American design-oriented e-commerce site Fab has just raised $150 million in the first part of its series D funding. For us, the most interesting aspect is the two brand-new investors ploughing money into Fab – Chinese web giant Tencent (HKG:0700) and Japanese conglomerate Itochu.

As reported by TechCrunch, Fab founder and CEO Jason Goldberg plans to push the e-store into China with help from Tencent. One Tencent executive will also have a board seat at Fab.

There’s no specific word on a launch in Japan, but Itochu’s retailing experience could help Fab in that nation. But then Fab has previously had one other Japanese investor in the form of the venture capital division of mobile telco Docomo, but Fab has not yet launched outside of the US and Europe.

Fab, which connects consumers with designers of items they can’t find elsewhere, currently operates in in 27 countries, and 40 percent of its sales happen outside of the US.

Worth $1 billion

The next part of Fab’s huge fourth-round funding will come in the following few months. Investors in this newest round also include previous backers Atomico, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, RTP Capital, Pinnacle Ventures, Lars Hinrichs, and Docomo Capital.

Fab is now effectively valued at $1 billion on paper. But its ambitions are greater – for it to become the world’s top design-oriented e-commerce site so that it can become the fifth $10 billion online shopping empire alongside Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, and Rakuten.

China’s top Fab-like designer-to-consumer site is possibly Xipin, which wrapped up $1.5 million in series A funding last October.

As for Tencent, it is one of China’s top B2C e-commerce companies (among its very many interests) and is well-placed to help Fab launch into China. Unless Tencent decides to launch a Fab-like site of its own.

Japanese fashion and shoes e-store Locondo.jp has today slipped into JPY 600 million ($6.2 million) in series B funding. The investment is led by web portal Excite Japan, and the tie-up also entails a big boost in visibility among the 50 million monthly visitors to Excite’s Japanese homepages.

Previous investors Lead Capital Management (LCM), and Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV) also participated in this second major round. The business has been backed by Rocket Internet.

Locondo claims to have an annual turnover of $31 million from its 300,000 users; it launched in February 2011. It marks itself out from rival e-stores with a very generous trying on policy that lets people return unworn items within 30 days. Locondo specializes in lady’s shoes but does also stock some accessories and several ranges of women’s clothing.

Locondo has had backing from Rocket Internet but is not officially one of its numerous startup ventures. Rocket’s sole e-commerce store in Japan is its pan-Asian make-up subscription service Glossybox.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

But it’s not all good news for Asia’s e-commerce businesses. India and China take much of the money, and both deals and funding rounds are way down from a peak in mid-2011. Furthermore, Asian startups – even in this vital e-shopping space – see tiny exits. Indeed, CB Insights calls the exit environment “flaccid”. Most of these web buy-outs in Asia are really small – usually under $50 million. Forget the blockbuster hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being thrown around in Silicon Valley. Here’s the overview graph:

India rings in the deals

In terms of buy-out deals (which includes IPO exits as well), Indian e-commerce ventures lead the way in this region. India has seen 154 e-store deals since 2010, with 25 deals coming in 2013 already. These 154 business transactions are worth $978 million from 2010 to this point in 2013.

Just two weeks ago, India’s second largest homegrown online store, Snapdeal, acquired a smaller rival. Snapdeal is also well funded with $50 million from eBay in its pockets. The larger Flipkart site also helps make India a red hot web shopping market – and one that’s ripe for lots of consolidation this year.

China leads in terms of investments – but we’ll look into China in more depth in a separate post later today (Update: China’s here!).

Here’s how this sector in India leads in terms of deal value:

And this is the remarkable uptick in this category in India so far this year:

MakeMyTrip (NASDAQ:MMYT) was India’s biggest ever tech IPO exit so far, worth $447 million in 2010.

E-shopping in fashion

So, what kind of web store is proving the hottest for business deals? Inevitably it’s clothing sites. Just look at the huge amount of money being thrown at Rocket Internet’s fashion store Zalora, which netted $100 million last month. But thankfully the nature of these e-commerce acquisitions is changing, as shown by the growth of multitudinous web stores that fit into the ‘other’ category in this graph:

Interestingly, clothing leads in India’s e-commerce sector (accounting for involvement in 44 percent of business deals), while the travel sector is second (15 percent).

Exit, pursued by a bear

Most of Asia’s e-commerce exits have been small – 60 percent of them valued at less than $50 million. Only major ones like China’s VIPshop (NYSE:VIPS) and India’s MakeMyTrip have bucked the trend as they IPO’d.

2012 saw an upturn in such exits, with a peak of 29. But there have been 14 so far this year, so 2013 might be even better. Here are charts for exit valuations and their share by geographic location:

Tiger economy

You could say that Asia’s online shopping sector is a tiger economy because the leading venture capital firm in the past three years is Tiger Global Management. It has been involved in 25 deals in 18 companies in the past three years – most of them in India. Accel Partners is second and Intel Capital is third:

Click to enlarge a bit.

See the full report on the CB Insights blog.

Japanese mobile telco NTT Docomo (NYSE:DCM) has today launched a fun smartphone app that will create video panoramas that include sound. While we’re probably all familiar with making panorama images using the iPhone camera or apps like Panorama 360, Docomo wants to shake things up by animating those things.

As you can see in the GIF (or the full demo video embedded below), Docomo’s Ugoku app animates a panorama only in the middle section, so that should be the focus of your tableau. The rest of the panorama is stitched together from photos in a double layer of eight to 10 images.

Once your living and breathing panorama is created, you’ll see that it looks pretty spooky with only the central part cleverly coming alive in video form. It’s a bit like those cinemagraph GIFs where only one aspect moves – as we’ve seen in Sony’s pretty neat MotionGraph app. Optionally, the new Ugoku app can also just take conventional still panorama images.

The beta version of the Ugoku panorama app is here in Google Play; it requires Android 4.0 or higher and is likely geo-restricted only to users in Japan.

See how an animated panorama is made in this two-minute demo video:

Japanese e-commerce titan Rakuten (JSD:4755) has revealed today that it’s acquired California-based logistics company Webgistix for an undisclosed amount. The deal gives Rakuten’s merchants a boost on its US site (formerly called Buy.com) as they can now have greater access to Webgistix’s cloud-based fulfillment technology for e-commerce retailers.

One of Webgistix’s main logistics services is one that can reach 98 percent of e-commerce customers in the US via ground delivery within one or two business days. The company has five US warehouses. This should be a competitive advantage for Rakuten’s open platform retailers as they battle direct B2C e-shopping rivals Amazon, Zappos, and others.

The newly acquired Webgistix has operations in 20 countries, but it’s not clear how it might help Rakuten’s other sites, such as Play.com in the UK or Priceminister in France.

Rakuten made a similar move in November 2012 when it bought up French logistics company Alpha Direct Services.

Rakuten CEO and chairman Hiroshi Mikitani says in today’s announcement:

Every step of the customer path to purchase is important, especially when the process takes place electronically. Webgistix ensures that fulfillment processes are carried out successfully at the most pivotal point of each e-commerce order, where digital services meet physical services. The experienced management team at Webgistix provides entrepreneurial leadership at the foundation of a growing Americas logistics operation, one that will benefit and support our current and future e-commerce marketplace customers in the Americas, and throughout the world.

Rakuten has e-commerce stores in 25 countries.

Manga camera app Otaku Camera has hit three million downloads as of May 2013 (see graph below). Launched in November last year, the app helps to turn regular pictures into manga style images or collages. Despite being made in Japan, Otaku Camera sees 90 percent of its users outside of Japan with the majority of them coming from the US, Taiwan, Mexico, and Thailand.

The creator of Otaku Camera is Tokyo Otaku Mode, a niche community site for manga and cosplay fans which is proving to be very popular with over 10 million Facebook likes so far. The Japanese startup recently concluded a financing round from YJ Capital, an investment subsidiary of Yahoo Japan, along with DG Incubation, and ITOCHU Technology Ventures.

We have reached out to founder Nao Kokada about Otaku Camera’s monthly active users and its future plans. We will update if we hear back. (Update: We’re told “we started to set up banner ads inside the app and might launch paid frames in the future”. But no word on active users).

The Line juggernaut continues today with the app’s makers, NHN, adding free e-books within the social messaging app. While this doesn’t yet represent a threat to Amazon or Apple’s trade in e-books in Japan, it might evolve into something larger in future.

For now, as detailed in Line’s announcement (in Japanese), Line has three free e-books available that are being serialized in the app. More will be added in due course. Line’s users in Japan – about 30 percent of its 160 million registered user-base – can follow the Line account @linenovel to see new titles as they’re added.

Line has connected with Japanese publishing house Kodansha for these e-books. They seem to be new novels in the popular fiction genre aimed at younger readers.

In addition, Line is encouraging users to submit their own literary creations in a contest, running until August 15th. The winner will be published by Kodansha and may well appear with the Line Novel bookstore.

The messaging app launched its Line Manga store in April this year. It’s possible that Line Novel will eventually grow into a fully fledged e-bookstore to challenge the e-book biz giants in the country, such as Kobo.

Rival app KakaoTalk has also moved into the publishing sector recently, though it opted to launch KakaoPage as a digital marketplace for all kinds of self-published content.

The parodies of Line’s characters are making the rounds on Sina Weibo right now (see the compilation below). The cartoon-ish cast of Moon, James, Brown, and Cony are featured as huge emoticons in the social app, and are popping up in Line TV cartoons and in merchandise too. But the Japanese impressions focus on Moon and James, who seem to be the most fun to copy. Check them out:

(Source: @史上第一最最搞 on Weibo)

All the buzz has died down about Comm, the chat app DeNA (TYO:2432) started rolling out in October last year. According to the last official word a few months ago from the Mobage operator, the app racked up a total of five million users.

That number is surely higher now. Comm has been advertised on TV in Japan. But I doubt there is a lot of faith left inside DeNA to turn comm into a real competitor for Line or KakaoTalk.

The company, however, isn’t giving up.

So far, DeNA has kept Comm and its social gaming business apart, and in a sense, this is still the case.

With the latest update, however, Comm users can now play games with their friends – albeit no Mobage titles (so Comm still does not integrate with Mobage in any way at this point).

Instead, DeNA is calling the new in-app game service “Talk Game”. With the newest version of the app, users can play the following casino titles with each other – while they are chatting:

• Poker (up to seven people at the same time)
• Daifugo (a Japanese card game, up to six people)
• Mahjong (up to four people)

While playing, it’s possible to exchange messages and stickers within Comm (including a number of special Talk Game-related stickers, a few of which are shown below):

In fact, the communication part is essential to the gameplay and a great fit for casino games (which are being played round by round and gives people time to interact with each other). I suggest visiting Comm’s Japanese product page and have a look at the Flash animation to see a demo.

Talk Game is currently live in the Japanese version of Comm only. All games are entirely free to play.

Apart from Line and KakaoTalk, DeNA’s app is also competing with apps like Kik, WhatsApp, WeChat, Cubie, or close rival GREE Messenger.

Ryota Inaba, President Director and CEO of PT Rakuten-MNC

Rakuten’s (JSD:4755) Indonesian e-commerce site, Rakuten Belanja Online (RBO), turns two-years old today. Coinciding with today’s anniversary, RBO also announces its cross border e-commerce platform that promises users a better user interface and more products coming from overseas. It’s scheduled to be launched on June 3 in Indonesia.

With the global cross-border platform for Rakuten users in Indonesia, merchants in the country are also able to do cross-border trades in different Rakuten marketplaces backed up by an enhanced language support via its translation and review process. So far the same global e-commerce platform has already been launched in Malaysia. We asked Rakuten about how it will tackle logistics and payments across border barriers and will update when we hear back.

RBO also sees an upgrade in its payment process by partnering with Veritrans, a payment gateway company headed by founder Ryu Kawano. RBO was previously using Doku for this, but Ryota Inaba explained that trust, chemistry, and Veritrans’ fraud detection system has won them over.

So much for the Rakuten and MNC split-up story. Ryota Inaba, president director and CEO of the Rakuten-MNC joint venture, started his presentation at the RBO office at MNC tower this afternoon by emphasizing that Rakuten is here to stay in Indonesia. Inaba says that Rakuten and MNC are still a team and insisted that the split up story is a rumor. He also highlighted Rakuten’s financial strength that it will be able to finance RBO to success in Indonesia. He said in the statement:

Rakuten is confident that Indonesia has the potential to become the biggest e-commerce market in Asia. The launch of our new Global E-Commerce Platform and payment gateway signifies Rakuten’s continued and deepened commitment to merchants and customers in Indonesia

In Indonesia, RBO says that it is experiencing fast growth. Its gross merchant sales grew by more than 115 percent year on year (YoY), paid orders grew by 257 percent YoY, and the number of online shops increased by 129 percent YoY. RBO also sees huge growth in mobile orders, seeing 438 percent of growth YoY. No absolute figure was revealed, unfortunately.

China, which is crowded with numerous third-party Android app stores, isn’t generating any game revenue on Google Play since its payment system doesn’t work there. iOS game revenue in China looks healthy, though. Junde said that iOS 6, which is packed with Chinese features, has encouraged many Chinese iOS users to update its devices and in process lose their jailbreak which causes revenue on iTunes to increase.

In Japan, though, the iOS news was less impressive; game revenue from iPad isn’t great, which came to many as a surprise. In fact, only the US generates huge revenue from games on iPad.

In terms of revenue per download, no one is even near Japan’s figures which recorded $1.83 and $1.89 on iOS Games and Google Play respectively. Junde suspects that Singapore’s high iOS revenue per download figure was encouraged by the nation’s recent addiction to the game Candy Crush.

The top publishers based on game revenue on both iOS and Google Play include a number of Asian game publishers including Gungho, NHN, WeMade, GREE, and DeNA. Interestingly, Japan’s Gungho only has eight and nine applications on iOS and Android respectively, but is doing better in terms of revenue compared to GREE and DeNA, which both have hundreds of applications published on both platforms.

Gungho has done extremely well recently thanks to hit game Puzzle and Dragons which is the top revenue game for iOS and Android in March 2013. On Google Play, Asian games are also well represented, with games including Puzzle and Dragons, Anipang, Line Pop, and Blood Brothers hitting the charts.

It’s a pity that we can’t embed the entire deck into this post but we thank App Annie for the permission to include some of the slides for our readers.

Japan has long had square watermelons, and now it has Square for mobile payments too. This marks the first overseas expansion for Square, the funky iPhone add-on gadget that lets anyone swipe credit card payments.

Square’s Japan launch comes in partnership with Sumitomo Mitsui Card Corporation (SMCC) and involves both the iPhone gadget and the iPad-oriented Square Register. The company will charge a “low” transaction rate of 3.25 percent per swipe. That’s one hell of a cut for retailers to swallow, though it is lower than some of Square’s rivals. Funds from swiped payments on Square are “automatically deposited in the merchant’s bank account the next business day for participating banks and within one week for other banks”, says today’s announcement.

Square CEO and founder Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-creator, hailed today’s launch in “a country with a rich history of design, innovation and tradition” that he feels matches with Square’s ethos.

Almost exactly a year ago, PayPal and Japan’s Softbank launched a joint venture for online payments that also brought PayPal’s triangular card-swipe gadget to the nation. In Japan’s very mature market, they’re certainly not the first, and things like Docomo Mobile Payment have been working on Japan’s complex feature phones for some time.

Aside from the US, Square has also launched over the border in Canada.

(Source: TechCrunch)

Twitter is fun, but it’s not a very visual medium. Japan’s TwitCasting is trying to change that with its video broadcasting platform that’s tied very closely to Twitter. Today the startup has revealed that it now has US$640,000 in seed funding from East Ventures and various angel investors to help it grow. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia).

TwitCasting now has more than 2.4 million users, of whom 80 percent are in Japan, 10 percent in Brazil.

Yosuke Akamatsu, CEO of Moi Corporation, the startup company behind TwitCasting, says in the announcement:

TwitCasting is seeing ‘hockey stick’ growth since last summer,
and we were behind the speed of the growth in terms of human resources
and system infrastructure. This funding will enable us to rapidly deliver a good
communication platform and acquire core team members.

TwitCasting has both viewer and broadcaster apps for Android and iPhone. There’s also a web app, where you can also choose to view streams that are radio only, music only, or full video. You can view live broadcasts where available, or dig through archived videos.

The service can be used for events and other useful stuff, though most of the videos on the site seem to be just people rambling on about stuff. A lot like YouTube.

With this investment, Taiga Matsuyama, a partner at East Ventures, will take a seat at on MOI’s board of directors.

Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia. See our ethics page for more information.

Mixi has ploughed over $700,000 into CloudStudy, whose main product is StudyPlus, a social learning management platform. The other investment, explains the Startup-Dating blog, is in Reventive, a young company that has so far made three social apps. It hasn’t been revealed how much Reventive got.

StudyPlus

CloudStudy’s StudyPlus platform helps students to record their study times, subjects, and content. Students can then share this progress with contacts inside the app, or to social networks like Facebook (yes, Mixi’s main rival).

After starting up in March 2012, it has now grown to 100,000 registered users, though CloudStudy’s CEo concedes that only about 12,000 of those learners are active on the service. But those who are active do post a lot each day. It’s accessible in a web app as well as on apps for Android and iOS.

Reventive

Reventive’s main product is a Path clone called Close (see the GIF demo), which is on Android and iOS. Whereas Path lets you have over 100 buddies within the app, Close lives up to its name by restricting you to just nine close friends. So perhaps it’s somewhere between Path and so-called couples’ apps like Between.

The same startup is also working on a location-based group dating/hangout app called Gocon which is still in the works.

Mixi mixing it up

While Mixi hasn’t acquired the startups, that might happen later if one really takes off. A few months ago, Mixi acquired the startup company Kamado, which makes a host of sites and apps.

But Mixi has also shut down a lot of things that don’t work. Its subscription fashion e-commerce service Petite Jeté was launched last September, but it was killed off by January of this year.

Mixi has been hovering – a polite way of saying horribly stuck – at about 15 million active users for two whole years while Facebook has grown strongly in the same time period. Also, social media trends have moved towards social messaging apps like Line. Line now has 150 million global users, with about 45 million of those based in Japan.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

Developed by Japanese gaming company DeNA, Blood Brothers is a popular mobile game that has hit number one place in 33 countries. It is also a mobile game played across most parts of the world except for China, Africa, and Japan.

Tetsuya Mori, managing director of DeNA’s Singapore office, said at today’s Casual Connect conference in Singapore that Blood Brothers is an important case study for developers because it is one of the few games that has won without special device leverage (like Nintendo had in the past) or a Japan-first success (like Rage of Bahamut). Mr. Mori added:

Blood Brothers is interesting because we didn’t even release the game in Japan. We just released the game in the global market and won the world. For that reason, it matters to us [game developers].

While most Japanese game publishers know how to make money in their local market, Mori says that not many know how to repeat the success in the global market. So what is the reason for Blood Brothers‘ success? Mori explains that in-game events have made the major difference.

The secret sauce: Games inside a game

As explained by Mori, events are “games inside a game.” They are usually set within a limited time and gives players rare items. Such in-game events usually double the average revenue per user (ARPU). Examples of an event could be a player versus player (PvP) event, boss raid, or special dungeon mission. Understanding that events are important, Mori shared five key design points on planning an event:

1. Leader-board: A way to spur gamers to climb the ranking ladder.
2. Separation into groups: To create a sense of belonging among gamers. But sometimes a group too big doesn’t provide that sense of belonging. “Divide the pyramid small enough so that players feel they have control,” says Mori. He also shared that a 10-person pyramids are what DeNA finds most effective for Blood Brothers but the team keeps evaluating and optimizing the group based on data they find.
3. Incentivizing effort: Blood Brothers gives one point for the first reward and provides increasing returns of points as users get higher.
4. One day, one match: Developers shouldn’t do events too frequently to ensure that events stay fresh and exclusive. Don’t make gamers exhausted.
5. Rewarding effort: Top players usually feel comfortable being at the top of the pyramid. To keep them working, Blood Brothers provides negative incentive from time to time to keep them on their toes.

Mori also shares the “five don’ts” when designing Blood Brothers:

• Don’t play, get lost.
• Don’t get players overwhelmed.
• Don’t get them bored.
• Don’t get them exhausted.
• Don’t let top players feel too secure and comfortable.

Actively managing games as a service

Mori says that a lot of game developers see a game as a product and leave it there once it is developed. But for DeNA, it is all about actively managing games as a service. “[A game] is art, yes, but it is more science than art,” said Mori (see slide 13).

Part of the work for Blood Brothers is done at DeNA Hanoi, the Vietnamese branch formed through the Punch Entertainment team it acquired 18 months ago. He ended his keynote saying:

Tokyo HQ studios rely more and more on the Hanoi studio. We have another
game called History Attacks. Just through this experience, we are making active transfer of our core competency to Southeast Asia. Not only in Hanoi, but we also set up a studio in Singapore.

UPDATE: To make it clear, Blood Brothers is available in China (on mobage.cn and mobage.tw) and Africa (on Mobage West Network)

Indonesian game developer Touchten today released a soccer app for Android that’s proving to be quite a head turner. This soccer game is quite special because it is developed together with legendary Brazilian footballer Zico. For those who don’t know who that is, Zico is the 1980s equivalent of Cristiano Ronaldo. Zico has also made a name for himself in Japan, earning the nickname “God of Soccer” there.

The brand-new game, which is titled Zico, is a casual 3D free kick game that also tells the story of Zico’s footballing career. There are three big stages inside the game located in Brazil, Italy, and Japan, countries where Zico played professional football. For now the only available stage is the first one, with Italy and Japan being released later.

How did an Indonesian game developer get the chance to work with Zico? Touchten CEO Anton Soeharyo said that they were introduced to NDV Consulting’s Fernando Vasconez by a Singaporean friend. They had chemistry straight away and immediately agreed on the deal. The Zico game is made in collaboration with Brazil’s 213 Sports.

During the game launch today, Zico has also made a video greeting to Indonesian soccer fans, particularly those from Indonesia’s largest online community Kaskus, which is Touchten’s launch partner. The game itself will be heavily promoted by Zico in his home country Brazil, including during Brazil’s Confederations Cup, World Cup 2014, and Olympics 2016.

The game will be pre-installed on eight to 10 million mobile devices in Brazil in preparation for the sporting bonanza in the country in the next few years. Zico is first launched in the Japanese market in commemoration of the 20 year anniversary of the J-League.

Anton said at today’s launch event that he wants to show that Indonesians can do something on the global stage. He thanked everyone including Zico and the other Brazilian partners for making this project come true. The Touchten team is actively pursuing other intellectual property products with famous people like Zico.

Zico comes at a price of US$0.99 on Android. You can download it on Google Play. The iOS version will come soon.

The fashion-loving Japanese startup Muse & Co has raised 350 million yen, about $3.4 million, in series B funding for its fledgling e-commerce business. The primary investors are Itochu Technology Ventures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Infinity Ventures Partners (IVP); this round comes exactly a year after a smaller first round.

Muse & Co aims itself at Japan’s savviest and most stylish shoppers – which are of course young, professional women. It’s a VIP flash sales site, something we’ve seen prove popular in the country with Luxa.jp, Monoco, Glamour Sales, and numerous others.

According to Startup-Dating, Muse & Co CEO Hirotake Kubo has revealed that the startup has 200,000 users and sees $500,000 in monthly sales, with 50 percent of that income from mobile shoppers. A whacking 70 percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices. The e-store has apps for iPhone and Android.

Started up in February 2012, the flash sales site has now grown to comprise 20 staffers. Like many such niche e-commerce services, it has a limited amount of items for sale each day – in Muse & Co’s case, just 30 – and flash sales on these last for just a week. It claims that most garments sell out before that deadline.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

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

Popular mobile messaging chat app LINE was created by NHN Japan 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. Hyunbin Kang, who is the head of LINE Business Office at LINE Plus (which supports LINE’s overseas expansion) 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 will continue to expand beyond its success in Japan, and reach out to various countries around the world. 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.

Using a smartphone is a very sensual and immersive experience, but so far our sense of smell has been left out of the fun. Not any more. A Japanese startup has created and is looking to launch ChatPerf, a hardware add-on for your iPhone that can emit smells.

The ChatPerk gadget (see the video below) could be synced up with various apps or games to emit specific odors at a certain time – such as the smell of burning rubber in a racing game, the scent of coffee to wake you up in conjunction with an alarm app, or to blast some soothing incense as you use a yoga app. I’m sure we can imagine some cruder smells that could be honked out as well.

ChatPerk is just a prototype for now, and the demo video below reveals that it looks very different to the conceptual designs on the startup’s homepage, so perhaps it’s all far from finalized. The biggest barrier to this being used extensively it that it cannot, inevitably, create scents magically from the ether, and so it requires the use of miniature plastic tanks of perfumes. That sounds a bit fiddly and troublesome.

A version of ChatPerk for Android is in the works, but there’s no indicated launch time or price yet for either that or the iPhone add-on. Check out the demo video shot by Diginfo.tv over the weekend:

(Source: Diginfo.tv)

We are reviewing our business to optimize our global game development operations through a process of selection and concentration, and this has led us to the difficult decision to close our China office and studio. GREE Beijing has developed several excellent games and the talented people who made up its staff have made a valuable contribution to GREE. We regret that we have had to make this closure and wish all the best to everyone affected.

Japan’s GREE has been a dominant force in mobile games on its home turf, and over the past few years has overseen an aggressive expansion overseas. But late last year the company was forced to lay off employees at its North American office, and now it has apparently shuttered its China branch completely.

We have contacted GREE for comment on this story and will update it if we hear back.

According to an internal announcement at GREE China yesterday (as reported by Sina Tech), the branch will totally cease operations on June 28th, and all of its employees will be laid off. The company has not yet announced a compensation plan for employees, but it should have plenty of time to roll something out over the next month and a half before the shutdown actually takes place.

The reason for GREE China’s demise — and the company’s declining fortunes in general — is generally believed to be its failure to recognize and commit to the global movement towards smartphones quickly enough. 60 percent of GREE’s revenue is still coming from feature phone users, but feature phone users are getting scarcer and the company has not carved out a dominant position as a smartphone gaming platform on either Android or iOS.

Of course, this is not to say the company is about to collapse. GREE is still projecting a net profit of around $300 million this quarter, but then again, if the company’s projections are correct it will be the first time since 2008 that GREE has seen its profits drop. It seems likely that given this shift, the company has decided to concentrate on its strengths on its home turf of Japan and reduce the degree to which it’s extended overseas. That’s probably a smart business move, but it’s a bummer for everyone working in the GREE China office.

Related: GREE’s founding story

(via Sina Tech)

We’ve seen all kinds of social fashion startups crop up in Asia in the past couple of years. One of the newest is Zoolook, created by a team of six people that’s split evenly between Tokyo and Hong Kong. This particular app focuses on the social and photography side of clothing, and is made up of a social network were people can share and tag their favorite looks (pictured below).

One big draw in the app, explains Zoolook founder Benoit Lavaud, is the presence of top fashion labels who have virtual “showrooms”, not dissimilar from Facebook brand pages, within the social network. This feature is being used by over 60 regional but prominent fashion companies, such as Kenzo, and… er… lots of others that I won’t pretend I know. But I’ve heard of Kenzo. For more clued-up fashionistas, the app is a way to keep up with trends, share their looks, and get inspiration from the numerous Asian fashion bloggers who also make use of the startup’s service.

Benoit explains this strategy to us:

Brands are quite lost in terms of promotion now that digital has entered their landscape. They lack resources to manage at same time in-store promotion and digital promotion. We have entered this category where they feel we do the job of connecting bloggers and influencers for both real and digital.

Zoolook is also working the floor at offline events in this sector, and was recently selected as the official app of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo. Readers in Hong Kong might want to check out Zoolook’s ‘live fashion snap’ event on Thursday (16th) evening at 6pm at Apple’s Causeway Bay store. Benoit explains what’s going to be happening that night:

We have invited over 20 top bloggers and Hong Kong Fashion icons to come and be snapped by Stephenie Kay, a Chinese fashion photographer. We setup a photo booth and a stage in the store and gather fashionistas to watch how Stephenie master photography snapping these influencers using an iPhone and our app. Very unique to be able to organize such a gathering in an Apple Store.

The Zoolook iPhone app is here, while the Android version is still in the works.

Japan’s CyberAgent (TYO:4751) has burst onto Japan’s crowdfunding scene with the launch of its new CyberAgent Crowd Funding platform. Actually, it will launch fully this summer, by which time it’ll be ready to match startup companies and neat ideas with people who want to fund them. The new site aims to be raising $1 million per month for its listed projects.

The new service will be a spin-off from the CyberAgent parent company, who’s investing 40 million yen (US$400,000) to kickstart it. Ryotaro Nakayama will be the new CEO. It’s also separate from CyberAgent Ventures, the company’s investment arm.

CyberAgent Crowd Funding promises to fully investigate all projects before adding them to the site, and will also back them up with media and promotional support.

Japan already has several funding platforms, such as Campfire and Ready For.

CyberAgent Ventures itself might be interested in some of the social and e-commerce projects that come up on the site, as those are the areas where the Tokyo-based fund makes its investments across Southeast Asia. Most recently, CyberAgent Ventures invested in a Taiwan-based fashion social network.

(Updated: Changed headline and some phrases to reflect that this is created by CyberAgent, not the CyberAgent Ventures subsidiary).

Photos become more meaningful when you look at them in relation to time. Reep is a made-in-Japan mobile app that remembers the photos you took a year ago. It syncs with your iPhone camera folder, Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr to help sort your images based on dates.

After you sync your photo accounts with Reep, you see a calendar that shows you the images taken a year ago. For example, a year ago on May 8, I was at Baidu headquarters in Beijing, China. Admittedly, Reep doesn’t solve any real life problem, but it is cool to know what was I doing in the past through the pictures I have taken. You can give Reep a download here at no cost if you have an iOS device available.

Hiromasa Yoshikane, CEO at Azit, the company behind Reep, says that his team was organized by a group of university students whose average age is just 21 years old. Despite the team’s young age, their mobile app, Reep, has won several award including the “CyberAgent × Biz Japan Business Contest 2012” and “Google for Entrepreneurs Tokyo 2012.” The young team is currently under the mentorship of Modiva Japan and Voyage Group in Japan.

I’ll say it again: if there is one mobile game out there right now that people in Japan will remember in 10 years, it’s Puzzle and Dragons.

The game, which boasts 13 million registered users in this country (10 percent of the population), has generated US$113 million in sales in April.

Since late last year, maker GungHo’s market cap at the Osaka Stock Exchange kept rising and rising – to about $10 billion – to the point that the company is worth more than Mobage operator DeNA, GREE, and Zynga combined.

The Korean version of GungHo’s money-raking game.

And today, GungHo (3765.OS) shares jumped limit-up by 300,000 yen to 1,342,000 yen (up 28.8 percent) in just a few minutes of trading, until the stock was bid-only.

As a consequence, the company’s market cap now reached 1.54 trillion yen, which translates to $15.1 billion. With this number, GungHo topped Nintendo’s market cap of US$1.53 trillion yen (or US$15.0 billion).

The US$15.1 billion market cap is also higher than that of Nikon, Fujitsu, Isuzu, Sanyo, All Nippon Airways, Sharp, or Mitsubishi Motors.

It’s a new world we live in.

Other market caps (Monday, May 13 at 11:30am JST):

• GREE: $2.8 billion
• DeNA: $3.6 billion
• Zynga at $2.6 billion
• Electronic Arts: $6.7 billion
• Activision Blizzard: $16.7 billion

GungHo’s new owner SoftBank can be very happy.

We’ve been following the progress of Videogram, a startup that hails from Tokyo, pretty closely in the past six months. Now that Videogram has a new iPhone app, I decided to give it a try.

Looking at the name, one might think that Videogram is the Instagram of videos – it is not, nor does it seem to aim to be. Started up by Sandeep Casi at Cinemacraft in Japan – before moving to Silicon Valley as part of 500 Startups – it’s about helping people discover videos, something that translates well in its iPhone app.

With most online video services such as YouTube, you’re only shown one still-frame to decide whether or not you’ll watch it. Videogram displays the video in a sort of comic-book format (think of Flipboard) where the size of the frames is determined by how important Videogram’s algorithm thinks they are, including factors such as user-engagement. To be clear – Videogram seems to be concerned only with how users discover and engage with videos before they watch them. Apps like Vine and Cinemagram seem to be the ones vying for the title of “the Instagram of videos” – focusing more on the ability to create and share videos.

In terms of video playback itself, there’s really nothing different on Videogram than what you would find with YouTube. However, it does offer users the opportunity to comment with the video playback time also tagged, similar to what Soundcloud allows, albeit displayed in a list format instead of on the linear playback bar.

In trying out the app, I encountered some playback bugs here and there, and I felt the experience was a little clunky on the iPhone 4 I tested it on. This may be because a large part of the app isn’t native code but HTML5 (the video playback is native). Trying to provide the same experience on mobile as on the web app version offers a challenge – especially for an app that’s visual by nature. Videogram alters the number of frames that are shown depending on the display size and the Videogram algorithm.

Personally, I think the Cinemacraft team is onto something interesting for video discoverability, and I think some tweaking is needed in making the experience just right. For example: I like the idea of its playlists, but didn’t like how the playlists are channel-specific – meaning I couldn’t mix and match videos from different content providers.

Cinemacraft’s impressive initial list of content providers and innovative approach to displaying videos is certainly a welcome change and a benefit for video content providers and consumers alike, and I’m looking forward to seeing the future of Videogram as it evolves both on PC and mobile.

Check out an embedded Videogram video in our first story on the startup. The Videogram iOS app is here.

Rebright Partners, a Japan-based incubator and one of the parties behind Indonesian VC firm Batavia Incubator has recently launched its new investment fund for startups in Southeast Asia. It has secured two investment deals with the first being made to online ad platform Adskom, which we talked about last week. We spoke with Rebright Partners CEO Takeshi Ebihara (pictured right) to find out more about the fund.

Ebihara first explained that there will be no conflict of interest with another VC firm Batavia Incubator. Batavia Incubator will focus on Indonesian startups with an eye on the domestic market, while Rebright Partners itself will focus on startups who are looking to target multiple countries in Southeast Asia. He explains further about the fund:

Our fund LP investors are Japanese well track recorded entrepreneurs and Corporations. So that the portfolio company can expect LPs wisdom insights and networks to grow own business. In that sense, the fund can be said Super Entrepreneurs Fund.

Regarding the kind of startups they target, Ebihara says that he wants to invest in internet startups as well as those covering the mobile space like media, e-commerce, and mobile apps. Ebihara prefers consumer internet service primarily, and that investing in the B2B business model is a rarity. He admits that Adskom is one of such rare cases. Does Ebihara consider himself as having a hands-on approach to his startup portfolios? He says yes:

In most of investment cases we take the lead position and in some cases our partners will be seated on board. Though we do not deny being in the non-lead minority sometimes.

Talking about the startup scene in Southeast Asia

Ebihara himself said that he has been watching the region closely as mentor for the Founder’s Institute in offices like Jakarta, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur, and that he likes what he sees. The scene around the region is getting hotter, Bangkok’s current situation reminds him of Jakarta two years back, there are more and more startup accelerators and co-working spaces spotted in Kuala Lumpur. “It is worth trying to find young talented hackers and entrepreneurs in this region,” said Ebihara.

He ends it with an invitation: “If you are a startup or entrepreneur trying to cover large Southeast Asian Internet and mobile space, we are now accepting applications.”

To give you some idea of the speed of these things, K is capable of ten quadrillion computations per second. So the new computer would be capable of performing one quintillion computations per second. If you want to see what that number looks like, it’s this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

It’s not clear yet exactly what the speedy new machine will cost or where it will be built, but developing K cost about $1 billion, and researchers are hoping this new computer will be a bit cheaper.

Supercomputers are sometimes seen as symbols of a global game of one-upsmanship, with countries competing to create the fastest computer and thus prove to the world that they are totally the best at science. But Japan doesn’t plan to use its new supercomputer just to wave in competitors’ faces. The computer will be used to do all kinds of awesome things, such as:

• Develop new medicines and medical formulas
• Run simulations and statistical analyses that predict natural disasters like quakes and tsunamis
• Become self-aware, conquer the world

OK, so I made up that last one, but the computer really is going to be used in disaster prevention and medical research, which is awesome. I’m no computer scientist, but I’m guessing that at one quadrillion calculations per second you can run some pretty goddamn complex simulations, which should be a huge aid in disaster prevention and medical developments.

(via Japan Times)

Japan-based social gaming platform DeNA (TYO:2432) has just rolled out its Q4 and full-year 2012 financials. After an expensive previous quarter in which profits dipped, the same thing happened again for DeNA in Q4 (up to March 31st 2013) with an operating profit of $184 million, which is down from $216 million in Q3, but up three percent on the previous year.

Quarterly revenue was $528 million (up 22 percent from same time last year), but below Q3’s record-breaking figure.

Things are rosier for the whole of the 2102 fiscal year, in which DeNA brought in a record $2.04 billion in revenues and $775 million in profit. Here’s the key table:

DeNA chose its quarterly highlights as:

• MobaCoin consumption in Japan was 58.3 billion yen ($588 million), 2.5 percent lower than the previous quarter.
• Overseas MobaCoin consumption showed strong and steady quarter-to-quarter increase, approaching $70 million.
• Increased user engagement drove monetization growth. As a result, Mobage titles occupied top ranks in US Google Play’s top-grossing chart.
• DeNA and Nexon formed a global business alliance to bring new Nexon-developed games to Mobage networks.
• Groovy, DeNA’s new music player app was launched in Japan.

For the current Q1 2013, DeNA expects to make $175 million in operating profit (UPDATE: Corrected that figure. It’s for Q1 only, not FY13).

See the full stats on DeNA’s IR homepage.

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]

There is no end to the Puzzle and Dragons hype in Japan, it seems.

The country’s top smartphone game now has over 12 million users, is generating a staggering US$62 million to $86 million per month, and has been advertised with a new campaign on national TV since the end of March.

Maker GungHo (3765.OS) has just announced a Nintendo DS version of the RPG/puzzle hybrid game for later this year, in addition to the release of a spin-off dubbed Puzzle and Dragons Challenge for iOS and Android a few days ago. both titles are for Japan only at this point.

And recently, the company rolled out a Puzzle and Dragons English version on Android (here is the iOS version that came out late last year).

GungHo is listed on the Osaka Stock Exchange, and I have pointed out how their market cap has risen over the last few months (driven almost exclusively by Puzzle and Dragons’ growth) quite a few times in the past.

As a reaction to the two Puzzle and Dragons spin-offs and the new English-language Android version of the game, GungHo’s stock price went through the roof.

After adding close to 15 percent in a single day, GungHo’s market cap now stands at a mind-blowing US$9 billion (Editor’s note: It’s $10 billion as of now). In that area, GungHo destroys every mobile game company out there, including:

• DeNA ($4 billion)

• GREE ($2.8 billion)

• Zynga ($2.4 billion)

With over $10 billion, GungHo’s market cap exceeds that of national airline ANA, Daihatsu, Mitsubishi Motors, Sanyo Electric, NEC, or Sharp: that’s what one successful smartphone game – a potential new billion dollar franchise – can trigger on the Japanese market.

MoneyTree, a Tokyo-based startup, has just launched its iOS finance app today. The service is basically a Mint.com for Japan, though the big difference is that MoneyTree is currently focused on mobile users.

The startup’s aim is to simplify the financial lives of users in Japan. There are many other apps from Japan that allow users to manually record their finances, such as Zaim, but MoneyTree is different in securely connecting users with over 30 different banks and credit cards in Japan.

I had an opportunity to sit down with Paul Chapman, the CEO of MoneyTree, and he was able to give me a first-hand tour of the app. Paul provided me a tour with their demo data set, and then I put it to the test with my own financial information.

You put in all your online banking information, and then MoneyTree goes to work. The end result is a really simple user interface based on two “cards” – one for your current overall situation, and then another that details your income and expenses. One thing I noticed was that a lot of my spending habits were already cleverly categorized by the app from my credit card usage.

However, Japan is still very much a cash-driven country. MoneyTree also makes it easy for people to mark how they spend that cash and categorize it within the app.

What really sets MoneyTree apart from other financial apps in Japan and elsewhere in the world is the simplicity of the user interface and experience. The information you’re shown is exactly what you need to see, and you don’t need to do any data input if you don’t want to. If you want to see more data on anything, you simply tap on the related field. It’s extremely apparent that MoneyTree understands the mobile-first approach. In future, the startup will add graphs so that you can visualize your finances.

MoneyTree is launching today in English and Japanese on iOS, and other platforms will be supported in the future.

The Tokyo-based startup that makes Gengo, the enterprise-oriented crowdsourced translation service, has wrapped up $12 million in series B funding, led by Intel Capital. Aptly for such a globally-minded business, other investors in this newest round are from all across the globe: Infocomm Investments (Singapore), STCV (Saudi Arabia), NTT-IP (Japan), Iris Capital (France), and previous investor Atomico (UK).

Gengo is a platform for human translation for 33 languages, with over 7,500 experienced translators providing their linguistic services to small- and medium-sized business and major corporations alike. The idea is that machine translation – using things like Google Translate – is not reliable or accurate enough for doing business.

Founded in 2009, Gengo got series A funding worth $5.25 million in 2011 to help with its initial expansion.

The new financing will be used to accelerate global expansion and speed up its translation process (see the demo video below). Gengo already has a deal with YouTube to improve its multi-lingual video captioning feature.

Hiro Tamura, a partner at Atomico, points out in today’s announcement that since their original investment, “Gengo has proven it can scale its business across the world whilst growing its revenue four-fold.” Meanwhile, Kuo-Yi Lim, CEO of Infocomm Investments, says that Singapore’s “multicultural and multilingual environment, and diverse talent pool” make for an ideal “base for Gengo’s growth into the rest of Asia.”

Quite a few startups are trying the crowdsourced human translation niche, such as Japan’s Conyac or the new project by the guy who created Captchas.

See how Gengo works in this short demo video:

If there was any doubt that Japan is still a hot market for startups, this news should clear any doubts. Yahoo Japan and SoftBank Capital are joining forces to pump $20 million into helping early-stage mobile and social American companies expanding into Japan. This will certainly be good news for startups in the Valley who have been eyeing the Eight Islands.

Toshiaki Chiku, who is now heading the US operations via SoftBank’s office in New York, had this to say:

Yahoo Japan is making a big effort to expand our venture capital impact in the United States, and we are firmly committed to helping companies at all growth stages get into the Japanese market. Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank, we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed.

SoftBank Capital is the venture branch of one of Japan’s largest telcos, SoftBank Corporation (TYO:9984), and thus has strong interests in promoting products and services that will be used on top of its wires. Yahoo Japan is set to report its Q4 earnings today and mobile advertising has long been its largest division, contributing to 20 percent of its earnings. Yahoo Japan is also Japan’s leading search engine and reaches over 80 percent of Japan’s Internet users through its many services. Yahoo Japan also went in with GREE Ventures to invest $2 million into social gaming just a few months ago.

SoftBank has been quite aggressive in expanding US startups in Japan. Not only did it invest early in Yahoo Japan in 1995 but also recently announced another $250 million to create the PrinceVille Fund aimed at getting US startups competing in Asia. SoftBank’s already got some considerable success with exiting companies. It sold Bluefin Labs to Twitter, BuddyMedia to Salesforce, HuffingtonPost to AOL, Hyperpublic to Groupon, and OMGPOP to Zynga. It’s looking to do the same in Japan.

Given the above interests, it makes sense for the two companies to double down on mobile and encourage innovation. Japan’s mobile consumers are also quite willing to pay for mobile services as evidenced by it being the top mobile ad market until late last year.

Full Press Release below:

SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN Announce Partnership and $20M Fund Investment to Help Bring More U.S. Startups to the Japanese Market

Japan’s leading Internet company to fund early-stage companies via SoftBank Capital and help startups drive business in Japan

New York, NY & Tokyo, Japan – April 24, 2013 – Yahoo Japan Corp. (“Yahoo!JAPAN”), Japan’s largest web portal and one of the largest e-commerce platforms, and SoftBank Capital, a venture group affiliated with Japan’s SoftBank Corp. (“SoftBank”), today announced an investment and partnership designed to help U.S. startups of all sizes in everything from early-stage funding to later-stage expansion.

SoftBank Capital’s early-stage Technology Fund ’10 has been investing $100 million on behalf of SoftBank, which has anchored SoftBank Capital’s investing activities since 1995. Yahoo! JAPAN, a joint venture between U.S. Internet company Yahoo! Inc. and SoftBank, has invested $20 million into the early stage fund. This complements the $250 million PrinceVille Investments, L.P. fund (“PrinceVille Fund”) announced in February.

In addition to its investment, Yahoo! JAPAN is announcing Toshiaki Chiku as its head of U.S. operations, where he will oversee investments and partnerships while working out of Softbank Capital’s Manhattan office.

“Yahoo! JAPAN is making a big effort to expand our venture capital impact in the United States, and we are firmly committed to helping companies at all growth stages get into the Japanese market,” Chiku said. “Japan can be challenging for many U.S. companies, and given our scale and affiliation with SoftBank Corp., we’re in a great position to help them grow and succeed.”

Yahoo! JAPAN’s influence in the Japanese market allows its partners to fully harness the market’s opportunities. Every month, Yahoo! JAPAN reaches more than 80percent* of Japan’s Internet users through its services. Criteo, the global leader in performance display advertising, recently began an expansion into Asia after completing a Series D round with investors including SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN.

“Our partnerships with SoftBank Capital and Yahoo! JAPAN have been crucial in helping us establish our presence in Asia, with Yahoo! JAPAN enabling us to rapidly scale our business by tapping into one of the largest sources of premium inventory on Japan’s leading Internet portal,” Criteo CEO JB Rudelle said.

Yahoo! JAPAN’s partnership with SoftBank Capital is one of many developments further cementing Softbank Capital’s reputation as the premier investment partner for U.S. companies looking to expand into Asia. The fund has been investing on behalf of SoftBank, which has brought many U.S. companies to the Japanese market starting with Yahoo! JAPAN in 1995. The investment firm recently announced its $250 million PrinceVille Fund designed to help growth-stage entrepreneurs and their businesses compete in and expand into Asia.

Yahoo! JAPAN and SoftBank Capital are looking to invest in companies in the mobile applications, social media, e-commerce, online advertising, gaming and cloud computing spaces. SoftBank Capital’s previous exits include Bluefin Labs acquired by Twitter, Buddy Media acquired by Salesforce.com, Huffington Post acquired by AOL, Hyperpublic acquired by Groupon and OMGPOP acquired by Zynga.

“We like to say that our expertise and partnerships give our portfolio companies an ‘unfair advantage’ when it comes to growth opportunities in Asian markets,” said Ron Fisher, Managing Partner of SoftBank Capital. “Partners like Yahoo! JAPAN allow us to deliver on that message and become a preferred partner that can help our portfolio companies forge the relationships necessary to further expand their international presence.”

Source: Nielsen (NetView JP), brand level data, access from home and office using PCs（excluding Internet application, February 2013

When it comes to soccer¹, there’s one brand global video gamers prefer: FIFA. Despite being the product of America’s two-time “Worst Company Ever” winner EA, FIFA is beloved by fans both because it’s fun to play and because it includes tons of licensed teams from all the most popular soccer leagues around the world.

But Konami’s second-place Pro Evolution Soccer (PES, also called Winning Eleven in Japan) may have finally found a gap it can use to challenge FIFA’s dominance, especially in Asia: the Asian leagues. Konami announced on Monday that it has finalized a deal with the Asian Champions’ League that will see Asia’s top club teams coming to the game for the first time ever in PES 2014. And while FIFA does have teams from Korea’s K-League and Australia’s A-League, it doesn’t have any club teams from other Asian countries, so Konami’s game will be the first to offer those teams to players.

Chinese soccer fans, for example, will be able to play as China’s top club teams Guangzhou Hengda, Jiangsu Shuntian, Guizhou Renhe, and Beijing Guoan for the first time ever in a major soccer game. And Konami is reportedly in negotiations to bring the entirety of China’s Super League, Japan’s J League, and Thailand’s Premier League into the game as well.

Although the biggest European clubs have huge followings in Asia, Konami’s inclusion of Asian fans’ hometown clubs could be a way of helping it scoop up some of FIFA’s market share across the region. No team licensing can make up for a bad game, of course, and it remains to be seen whether PES 2014 will be able to compete with FIFA 14 on that front. But if the games are comparable in other ways, the pull of being able to play as the hometown heroes may be enough to bring some Asian fans over to PES.

In China, it already appears some fans are excited about the prospect of playing as Chinese Super League teams. The comments section on this article about the new PES 2014 seems to have descended quickly into banter and cursing, with fans talking about things like whether games played in Beijing Guoan’s home at Worker’s Stadium will feature the sounds of Guoan fans’ legendary foul-mouthed chants. If Konami can capitalize on that interest, it may just have found a way to challenge the dominance of FIFA in the world’s most populous continent.

1. Yes, I called it soccer and not football, because that’s what the game was originally called. Watch this newsreel clip of Liverpool FC from 1935 if you don’t believe me. Football used to refer to any game played on foot, with the most popular games being Association Football (the sport we now know as soccer) and Rugby Football. The name “association football” was later shortened to assoccer and then just soccer in the colloquial language of the time in the UK.

Japanese mobile gaming giant, GREE, has been secretly pushing its mobile messaging app, Tellit (Tell it). It was first launched as GREE Messenger late last year but has apparently since rebranded as Tellit in the middle of last month. When asked, a GREE representative declined to reveal user figures but said that Tellit has achieved number one under the free downloads section in Apple app store in Malaysia, Italy, and Germany. Tellit is available both on iOS and Android.

Tellit is built by GREE-invested eBuddy, an Amsterdam-based startup with over 100 staff who specializes in messaging products. Jonie Oostveen, director of strategic partnerships at eBuddy, tells me that although eBuddy built Tellit for GREE, it doesn’t help to market or chart the future of the chat app. It seems that eBuddy is in an odd position as it runs eBuddy XMS which is also a mobile messaging app. Tellit, as I understand, runs on the eBuddy backend too.

eBuddy XMS has more than two million monthly active users. That rises to 16 million monthly active users in total including the eBuddy IM chat aggregator. Oostveen describes XMS as having a more “European look and feel” compared to GREE’s Tellit. XMS doesn’t have stickers packs.

Tellit, on the other hand, fits with the general Asian culture better with a cuter overall design coupled with stickers similar to KakaoTalk, Line, and WeChat. I’m guessing that GREE has plans to make Tellit a mobile gaming platform once it gains steam. But a GREE representative said that the company has no plans to turn it into a mobile gaming platform just yet.

Whatever it is, GREE has two mobile messaging apps at its disposal. I guess it could tap into eBuddy XMS for the Western market and Tellit for the Asian market. But first it probably has to buy the rest of eBuddy to make that possible.

The three-day event heeds the model motto of “failing fast, succeed faster”. It will impart lean startup skills, focusing on the process and validation, such as identifying the problem, testing the prototype, and eliminating barriers to a viable business model. Some of the more specific topics that will be covered during the workshop include customer development, lean UX, landing page design, and how you can develop experiments to get your startup ideas validated. Attendees are expected to walk away with the know-how to build revolutionary products – and products that people will want.

So what sets LeanTOKYO apart from other workshops? Ariba Jahan, global coordinator for Lean Startup Machine Tokyo, tells us:

The key tool people will be using is the Validation Board, this is what makes us so unique. We don’t only educate others on lean methodology, we make sure you get to walk through the process and get your ideas validated.Then you can apply this learning towards any and every future ideas. LSM was selected to be in TechStars for this innovative Validation Board. The Validation Board allows users to test their startup ideas before exhausting time or money. It allows users to strategize their goals, develop experiments and monitor progress. Then, they can make faster decisions, improve team accountability and build not only better products, but products that will actually solve an existing problem.

The event also aims to bring some of the best practices of Silicon Valley, adapting it to the heart of Tokyo. Some of the mentors at LeanTOKYO include:

• Hiro Maeda, managing partner at Open Network Lab
• Toshihisa Wanami, founder at Lean Startup Japan
• Ian McFarland, group CTO at Digital Garage and founder and president at Neo
• Yoshi Oikawa, CTO at Salesforce.com Japan
• Yusuke Takahashi, founder at Appsocially
• Pieter Franken, co-founder at Safecast
• Chiaki Hayashi, co-founder at Loftwork

As this marks the inaugural workshop in Tokyo, tickets are expected to sell out fast. So for interested participants – as long as you’re keen to learn – you can visit their website here to find out more. Better still, for Tech in Asia readers, you can enjoy 15 percent off ticket prices if you sign up here with the discount code 15leantokyo.

Got more questions? Ariba is also reachable at ariba[at]leanstartupmachine[dot]com.

Softbank (TYO:9984) offered $20 billion for mobile telco Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) last year, but the deal is not yet done as it goes through regulatory inspection. While the acquisition is under scrutiny, today the satellite-TV provider Dish Network (NASDAQ:DISH) hijacked the deal by offering a $25.5 billion bid, part cash and stocks, for Sprint.

“We think we’ve made an offer that’s much more compelling than the Softbank transaction,” said Dish chairman Charles Ergen today in New York. Dish reckons that its proposal is worth 13 percent more to Sprint shareholders than the offer made by Softbank.

Softbank CEO and founder Masayoshi Son has huge aspirations in this Sprint deal. Even before the deal was sealed, Son proclaimed that Sprint and Softbank combined will make Softbank Group the third largest telco in the world in terms of revenue. Son said back in October:

This transaction provides an excellent opportunity for Softbank to leverage its expertise in smartphones and next-generation high-speed networks, including LTE, to drive the mobile Internet revolution in the world’s largest market. As we have proven in Japan, we have achieved a V-shaped earnings recovery in the acquired mobile business and grown dramatically by introducing differentiated products and innovative services to an incumbent-led market. Our track record of innovation, combined with Sprint’s strong brand and local leadership, provides a constructive beginning toward creating a more competitive American mobile market.

This is apparently a huge blow to Softbank’s overseas expansion and American dream. But given Son’s ambition and winning mentality, you can be assured that Softbank will not give up without a fight.

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

Puzzle/RPG hybrid Puzzle & Dragons and messenger app Line aren’t the only hypes in Japan’s smartphone world right now.

The third big name that must be mentioned in this context is Nameko Saibai, a series of super-quirky smartphone games that center on cute mushroom characters (nameko is a special mushroom, while saibai means cultivation).

Tokyo-based Beeworks probably didn’t know they were to produce the country’s first really big smartphone game when they launched the first Nameko title, namely Nameko Saibai Kit (English version: “Mushroom Garden” or “Funghi Gardening Kit”) in June 2011 on iOS – eight months before Puzzle & Dragons.

Today, if there is one company that can be labeled as a Japanese counterpart of the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio, it’s Beeworks – albeit on a small scale.

The first game in the franchise

As the title suggests, players need to grow mushrooms on a piece of wood, and wait a while for them to grow before harvesting them by swiping over the screen. There are varieties of Nameko, some of which are harder to get than others. The goal of the game is to “collect them all”. There is basically no real game play, no high-quality graphics or music (quite the contrary), and no social hooks.

Reasons I heard from Japanese players why they like the game so much include “I like the feeling of swiping over the screen to harvest the mushrooms”, “The Namekos are so cute”, and “I love how they say NNFF NNFF when I harvest them”.

This first Nameko game took Japan by storm (without any marketing at the start) and currently boasts 11 million downloads across iOS and Android, putting it in Puzzle & Dragons territory.

Variations on a theme

Much like Rovio with its numerous editions of Angry Birds, Beeworks was very clever in creating variations of essentially the same game and making use of its existing user base for distribution. There are two different versions in addition to the original, namely Nameko Saibai Kit Seasons (users can harvest different mushrooms, depending on the season) and Nameko Saibai Kit Deluxe (which has some improvements, i.e. BGM).

Beeworks has been seeing considerable success with this strategy, in Japan and some Asian countries. The company is offering English versions of Nameko (on iOS and Android), but success outside Asia has been limited so far. As of April 7 this year, all Nameko Saibai Kit games have been downloaded 30,192,789 million times worldwide.

Parallels to Rovio

The Japanese developer can’t think in billions like Rovio does, but the numbers above are pretty impressive, and there are a few parallels between the two companies. For instance, much like Rovio, Beeworks was a small company that was around for a long time but largely unknown before landing its first real big hit (Beeworks was established in 1998, Rovio in 2003).

Both companies rolled out variations of their hits in quick succession and cross-promoted them inside the existing user base: the “Seasons” versions even share the exact same name and idea. Both franchises are specifically made for touch screens, feature “character-focused” design, come with a low learning curve and with extra-cute graphics and sound.

But the biggest parallel can actually be found somewhere else.

Nameko’s popularity in Japan made it possible for Beeworks to build a successful merchandising business around its IP: there are now Nameko-themed toys, phone cases, stationery, key holders, clothes, music CDs (yes, really), candy, coffee mugs, manga, furniture, slippers, etc.

The line-up of official Nameko goods can be found here (the list is not even complete: for example, it doesn’t show there are special Nameko stickers available for Line, too).

What’s interesting (and a big difference to Angry Birds) is that all Nameko games are entirely free: there are no download fees, no premium versions, and no in-app purchases. In addition, Beeworks is relatively easy on the ads, a lot of which are just used to drive traffic from one Nameko game to the other.

The strategy here is to bring the game in front of as many eyeballs as possible and make money (almost) entirely with non-game related products later.

Beeworks isn’t saying how well this is working, but anecdotally speaking, I can see the strategy of building a character goods business on top of a free game series succeeding – at least here in “character-crazy” Japan (the title’s Facebook page offers a lot of hints). I even believe the life cycle of the Nameko merchandising business could be longer than that of the apps, which may be something Rovio is betting on as well with Angry Birds.

But so far, the game itself is still working: social games specialist Chiho Komoriya (who is part of a family of farmers in Akita prefecture) goes so far as to say Nameko’s popularity is responsible for the recent increase in demand for real nameko mushrooms in the country.

In Vietnam, VietnamWorks is generally synonymous with finding a job. It’s far and away the top site and lists thousands of job listings, and gets an average of 200 new job listings per day. En-Japan, one of Japan’s top online recruitment firms, has also expanded across Asia outside of Japan including South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and Australia. This latest acquisition will be its first foray into mainland Southeast Asia. The specifics of the deal have not yet been confirmed and I doubt they will be, but it will send shockwaves through the startup community for sure. Local Vietnamese news site Cafebiz.vn has speculated earlier this year that the deal would be around $22 million.

In February, CareerBuilder from the United States acquired VON (Vietnam Online Network), which manages KiemViec.com, the second biggest recruitment site in Vietnam. This left people wondering, why did CareerBuilder pass up VietnamWorks? Well, it looks like VietnamWorks had its sights elsewhere.

For the Vietnamese startup scene, this will be huge news, as VietnamWorks has been such a big and successful player in the online space. I’ve reached out to the CEO of VietnamWorks for comment and will keep you updated.

Hat tip to Chris Harvey for the catch.

(Source: En-Japan)

The hype around Japan’s most popular mobile game Puzzle and Dragons, which is estimated to generate a mind-blowing US$62 to $86 million per month (or more) in sales, continues.

According to maker GungHo, the RPG/puzzle hybrid game now boasts 12 million registered players in Japan (the company doesn’t say how many users the game has abroad).

It took Puzzle and Dragons a total of 15 days to go from eleven to twelve million users. Here’s a chart we made of the game’s growth using data from Japanese news site Social Game Info:

One day after the game hit 11 million users, on March 26, GungHo started a new TV ad campaign.

What’s interesting about Puzzle and Dragons is that this is the tenth time in a row the title attracted one million users in less than three weeks. This development started in October last year, just after the Android version was released and GungHo started advertising the game on TV for the first time.

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)

We concluded our Startup Asia Singapore 2013 event last week with a blast, and our female entrepreneurs had fun on the panel debating issues facing women at tech startups.

At the event I had the privilege to speak with Akiko Naka, CEO of Wantedly, a Japan-based social recruiting site. She told me of her struggles during her corporate career and how she managed to take the first leap to pursue entrepreneurship. Her love for coding and a stint at Facebook Japan inspired her to create her current startup, and she hasn’t looked back since.

Her advice to entrepreneurs out there? Gender doesn’t matter. The three skill sets necessary to survive in this technology and startup industry? Read on to find out more.

Tell me a little about yourself.

I was born and raised in Japan, always had an interest in web services and front-end coding as my dad was teaching IT at a university. I had my own Mac since elementary school, and used to create visual games using Visual Basic. Later at a university I ran a small business with few other members, who are all students, creating static homepages.

I chose Goldman Sachs as my first career, but I just could not forget my passion for web services. So, I moved onto Facebook Japan at the age of 25 where I felt a phenomenonal social wave coming to Japan. I then started building my own service Wantedly, a social recruiting site at the age of 26. Now the service is taking off after a year from its launch, having over 1,000 clients and about 40,000 members, making us the largest social recruiting site in Japan. Now Wantedly has eight full-time team members.

What is the startup about and what’s your role?

We believe good hires happen through friends’ recommendations, because having mutual friends guarantee the quality of candidates to an extent. It works the other way too – where candidates have a good chance of meeting a good team through mutual friends. We have a core feature called “support this job listing” that encourages your friends and team members to share job listings. In this manner, through the power of social media, the listing gets passed around, leading to a good match.

Companies are able to list one job for free, forever, but will be required to pay JPY 35,000 (US$355) for unlimited job listings. Our clients include DeNA, CyberAgent, Amazon Web Services, SalesForce, and Engine Yard.

I currently serve as the CEO and am in charge of marketing, hiring, and a bit of front-end coding. My previous experience includes front-end coding so I still help design, UI, and fixing bugs.

How and why did you get started in this industry?

Two reasons for me choosing social recruiting. First is my passion in work. Our goal is to grow the number of people who truly love what they do as their job. My first career at Goldman Sachs was exciting but at the same time I started to ponder; I wanted to do something that creates 1s and 0s; the finance industry is more about calculating millions, and it was not something that I was truly passionate about.

Initially it was tough to move on to the next career. And I feel that there are so many young people like me who are afraid of stepping forward to pursue what they truly love. With this, I want to help those people to make the first move and discover a job that they would fall in love with.

The second reason is my experience at Facebook. I was fascinated with the power of social media, during my stint at Facebook Japan back in 2010. I was amazed at how it empowers individuals, and hence wanted to create something surrounding the same theme.

The birth of the social recruitment service, Wantedly, was a beautiful marriage between the love for work and social, allowing people to pursue the career they truly love.

Did you face any challenges in particular?

In the early days, I had my friends to help code and create a prototype of the site. However, my friend was holding on to a full-time job and could only help me at night or on the weekends. Hence productivity was pretty low. So I self-taught Ruby on Rails with a book to build a prototype. Learning backend coding was not easy but I tried hard and came up with something that works. That prototype was featured on TechCrunch and created a huge buzz. That was my first challenge, and my first turning point in my entrepreneurial life.

How do you seek out relevant mentors and people for help?

Fortunately for me, I knew many CEOs and entrepreneurs through various events and work. I relied on those people (around five to six of them), and asked for advice so they were my mentors. The biggest chance I had to create that kind of network was attending Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS) in Japan.

What were the sacrifices you’ve made in the pursuit of this move? What was fundamentally different between a corporate career and startup life?

To me, it felt like I gave nothing up to pursue this. To put it this way: I think I was sacrificing so many things working for larger, and more established companies.

The difference between a corporate career and pursuing the startup route is freedom. In a corporate career, it is very difficult to pursue what you truly love. The fear of losing a stable fixed income sometimes blinds you and makes people difficult to step out of corporate career. In a startup life, you have the choice of freedom. You, of course, will have less income in a short term, but upside potential is unlimited. I believe, learning how to build a service/organization/business in your twenties is much more important than earning some amount of money and doing what you are not passionate about.

Do you think your gender has played a role in helping you gain an advantage over your male counterparts? (soft skills, personal touch, attention to detail, etc.) Has it been a disadvantage in any way?

Perhaps in terms of publicity. I had many interviews and much media exposure in Japan due to my gender, and that’s due to being in an industry where I form the minority.

In your opinion, what are the necessary skill-sets and attitudes required to succeed in the technology and startup industry?

First is to learn fast. The key is you have to learn very fast in order to survive. You need to execute fast, fail fast, and learn fast.

The second is to focus and keep things simple. Focus on what you are doing – keep your product, UX, and organization simple. Just do one thing at a time.

Lastly, be user-oriented. Always place the users as your priority and don’t let any excuses come in your way. Stop giving yourself excuses, like “this is too hard to code”. Do your best to realize the best user experience.

In summary: Learn fast, focus and think/act/make it simple, be user-oriented.

Do you have any female role models that you look up to?

At present, no. But I do look up to Steve Jobs, Hayao Miyazaki who is an animation creator, and Taro Okamoto, who is a contemporary artist.

Do you have any advice for fellow female entrepreneurs?

My advice is that you don’t need to be too conscious about your gender. I have never been. Just be you, and you might get lucky in terms of publicity if you stand out in the pool.

Are you single or married at the moment? How to you strike a balance between work and personal life?

I am not married, but I’m hoping to be within a few years. I think having a family is a very important factor in our lives. It would be ideal to spend half of your time at work, and half of your time with your family. I believe family is as important as work.

Anything else to add?

Wantedly is solving a problem to reduce the number of people who hate their career. Work should be something that you truly love and makes you want to dedicate your life to doing it. To achieve that, we have come together to build and operate Wantedly, which we’re proud to say is the largest social recruiting service in Japan. We believe having a good team matters, which adds value to loving what you do.

This is part of Tech in Asia’s series on female entrepreneurship.

California-based game studio Kabam has set up a $50 million fund aimed at getting Japanese games into the Western markets of Europe and the US. Kabam’s fund will also involve assistance in localizing and translating games for export, marketing the titles, and helping developers with analytics on their game’s performance.

As noted by the WSJ, the new Kabam fund and platform puts the studio into competition with Japanese social gaming giants GREE and DeNA for the affection and allegiance of Japanese developers.

Since Kabam pitches itself as a maker of social games for hardcore gamers – not for bizarre and fairly simple games like Battle Cats – it’ll likely be more interested in promoting titles like its popular and free-to-play Kingdoms of Camelot. So this news might be positive for Japanese developers who make more complex titles like the card battle game Rage of Bahamut.

“We’re putting our money where our mouth is,” said Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, who added that a Japanese game developer can double revenue by achieving success in western markets. Although Japanese smartphone owners are great for paying up for games, the prospect of doubling the money will appeal to a lot of startup studios in Japan.

Kabam also has a Beijing studio, where it now employs nearly a hundred people after boosting numbers in December with the acquisition of Balanced Worlds. Kabam acquired two other properties last year after a $85 million series D funding round helped fuel aggressive expansion.

Kabam made more than $180 million in revenue in 2012 and now has 600 employees across the US and China.

(Source: WSJ Japan Realtime blog)

According to data released by Tokyo-based game magazine publisher Enterbrain (published in The Nikkei over the weekend), the Japanese market for video games grew 1.2 percent to US$4.6 billion in fiscal year 2012 (which ended on March 31, 2013).

Software sales for gaming consoles and handhelds contracted 1.2 percent to $2.8 billion in that time frame.

But hardware sales increased five percent to about $1.8 billion in Japan, thanks to the introduction of the Wii U (well, OK, if the report says so), a new 3DS, and Sony’s recent price cuts for their consoles.

What’s interesting is that while a 1.2 percent plus sounds pretty modest, the overall market for video games in Japan grew for the first time in five years. Enterbrain’s numbers for the first half of fiscal 2012 were already indicating such a trend.

And what’s even more interesting is that even though different data providers use different methods, it looks like the sizes of the video and social gaming markets in Japan are now very similar.

The latest report of note came from Yano Research in January, estimating the social gaming market in Japan was worth $4.3 billion in 2012. Even though that number is closer to $4 billion using today’s exchange rate, that market grew faster between 2011 and 2012 than the one for video games, making the difference not that big anymore.

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)

Japanese game developer and publisher Nijibox announced on Monday that there are a few personnel changes for the company’s key positions. During this opportunity the company also told us about its latest development: it’s got five million users.

Since Nijibox’s inception in November 2011, the company has gathered an average of 400,000 active users every month across its 46 game titles. 18 percent of users downloaded the game directly onto feature phones, 42 percent from smartphone downloads, and the rest comes from Nijibox’s partnership with gaming platforms worldwide.

Nijibox has achieved quite a feat in Indonesia too, reaching 1.5 million users in December, only five months since the company launched two game titles, Monster Fantasia and Costume Fantasia, last year. Both are card battle games, Monster Fantasia lets you play as a monster tamer and save the world while in Costume Fantasia, you get to save the world by rescuing beautiful ladies first. The company’s monthly revenue in Indonesia also increased 620 percent in that five month period.

Nijibox recently launched its third Fantasia card battle game title in Indonesia called Legend of Fantasia. Set in the future, you get to save the world by fighting off alien invaders.

Founder and CEO Yoichi Aso now holds two more strategic positions as president and representative director. As TMG founder Alvin Yap puts it to fellow entrepreneurs, we hope Yoichi can still get enough sleep.

Korean mobile messaging giant, KakaoTalk, says in a blog post today that it has hit 10 million downloads in Japan (h/t SD Japan). The last count that were are aware of was 7.5 million back in December last year when it began pushing TV commercials, featuring model/entertainer Anna Tsuchiya in Japan. Just last month, KakaoTalk also launched its gaming platform in Japan too.

Perhaps, KakaoTalk’s fast growth shouldn’t be too much as a surprise given that it has the backing of Yahoo in Japan. But NHN Japan’s Line is still the dominating mobile messaging app in Japan with more than 45 million users and 120 million users globally.

Besides Japan, KakaoTalk has also observed fast growth in countries like Vietnam and Indonesia. As a whole, KakaoTalk has more than 80 million users worldwide with 27 million daily unique visitors who send more than 4.2 billion messages each day.

Made by Japanese mobile giant I-Freek, the photo customization app Photodeco has hit 500,000 downloads in nine months. I-Freek, however, declined to share Photodeco’s monthly active user numbers. The Japanese mobile app helps users decorate their images with cutesy stamps, frames, and effects, such as the one above.

The app was first launched last June and is available on Android, iOS, and Amazon’s Kindle Fire with 20 percent of its users outside of Japan. Taiwan, which has a similarly cutesy culture, makes up 10 percent of all Photodeco’s downloads.

Photodeco is available for free and also has a paid version at Photodeco+ which currently has about 2,000 users. Photodeco makes money when users download premium stamps and frames. The photo decoration app is available in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean and is featured on the Docomo and Softbank app stores, so it has good visibility from two of the largest telcos in Japan.

Photodeco competes with DecoAlbum, which coincidentally is also a Japanese startup, and who recently received $100,000 seed funding from East Ventures. That app has had one million downloads so far with about 50 percent of them being monthly active users.

Yes, there’s already Instagram and a whole host of photo-sharing services out there, but they don’t allow for much photo tweaking. That’s why niche photo apps for customizing images often do well – especially apps aimed at half the population. That’s the case with Japan-made DecoAlbum, which is aimed at women smartphone owners. The startup has just revealed the finalization of $100,000 in seed funding from East Ventures. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in TechinAsia).

First launched in June last year on iPhone, then in December on Android, the DecoAlbum team tells us that it now has one million users, with half of those being active each month. The app’s available in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai.

DecoAlbum is not a social network by itself, and instead focuses on customization of your photos with text, backgrounds, glittery virtual stickers, and lots more. It supports posting images to Instagram. Plus, the app lets users chronicle their photos and organize them into albums in a way that’s easier than with the stock photo apps on iOS and Android.

There’s a “DecoShop” inside where users can download extra artwork. Currently, all 600-plus customizations are free, but that’s a monetization avenue the startup can follow.

90 percent of DecoAlbum’s users are Asia. There’s a lot of competition in this kawaii sector of the app market, with lots of similar apps from developers across Japan, South Korea, and China. That includes some major web portal competition, such as from SK’s Cymera or the China-made MeiXiuXiu.

Find DecoAlbum for free on iPhone or Android.

Disclosure: As mentioned above, East Ventures is an investor in TechinAsia. See our ethics page for more information.

When the Japanese social gaming giant DeNA (TYO:2432) rebranded a couple of months ago, it also teased an upcoming social music service. Today it has launched, using the not very groovy name ‘Groovy’. With Spotify still not available in Japan, DeNA will be hoping that its latest social app can provide all the music that young smartphone owners need.

Tokyo-based tech blog Startup-Dating notes that Groovy will hit iPhones soon, but for now it’s only on Android. The service has a million songs in its repertoire, and on-screen lyrics are available for about nine-tenths of those – a good idea for Karaoke-crazy Japanese users.

DeNA’s latest social effort – coming five months after it entered the messaging app battle with ‘Comm’ – was made possible by acquiring an existing music app, Discodeer, at the start of this year. That previous app was very popular, passing one million downloads in its first four months, so DeNA will be hoping for an even stronger performance from its Groovy new product.

DeNA’s Groovy launched today on Android.

Groovy is not free, of course, and users will need to buy virtual credits; each credit allows for a particular song to be listened to three times. It sounds like one credit doesn’t get you much; but 17 credits will cost you just 99 yen (US$1.05). For being social and inviting friends, users will get free tokens. It’s not clear if monthly or annual subscriptions will be available later, but the current pay-as-you-listen model sounds like a bit of a killjoy system, meaning that Groovy is not something you could leave on in the background as you work.

So far, its archives are stocked with music from 39 labels, including Sony Music and Universal.

If you’re in Japan, grab Groovy in Google Play.

(Source: Startup-Dating)

A little more than two years after the colossal Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 2011, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has let its Street View cars venture into the Fukushima exclusion zone town of Namie­-machi (pictured) for the first time. Its residents, however, are still not allowed to return due to the meltdown at the nearby Fukushima nuclear power plant caused by the freak wave that swept ashore.

The Google Street View cars capture eerie scenes of collapsed buildings still in a heap in the badly damaged main streets of Namie­-machi. There’s not a person in sight:

Click this or images below to enlarge

Located one kilometre inland is the fishing boat pictured below. In a blog post written by local mayor Mr. Tamotsu Baba that will soon go up on the official Google Japan blog, he points out that “nearby Ukedo harbor once proudly boasted 140 fishing boats and 500 buildings.” Few of either remain.

Near Ukedo harbor

In the vicinity is Ukedo elementary school, where Street View cameras have ventured on foot to capture the abandoned and wrecked classrooms:

Inside an abandoned classroom

It’s a painful yet poignant reminder that Namie­-machi and Fukushima are trapped in a time-warp, frozen in convulsed horror in the day of the massive natural disaster that assaulted the land and seas.

This is part of Google’s Build the Memories project that we looked at back in December 2011. At that time, the Street View cars had captured the devastation caused by the tsunami in badly-hit Miyagi prefecture. But until now, the hauntingly desolate streets around Fukushima had been off-limits. We notice that the street snaps of the whole area haven’t been refreshed for this project, so you’re limited to viewing certain areas, such as the two places we’ve linked above.

In the days and weeks after the disaster, a great many initiatives used technology to try help victims of the great Tohoku quake in some way, such as with ‘person finder’ videos on YouTube, through digital photography, and a site that connected Japanese who’d lost their homes with a host family.

Dr. Serkan Toto is a gaming expert and independent consultant based in Tokyo. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog. This article is republished with his permission.

The crazy Puzzle and Dragons boom in Japan continues – and it gets even crazier.

Maker GungHo (3765.OS) posted a new financial document according to which sales in February for the company reached an almost unbelievable 10 billion yen in February – up 1,280 percent year-on-year. That is US$106 million. In a month with 28 days.

In January (31 days), GungHo, which is soon to be turned into a subsidiary of carrier SoftBank, reported sales of just US$92 million.

Before you say this is impossible, remember the company isn’t private. It’s listed on the Osaka Stock Exchange – in other words, GungHo cannot make financials up.

As last month, there is no discussion in Japan’s gaming industry that Puzzle and Dragons is the main driver behind this growth. Back then I summarized a few reports in gaming media over here, estimating that the puzzle/RPG hybrid alone racked up between $54 million to $75 million in January – or between 59 percent and 81 percent of GungHo’s sales in that month. (As a side note, that would roughly be my estimated range as well).

Applying this to the $106 million the company made last month, this would mean that Puzzle and Dragons alone generated $62 million to $86 million.

As I mentioned earlier, I have seen many hard-to-believe numbers in Japan’s mobile gaming industry, but this game tops everything. That revenue is generated by nine to ten million registered users the title had in February on both iOS and Android.

Seeing that Puzzle and Dragons is still growing steadily, revenue will probably be higher in March , which has three more money-making days than February.

This is big: Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank (TYO:9984) (the one that acquired Sprint in the US) will launch a tender offer to increase its stake in game studio GungHo Online Entertainment (3765.OS) between April 1 and 26 this year. the deal will be worth over a quarter of a billion dollars. It’s timed to coincide with GungHo conducting a 10-for-1 share split on April 1.

GungHo has produced Puzzle and Dragons, Japan’s most popular smartphone game with over 10 million users. It’s perhaps the most profitable mobile game worldwide, estimated to rack up well over US$50 million per month currently.

A few days ago, GungHo’s market cap reached a mind-blowing $5 billion – more than that of GREE or Mobage operator DeNA.

SoftBank (or SoftBank Mobile, to be more specific) will acquire 6.4 percent of GungHo’s total shares for 25 billion yen ($264 million). With that investment, the telco’s stake in the Puzzle and Dragons maker increases from 33.6 to 58.5 percent.

SoftBank explains:

With this understanding, the company recognized the importance of enhancing mobile content by combining smartphone-focused development capability and infrastructure held by the SoftBank Mobile Group and planning and creating capability in the smartphone game industry held by the target company group to further improve the efficiency in operation of the mobile communications business, profitability and competitiveness.

After the execution of the deal, GungHo will become a SoftBank subsidiary.

SoftBank acquires the shares from a company called Asian Grooves, which is owned by Taizo Son – who is the brother of SoftBank CEO and founder Masayoshi Son (Taizo Son is also chairman at GungHo).

Metaps, the Android monetization platform out of Japan that just secured $11 million in series B funding, is today teaming up with Vietnam’s Appota, an iOS and Android app monetization and distribution platform, to tackle the Vietnamese Android app market. The deal allows Appota to use Metaps’ SDK as its official monetization engine, which should make it easier for local developers to make money from their Android apps.

Metaps, which is now operating in Japan, Korea, the US, Singapore, and Hong Kong, has been aggressively expanding its reach. By bringing Vietnam into the fold, this signals Metaps has its eye on Southeast Asia where smartphones are still on the rise. In Vietnam, for example, smartphones barely make up 20 to 30 percent of the mobile market, compared to East Asia where smartphone acquisition is at 90 percent in South Korea. But with Vietnam’s rapid smartphone growth, it’s time to get in now before rivals ad platforms do so.

This is an interesting move for Vietnam’s Appota, which started in 2011 and has its own SDK that allows developers to monetize their apps. I spoke with the CEO Do Tuan Anh and he’s long had dreams to bring Appota out of Vietnam, so this deal may fall right in line with that. According to Tuan Anh:

We will have the main mobile business in advertisement, so cooperation with Metaps will be a good step for us to join in the advertisement industry.

Metaps, which garnered over 10 million downloads via its platform in 2012 will now be able to access Appota’s 7.6 million Vietnamese users.

This is all in keeping with Metaps’ goal of being the largest Android monetization platform in the world by 2013. But before it gets there, it’s probably going to have to start looking seriously at China (which is on Metaps’ to-do list) and Europe, where smartphone penetration is much higher than in Southeast Asia.

Update: Added quote from CEO.

Japan’s NTT Docomo (NYSE:DCM) is buddying up with another giant telco, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), to bring its mobile gaming portal to an overseas market for the first time ever. Starting from tomorrow, Docomo’s ‘D Game’ portal, which launched in Tokyo last fall, will launch within China Mobile’s own app store.

Dubbed the China Mobile Market, it’s one of China’s largest third-party app stores (see it here), focusing on Android and feature phone apps and games. The arrival of the D Game portal for China Mobile’s 700 million subscribers will be good news for Japanese developers who publish via Docomo’s platform. An initial 20 titles will launch tomorrow on D Game China [1], from studios like Capcom, Konami, and Square Enix. Its catalog will expand over time.

China Mobile’s app store does support paid apps – via carrier billing, of course – but it’s not clear if the D Game titles will be paid ones. Docomo’s announcement today points out its involvement with Dentsu and NTT Advertising in a Chinese joint-venture called D2C, so it’s likely that the games will monetize via in-game ads.

D Game is part of Docomo’s recent push into content and mobile commerce, along with companion services dubbed dmenu and dmarket [2]. The latter one got a big boost recently with Docomo’s acquisition of a women’s fashion e-commerce site.

China Mobile has just [over 100 million 3G subscribers](Dentsu and NTT Advertising in Japan. Dis), so it has a fairly large smartphone user-base, who are the ones most likely to be keen to snap up Android games.

Selling everything from pricey sake to quality skincare products, Luxa.jp, as its name might suggest, is a luxury-oriented e-commerce site. Its main draw is that its items are sold at useful discounts during flash sales. Today Luxa is announcing 500 million yen (US$5.25 million) in series B funding from the JAFCO Super V3 Series Fund. Its first major round was worth the same amount.

Luxa’s new funding will be used to strengthen its sales force, accelerate customer acquisition, and “launch various vertical sites targeting specific categories.” That will likely see Luxa expand some of its specialist areas, like home decor or foodstuffs.

Most of Luxa’s flash sales start at noon each day and run for 72 hours. The site has over 350,000 members so far, with its largest user-base being fairly prosperous Japanese consumers aged 30 to 40. It aims to use the newest investment to reach one million users soon, and to hit an annual sales revenue of $1 billion by 2016.

In its home market, Luxa is up against the likes of Glamour Sales, which has a similarly broad variety of products.

We’ve seen such luxury flash sales sites do well elsewhere in Asia. Perhaps the best success of its kind in the region is China’s VIPShop (NYSE:VIPS), whose stock value has kept rising since its US IPO last year where it raised over $70 million.

The last time we saw the JAFCO fund in action, it pumped $5 million into the voice messaging social network Bubble Motion.

Sweden-based crowdsourcing phone directory app Truecaller announced today that the company now processes around 500 million name and number lookups each month, a 70 percent increase since we talked about the company just last month. Userbase numbers have grown by two million since then as well, with half of the new users coming from India. Marketing manager Kim Fai Kok shared some data with us that shows how well the app is doing in Asia.

India is still the number one Asian country user for Truecaller. The country ranks first when it comes to the number of searches made every month. In the past month alone, there has been an increase of over one million users from India. Now basically one of every seven smartphone users in India uses Truecaller.

Asia is definitely loving Truecaller, with almost 50 percent of contact requests now coming from the continent (not counting Truecaller’s Middle Eastern users, who are technically also in Asia). The company is now eyeing potential Asian markets to expand into, and Japan and Indonesia are high on the list “due to smartphone penetration rate and maturity,” as Kim explained. I personally believe that their choice to expand to Indonesia is a good one, as the country is definitely one to look out for in the coming decades.

Recording 200 million additional searches in one month is no small feat, and it seems like the company is on a roll. We look forward to hearing more about it when Truecaller dips its feet deeper into Japan and Indonesia.

Indonesian online market research site NusaResearch is a startup that believes its Japanese expertise can spice up the Indonesian research ecosystem. It aims to be the nation’s top online survey site by the end of this year. The company’s secret weapon is the points it offers to members who will help NusaResearch fill in survey questions. Those points can be redeemed for prizes, which at the moment are wired as cash (through iPayMu) or phone credits.

NusaResearch has been operational since November last year with CEO and founder Yoshio Fujii at the helm. The company itself has been invested heavily by Japan-based WWS Corp. The way it operates is simple: members will earn points for filling in online surveys on the site. And the company earns money from conducting those surveys.

Each point is worth IDR 50 (1 US cent) and can be redeemed once you’ve hit a minimum of 500 points. A NusaResearch representative said that its members can generally get 2,500 points every two to three weeks if they routinely fill in surveys on the site. How much is that worth? A meager IDR 125,000 ($13). Although that is quite small, the company still managed to attract about 7,000 members in the past two months.

Process behind the front door

NusaResearch has two websites. The aforementioned .net domain is for its members, while the .com domain is for business clients.

For a standard survey of five questions sent to 300 members, the company charges about IDR 10 million ($1,008) to companies, which means that for every question asked to one member, NusaResearch earns around IDR 6,700 (67 cents). That’s quite a high return if you compare it to the points awarded to members. There are also optional fees for things like screening questions that can make survey projects even more lucrative.

NusaResearch says that it strictly manages its panel (members who answer the surveys) at every stage from registration to survey responding via two main methods: screening members, in which the company manually monitors each members’ activities like past survey results, and system censoring, which automatically checks the project panel through periodic trap, logic, and reverse questions. That will help trim out the invalid respondents from the results.

NusaResearch believes that its main competitors here are iPanelOnline and aipSurveys. And there are three main differentiators for NusaReseach: local manpower and offices, having the most active panel of respondents (accoridng to the company) by offering monthly campaigns and activities, and the aforementioned incentives to its members.

Hearing the true voice of Indonesia

While middle to high income earners in Indonesia would say “no thanks” to the point offers, NusaResearch is useful if you are a company looking to hear the thoughts of Indonesia’s masses – people in low income bracket who are attracted by the promise of an easy IDR 125,000 ($13) cash boost every month or so. That perhaps makes the research best suited to brands inside the general consumer goods industry.

The startup research firm is planning to launch mobile apps so that members can fill in the surveys directly from their smartphones and tablets. And of course, NusaResearch is looking to tie up more deals with merchants to offer more rewards to its users.

PoinWeb and Excite Points are among two Japanese companies who offer reward points to its users for performing various online actions. While Jakarta Founders Institute graduate TicBox also offers online research services in Indonesia.

Today, Japanese telco NTT Docomo (NYSE:DCM) has confirmed that its proposed stake in fashion-oriented e-store MagaSeek (TYO:3060) has been accepted. The Docomo acquisition amounts to a stake of 71.28 percent in MagaSeek in a boost to the telco’s burgeoning e-commerce efforts.

The acquisition deal is worth 2.04 billion yen (US$21.2 million), and is a lot more than the initial 42 percent slice that was initially proposed to MagaSeek and parent company Itochu Corporation – who will retain 25 percent of the e-commerce site under this new agreement.

MagaSeek’s shoppers are mainly female customers in their 20s and 30s, and Docomo will be hoping that a number of its 60 million subscribers (of whom seven million are now on 4G) will try out the e-store once it’s fully integrated into Docomo’s ‘dshopping’ mobile shopping service later this month.

At present, dshopping mainly sells foodstuffs after Docomo took a controlling stake in online supermarket Radishbo-ya last year. By 2015, Docomo aims for e-commerce to contribute seven percent of its revenues, and surely that will necessitate a couple more acquisitions as its dshopping service expands into more product areas.

Of course, if you want to learn more about GREE, a good place to start would be this long interview we did with GREE founder Yoshikazu Tanaka.

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

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.

If the world were cooler, this is what VPN tunnels would look like.

VPNs are useful for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that they help you hop over China’s Great Firewall and evade the country’s web censorship. But most Chinese net users don’t have VPNs, in part because they tend to be a little pricey — between $50 and $100 for a year of service. Of course, there are other reasons Chinese net users don’t typically have VPNs, but the price problem could be a thing of the past, as Japan’s University of Tsukuba has just launched a project called VPN Gate that provides users with high-quality VPN connections for free. No fees, no ads, and no registration required.

VPN Gate is actually an experiment in p2p VPN connections, as the connections listed on its site are provided and operated by volunteers around the world. The site launched on March 8, but as of this writing it has more than 80 available connections to choose from and has already attracted more than 45,000 users. Most of its current connection offerings, so it should be an especially good option for China-based users looking to connect to a VPN without having to filter all their traffic through a US server halfway across the world.

Of course, hooking up a VPN connection manually can be a little tricky. But most VPN Gate connections come with several connection guides and a downloadable OpenVPN config file that should add the connection to OpenVPN (a free VPN client) automatically. It’s still not something your grandmother is likely to be able to do on her own without a little help, but it’s about as easy as setting up a VPN gets. And while many of the servers are password protected, they all share the same username and password: vpn.

In an email, a representative of the VPN Gate project told me that the goal of the project is to expand the knowledge of globally-distributed public VPN servers. They didn’t mention China specifically, but it’s clear they are thinking about Chinese users because there is already a Simplified Chinese version of the website. Simplified Chinese is used almost exclusively in mainland China where the Great Firewall censors the web; the freer Hong Kong and Taiwan both use traditional characters.

If you’re looking to anonymize yourself, evade censorship, or just take some of these public VPN connections for a whirl, you can check out VPN Gate in English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.

(image source)

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 already has a sophisticated and trigger-quick public alerts system for disasters like earthquakes and tsunami – and now Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is helping out to ensure that these life-saving notices are seen by people as they browse the web. The Google Public Alerts system has just launched in Japan, marking the first time it has been rolled out beyond the United States.

With this new implementation by Google, whenever a disaster alert goes out, it will become visible instantly on Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Now (pictured above). So if a person misses the alerts on, say, TV or SMS, then they might catch the important notice prominently displayed across those Google services. These alerts appear across mobile or desktop sites. Here’s how it would look for a tsunami warning when using Google Maps:

Google’s blog notes that this is being run in conjunction with the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Perhaps the cleverest part of the whole scheme appears in Google Now. So if I’m on a trip to Tokyo, my phone’s location will have already been detected by Google Now – and then if a disaster alert is issued, I’ll see it as well despite not even living there.

As we noted recently, Japan’s government has set up a sort of online portal for post-disaster co-ordination to ensure that latest information is available to people even if black-outs have taken down TV and radio.

Get more info on the Google Public Alerts homepage.

Android monetization platform Metaps has just announced series B funding worth US$11 million. The Japanese startup, which launched in August 2011, helps developers earn money from their Android apps by applying adverts, in-app cross-promotions, or gaining new users from social media sharing.

Metaps’ funding comes from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan along with some existing investors. Today’s announcement explains:

The proceeds from this private placement will be used for securing top talent and growing Metaps service in Asia along with expansion to other countries. The company aims to accelerate business and become the largest Android monetization platform in the world by the end of 2013.

Metaps has been focusing on developers in Asia where Android is (or is close to being) the leading mobile OS – such as in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Metaps now has overseas offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Silicon Valley.

A few months ago, Metaps told us that its ad network and cross-promotions had helped drive 10 million Android app downloads and that it has helped some partners make more than $1 million per year from their apps.

The Android specialists got a massive $4.2 million in series A funding shortly after starting up, and that was followed by a minor round of $1.3 million in February 2012 that helped with its overseas push. An anticipated office in China hasn’t yet appeared, where Metaps will be up against some homegrown app-boosting platforms such as Innovation Works-backed Umeng.

An example of Metaps in action in an app.

The exact selling price will be revealed at close of trading on March 5th, which is tomorrow. DeNA is currently at 2,596 yen per share at the close of Monday’s trading.

Sony’s announcement today, as caught by TheNextWeb, explains that it “is transforming its business portfolio and reorganizing its assets in an effort to strengthen its corporate structure. This sale is made as a part of that initiative.”

The Sony stake in DeNA, which amounts to 17,722,500 shares and 177,225 voting rights, will be bought by Nomura Securities.

Though $438 million is a useful chunk of cash for the struggling firm – which is now down to sales of under two million of each of its gaming gadgets in Japan – it’s not the biggest pile of money that Sony will be getting soon. That’s because Sony has also sold off one of its Tokyo office buildings for a cool $1.2 billion. Sony outlined a number of such cost-saving measures in its recent financial forecast.

Sony lost $5.7 billion in 2011. In 2012 Q1 it saw a less alarming $312 million evaporate, followed by $198 million vanishing into the ether in 2012 Q2.

DeNA, in contrast, is doing well as one of the world’s top social gaming platforms. It expanded aggressively in 2012 yet still managed $216 million in operating profit in 2012 Q3.

(Source: Sony (PDF))

Japan-based communication platform for businesses, ChatWork, turns two years old today. It is a cloud-based solution for people to collaboratively do task and file management in a way that’s compatible on multiple devices. It’s somewhat in the same space as Yammer and Chatter.

In celebration of its birthday, ChatWork revealed some pretty impressive figures. Company representative Shuhei Tanigawa says that ChatWork has signed up more than 150,000 users since it launched in March 2011.

Some of its clients include KDDI, ZOHO, and Keio University. The company revealed that more than 30,000 users log on to ChatWork every day, with 71 million messages sent altogether so far. It also claims that the paid conversion rate is more than double that of Dropbox or Evernote.

To tackle the Southeast Asia market, ChatWork has partnered exclusively with Malifax Technologies to distribute its product in Southeast Asia. Founded in 1985, Malifax Technologies has over 600 business accounts in Southeast Asia. When asked about profitability, Tanigawa told me:

As a company we are already profitable enough to drive business. The partnership with KDDI is going good and our marketing effort is working good in terms of getting new customers. Percentage [of paid users] is growing and we strongly feel this is the reflection of market needs.

ChatWork also added in a new feature that allows its users to look for and add friends through their Facebook connections.

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.