at the same time. They use the Android phone for messaging apps like Line and WhatsApp, particularly for their inner circles of friends.

People who don’t like their Blackberry phones

Let me break down a few insights I got from the interviews:

• BBM has become deeply connected to people’s jobs, and it’s very hard to replace that anytime soon. Merchants and salespeople won’t ditch their exhaustive lists (which can reach over 1,000 contacts for some merchants) of customers on BBM, and journalists won’t ditch the chance to get valuable and timely information either. Those lists can’t be exported to the other messaging apps easily, and the network effect keeps people mutually bound to BBM groups right now.

• A lot of Blackberry users are not satisfied with their phones. For example, my online merchant friend regularly resets his Blackberry phone twice a day, and my other friend’s phone crashes often, apparently because her call history is too full.

• There’s a growing trend where people use another phone (most likely an Android phone) for personal usage, while using a Blackberry phone for work purposes. Messaging apps like Line, WeChat, and KakaoTalk are popular, and are perceived as working a lot better on Android – giving users things like animated emoticons and video calling. These tend to be used more for personal circles rather than work purposes.

According to a report from Arbitron Mobile, Line is currently the number one messaging app in Indonesia. While WeChat is gaining around 90,000 new users by the day in the country thanks to its new national TV ads. KakaoTalk, meanwhile, recently reported that it had increased its user numbers by 288 percent from January to February.

• Most of my friends, who are mostly in the middle-income bracket, don’t really care about the new Blackberry 10 handset. They prefer other platforms like Android and iOS. The middle class segment of society represents quite a lot of people who have considerable buying power.

The allure of Android

So what will happen? The new Blackberry Z10 in Indonesia is battling against the Samsung Galaxy S3 (soon to be the S4, which will be launched later this month) and iPhone 5 for the country’s wealthier users. But they’re the minority of the populace here anyway. The majority of the population, who are in the lower-income demographic,would opt to purchase more affordable Android devices because they see that the OS, together with its apps’ ecosystem and games, outperforms Blackberry handsets in the same price range. Or perhaps they’ll buy older Blackberry models since there’s nothing for BB10 available at the usual cheap prices of below $200.

These people, targeted by national TV ads by Line and WeChat, will start to use those apps and find them more fun (so long as they switch to using those apps on Android or iPhone) than BBM.

Groups feature is the key to success

I think the groups feature will play a major role in defining which messaging apps will come on top in Indonesia. Those groups will only be made when people believe that there are enough members inside the messaging app and its ecosystem.

In the end, young Indonesians will choose to either buy a telco’s BBM package or the cheaper messaging apps’ package for various Android phones. And the transition starts there – leading to the point where, eventually, one of these apps and its groups function becomes a full-featured enough replacement for getting work done. That’s when the once irreplaceable BBM groups and communities will be dead in the water.

But perhaps we will see cheaper Blackberry 10 handsets unveiled before the end of this year. Can that be the saviour of the Canadian company? Maybe. But by that time, quite a lot of people in Indonesia might have transitioned to other platforms and other messaging apps. They’ve waited long enough.

I’d advise messaging apps vying for a place in Indonesia to start convincing communities, both personal and professional, to build groups on their platform. It’s the messaging secret sauce in this part of the world. And we understand that this is exactly what KakaoTalk and WeChat are moving towards in Indonesia.

Viber’s got 3.5 million users in Vietnam. Besides Whatsapp, whose numbers are still not confirmed, Viber is crushing everybody else in the messaging app battle in Vietnam. We know that both Line and KakaoTalk have one million users each in the country, so Viber (which also does VoIP calls, like Skype) is well ahead.

To uncover their strategy in this market, we talked to the CEO of Cyprus-based Viber Media, Talmon Marco. He explains that Viber adds 20,000 users per day, and in the month of February it added another 500,000 users. So I had to ask Marco, what do you think is the reason for your explosive February growth? Turns out, it’s a trend:

We do not see February as “explosive growth” but rather as ongoing growth. For example in January we added 390,000 users, in December 360,000, and in Nov 290,000 – so numbers are ramping up. My guess is that in March we will add about 600,000 users.

These numbers are especially compelling when you consider that Viber has not actively promoted the chat app in Vietnam. In fact, the startup does not actively promote the app in any of the countries it operates in.

Marco also commented on types of activations, saying that Viber sees more activations on iOS than on Android in Vietnam, but only by a very small margin.

Lastly, Vietnamese users will be happy to hear about what’s coming in Viber 3.0:

As announced a few weeks ago, Vietnamese support is coming soon with Viber 3.0. We will be looking to further support the local market with additional features.

By the way, Viber recently announced it has over 175 million users worldwide. And e27 caught that Viber’s got over a third of its users in Asia. These recent numbers from Viber will certainly be a concern for Line, KakaoTalk, Zalo – three rivals who have a confirmed user-base of one million users or less – and any other chat app hoping to gain the attention of Vietnam’s young mobile users.

Sidenote: Marco has assured me that in Viber 3.1, the team will be allowing users to take out the notifications I complained about in my previous article.

The big number, they tell us, is due to the company’s latest TV advertising and local events, and puts them on the map as a very strong competitor in Vietnam’s messaging app fight.

For a refresher, here are the latest confirmed numbers in Vietnam: KakaoTalk is at one million, Line’s at one million, Zalo is at 700,000, and Whatsapp, WeChat and Viber, who are all strong contenders, have not confirmed any numbers.

All in all, this makes for a particularly intense battle. At last count, Vietnam’s smartphone users make up about one-third of the mobile phone population – so that’s over 30 million smartphone users. I’d estimate that the six chat apps mentioned only account for less than ten million of that 30 million. There’s still much more growth to be had, and still a market leader to be decided.

Line, the mobile messaging app out of Japan, just hit one million users in Vietnam. This is a big milestone for the company, which has just over 100 million global users, more than half of whom are outside Japan. Line is one of many apps fighting for users across Southeast Asia and the globe, such as Whatsapp and China’s WeChat.

WeChat was recently under attack by local netizens due to Sino-Vietnam tensions, which will have hurt its reputation in the Vietnamese market – and perhaps damaged its user numbers. Another challenger, KakaoTalk from Korea, is still so new that it hasn’t gained major traction – last I heard KakaoTalk was at 150,000 users in Vietnam (UPDATED I wrote 15,000 but the actual number was 150,000). It’s safe to say that Line’s three biggest competitors in the country are Viber, Whatsapp, and the locally-made Zalo.

Viber and Whatsapp have dominated Vietnamese texting for over a year now. Being first movers, it makes sense that they’re on top. But with Asian messaging apps coming in with localized and fun animated stickers, it was only a matter of time before the plain-looking Western messaging apps would start to lose ground.

On the other hand, Zalo, Vietnam’s local competitor, now sits at 700,000 users and growing. Next month, we’re bound to see the service hit one million. So it’s down to Zalo versus Line in this nation. Who’s going to win it?

Currently, I think Line is much more pretty – it’s got lots of nicely designed stickers and a slick interface. Zalo’s got some cool features but needs to catch up in terms of UI/UX (it got a new Retina-ready icon last month), but with local support and a cool drawing function, it’s a strong contender. Although Line has a head start, and I may be biased, I think Zalo may prevail.

Note: I use Whatsapp and Zalo mostly. I used to use Viber, but it sucks because it requires users to turn on notifications in order to use. I don’t want to be distracted by annoying notifications, I just need a badge icon.

(Source: Pandora.vn)

The fight is on! Back in December, there was a discussion event among Indonesian telcos about what they should do regarding so-called OTT (over the top) players choking their profits. OTT, by the way, is a term telcos use to refer to third-party products that uses telcos’ infrastructure – apps like Line and KakaoTalk. It seems that the Indonesian telcos have made up their mind to beat these OTT players at their own game by brewing up a plan to build their own cross-platform messaging app called “Messaging Indonesia” together with the Indonesian Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (BRTI).

The big idea here is for Indonesians to use more local messaging apps which can save the local telcos more money as routing will happen inside the country. Local companies like handset manufacturers Nexian and Esia already have their own BBM-like services. Surely the telcos have more than enough capital to build their own messaging apps too.

Indotelko cited a BRTI representative yesterday saying that the challenge here for the telcos is to set aside their egos and cooperate with each other. So far, during the preliminary talk about this plan, the Indonesian telcos have agreed to work on this platform together. But a question that they need to answer is how they plan to build it together. Will they subcontract a smaller company to build it or take teams from each of their own companies? This can well be a management nightmare.

Enemy of my enemy is my friend

In the past, Indonesian operators were at war with each other by launching new telco tariffs and packages to beat the competition. But this time, they all share the same problem.

The latest report from Arbitron Mobile found that Indonesians were using a lot of VoIP and chat apps last month, beating even the usage rate from countries like the UK, the US, Germany, France, and even China. What messaging apps do Indonesians use most? It’s Japan-based Line. While there isn’t a deadline yet for the telcos to speed things up, it is clear that this has become one of the biggest issues among the Indonesian operators.

If Messaging Indonesia does come to fruition, and if it offers cheaper messaging services compared to the current chatting package deals, like Telkomsel’s Chat and Share, then it can definitely be a serious threat to foreign messaging apps’ plans for dominance in Indonesia. On the other hand, apps like Line, WeChat, and KakaoTalk have become more than just chatting apps and also feature things like social gaming integration, animated emoticons, and voice/video calling. So it’ll be hard for telcos to create appealing and cool features like those.

Indonesian operators are not the only ones thinking about this plan. Singapore’s StarHub and SingTel are also planning to build their own messaging apps. Starhub’s app is planned to arrive in the second half of this year while SingTel should be launching its app in the coming months. Chinese telco China Mobile has actually built its own messaging app years ago even before WhatsApp called Fetion. But it now seems to be running behind the newer and more innovative apps like WeChat.

It’s not totally unheard of for a local player to take on international entrances, local Vietnamese Zalo, for example, has taken on the likes of WeChat and Line in Vietnam to rise to the top of the Apple Appstore. It’ll be exciting to see what kind of messaging apps the multi-billion dollar telcos can come up with in the near future. One thing is certain though – competition sparks better quality and maybe even lower prices.

(Source: Indotelko via DailySocial)

Japan-made messaging app Line is keen to chat up users in emerging markets by launching a version of its app for the budget Nokia Asha phones next month. NHN Japan says today that it’s “exciting news for all you Nokia fans” and highlights that this move is aimed at recruiting new Line users in Southeast Asia especially, such as Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Cambodia.

The announcement from the Line team today, as noticed by TheNextWeb, reassures Nokia Asha users that four types of sticker sets will come free with the app, and the Asha version will also include one-to-one voice chats. Line is already available on (the old) BlackBerry OS, giving it access to nations like Indonesia and helping the messaging app to fight against the iconic BBM service.

Line has over 100 million users so far, and is up against rivals old and new, from Whatsapp to WeChat. Indeed, both those have been available on Nokia’s Symbian platform for some time, so Line is playing catch-up.

Nearly 59 percent of Line’s users are overseas, and it has already been doing well in markets like Thailand and Taiwan (over 10 million in each) thanks to the iPhone and Android apps.

The Line app for Asha phones seems to have come about due to a specific deal with Nokia, though it’s not clear what are the terms of the agreement. A few months ago, Nokia revealed that Indonesia is its second-largest market in Asia.

The Japan-made messaging app Line is once again challenging Facebook, this time by adding a mini social network for its 100 million-plus users to try out. Called Line Band, it’s a social app for friends to arrange to meet, share albums of photos, state your mood, and remember your buddies’ birthdays.

The new Line Band app was launched as a standalone app for iPhone and Android a few days ago, and was noticed by TheNextWeb team earlier today. It’s actually more like Path than anything else, or a sort of stripped-down only-on-mobile Facebook. Line Band uses the visual cue of a paper notebook, replete with customizable covers and ribbons. The new app can also be used to form social groups – Bands – and you can set notifications and events within your Bands:

In some ways, Line is now emulating the China-made WeChat app, which has a mini social network baked into its regular app in a section called Moments. As its name suggests, Moments is a lot like Path too, with an element of Weibo thrown in as well.

But Line Band seems to go beyond what the other apps are doing, and makes its ‘group messaging’ app a lot more adept at group socializing in a much broader sense. It’s a great-looking app as well, so hopefully it’ll force WeChat and some other rivals to update their ancient-looking and laggy apps.

Line Band is here for iPhone, and here for those on Android.

Facebook is under siege from every direction. Snapchat’s picking away at the young sexting market, Twitter dominated TV sets at the Superbowl, and Path is building a tiny fortress for close friends. That’s not all – the one-billion-user giant’s got nuclear warheads from Asia to watch out for too.

Asia is now a crucial battleground in the mobile messaging wars. Both in terms of user-base, and because so many innovating social apps are being built in the region. One third of all Viber users are in Asia, Facebook Messenger is visibly becoming more like China’s WeChat, and the originally Netherlands-based Nimbuzz moved its headquarters to India. Even Kik, the Canada-based mobile messaging app with over 30 million users in America and Europe, has started to include more multimedia content in its app, a feature the CEO admits he was observing in Asian apps first. And then there’s Line from Japan and KakaoTalk from Korea, which are both platforms for social gaming. Facebook really is under attack from every direction.

In my mobile messaging app list, I outlined most of the features that make these apps special. Stickers, broader social media integration, microblogging, mobile gaming, celebrity accounts, and monetization all seem trivial at first, but are actually hammering at Facebook’s empire.

Here’s why: Stickers replace emoticons. Microblogging embedded in chat apps replaces status updates and Instagram. Mobile games replace Zynga-like web games. Celebrity and brand messaging app accounts replace Facebook Pages. And monetization via promoted posts isn’t as compelling as mobile commerce. And there’s more.

The Asian advantage

Mobile dominates Asia, in a way that the web browser dominated the West in the early 2000’s. Just this week, China overtook the US as the biggest smartphone market. This means companies are rushing to Asian mobile markets to secure a dominant position down the line. It’s not like the US, where internet traffic is transitioning from web to mobile. In Asia, much of the internet traffic is jumping straight into mobile.

The web across Asia is still fragmented and young. Asia didn’t make a steady progression from one major technology startup to the next, littering the online landscape with useful online services along the way. Asian consumers don’t yet have the breadth of access as the many online services the Silicon Valley tailored to the American market. For example, Facebook will not step into Amazon territory without significant opportunities. The landscape is more compartmentalized.

Thus, chatting apps are becoming platforms for anything they can technically handle that doesn’t already exist as a dominant consumer web service. So Line pushes games, KakaoTalk pushes mobile commerce, and WeChat pushes brand and celebrities. Areas like gaming, e-commerce, and communication are still untapped real estate. I’m sure there’s more to come from these Asian apps – perhaps mobile payments.

And with Asia’s population, all the data these apps can collect on users, if read right, can only enhance their interfaces.

Immediate versus asynchronous communication

Chat apps record users by daily usage, and Facebook reports users by monthly usage.

Twitter and Facebook are still the dominant social media platforms in the world, but they’re characterized by asynchronous communication. Status updates stay online forever and friends or followers can respond days to months after you first posted.

Texting, on the other hand, requires an immediate response. In Vietnam, for example, friends will complain if you don’t respond to a message in these apps within 24 hours, others will get anxious if you haven’t responded after an hour. This immediacy is also baked into things like mobile games and mobile commerce.

Asian users want “now” and “live”. They also want intimate and private. And the truth is, so does everybody else. This is where chat apps crush asynchronous social media and is exactly why Mark Zuckerberg is so eager to transition Facebook onto mobile.

Predictions

To me, we’re looking at a significant assault on Zuckerberg’s empire. And the weapons in Asian chat apps’ arsenal are not something Facebook has to deal with at home. But ignoring these rivals would be fatal, as giants like WeChat and NHN’s Line start to look more at the US market. So what’s next?

Two factors that I think will spur Asian chat app innovation are the fact that there is no clearly dominant messaging app across Asia and all of the chat apps in Asia are attacking each other’s markets. KakaoTalk, Line, WeChat and others are all battling each other in their home markets of Korea, Japan, and China, but they’re also pushing into the nascent Southeast Asian markets. They will be forced to out-innovate each other to survive. This will give users plenty of options and a lot of features. Like Cubie adding Snapchat-like abilities to its app, and Zalo adding a Draw Something function, there is no reason to believe that Asian chat apps will not steal the latest in tech trends and bake them as features into their apps. This could change on a week-by-week basis. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone copied Vine’s six-second video format (oh wait…WeChat already allows sending video clips with a 2MB time limit) and put it in their messaging app.

On the other side, Facebook isn’t going to take this lying down. Not to be outdone by Asian stickers, Facebook is collaborating with a Pixar artist to redesign the emoticon set (unfortunately for them, animation is an afterthought; most chat apps already have animated stickers). It has also recently updated the Facebook Messenger app with audio notes. Plus it more recently built Facebook Poke that competes with SnapChat, to no avail. But I see no evidence that Facebook is monetizing its mobile experience with games and m-commerce yet.

Given the burgeoning Asian chat app market at present, along with Facebook’s inability to take down Snapchat in native Silicon Valley, there is no reason to believe that Asian messaging apps will leave Facebook in the dust. So the truth is, it’s Asian chat apps that are saying “Welcome Facebook, Seriously.”

With the numbers Rick released on mobile messaging apps growth, and Willis’ post on how heated the mobile messaging battle is getting, I thought I’d take a look at the killer features that make messaging apps so strong with younger smartphone users in the region. They’re all a big threat to Facebook Messenger (which seems to be imitating Asian chat apps in some respects) and the newer Facebook Poke.

Why are these apps so hot? It all boils down to the virtual stickers and being so multimedia and immediate. This is where Asian apps are innovating like crazy.

Of course, all messaging apps have a set of features that mark them as messaging apps, so we’ll just note them in a quick list and move on:

• Instant messaging with ‘sending’ and ‘received’ notifications
• Group chat
• Sending a photo or video (WeChat and Zalo are the only ones that offer Instagram-like photo filters)
• Changing your chat area’s wallpaper
• Leaving an audio note or message
• Sharing contact info
• Sharing your location
• Live video or voice calling
• A microblogging feature like Path.

Now, I’ll go through the ten most prominent chat apps in Asia, and show you what each one has that makes them stand out from the others.

Chikka from the Philippines

Released: October 2010
Users: 500,000+

The Philippines, where foreign-made chat apps like Whatsapp and Viber rule the roost, also has its own messaging app called Chikka. The app is currently sitting in 28th position in the Apple App Store in the social networking category, which means it’s had hundreds of thousands of downloads. The app doesn’t have any notable additions beyond the basics. And hasn’t grown much over the past three years.

Comm from Japan

Released: October 2012
Users: ~5 million

Comm, created by social gaming platform DeNa, came out in October last year and already has five million users to date. The app is also the only one in this list that sports a left hand side tab bar, similar to the Facebook mobile app.

Cubie from Taiwan.

Released: March 2012
Users: ~5 million

Cubie centers its chat experience around allowing users to draw pictures (and to add text bubbles to those pictures) and send animated GIFs, which is not a very common function. Cubie also recently added a Snapchat/Facebook Poke-like feature, allowing users to send messages that disappear within 10 seconds. Only Cubie has this among the Asian-made apps, and it’s awesome. Cubie recently raised funding and joined 500 Startups’ incubation program.

GREE Messenger from Japan (only available in Australia, New Zealand, and India)

Released: February 2013
Users: 50,000+

The Japanese game platform juggernaut is stepping up its game by entering the chat app arena. It’s too soon to tell with the numbers, and the app only carries the basic features for now, but it’s bound to start integrating with the backing of GREE’s many game developers and designers.

KakaoTalk from South Korea.

Released: March 2010
Users: 75 million

Kakaotalk allows users to create and schedule an event with friends in the chat window. A feature that surprisingly no one else has. KakaoTalk is open source, thus allowing users to create their own themes. It also allows users to download a separate game app and play with Kakaotalk friends. KakaoTalk has also added localized stickers for Lunar New Year, and even pushed K-pop star stickers into the spotlight. It also has animated stickers and even ones with sound. And the most cool feature of all? The app allows users to buy vouchers for friends that can be redeemed at cooperating merchants. For example, I could buy you a coffee through the chat app, and you could show the coupon, and get it at your local coffee shop. Unfortunately, this has only been released in South Korea.

KakaoTalk also has social gaming integration, though that’s currently only running for users in Japan and South Korea.

Line from the Japanese team under South Korean company, NHN.

Released: June 2011
Users: 100 million

Line allows users to send cards, drawings, pictures, and play games. Games have been a huge factor in drawing users to the chat platform. Unfortunately, these features can only be accessed after users download separate apps. It makes much more sense to me to get them natively in the app. But this hasn’t stopped the chat app from accumulating a massive base of users. The design is really nice and it sells $2 sticker packs. Line also pushes celebrities’, companies’, and even lotteries’ info to users’ chat screens.

Its makers, NHN Japan, plan to focus even more on Line in 2013, and will even spin it off into a separate company.

Nimbuzz from India via the Netherlands

Released: November 2008
Users: 100 million

Although the app is originally a Dutch company, it moved its headquarters to India in mid-2011. The app is relatively simple like Chikka and GREE Messenger but offers integration with online chat applications like Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Facebook, and Windows Live Messenger. It also has a feature where users can make international calls. Some might say this is more like an older style instant messenger (IM) app.

WeChat from China’s Tencent.

Released: January 2011
Users: 300 million

WeChat allows users to access add-ons, like Battery Doctor and Find Nearby, which users can install (or disable) just like browser extensions. Plus, WeChat has live video and voice calling, in addition to the option of sending shorter voice or video clips. This is perhaps the most multimedia of all messaging apps.

It also offers a web interface so you can send messages via any web browser – it’s activated with a neat QR code. In its newest update last week, WeChat added song recognitionc (like SoundHound) and voice chatrooms.

Plus, WeChat also has a broader social network inside it, called Moments, which is basically a lot like Path.

WeChat employs a cool feature for users to find new friends by shaking their phones. If I shake my phone and you shake yours at the same time, we’ll be able to chat with each other. Also, it lets users find people by checking who else is using the app within a one-to-two kilometer radius. Alongside its massive user-base and local Chinese advantage, WeChat is taking on Whatsapp and Line in Southeast Asia, and is pushing into global markets as well.

Zalo from Vietnam.

Released: August 2012
Users: 500,000+

Zalo is Vietnam’s homegrown challenger. It’s made by sVNG (formerly Vina Gaming) and has been accumulating users at breakneck speeds. It’s already at the top of the Vietnamese iOS App Store. Zalo allows users to send drawings natively in the app, and allows users to play a Vietnamese version of Draw Something. It’s also got animated stickers with sound like KakaoTalk, featured mainly for Lunar New Year.

Zalo, like WeChat, allows users to find new friends within a five kilometer radius. But, hungry for more users, it also lets users to go into topic-specific group chats to find friends. Built on the still burgeoning forum culture in Vietnam.

Relationship Apps

A special mention goes to relationship apps, which are decidedly niche messaging apps. Given the relative success of these smaller apps and the increasingly crowded space created by the mains apps discussed above, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more “vertical messaging apps” that cater to specific segments of the texting market. After all, we already have flirting apps, and now the “self-destructing” messaging apps. These relationship apps are sort of the opposite of those other apps, and are all about trust and intimacy.

Between from South Korea.

Released: November 2011
Users: 2 million+

With Between, on top of allowing users to text each other as in the big general apps, it also allows users to create albums together, write cute notes to each other, and remember events like anniversaries together.

Between recently raised nearly $3 million in funding.

Lovebyte from Singapore

Released: July 2012
Users: 40,000+ (but apparently enough to crash its servers)

Like Between, Lovebyte also allows users to create albums, notes, save dates, and even add milestones like the first date. Plus, it can store details like a couple’s favorite movie, and even displays how many days you and your loved one have been together. A cool feature that the app has on the side is allowing users to send each other scratchcards. It’s basically a two-sided flashcard that you send to your loved one. You put text on both sides, and your loved one scratches the other side to see a love note that you put on the other side. A cute and interesting idea for young couples in love. Lovebyte launched on Android a couple of weeks ago.

The Innovation Continues

As you can see, this list is jam-packed with innovative ideas for communicating and connecting with friends, family, and loved ones. From KakaoTalk’s mobile payment vouchers to WeChat’s ’Look Around’ feature to Zalo’s version of Draw Something, there are so many cool things that users are able to do in these messaging apps. With the battle raging on, I’m sure companies will be using 2013 to pump out even more cool features, and the user numbers will just keep doubling.

It’s all part of what social gaming expert Serkan Toto calls a “big shake up” at the massive Japanese web company, which is itself a subsidiary of Korean’s NHN (KRX:035420). It means that NHN Japan’s gaming business will be independent under the provisional “Hangame” moniker, while all the rest – such as Line, the Livedoor web portal, and the Naver Matome news aggregator – will be under Line Corp. A date hasn’t been set for the official restructuring.

There will also be a third business dedicated to Line’s international operations, which bears the tentative “Line Plus Corp” name. More than half of Line’s users are outside of Japan – with, for example, 12 million in Thailand alone – so it’s a key battleground to wrest young users away from Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger in markets such as Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. Line app even has some star ambassadors and users, such as the rapper Snoop Dogg, or whatever his name is this week.

Control of the new Line Corp will be split between the Korean and Japanese bases, with 40 percent of it operated by NHN in Korea. That doesn’t sound very efficient. To use what might seem to be a bizarre comparison with the world of Formula 1, the official Honda and Toyota F1 teams struggled (and then quit the sport) in large part due to maintaining a very Japanese hierarchy across two nations. The social media world is every bit as cut-throat and fast-moving (and prone to crashes) as Formula 1, so there isn’t time for decisions to be tossed between two complex corporate structures.

Anyway, NHN Japan is clearly reshuffling to focus on Line, as well as to bolster its social gaming platform that’s so reliant on Line.

Another challenger to Line, especially in Southeast Asia, is the China-made WeChat app, which has 300 million users thanks to its large home user-base. The makers of WeChat, Tencent, also restructured recently so as to focus more on its superbly-named MIG – its ‘mobile internet group’.

(Source: Serkan Toto)

If Vietnam’s got a heated battle for messaging app dominance, where is the Vietnamese contender? Well, just a few days ago, Zalo released a big update to its mobile messaging app (on Android, iOS and Symbian) and it has been blasting Facebook and Zing Me with marketing. The update has made the app significantly faster, added a VIP microblogging feature, fixed a bunch of bugs that were making the app unstable, and finally added a Retina app icon. I think Vietnam’s finally got a viable product to contest foreign apps like KakaoTalk, WeChat, Line, Whatsapp, and Viber.

To be sure, Zalo isn’t as sophisticated as the others. Some of the stickers aren’t as pretty, and there aren’t any games or mobile payments, but the beta was released last August and the first full release was in November. Give it time.

Just a 30-minute motorbike ride away from District 1, I visited VNG headquarters to meet the Zalo team. There’s a full floor dedicated to the team. After sitting down with Vuong Quang Khai, the project leader, I quickly understood why:

Zalo is a combination of Zing and Alo (Vietnamese for hello on the phone). If you look at all of our VNG branding before, it’s Zing Mp3, Zing Me, Zing Game, etc. we always featured the full word, Zing, as prominent. Zing is associated with web services. So Zalo is a step away from that. In fact, the original name for Zalo was going to be Zing Talk, but we decided to forget that. New all the way. Last year, we decided that “mobile first” was a really important strategy for us moving forward. The mobile market in Vietnam is huge and it is also where Facebook is still entering and not dominant. The name symbolizes the departure from the old and moving powerfully into something new.

The big staff reflects this renewal. In true Apple style, the Zalo team poached team members from other projects like Zing Me to build Zalo.

A lot of our users were asking, why hasn’t Zing Me been updated in awhile? It’s because we moved all our efforts into Zalo.

In a way, you could say Zalo is the new face of VNG. The full Zalo team is about 80 people, with 40 engineers and the business development, marketing, design, and backend support. Khai says that one of the reasons the engineering is so big is dealing with scaling and a dedicated push to mobile. Khai elaborates on what aspect of mobile messaging the Zalo team emphasizes most.

As far as mobile messaging goes, there are three main areas: communication, social, and entertainment. Each app has its strengths. Viber is strong in communication via its free calls and SMS. Line is strong in entertainment, KakaoTalk is strong in social. For Zalo, we want to push communication because we believe that is what is most important to users. Once that is solid, we will move into other features.

It’s only a matter of time, and most likely a very short time, before we start to see games on Zalo. VNG, after all, used to mean “Vina Gaming” and the company has strong roots in the gaming industry. VNG currently has 5 game studios that produce games and some are already testing mobile games like the very successful Skygarden.

As of late January 2013, Zalo has over 500,000 users. Zing Me, VNG’s social media platform, has over 8 million. But Zing Me is targeted at a teen audience, whereas Zalo is looking at a broader market with people between 20 to 30 years old.

In addition to chatting over the mobile network, Zalo also has group chat for specific topics like love, events, and education. Obviously a throwback to the popularity of Vietnamese forums, and not a prominent feature on foreign messaging apps. With a team of Vietnamese designers, the app also features a plethora of Vietnamese-specific stickers. Like WeChat, Zalo also has the ability to search for new friends nearby and and to follow celebrities or friends via microblogging. And of course, there are photos; an app can’t survive in the 21st century without them.

With Zalo’s latest update, it’s foreseeable that the app will become a significant contender in 2013 for the typing thumbs of Vietnamese mobile users.

You can download the apps on iOS, Android, and Symbian here.

• Line has 41.5 million registered users in Japan – This is the one which stands out the most to me, because given that recent estimates put Japanese entire population of smartphone users at around 40 million as well ¹, it means that Line is pretty close to being a ubiquitous mobile application in the country.
• 12.3 million users in Thailand, and 11.8 million users in Taiwan — both surprisingly high numbers!
• Reached 100 million users in just 19 months – This is faster than Twitter (49 months) and Facebook (54 months).

And while those numbers are impressive enough on their own, the application’s potential as a gaming platform is equally stunning. Yesterday we pointed out that its recent games Line Pop and Line Bubble have reached 20 million and 10 million users respectively, thanks to NHN Japan being able to distribute them so easily via its chat app platform.

at Line HQ, just before the milestone was reached

As we mentioned in our post yesterday, NHN Japan’s Line application has been slowly creeping up on the impressive milestone of 100 million users recently. And it appears as though the company has just broken through, as its user counter (which it set up a few days ago to mark the occasion) has just rolled over.

Over on the Line Facebook page, they’ve been sharing pictures of what looks to be a big soiree (see above) over at Line headquarters in Shibuya, Tokyo. Lime Line green balloons are decorating the place, and a big projection of the user count is featured on a wall. the company also has a commemorative video which you can see below. Some of the testimonials come across as a super scripted, but it’s still sort of neat.

Yesterday, we took a look at the major players in the mobile messaging wars, and Line ranks right up there with WeChat (300 million) and Kakao Talk (72 million) as the major players in Asia. But I expect their reach will begin to solidify in western markets this year too.

I can’t help but wonder if there is a clash with Facebook on the horizon, as the social giant begins to roll out free voice calls, which have been a major selling point for the afore mentioned chat apps. If Facebook can get its mobile act together, its offerings might begin to overlap significantly with many of these chat apps.

Line will soon hit 100M users

Yesterday we pointed out that Chinese chat application WeChat (known as Weixin in Chinese) had surpassed the 300 million user mark. And just yesterday evening, apparently not wanting to be outdone, NHN Japan’s Line put a teaser site online saying that it would soon pass the 100 million user milestone.

Both feats are astounding, considering that these chat apps have only been around for a relatively short time. Given that we now have reasonably up to date figures for many of the major chat app players, let’s take a moment to compare their progress as we head into 2013:

Of course, WhatsApp is not included on this list. Its user numbers are tough to pinpoint, but word on the street is that they total between 200 and 300 million. It will be interesting to see if WhatsApp can continue as a paid service, with so many free up-and-comers. Many of these Asian players are expected to make a stronger push into Western markets this year, so I would expect the folks at WhatsApp are worried. I don’t use the application, but my colleague Willis also expressed some skepticism about WhatsApp recently.

There are other new players on the scene as well, including DeNA’s Comm which recently announced it had five million downloads as of this past December. GREE Messenger just burst onto the scene as well, although its offering is still sort of beta, and I expect a marketing blitz will come sometime soon, starting in Japan.

Line app experienced crazy growth last year, and looks set to surpass 100 million global users sometime this month. To hit that milestone, and to get onto the smartphones of more kids in North America, NHN Japan has persuaded the rapper Snoop Dogg to give the app plenty of shout-outs. Not only that, Line app now has a range of Snoop Dogg virtual stickers that are available for download (pictured above).

Snoop Dogg has been promoting – or pimping – Line via Twitter to his 10.4 million followers, shrewdly using a couple of corporate-approved hashtags:

make sure to download tha new free snoop sticker set on tha #LINEapp 2day!!!! uhearme!!!! #expressmore

— Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) January 15, 2013

If you follow Snoop within Line, you’ll notice him making the same pitch there.

When Line app reached 70 million users back in October, NHN Japan revealed that just over half of them (about 37.4 million) were overseas. Anecdotally, it would seem that most of those are scattered across Southeast Asia, particularly in places like Thailand and Taiwan (and thanks to Taipei-based @Tortue for the screenshot).

So Line app clearly needs a bit of help in western markets, and the Snoop buddy-up should help quite a bit in the long-term battle against Whatsapp and Kik. Line also has plenty of strong competition from this region in the form of KakaoTalk and WeChat, the latter of which just hit 300 million registered users.

Line app recently enlisted some other all-singing, all-dancing marketing help in the form of Korean pop star Psy, of invisible horse-riding fame.

From MMD, with some labels translated from Japanese

As we pointed out yesterday, 2012 was a pretty big year for NHN Japan’s Line chat app. But if you need further evidence of its popularity, MMD Laboratory has conducted a 2012 smartphone insights survey, and the results tell us a lot about how Japanese users are jumping on board the chat app bandwagon.

When 670 participants between the ages of 20 and 59 were asked about which application they use the most, Line was the most popular response at 16.2 percent. Facebook also fared well at 12.6 percent. Twitter was a distant third at 4.6 percent. GREE, Mixi, and Mobage took roughly a percentage point each as you can see in the chart above.

Looking at Japanese users’ preferred genres, you can really see a distinct change between this most recent survey and MMD’s previous one back in July. As you can see in the chart below, the amount of respondents who say they regularly use free voice calls or chat apps (like Line) has jumped from 28.4 percent to 40.0 percent. Usage for other genres has remained more or less the same among the most popular genres. I wouldn’t be surprised if this apparent trend is even more visible if younger smartphone users under the age of 20 had been included.

If you’d like to read more info about this survey in English, the What Japan Thinks blog has a great overview which I encourage you to check out in its entirety for more great info from this poll.

[Download image version of this chart]

This is part of our Japan 2012 in Review series, which you can find in its entirety here.

NHN Japan had a pretty crazy year in 2012. In retrospect, things really got busy for the company and its wildly successful chat app Line after it decided to get into the gaming business. But overall, 2012 has been a year of crazy growth, interesting business and distribution models, and a lot of flat-out fun in the mobile space. I thought we could run down though some of the highlights of our own coverage of the Line platform this year, particularly the second half of the year. I’ve also supplemented it with some links from social games expert Serkan Toto, whose website is a great resource if you want to follow stuff like this.

Expect even more from NHN Japan in 2013, as it will be giving Line more of an offline presence, starting with a new anime (Line Offline) coming to Tokyo Television next week, and perhaps more in the merchandising department a la Angry Birds.

December

• Japanese Chat App ‘Line’ Does Gangnam Style – 12/27
• ‘Line Play’ Virtual World Comes Out of Beta with a Million Users 12/18
• Line App Launches in China 12/12
• LINE Pop Racks Up 10 Million Downloads – In 12 Days | Dr. Serkan Toto 12/4

November

• Thailand Turns to Line App in an Effort to Hook More Travelers 11/29
• Line’s iOS Games Dominate Japanese App Store 11/29
• Line Gets 5 Additional Social Games | Dr. Serkan Toto 11/19

October

• Line Passes 70M Users 10/25
• After 97 Days: LINE Birzzle Hits 10 Million Downloads | Dr. Serkan Toto 10/12
• Japan’s Prime Minister’s Office Opens Account on Line, Closes its Weibo 10/5

September

• Line Surpasses 30 Million Users in Japan 9/27
• For LINE: Korea’s WeMade Signs Deal With NHN Japan For 6 Games | Dr. Serkan Toto 9/22

August

• For LINE: NHN Japan Inks Distribution Deal With Carrier KDDI [Social Networks] | Dr. Serkan Toto 8/31
• Chinese Developer Sells Fake Line Camera Application in Apple App Store 8/30
• Line Gets Coupon and Fortune Telling Features 8/22
• Line Camera Passes 10M Users in 117 Days, 3x Faster than Instagram 8/10
• Another Hit for NHN Japan with ‘Line Brush’ Drawing App 8/1

July

• NHN Japan’s Line App Passes 50 Million Users in 399 Days 7/26
• LINE and Telkomsel Add Special Stickers for Indonesian Users 7/13
• Line Birzzle Hits Number 1 in App Stores Around Asia 7/5
• Japan’s Line App Evolves into Platform, Expands into… Um… Everything 7/3
  • This was the perhaps the moment that changed everything for Line in 2012. It announced it would be launching a number of features, but in retrospect the one that really made the difference was adding games on top of its platform.

June

• Line App for Windows Phone Launches 6/12
• Line Passes 40 Million Users in 1 Year 6/6

First half of the year

• ‘Line Camera’ Launches 4/13
• Line Gets Desktop Apps for Mac and PC 3/7
• Line Cited by Docomo as Being Among VoIP Apps Putting Strain on its Network 1/30
• Line Hits 15 Million Downloads 1/27

There are so many mobile messaging apps coming out of Asia – KakaoTalk, WeChat, Comm, GREE Messenger, Line, Cubie, and the list goes on. It’s getting pretty crowded. But I expect more local mobile chat apps to be launched this year because the space still offers a lot of opportunities, typically in gaming and in the vertical chat app space.

Newcomers will find it harder to stand out, and big players will begin to monetize their platforms. While many folks think chat apps as just for… well… chatting, I see them more like social networks — but without the noisy news feed or stream. It’s much more engaged and intimate because the people who you send messages to are the people who you really give a shit about, right?

Games work well on mobile messaging apps because people want to play with friends they actually know, not someone they met just once or twice. That is also why DeNA and GREE are scrambling to build their own mobile messaging apps, pouring on resources despite being relatively late entrants to this market.

And it might not be just games which will thrive within the mobile messaging app platform. Other verticals like mobile commerce could also work well with high user stickiness. Let me elaborate a little bit on this:

1. Market grab

WeChat dominates China. KakaoTalk dominates Korea. Line dominates Japan and is looking to snag a slice of China. It’s like a war out there now.

The rest of Asia is pretty much up for grabs. We are seeing a concentration of fighting going on in Indonesia where chat apps are working with local mobile carriers and partners and setting up bases across Southeast Asia. Tencent has been quiet about its movements but we know it is moving full steam ahead in Indonesia and Thailand. The market grab is for real but it isn’t quite in the media limelight just yet.

2. Mobile gaming platform

KakaoTalk and Line have proven that games make money on mobile messaging apps. So suddenly, everyone else wants to jump in. I have people asking me why Tencent hasn’t made a move into games for WeChat. Well, we asked the folks from Tencent but they declined to comment. My take is that Tencent is more focused on grabbing users than monetizing WeChat. Seriously, they don’t have to do anything else just yet. Tencent is rich. And if they decide to go into games, they certainly can. Tencent is strong in games anyway.

While the idea of a mobile messaging app as a game platform is fresh now, it may turn stale as more mobile messaging apps start hopping onto the bandwagon. Eventually, developers will become confused about who to build games for, and the one that offers the best revenue share ratio and an easy plug-and-play solution to host games would be the winner.

3. Vertical chat apps

Today, we have general social networks like Facebook and Twitter. If you want something more private with your family and friends, then go for Path. There are also general e-commerce sites like Amazon and Tmall and vertical commerce sites like Mbaobao and Lamiu. The point is, I believe the trend is the same for mobile messaging apps. In fact, it has already happened in a way. There are specialized chat apps for couples (Between, Lovebyte), ladies (Cubie), and for hook ups (Momo). There will probably be more specialized mobile chat apps in 2013. I also believe there will also be chat apps serving local markets in their own local languages too.

Admittedly that’s a lot of guesswork, but it’s just because I’m excited how this race will pan out. Whether you’re an investor or entrepreneur, watch this space closely as it may bring some very unexpected opportunities in 2013.

Image credit

NHN Japan’s animated rendition of Gangnam Style

Korean pop star PSY, who recently hit a billion views on YouTube, is being featured by Japanese chat application ‘Line’ in a fun promotional video. The clip only runs for about a minute in length, but it’s really well done, and features all Line characters that you’re likely familiar with if you use the up-and-coming application. Check it out below:

While PSY long-surpassed the status of global phenomenon, NHN Japan’s Line application has been a phenomenon in its own right in Japan and around Asia — but clearly its intention is to become something bigger. It has about 89 million users right now, and is pushing pretty hard to grab more. Hooking its wagon to PSY’s infectious Gangnam Style is certainly not a bad idea [1].

Meanwhile in Taiwan, the company has gone so far as to advertise on a local train. And by that, I mean that NHN has literally plastered an entire train green and covered it with Line characters (pictured below). On the inside of the train, passengers can use their smartphones to scan QR codes and read/receive events from the application.

Meanwhile, More Games

NHN Japan has also continued to roll out more games via its chat platform, with three new titles including the new Line Bubble (iOS/Android). That title is currently ranked as the number one free iOS app here in Japan, and on Google Play, it’s ranked fourth. The games are all casual titles like previously released Line games, and all will likely do very well thanks to quick and easy distribution via the Line chat application.

[NHN Japan via Techwave]

There was lots of interesting tech news going down in Asia this week, and particularly in China. The iPhone hit in a few new countries, although there was more going down around the region that warranted attention.

Coincidentally, much of the news from this week did center around apps that run on iPhones though. I guess there just isn’t any escape, is there?

Charlie’s pick: You’ll Never Guess What The9 and ZTE Are Teaming Up to Work On

The MIIT news is huge, too — Steven will explain that shortly — but I’m going to pick this news this week because I think it’s indicative of where a lot of Chinese tech companies are headed right now. I won’t give away what it is they’re working on, but it’s something a lot of other tech and web companies are thinking about working on, too.

Rick’s pick: GREE’s ‘Metal Gear Solid: Social Ops’ Hit 100,000 Downloads in First 2 Days

This new title from GREE and Konami got off to a good start with 100,000 downloads in its first two days. And today we’re hearing that it the mobile game has gone on surpassed 500,000 downloads. And to mark the occasion, players will be able to earn 1.5x experience points from now until December 17 as part of its campaign to mark the milestone.

Steven’s pick: China’s App-ocalypse? All App Stores Might Have to be Regulated

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) seems keen to regulate all of the nation’s app stores, leaving developers worried about the potential impact. This would apply even to Apple’s iTunes App Store and Google Play. While it might help control piracy and malware on the numerous third-party app stores in China, this kind of monitoring by authorities will, I reckon, likely involve some meddling into the kinds of apps that can be distributed.

Willis’ pick: Line App Launches in China

The chat app war is getting really intense! Tencent might have thought that WeChat was safe and secure in China with it huge user base. But Line isn’t giving up without a fight, hoping to loosen WeChat’s stranglehold in China. It’s unlikely Line will win the battle, but it’s ballsy for NHN Japan to take such big risk. Grab your popcorn, place your bets. We may be in for an epic battle in China between Line and WeChat. 

The smash-hit messaging app Line – which is especially huge in Asia – has just made a move into the biggest country in the region: China. Now sporting the name ‘Lianwo‘ in Chinese (which is a play on “line me” or “link me”), the app’s makers, NHN Japan, have also set up a local homepage for the app at lianwo8.com.

This new Chinese version of Line is touting its iPhone, Android, and Windows apps, ignoring its other versions for WP, BlackBerry, and Mac. It comes with most of the features that are familiar to its over 70 million users – but not the social gaming support.

Line, in its guise as Lianwo, is going head to head with WeChat – “Weixin” in Chinese – which is made by local web giant Tencent (HKG:0700) and already has over 200 million users. Line certainly does look cute – and its large, animated emoticons will play well in China – but it might have arrived about a year too late to make a big impact on WeChat among Chinese social media lovers. Line launched in the summer of 2011.

Click to enlarge.

Back in July of this year, we wrote about how NHN Japan (KRX:035420) was looking at China for expansion, so this seems to be the result of that development. Prior to this move, Line has been targeting smartphone users in Thailand and Indonesia with things like special stickers and local tie-ups for social marketing.

[Hat-tip to Leiphone (article in Chinese) for spotting this]

Thanks to the folks over at Coconuts Bangkok for pointing out that the Tourism Authority of Thailand has launched an account on NHN Japan’s popular chat platform Line. Its goal is to create another channel by which it can update travelers about promotions and activities.

The governor of the TAT, Suraphon Svetasreni, noted that this effort is part of its worldwide social media strategy. It’s interesting to see that Line has risen rapidly to be counted alongside social networks like Facebook and Twitter as important channels through which to reach consumers.

You can find their account by going to the ‘add friend’ section of Line, and browsing ‘Official accounts.’ You can find Tourism Authority under the the ID ‘Amazing Thailand’ [1]. And from now until December 26 the TAT says it is offering fun stickers for download as well.

We also recently saw Thai foodstuff and retail giant CP Foods join Line as well, and local mobile operator AIS is working with Line as well. There is even a set of exclusive stickers available for the cartoon character Mamuang, from Thai cartoonist Wisut Ponnimit.

When last we checked, Line had a user base of about 75 million in total [2], with nearly half of those being based in Japan, and a high portion from other Asian countries.

Line has been in the top 10 social networking apps for Thailand on iOS for about a year now (currently sixth), and appears to be doing well on Google Play as well, ranked fifth overall for free apps in Thailand.

Korea’s Kakao recently claimed that its the first company to successfully merge a messaging service and social games. NHN Japan might take exception to that claim, as its game platform launched just before Kakao’s — but it all depends on how you define success.

Its Line Birzzle has been doing well, and the company just launched a new lineup of four games, one of which – Line Pop – has surpassed 3 million downloads in just 24 hours.

Given that Line now has a user base over 75 million both in Japan and around the world (mostly here in Asia so far), it is effectively using that platform to cross promote its own games in prime real estate in its main chat app.

From App Annie: top 5 free. iOS

Currently in Japan’s iOS app store, Line Pop, Line Patapoko Animal, and Line Cartoon Wars (my personal favorite) are in 1st, 2nd, and 4th place respectively. Not too shabby. Over on Google Play, Line Pop sits in 10th spot. We haven’t seen this sort of domination since, well, since yesterday — when we looked at Kakao’s dominance of the Korean app store!

Ironically, since I’ve started writing this post, I have also heard DeNA’s Comm app advertised on TV (here in Tokyo) at least three times. I expect that it will also be a service to be reckoned with in the future as well. Comm is a little late to the party, but I don’t think it’s too late by any means.

Today, Indonesia’s biggest telco Telkomsel, together with Samsung Indonesia, launched a BBM-like package deal for popular third-party chat apps called ‘Chat and Share’. The package deal would make online messaging costs separate from regular data plans in Indonesia, which is great for serious chat app fans. The new package deal is available only for Samsung Android devices.

The ‘Chat and Share’ package deal offers integration with Facebook and Twitter, and allows 500MB of monthly [1] data for third-party chat apps like Line, KakaoTalk, WhatsApp, and ChatOn. This is similar to the ‘Blackberry Lifestyle’ deal Telkomsel offers Blackberry users, which gives the same social media integration and also unlimited usage of BBM. The big difference lies in the price, as ‘Chat and Share’ is a lowly IDR 20,000 ($2) per month whereas the ‘Blackberry Lifestyle’ costs more than twice as much, at IDR 45,000 ($4.70) for the first month of usage [2].

Detik cites Ririn Windaryani, the marketing VP of Telkomsel Group today as saying that Telkomsel has around 5.1 million registered Blackberry customers at the moment. She also acknowledged the rising popularity of Android, as it now has two million Android customers, a number that has soared 200 percent over the past year. The VP of Samsung Indonesia explained via Detik that 40 percent of all Indonesian smartphones use Android, and four out of five of those are Samsung devices.

Beginning of the End for RIM?

It was just yesterday that we noted that RIM would have cause to worry if chat apps receive BBM-like package deals. And that has happened already. The biggest telco in the country seems to be leading that movement by offering two package deals now for unlimited chat apps usage (the other is here and was launched back in July). These deals will be strong challengers to Blackberry’s exclusive BBM services.

So what are the reasons customers might jump from Blackberry to Samsung or other Android smartphones? First, users can now get the free calling service that’s also part of KakaoTalk or Line on Android, which is unavailable on Blackberry. Second, Android has a bigger array of games and other fun apps, all more attractive to young Indonesian users.

This might only be the beginning of the upheaval for RIM’s BlackBerry in the country, since the other Indonesian operators will likely consider offering similar deals as well in the future. Blackberry 10 may well be RIM’s final chance to save itself.

[Via Chip.co.id, original image: images.wikia.com]

What was initially a domestic hit has been pushed aggressively abroad, particularly around Asia. NHN Japan has worked with Thai food manufacturer CPF, Thai airways, and a partnership with carrier AIS [1]. The company also has a tie-in for the Samsung Galaxy Pocket handset that pre-loads their app. Check out the commercial for that below:

Meanwhile in Taiwan the company has a partnership with convenience store chain Family Mart as well as a partnership with VIBO Telecom, with whom it has a television commercial with its cute stickers front and center:

In Indonesia, Line has been working with carrier Telkomsel pushing its customized Telkomsel sticker pack in the country. And, as you might expect, there’s a Telkomsel commercial featuring Line as well.

Meanwhile, back in its home market of Japan the service has about 32.6 million users. As we noted earlier this month, it can now count the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office as one of its newest, as the PMO recently announced that it would use Line to communicate important messages to the public.

With more and more companies getting into chat applications (DeNA just launched its own chat application, Comm, two days ago), Line’s aggressive pursuit of users in markets around Asia will no doubt give it an edge.

China’s Tencent is pushing hard as well, with strong efforts in Indonesia in particular. But Line has expressed interest in expanding to China as well, which should make for a very interesting showdown indeed.

Japanese social gaming giant DeNA (TYO:2432) has just launched its very own voice/chat application called ‘comm’ (at co-mm.com) The free application is available for both iOS and Android and is available in 204 countries/regions. It allows users to make free voice calls, and also includes chat features and photo sharing.

We’ve written much about the recent rise of mobile chat applications in Japan and around Asia, most specifically NHN Japan’s Line and KakaoTalk out of Korea. Both those companies have expanded their services to include game platforms, and given their rapid user acquisition they may pose a threat to the current mobile gaming incumbents, GREE and DeNA. So it’s really interesting to see DeNA join the chat app party at this point in the game.

Of course, DeNA is not only a social games company (it does e-commerce as well, for example, and describes itself as a “global internet company), and I’m told that Comm is “not a reactive measure” but rather a way to reach out to new users that it might not reach with Mobage. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to see such overlapping competition in the mobile space these days.

Upon sign-up, Comm asks for your real name and phone number, sending you an activation code via text message. Users can also sign up with their Facebook accounts, if they choose. From there, you add or search for friends and see who else is using Comm.

I initially thought that this would be a service that DeNA might tie up with its Mobage gaming platform. But the company notes that this is a stand-alone service that will not connect with Mobage or its other services.

We also understand that there is no immediate plan for monetization or advertising, but that DeNA will look into that later on.

We are back with a new issue of our Thai tech round-up, courtesy of Thumbsup. This one focuses on startup fundraising, and a fresh, new look for a Thai community website.

Intouch backs Ookbee

At the end of last month, the Shin Corporation’s Intouch announced it has taken a 25 percent stake in Ookbee, a digital publisher and major e-bookstore, with its $2 million investment in it.

The massive Shin Corp did not invest so much in any outside business for a decade, so it’s a major vote of confidence in the popular e-bookstore. The funding comes via Shin Corp’s Invent investment arm.

Ookbee has grown itself with partnerships with major telcos and retailers, creating apps and services such as the AIS bookstore, and the B2S app. This fund raising will enable Ookbee to grow faster and expand in the region.

Launching today, the new-look Pantip 3G

We reported recently that the popular Thai forums Pantip 3G will see a major website revamp coming soon – and it launches today. Invited guests are gathering right now at Central World to hear of more new features that will come with this relaunch. Take a look at it here.

Food giant CP launches free stickers in Line app

The Thai foodstuffs and retail giant CP Foods is getting more social by jumping on the bandwagon of brands using the Line messaging app for social marketing. Special CP stickers (pictured above) launched in Line’s sticker store on October 9th and are free to download and use in the app.

We have previously written about Japan’s Prime Minister’s Office and how it has been reaching out to the public via social media. First it started out on Twitter and Facebook in the wake of last year’s earthquake. And now today the office has announced yet another communication platform added to its growing social media repertoire, with a new account opened up on popular chat platform Line. You can find the PMO’s office under the Line ID #kankei.

One of the main purposes of this account will be to help send out essential information in the event of an emergency or a disaster. And in this respect, I’m glad to see the PMO making an effort to get on as many platforms as possible. And given that Line has over 30 million users in Japan, that’s certainly an important channel on which to build a presence.

Regrettably (and unsurprisingly) the conversation is just one-way, as sending a chat message to the Prime Minister’s Office Line account will only yield and automated reply directing you to its website.

How’s that Weibo account doing?

Readers may recall that recently the PMO also opened up an account on Sina Weibo in order to get its message out to Chinese language speakers. That account was, to the best of my knowledge, sort of soft launched without much fanfare, but appears to have been closed down sometime last month, most likely amid all the craziness of the Senkaku islands dispute and (often violent) protesting in China.

I’m not certain when the account closed, but it looks to have been in mid-September. I’m not sure if this was due to unexpected abuse, but I would guess that it received a healthy portion of Chinese fenqing crazy at that time.

Earlier this month, Line hit the 60 million total users mark. But perhaps more importantly, the company also announced that it had made over 300 million yen (or $3.8 million) from its sticker shop in the month of August.

[Download image version of this chart]

While I’m a little skeptical about all the things that Line is trying to do at once, its growing user base in Japan is particularly encouraging, as this is a market that is willing to spend money on mobile more than other nations.

Sooner or later though, I think Line will face a saturation point in Japan. So it’s good to see that NHN Japan is preparing for that eventuality by chasing users in other markets.

When I last spoke to NHN representatives, they noted that China is one market that they hope to explore. Although given the current political tensions between the China and Japan, I don’t expect to see that venture any time soon.

Recently WeChat (aka “Weixin” to Chinese users) made a lot of headlines by announcing that its userbase has surpassed the 200 million mark. The messaging app, made by Chinese internet company Tencent (HKG:0700) has great plans for global expansion, hoping to have the company’s first-ever worldwide hit. In order to learn more about the company’s plans in Indonesia, we got in touch with Tencent to find out more.

We’re told by a representative that Tencent takes Indonesia very seriously, by saying that the country which comprised about 50 percent of the whole population in Southeast Asia is a huge potential user-base for WeChat. There are no Tencent offices in Indonesia yet, but the company is planning to set up one soon. There are WeChat representatives coming back and forth talking to some partners in Indonesia at the moment.

Tencent has been talking with a few local celebrities, merchants, and media about the possibilities of working together on WeChat. So far, when doing WeChat promotions in other countries, the company usually partners up with the local entities there. Take for example, the cooperation with Starbucks in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan.

A representative cited another example involving cooperation with a famous shopping mall in Hong Kong called Harbor City. At the front gate, the mall set up a big QR code for people to scan with their phone, which lets people automatically become mall members in WeChat. Not only do they get messages and coupons like with Starbucks, but the membership also acts as a replacement for the traditional membership cards that makes people’s wallets so thick these days. The WeChat rep tells us that the app has become very popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan because of that, and the same cooperation can be implemented in other countries like Indonesia. He elaborates, “It has tremendous effect. We’ll be the next generation of co-marketing.”

Tencent also looks to use a more localized marketing approach in the country for WeChat. The company is considering to make its app available on Blackberry, which is very popular in Indonesia, and also to create similar BBM packages, in conjunction with some telcos, for the local users. We’re told that WeChat is gaining steam in Indonesia, and eventually users would ask telcos to offer BBM-like packages for WeChat. We understand that so far the biggest WeChat users in Indonesia use Android.

User Behavior

Tencent already has another messaging app created specifically for Indonesia called Qute. We asked if there’s any confusion from the Indonesian users regarding WeChat and Qute, but we’re told there is not. The representative says that people’s focus is only on the app’s quality and brand name, not about the company behind it. This is similar to what happened with the QQ IM back in the early days in China. People then only knew QQ, but not so much about Tencent. Moreover, the rep agreed that the consumer target for both WeChat and Qute is different. The former focuses on smartphones, while the latter is on feature phones.

There are already other messaging apps prominent in Indonesia like Line and KakaoTalk. But the Tencent rep thinks that WeChat’s killer feature, “push-to-talk,” will be a differentiator. Indonesian users are starting to become aware about the feature, but it’ll take a few more months for it to really take off, just like the way it happened in China.

Message to Indonesian Developers

A lot of products from Tencent are open platforms, including WeChat. The app opened its API for third-party integration with developers and content providers. Thousands of applications (aka WeChat extensions) are submitted every month. Tencent is open to any new utilities such as games, music, videos, or things people want to shop for. The representative notes:

People compare us to Facebook, saying that WeChat is great, something like Facebook in smartphones. Saying everything you can do here, you can follow celebrities, read articles, talk to a friend in a lot of ways; you can use it for dating, even for e-commerce.

[Second image source]

A new report from the folks over at Distimo looks at which mobile social networks are doing well around the world, and specifically which networks are winning out in Apple’s App Store for the biggest global markets.

While Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is still the world’s dominant social network app on mobile, some changes over the past year in Asia now mean that it “its dominance is not as apparent” as the year before, says Distimo.

We have watched the rise of Line, NHN Japan’s popular chat application, and Distimo says that it was the most popular mobile social network app for iOS in Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. NHN Japan now claims about 55 million users in total (across multiple platforms) and has its eyes on China, although that market is sure to prove difficult.

Speaking of the Middle Kingdom, in China the top social app was WeChat, which is also coming on very strong (it was tops in Hong Kong too). Korea also has a strong mobile social challenger in KakaoTalk, which was the most popular in Korea.

Distimo also looked at which countries has the biggest appetites for social applications. Surprisingly the Asian nations were less social than the average. In the United States, the download volume for the social category in the App Store accounts for 20 percent of the ‘Top Overall’ download volume (see chart below). In contrast, Asian countries affinity for the social apps category is far less. In Singapore the figure was 14 percent, and it was far less in Japan and Korea (10 percent each), and lesser still in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (nine, eight, and seven percent respectively).

[Lead image: Daily Mail (modified)]

VS Media is pointing out today that an imitation of NHN’s popular Line Camera photo app has appeared on Apple’s app store. Line Camera from Japan has skyrocketed to 10 million users at a rate faster than Instagram, and it’s not a total surprise that some weasel out there would try to exploit that. This new fake app, entitled ‘Line Camera*’ [1] differs from the original in two ways:

• It is a paid app, selling for 85 yen (or $0.99).
• It is shitty.

I have no intentions of buying/trying the app, but the screenshots indicate that it turns your photos into a really awful pencil rendition of the original. This is perhaps symbolic of the developer’s creative spirit. His name is listed as Lee Zhihong whose website (in Chinese) is at cartoonxiang.yolasite.com, which doesn’t have any identifying information.

Currently a search for Line Camera in the app store (see right) will give you both the original and this Chinese pretender which is using the same app icon that Line Camera used to have.

On a similar note, our readers may recall our story from last week about a Chinese “developer” who stole an entire Western-developed game engine and then sold it for half-price in China. After we reported on it, the copied game engine was soon taken offline and the thief apologized to the original developer.

In any case, it’s pretty discouraging to see incidents like these drag down others in the Chinese industry who are trying to succeed legitimately.

[Source: VSmedia.info (Japanese)]

NHN Japan has been so busy with its Line app/platform recently that we can hardly keep up with the updates. In fact if we tried, this would very quickly become a ‘Line’ blog. The most recent one is today when the company pushed a Line Coupon feature update to its chat application.

Now when users in Japan log in to the chat application, they can see gourmet coupon offers from nearby places, assuming you’ve allowed the app to use you location. The service is powered by Recruit’s Hot Pepper, and users can bookmark their favorite coupons for easy access later on.

In addition to this new feature, Line has also just yesterday announced its horoscope or fortune-telling service on its platform too, as well as its ‘Line Coin’ virtual currency.

The company now has over 55 million users, and is poised to bring on even more with eyes on China. It will also bring in quite a few new users from Blackberry-happy Indonesia, having launched on that platform just last week.

[Via CNet Japan]

First Line app stickers from a Thai cartoonist

Line is the popular, Japanese-made chat app, which makes a lot of money from emoticon sticker packs sold as in-app purchases. In our first Thai round-up, we mentioned the exclusive stickers from one Thailand mobile telco in the Android version of the app. And now, “Mamuang” (meaning “mango” in Thai) is the first sticker pack from a Thai cartoonist, available now in the in-app Sticker Shop. Wisut Ponnimit, Mamuang‘s creator, is a famous cartoonist in the country, and draws cartoons in numerous Thai and Japanese magazines.

Mamuang is a very popular cartoon character in Japan, and so it made sense for Line’s creator, NHN, to bring it into the app. There are three main characters included in the sticker set: Mamuang, the cute doggy Manow (meaning “lemon”) and Loong Lin Yai (Thai for “big tongue uncle”). You can get all 40 virtual stickers for $1.99 within the app.

New social radio app launches

The first Thai-based digital radio streaming Facebook app – called “BandOn Radio” – has launched. Worapot Nimwijitra, a former executive at RS (a major Thai entertainment company), is the owner of this project.

BandOn Radio is a music streaming service similar to Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer (a startup already operating in Thailand). Bandon Radio programming will be arranged by various DJs who might be familiar to some local music lovers.

As for the business model, Bandon Radio’s income will come from advertising. So audiences have no need to pay for listening to the streams. One advantage of this service is that the DJs can interact with the audience directly on Facebook, and people will be able to listen to music-set re-runs. BandOn is on-air now.

Two Thai gaming companies prepare for battle against China’s Tencent

Two big players in the gaming industry in Thailand, Asiasoft and ThaiCyberGames, have announced a partnership to establish a new online game company. A big part of the reason for this is so as to better face up to Tencent, the biggest tech company from China, which is pushing into Southeast Asian markets these days.

Asiasoft runs some popular social gaming titles from South Korea and China. And it is now trying to expand into other local markers before it’s too late – specifically into Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. ThaiCyberGames is the official operator of Warcraft III in Thailand.

The plan for the partnership company is to build a strong online gaming presence in the region.

New Line stickers

NHN Japan’s Line application, which recently surpassed 50 million users worldwide, has just received a big boost in the top grossing apps rankings. The company’s iOS app was ranked 23rd overall in the Japan App Store on August 11, but after the recent addition of the Home and Timeline features on Monday, it shot back up to second overall in the App Store today (see chart below). And ostensibly taking advantage of this new surge, NHN Japan pushed out eight new kinds of stickers yesterday which users can buy.

The company announced back in early July that its sticker shop had made over 350 million yen (or $4.38 million), so apparently it knows what it’s doing.

The successful monetization of its kind of sticker model is very interesting, especially for those of us looking on from foreign countries. Are applications like Line only successful in their monetization because Japanese customers are accustomed to paying for items on their mobile devices? How much of their success is due to the experience and know-how of in the mobile space? And perhaps the million dollar question is, can concepts such as this one translate to other markets outside of Japan and be just as profitable?

My guess is that as mobile penetration and mobile payments elsewhere catches up with Japan, then users habits will gradually begin to resemble Japanese habits. I don’t think such made-in-Japan models will be as profitable, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be profitable.

But NHN Japan is certainly going to try, and indeed has already started with localized stickers in places like Indonesia and Thailand. A representative recently informed us that China is in their plans as well. [Via gamebiz.jp]

source: appannie.com

When NHN Japan published its Line Brush application last week, I was a little hesitant to look at it. I mean, we’ve been hearing so much from the company of late that it’s getting to be a bit too much. But admittedly the application looks very cool and it’s now the top free app in Japan and has been in the top spot for productivity apps since its release [1].

Admittedly, I do have an interest in drawing and painting apps and have always been looking for one that works really well on an iPad. Art Rage is okay, but for drawing enthusiasts out there on a budget, it’s not free. But Line Brush is free, and comes with a pretty extensive set of drawing tools. It can be used in portrait or landscape orientation, which is also a nice option to have.

One feature I like is the ability to draw on top of pictures. I took a picture of my late dog and added a pretty pink bow, for which he will probably never forgive me (Sorry Pepe). Anyway, you get the idea. There are also brushes that apply shorts of filters to photos in select areas, and that’s handy too. Of course if you really want to go crazy glitzing up your photos with decorations like this, you might prefer the Line Camera app, which lets you do lots of wacky stuff like that.

The pictures you create in Line Brush can be shared over the Line app, saved to your iPad’s photo album (where they can then be mailed), or opened in other apps.

The app is available for both iPhone and iPad if you’d like to check it out.

The Korean Herald is reporting today that NHN Corp (KRX:035420) plans to launch its popular Line application in China this year. The company’s subsidiary, NHN Japan, today just announced that it had reached the 50 million user milestone after just 399 days. The company is targeting 100 million users by year’s end.

Recently we have seen Line make localization efforts with its app in Thailand and Indonesia with special stickers offered as well as local partnerships.

As for China, NHN would face competition from already established chat apps, most notably Tencent’s WeChat. But Line’s growth thus far has been pretty astounding, so personally I would not bet against it. You can see in the chart below see that for iOS, Line already is being used in China to some extent, ranking respectably in the social networking category for almost a year now according to App Annie.

We’ve reached out to NHN Japan for more on this possible China move, and we’ll let you know if we hear anything.

This is the first tech round-up from our partner site Thumbsup, a Thai tech blog covering key digital business, social media, and startup stories out of Bangkok. Look out for more of these features every fortnight on Tech in Asia in the future.

Wongnai Funding

Let’s start with a rumor about the Thai startup behind the popular app Wongnai (meaning “deep inside” in Thai), which aggregates information and social reviews of food and restaurant venues. A source told us that Japanese investors are keen to invest in Wongnai in a series A round expected to be worth 15 to 20 million baht (US$475,000 to $634,000). We’ll look into this in more detail once it’s confirmed.

(Click to enlarge)

Line App Sticks it to Thailand

Regular readers will be familiar with the Japanese Line messaging app, which currently has close to 50 million users. The app is hoping to pick up a lot more users in Thailand, and so there’s now an exclusive virtual sticker pack made for AIS, the mobile phone operator in Thailand which is the first local partner with Line. The sticker set is called “Oun Jai” (meaning “warmed heart” in Thai; pictured right) and is only for AIS customers using the Android version of the app. This move coincides with different stickers made for Indonesian users on Telkomsel.

NHN’s strategy with Line is to seek out potential markets abroad, via alliances and brand building outside of Japan and Korea (the origin country of the app) and by studying the local consumer behavior in each country. Perhaps the main reason for Line choosing Thailand as a priority is the fact that it’s number one in terms of sales of stickers within Line for iOS.

Paypal Seeks Bangkok-Area Boss

The next bit of good news is from the biggest online payment company Paypal. With the increasing volume of global transactions being settled via online payments and the need for the company to expand more in Asia, Paypal is now seeking a country manager for Thailand via a post on LinkedIn. This position will be stationed in Bangkok, Thailand, and report directly to the General Manager for Southeast Asia and India (SEA/IN). The announcement from this giant company is a good sign for e-commerce in Thailand and Southeast Asia, giving online stores an e-payment platform to rely on.

Startup Events!

We love events that provides a platform for entrepreneurs and VCs to interact. Here are two recent startup events that were held in the country and which reoccur from time to time:

The first event, Web Wednesday Thailand (WWTH), is a meeting for people in startups and digital marketing. The theme for the recent WWTH 10.0 was “Insights from the Investment Community” and there was a special session where startups could pitch to investors.

The second event, Webpresso, was set up by the Thai Webmasters Association. Its most recent meeting ran with the theme “Online startups.” All the speakers were involved in online marketing; among them was one from Builk, the winner of Echelon 2012 in Singapore, and another one was an editor from Thumbsup, the site that’s bringing you this new Thai roundup series on TechInAsia.

The free sticker pack is labeled as “Telkomsel Blob & MyAppsMall,” and contains cute emojis/emoticons you can use while chatting with your friends or family, just as with other sticker packs. But in this pack, Blob, the Telkomsel character, is being used as the main selling point.

Line has passed 45 million users and has generated $4.38 million in sales from the sticker shop alone in two months.

NHN Japan is not alone though, with Tencent planning to push its WeChat and Qute apps in Indonesia. Plus there’s KakaoTalk (which also has Tencent backing ) and which is also expanding here, trying to cut the market share of the incumbent BBM. Ready to type more messages, Indonesia?

Two days ago we mentioned NHN Japan’s ambitions to expand it’s Line service into a platform supporting things like games, coupons, and virtual currency. The company also announced an interesting puzzle game on that day in Birzzle. Developed by South Korea game developer Enfeel, the title is not a new one. But it has been given a fresh boost in this new collaborative partnership with NHN Japan via its messaging app Line.

Word on the street is that Birzzle was named by rapper Snoop Dogg during an expedition to the Arctic Circle. True story [1].

The free version of Birzzle is currently being featured front and center in Line’s sticker shop (see right), where users who install the app will be rewarded with a free sticker. This seems like a very smart and handy way for Line to promote any of its services in the near future.

Indeed that strategy seems to be working as the free iOS version of Line Birzzle is currently ranked number one in app stores in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Macau.

I took the game for a quick spin and it is pretty addictive, so proceed at your own risk. The free version (iOS and Android) has some in-game purchases available, while the paid version, Line Birzzle Plus (iOS and Android) features some extra playing modes.

You can check out video of some Line Birzzle gameplay below, and if it looks like your thizzle, give it a schnizzle.

NHN Japan held a press conference today in Tokyo where it announced its plans to expand its popular Line app into a new platform service, which is to be called Line Channel. The company says that the service will first serve Japanese users, but eventually overseas users will get it as well.

Building on top of its successful messaging service (which has accumulated more than 45 million users since launching just over a year ago), Naver Japan plans to use Line Channel as a new sort of ecosystem which brings together your real life friends over various smartphone services. Some of the new services that Line mentioned today, which will be coming in the next few months, include:

• Line Game (July)
• Line Talk Novel (August)
• Line Fortune (as in fortune telling, July)
• Line Coupon (August)
• Line Sounds Shop (September)
• Time Line (for status updates)
• Line Coins (Virtual currency)

This is a very ambitious move for Line, jumping into many new things very quickly. Part of me thinks the company is moving way too fast to be able to tackle all these areas in a competent manner — but then again, the Line app’s success thus far was not built by moving slowly.

Naver Japan also noted today that 44 percent of all smartphone users in Japan use Line, and that its recently launched sticker shop has seen over 350,000,000 yen ($4.38 million) in sales in just two months. The company hopes that it can hit the 100 million user mark by the end of this 2012.

If you’d like to see the presentation from today, you can check out the replay of the live stream below. It can be viewed with Japanese audio here.

NHN Japan, hot on the heels of hitting its 40 millionth user milestone for its popular Line calling/messaging application, has today announced the release of Line for Windows Phone.

Currently Line is available for iOS, Android, and there are also messaging apps available for PC and Mac. But the company aims to have Line available across all platforms and services, and the move to Windows Phone is a step in this direction. It does come as some surprise since Windows Phone is not especially popular in Japan yet [1]. But it should increase in popularity as local carriers continue to add more handsets to their respective lineups.

It should be noted, however, that this version of the Line app will only allow for the messaging function, and not the free voice-calling function. The company notes that this function will be added to the app in a later version.

Line has proven to be wildly popular so far, racking up new users at a meteoric pace. NHN Japan sees the service as a platform upon which it will deliver new services, such as the ever-so-cute photo app Line Camera which it launched two months ago, as well as its Sticker Shop within the Line app, which catapulted the iOS version of the application onto the top grossing app charts in the Apple store.

If you’d like to try Line for Windows Phone, you can get it here.

Line, 40 million users (click to enlarge)

NHN Japan has announced today that it has passed yet another impressive user milestone, now with 40 million users worldwide. The popular VoIP calling and messaging application has been recently growing at a rate of five million new users per month [1], as you can see in the chart on the right.

It’s interesting to see how well the application is doing in countries other than Japan, where it has 18 million of its 40 million users.

Riding on its sudden wave of popularity, NHN Japan is now pushing Line as a platform from which to launch other services. We’ve already told you about Line Camera (see our review here) which NHN says received 6.5 million downloads in its first month. But in addition to that, the company also has its Sticker Shop within the Line app, which launched back on April 26 allowing users to buy (you guessed it!) stickers. As you can see below, those in-app purchases helped bring Line into the top grossing app charts in Japan over the past month.

In the company’s announcement for today’s milestone, executive Jun Masuda noted:

[W]e see this as a great opportunity to start a full-fledged development of LINE as a platform for other additional services, as we have been planning from the very beginning. With the aim in mind of acquiring 100 million users during 2012, we will keep improving the user-friendliness of our services, as well as offering our services on multiple devices with multilingual support, with the intention of developing LINE as a platform which caters to all users worldwide

I’m not sure how long Line can sustain its current level of growth, and 100 million users by year’s end is indeed a lofty goal. But if Line can continue to roll out more interesting services and create more buzz among its current user base, then it might be a reachable target.

Line app rankings, Japan app store

NHN Japan, whose VoIP application Line has seen a skyrocketing user count over the past few months, has today announced the release of its official camera app, aptly named ‘Line Camera.’ For now its Android only, although the company promises an iPhone version within a few days.

The application is in the Japanese style of purikura, where users can decorate their photos by using the assortment of tools that the app provides. According to NHN Japan, there will be 600 stamps, more than 100 frames, 14 different filters, 156 brushes, and specialized text functions too. The photos can then be shared among friends who are connected on the Line VoIP application, but they are also saved to your camera roll so you can use them elsewhere too.

I gave the app a try just now, and it’s really a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it seems to work on some people better than others. I mean, I was pretty sure I was using it right. But my self-portrait on the right didn’t quite come out as I had hoped. Ah well…

Line originated in Japan, but is being used all over Asia. And NHN Japan has built in the ability to share photos over a wide range of regional social networks: there’s Twitter and Facebook, Japan’s Mixi, Korea’s me2day and Cyworld, and China’s Sina Weibo. (Are you taking notes, Instagram? [1])

The app is available for free at camera.line.naver.jp, and comes in English, Japanese, Chinese (traditional and simplified), and Korean.

Group messaging – or so-called over-the-top (OTT) messaging – apps have been featured a lot in the news of late, with big plans hailing from China’s Weixin rebranding as WeChat in order to go global, to WhatsApp standing accused of munching into the revenue pies of operators [1]. It is pretty evident that these messaging apps have become the ultimate nemesis of operators across the globe, redefining the way we communicate in text on our phones.

In the light of these events, it seems pretty timely for eBuddy XMS to roll out its iMessage-like feature this upcoming summer, which will be called eBuddy XMS-SMS. It’ll work sort of like the other OTT messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Line. Difference is, besides allowing users to send ‘XMS’ messages (ie: group messages using a 2G or 3G connection), they can also send and receive conventional SMS messages from within the app. It works like Apple’s iMessage, giving users a seamless experience between sending XMS as well as SMS messages within one single app.

When we reached out to Jonie Oostveen, director of strategic partnerships at eBuddy, for his thoughts about WhatsApp’s defense against the accusations, he said:

Brian Acton of WhatsApp is partially right that WhatsApp might stimulate data usage, but WhatsApp is also pushing operators in the “bit-pipe” mode, meaning that operators will become like providers of a commodity like electricity, without any added value. A lot of operators have the strategy to play a more important role in the value chain and want to provide more value-added services (and get more margin and create better customer lock-ins) than just providing data access.

In fact, XMS-SMS could be used by telcos to counteract the influence of the current batch of OTT messaging apps in the market and help maintain SMS revenues for operators. The eBuddy product will be different from other OTT messaging apps because it includes the sending and receiving of SMS messages, which gives the operator the possibility to sell a specific messaging bundle that includes both data and SMS.

A Feature for Feature-Phones

It caters not just to smartphone users, but also to feature-phone users. So, for example, when massive amounts of messages are being exchanged in a group chat consisting of friends on smartphones and feature-phones, the latter can still receive and reply via SMS when they’re offline. It might drive up the SMS revenues of operators pretty significantly, because people would be more inclined to take part in these conversations.

How will you tell if someone is using the XMS app or not? According to Jonie, there will be one single contact list in the app that combines both XMS as well as other phone contacts you have. For those XMS contacts, they will be identified by a XMS logo behind their names, so when you send the message it will use your data network. Likewise, non-XMS contacts will have an operator logo behind their names, so when you send a message across the GSM network will be used.

At present, there are around 250 million eBuddy chat users worldwide, with four million monthly active users (MAU) in India and two million MAUs in Indonesia. For a start, the team at eBuddy is first targeting Indonesia and India to roll out this XMS-SMS service. In fact, this service has been introduced at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona earlier this year, and has garnered much interest from operators – especially from those in emerging markets. Their first operator launch will be later this year in Indonesia. They are also currently in talks with other operators in other APAC countries, as well as in the Middle East and across Latin America.

Won’t eBuddy be afraid that the other mobile messaging apps would replicate its model? Jonie further explains that this service is another ball game altogether. This service requires a connection with the SMS router, and is not something that developers can easily copy and roll out. This would mean they would need to work together with mobile telcos – which eBuddy has already been doing, giving it the first-mover advantage.

Will you ditch your WhatsApp to use the new XMS-SMS application? Throw us your thoughts in the comments below.

It was just a few days ago that Naver Japan’s mobile messenger and voice application Line surpassed the 20 million downloads mark. Now the service is getting the tablet and desktop apps that were promised a few months back.

But don’t get too excited just yet, as this is a somewhat limited step onto the Desktop so far. Only the chat function is available right now, and free calling is “not yet available.” It should also be noted that these desktop apps can only be used by existing Line smartphone users [1], as Line accounts can only be created on mobile devices.

For those who would like to try it, you can download the Mac and PC apps over at line.naver.jp/en [2]. I can the Mac version a quick spin just now, and you can see the screenshot of how the app looks below. There’s a handy menu-bar item, so you can access it easily. Unfortunately, I still don’t have any friends on line besides this translation bot. Although I suppose translations is kind of neato. I guess [3].

I have yet to try to tablet app, but as far as I can tell, it would be a similarly restricted experience. I asked a Naver Japan representative about this, and was told that the intent for now is to add value for existing smartphone users. But they also noted that they’re expecting Line could be used for business, or casual internal communication at companies.

Speaking as someone who lives primarily on a desktop computer, I had higher hopes for the desktop app. But for the 20 million people who have downloaded the smartphone app, this should help enhance what is already a wildly popular service.

The company has previously stated that video calls would be coming to the smartphone app in 2012, and while there isn’t any date decided yet, I’m told this evening that they are hoping for the first half of this year.

According to a Kyodo news report earlier this week, Japanese carrier KDDI (TYO:9433) experienced a data communication disruption that affected over six million users. Our readers may recall that it was just a few weeks back when NTT Docomo experienced a similar service disruption, which it subsequently attributed to increased smartphone usage — particularly the increased use of VoIP applications like Naver Japan’s very popular Line.

What I thought was curious about the KDDI was that the company also acknowledged heavier data traffic from smartphones as a possible cause. From Kyodo’s report:

The latest trouble was caused by a failed electric supply to [KDDI’s] computer servers for e-mail services, but the incident had no impact on voice calls and Internet access, it said, adding that the failure may have resulted from an increase in data communication traffic for smartphones.

While it’s not surprising that carriers are having difficulties accommodating the increased data usage that comes with the rise of smartphones, I was curious to know to what extent Naver Japan’s Line app (with 15 million downloads in seven months) was creating difficulties for KDDI. I sent inquiries to representatives at both KDDI and Naver Japan on Monday, but as yet have not received a reply.

When we attended the Global Mobile Internet Conference last year, Softbank Mobile Corp’s executive vice president Ted Matsumoto commented on increased data usage in Japan:

46 percent is voice and SMS, the rest is data. Data usage is increasing steadily as voice is declining, becoming less and less important. Someday it will be replaced by VOIP.

The big value for us is that smartphones create traffic. We are the people who are in front of the end users to integrate and support the entire value chain. Network operation is only a part of our business. The important thing is that we are in front of end users responsible for end user satisfaction.

So while increased data usage is certainly a welcome thing for providers, this last point on end user satisfaction is key. Can carriers in Japan stay ahead of customer demand without experiencing the outages we have seen in recent weeks? Will new, data-hungry apps like Line be allowed to grow without interference from carriers? And perhaps most importantly, how will carriers’ networks respond in times of crisis like last year’s earthquake? All three major mobile operators (Docomo, KDDI, and Softbank) experienced major outages during the March 11 earthquake last year.