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 Mystery 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, with Japanese and Korean team inspired by the tragic earthquake that happened in Japan in 2011. When SMS and calls were unreliable during the disaster, data messaging became the primary mode of communication.

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

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

Line characters and content

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

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

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

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

Line outside of Japan

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

Chatting up China

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thailand, Indonesia, Spain, and more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

ABI Research has published a new report today that says Asia-Pacific’s 4G subscriber market is growing – but is not exactly huge. At Q4 2012, the researchers state that the region had 34.6 million on various LTE networks, up 60.9 percent on the previous quarter. By the end of the year, there’ll be an anticipated 72.1 million people on 4G in APAC.

Clearly that’s a small fraction of the total 3.45 billion mobile subscriptions across the whole Asia-Pacific area. Furthermore, I suspect that most of the current 34.6 million figure is in South Korea and Japan. Indeed, Korea’s biggest telco, SK Telecom, had seven million on its LTE service at the end of 2012 and aims to push that to 13 million by the end of 2013. Japan’s NTT Docomo recently said that it has surpassed 10 million on its fastest mobile data network. Just those two companies have half of the that 34.6 million stat.

Across the rest of the continent, there are few full-scale LTE networks rolled out. China is conducting limited trials now, and has been throughout last year in readiness for an anticipated 2014 launch nationwide; India has limited coverage in some cities; Indonesia is still grappling with the move from 2G to 3G. Until those three countries fully roll out 4G nationwide, it’s likely that Asia’s numbers will look unimpressive.

Admitedly, ABI Research is a lot more optimistic on these numbers than am I at the moment. Worldwide, the researchers expect there to be 785 million LTE subscribers by 2017, with North America and Asia Pacific contributing the biggest numbers.

Last April, the same team said that 63 percent of mobile telcos in Asia had rolled out 4G LTE services, or are now conducting trials or have firm plans.

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

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

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

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

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

The new Asia Pop channel has only four videos so far, but that will soon expand once it adds livestreams of special events. The first Hangout will kick off on March 8th with Korean pop star SHINee.

Also useful are the playlists within the new Asia Pop area – there are five so far – that give you a rundown of the most popular music of the past week.

Google tells us that the new channel will focus on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese pop music. Hopefully that might also expand to cover other nations with vibrant pop music scenes that have cross-border appeal – and perhaps some alternative music too. But that’s just our wishful thinking.

There are seven Hangouts planned for early March. This is the line-up so far:

March 8 – Shinee (K-Pop)

March 9 – Wang Lee Hom (C-Pop)

March 10 – Super Junior (K-Pop)

March 11 – Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (J-Pop)

March 12 – Flumpool (J-Pop)

March 13 – 2PM (K-Pop)

March 14 – Mayday (C-Pop)

Only five lucky fans, Google explains, will be allowed into each Hangout, so you better start thinking of a good question if you want to get in.

As you’ll likely know already, PSY’s Gangnam Style is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, so it seems like a fitting time for the region’s pop music to get more attention from YouTube itself.

Just last week, YouTube announced the opening of Asia’s first YouTube Space in Tokyo to give content creators a professional space to craft their videos.

Scirocco Cloud is a Japan-made (by Sonix Co., Ltd), cloud-based Android compatibility testing platform for developers. The open-source Android mobile operating system is used by many handset brands to build phones of many different screen sizes and specs, so building an app for Android is a pain in the ass for many developers.

What may work on your Samsung Galaxy S3 may not work on a HTC Butterfly or a Xiaomi phone. So what Scirocco does is that it allows you to gain access to over 80 Android devices to test your application — both native and web — on a virtual environment.

Scirocco Cloud’s founder, Takenori Yoshizawa, said that the startup physically owns these Android devices to make testing possible for his clients. These 80-plus Android devices are connected to his Tokyo server which can be accessed through Scirocco’s online platform. One user can access one phone at a time. To curb demand, there are more sets available for popular phones like the Samsung Galaxy S3.

A free user is allowed to test on devices like the Galaxy and Google’s Nexus phones with one hour of usage per day. If you pay $199 for a professional package, you get to use Scirocco Cloud for up to eight hours each day. Yoshizawa shared with me more about why developers are using his service:

Buying and maintaining Android phones is very troublesome and costly. With Scirocco Cloud, developers can get accessed to all different types of Android phones through the web. It’s very convenient, easily accessible on the web, cost effective for users, and increases app quality.

Most importantly, Scirocco Cloud has automatic testing features for both native applications and web applications. It supports Google’s NativeDriver and AndroidDriver as its main testing library. “Since it is automatic testing by using test script, it contributes cost and time savings drastically compared to testing by manpower – approximately one-sixth cost saving,” said Ikuma. To date, Scirocco Cloud has over 250 clients using its service.

In the near future, Scirocco Cloud plans to open up data centers both in Singapore and Silicon Valley. With the data center established, Ikuma says that popular Android devices within the U.S. and Asia will be made available on Scirocco Cloud soon. He added:

[Our] professional plan tests one device at a time. [But] premium plans will provide Auto Parallel Testing which is capable of testing 10 to 30 devices at the same time.

You can watch the video below to understand more about Scirocco Cloud’s features.

Yahoo Japan and GREE (TYO:3632) announced today what they had teased a few months back – the launch of a joint-venture company that will focus on developing and running social gaming titles for smartphones. After comitting ¥200 million (US$2.2 million) to this new gaming venture, a cat was then brought into the office and allowed to walk across a keyboard ¹, creating the joint-venture’s tentative name, GxYz.

GREE will hold 51 percent of the stake in GxYz, with the rest owned by Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO). Today’s announcement says that it’ll open for business on March 15th with GREE’s Tomoyuki Isaka as the CEO. The focus will be on Japanese gamers and doesn’t cover GREE’s overseas operations.

GREE is already Japan’s top social gaming platform, up against rivals as diverse as DeNA’s Mobage, Apple’s Game Center, and increasingly strong messaging apps with gaming integration, such as Line and KakaoTalk. The tie-up with Yahoo has already given GREE’s mobile titles greater exposure on Yahoo Japan, which is the country’s preferred search engine.

Today’s announcement summarizes:

Through the establishment of GxYz, the two companies aim to strengthen their smartphone social gaming business partnership, combining the user acquisition capabilities of Yahoo Japan with the social gaming development and operational expertise of GREE, while developing exceptional social games that will open up new possibilities in the game development business.

The two tech giants are already co-sponsoring Japan’s push to secure the 2020 Olympics.

As for Yahoo, we know that Yahoo Japan wants to be more social and mobile, so GREE seems like a good fit for the web portal company.

The GxYz name is not yet written in stone and could be replaced if a better one comes along – perhaps by picking letters at random from a bag of Scrabble tiles.

(Source: GREE, via TheNextWeb)

I’m not gonna lie. When I was in middle school in the States, Tamagotchi was the coolest thing. It was either Pogs or Tamagotchi. My classmates and I would carry the little plastic nuggets in our pockets every day: feeding it, petting it, playing games with it, and making sure it didn’t die like a real pet. Tamagotchi and anime were the biggest things to hit America from Japan in the late 1990s, so hearing it come back in the early 2010s to Android, launching just yesterday, sends waves of nostalgia through my body.

For those not in the know, Tamagotchi was a digital pet that you could fit into your pocket (pictured right) and was sold by Bandai in 1996. It was a huge toy craze in the late 90’s by. At the height of its popularity, schools were banning it because kids had to take care of the pet all day long lest the cyber creature die of starvation. As of 2010, Bandai had sold over 78 million of the little toys. It was one of the most addictive and distracting electronic toys before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.

These days, California-based Sync Beatz has licensed the brand from Japan’s Bandai, and newly released it for the smartphone age as Tamagotchi L.I.F.E. (meaning ‘love is fun everywhere’) for Android. Bandai has released a different Android app in the past. Think of it as a sort of 90s throwback and tribute. You would think this has got tons of potential in the age of smartphones that have CPUs more powerful than Apollo 13 and can handle graphics-heavy games like Max Payne. Alas, the little virtual pet isn’t just retro, it’s outdated.

The app opens with a triumphant 8-bit game soundtrack, reminiscent of Pokemon (you’ll want to lower your phone’s volume levels before proceeding). The graphics for the pet are basic pixels like the old version, so how do they expect to compete with all the other graphic-rich games in the Google Play store? Also, the app often notifies users with “Tamagotchi is calling you” but doesn’t say exactly what for. Should I feed it? Should I play with it?

On the other hand, there are a few added features that make the app slightly better than the device of yesteryear. Players don’t have to stick to the old three-button view and can tap on specific activities with the pet to do things like ‘rock paper scissors’ and feeding. There’s also Facebook integration, which allows players to share pictures of their pet to their friends.

Sync Beatz plans to update the app every two months to add features and bringing the app to iOS. The app is free with ads or costs US$0.99 for no ads.

Question is, will this appeal to kids of the 21st century? I don’t think so. The graphics alone, though cute, will be a killer for Tamagotchi L.I.F.E. Also, virtual pets have evolved in leaps and bounds since the late 1990s, not just in graphics. From Zynga’s PetVille where players could decorate a pet’s sophisticated house with furniture and clothing, to this list of Android’s leading virtual pet games where your digital pets can go fishing, maintain crops, and interact with friends. So I don’t think Bandai’s got a chance. Users want geo-location, interacting with friends, more complex puzzle games, and beautiful graphics. Kids these days have a much higher bar for games – so rehashing old games just isn’t enough.

You can download the Tamagotchi L.I.F.E. at the Google Play Store here.

Written in collaboration from my colleague, Youshen Lim.

We’ve seen the niche community called Tokyo Otaku Mode pass 10 million Facebook ‘likes’ and launch the awesome Manga Camera app, and now the fledgling social startup has another major milestone. This evening, Tokyo Otaku Mode announced that it has attracted funding, for an undisclosed sum, from three local VCs. The investment came from YJ Capital (an investment subsidiary of Yahoo Japan), DG Incubation, and ITOCHU Technology Ventures.

Focusing on the otaku community surrounding Japanese anime, manga, and cosplay, its venture started out as a Facebook page before also launching a standalone site and its first mobile app (pictured below). [UPDATE: We're told the app has had nearly 700,000 downloads so far; plus a brand-new app dedicated to users of the main site will be launched in April]. Tokyo Otaku Mode will use the funding to accelerate its growth and global presence, says today’s announcement.

The site features user-generated otaku content, and is perhaps the world’s biggest English-language destination for this kind of niche pop culture.

Explaining the attraction, YJ Capital’s Toshiki Oya said today:

The presence of Japan’s pop culture is being strengthened throughout the world. As a worldwide media distributor, Tokyo Otaku Mode spread rapidly. I am exceedingly glad to be able to take part through investing. I anticipate seeing even more growth from this company moving forward.

After enjoying Manga Camera so much, I hope that more apps will be a key part of its global expansion. Find it here for iPhone, and here for Android.

Nexon’s (TYO:3659) Q4 2012 results are just in. In brief, the Korean gaming giant did okay. Last quarter saw Nexon hitting ¥30.94 billion (US$329.29 million) in consolidated revenue which was up 24 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Operating income increased by 25 percent from the same quarter last year to ¥9.8 billion ($104.1 million) .

[UPDATE: An editorial slip-up turned the above two yen numbers into millions when they should be billions. It's all now corrected. Apologies].

Operating income margin was at 31.6 percent as more mobile gaming gave Nexon higher margins. In October last year Nexon acquired Japanese mobile game developer Gloops for a whopping $469 million. It also acquired inBlue for an undisclosed amount.

There’s a net loss of $1 million as Nexon pointed to write-downs of some of its investments and also higher tax expenses due to new Korean tax regulations.

For Nexon’s fiscal year 2012, here are the highlights from its statement:

Nexon revenues by region from its latest financials.

• Total revenues were $1.2 billion for full-year 2012, an increase of 24 percent over the prior fiscal year.

• Operating income was $513 million, an increase of 25 percent over the previous year. Operating income margin was 44.1 percent, slightly higher than the 43.7 percent in 2011.

• Adjusted net income for the year was $297 million, up two percent over last year.

It’s apparent that Nexon is looking to march towards mobile gaming with its Gloops and inBlue acquisition. It has also recently partnered up with DeNA which will see more Nexon games over at the Mobage platform for both Japanese and global users. Nexon forecasted that for Q1 2013, revenue from mobile gaming is expected to increase from $2.39 million to $80 million, a whopping 33 times higher. Seungwoo Choi, President and CEO of Nexon said:

We enhanced our mobile business through the successful acquisitions of inBlue and Gloops, positioning Nexon as the leading third-party mobile game developer globally. Since acquiring these companies, both have outperformed our expectations and each is set to deliver a strong 2013 lineup for the domestic and international markets.

Importantly, through our recent alliance, DeNA is running strong marketing promotions for our games on the Mobage platform. We expect continued strength in our PC business over 2013 as we begin to realize the returns from the large publishing deals we signed in 2012.

For now, Nexon’s businesses are very much focused on China, Korea, and Japan. North America and Europe play a small role in its revenue. Al, there’s no sign of Southeast Asia operations anytime soon.

V-cube is a Japanese company that provides visual communications — basically video and web conference solutions — for enterprises. It was founded in October 1998 by Naoaki Mashita first as a web and mobile consulting and development studio.

In 2004, V-cube ventured into developing its own consumer apps and even had an L.A office. Back then Mashita said it was extremely difficult to have virtual meetings between the U.S and Japan teams. There just weren’t any good video or web conferencing products available on the market. Instead of hoping for one, Mashita and his team decided to build one themselves for their own use. It turned out to work very well for them.

Going full throttle in visual communications

In the same year, in 2004, V-cube realized that its customers were also facing the same problem of not having a user-friendly and reliable solution to hold virtual meetings with overseas team members. Seeing the opportunity, Mashita started to introduce V-Cube’s own in-house conferencing solution to its clients. The feedback was great.

Soon after, V-cube turned into a full-fledged visual communication company, focusing just on providing video and web conferencing solutions for enterprises. That decision proved to be right. Today, V-cube is one of the leading visual communication companies in Japan. Citing data from Seed Planning’s Video and Web conferencing 2012 report, V-cube ranks first in the Japanese web conferencing industry, with 32.5 percent of the market share.

Despite web conferencing being its biggest revenue generator with over 3,000 clients, V-cube also provides visual communications solutions for other functions like:

• Web seminars
• Online support and maintenance
• Online sales
• E-learning
• Tele-healthcare and distant counseling

V-cube visual communications solutions are browser-based so they don’t require any installation on the users’ end. It is also compatible across all major operating system including, Windows, Linux, Macintosh, Android, and iOS.

Asian style communication

The reason V-cube was able to beat its overseas competitors is that it understood the Asian culture better. Mashita said that in America and Europe, conferencing involves mainly text and voice. There’s no real need to “meet or see” the person online.

On the other hand, in Asia, it is important to first “meet” the clients. Thus, doing face-to-face conferencing is an important core. By understanding this important cultural difference, V-cube gained a huge advantage over Western competitors like Cisco and Microsoft. Mashita claims that all 47 Japanese prefectures are using V-cube virtual conferencing solutions.

Bad times, good times, and expansion

In 2008, when financial crisis loomed over the world, Mashita told me that V-cube’s business was exceptionally good. He told me:

2008 was a good year for us. Web enquiry increased 20 times. Unfortunately, our business is usually better when there is disaster like tsunami and earthquake. People realized that phone line doesn’t work but the IP (internet provider) still works.

In times of financial distress, Mashita told me that companies are more likely to explore ways to reduce manpower but yet maintain the output of the staff. So for sales functions, an online sales team becomes crucial for many companies who are tightening their budget. To have a reliable online sales channel requires V-cube’s virtual communication solutions, which explains why web enquiries shot up.

In 2011, the Japanese web and video conferencing market was worth $100 million. Mashita shared that 10 years down the road, the industry is expected to grow to $1 billion in Japan. Being one of the leaders in the industry Mashita has also set his eyes on overseas expansion.

In 2010, he set up V-cube Malaysia. In 2012, his Singapore and Indonesia offices were also established. In Indonesia, Mashita told me that even though the international network speed isn’t fast, V-cube’s connected datacenters across the world helps to make virtual communication smooth. Besides Southeast Asia, V-cube also has offices in Los Angeles, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

Naoaki Mashita, founder of V-cube

Mashita also recently moved to Singapore with his family to stay closer to the Southeast Asian market. He commented that Singapore is a good base to be in with its easy access to other neighboring countries and also convenience in setting up a business in the country.

V-cube has so far raised over $20 million of capital largely from from Globis Capital Partner (who was also an early investor at GREE) and Intel. Today, Mashita says that V-cube is profitable, generating $27 million in revenue last year and aiming at $40 million this year. When we talked about exit plans, Mashita shared that V-cube is gunning for an IPO in the Tokyo Stock Exchange market.

“We also hope our success will promote and inspire more enterprise technology companies in this region,” said Mashita.

Another Japanese company is eyeing a few slices of the Indonesian market, this time in the form of online points provider Poin Web. The site now offers users in Indonesia free points, redeemable for prizes from the site’s list of merchants, by undergoing certain online activities.

This is similar to the business model of another Japanese reward website, Excite Point. And while this model is still quite new to Indonesia, the ambitious Poin Web team is aiming to gather one million users and 300 merchant partners by the end of this year.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, of course, so the real reason behind this is advertising. Looking over the Poin Web site, there are currently 17 activities from which users can earn points. Those include looking for a hidden cute ninja inside the website, filling questionnaires, playing simple games, clicking merchants’ websites, and promoting merchants’ Facebook or Twitter pages. Some of the activities also act as ‘lucky draw’ contests which promise vouchers to some lucky clickers. Users will earn points from doing those activities, which mostly can be done without spending a dime.

The collected points can then be redeemed as vouchers for Poin Web’s merchant partners like Starbucks, Rakuten, and PayPal.

The site’s aforementioned activities act as an alternative to online advertising channels for brands and merchants. Poin Web earns money from CPA (click per acquisition) according to the merchants’ requests, such as making users visit to a designated website.

Point hunters?

Poin Web is a joint venture between Japan’s RealWorld Asia and Indonesian financial group Corfina. Poin Web COO Tatsuhito Muramatsu admitted to TechinAsia that there’s the “point hunters” problem with such services. Point hunters are users whose personal aim is to garner as many points as possible, but without giving any tangible benefits to the merchants. For example, such point hunters are people creating extra accounts to multiply their points, and so merchants get little value out of zombie accounts.

Muramatsu said that though RealWorld has had seven years of experience in this field, and has implemented solutions to improve the quality of users for corporate advertisers, the point hunters issue cannot be avoided completely. He explained that a lot of RealWorld’s clients actually come back for repeat collaborations, so this can only mean that the point reward business model works for them.

At the moment, Muramatsu believes that gathering new users in Indonesia won’t be an issue for them. He added that his main concern is adding more activities on Poin Web. Among those are crowdsourcing, and doing micro tasks like writing simple articles for users to earn points (1). Several foreign companies are also interested to deploy its business in Indonesia by utilizing Poin Web’s services.

We need more points!

The point reward system looks good. But maybe this model appeals more to younger or poorer web users due to the low amount of points awarded. Take for example the fact that users need to exchange 52,500 points to receive a IDR 50,000 (US$5) voucher from PayPal, which means one point is equivalent to around IDR 1 (just one-hundredth of a US cent). And most activities reward users in the range of one to two points only. That means the effort results in little reward.

Granted, there are activities which can get 1,000 to 2,500 points for each friend referred, but in the long run, I don’t think referrals can be the main weapon when someone wants to collect the points on a regular basis. Sometimes the activities also offer lucky draw of vouchers valued between IDR 50,000 ($5) and IDR 100,000 ($10), but unfortunately the voucher is given to only one winner for now.

The points reward system is attractive to some advertisers, as users can receive prizes through points gathered from online activities. But I think its success lies in the feasibility of each user winning the prizes there. Or greater real-world rewards than a miserly one-hundredth of a cent.

With the US top for mobile ad impressions and Indonesia second, there was also a lot of ad serving and clicking going on in India (5th), Japan (10th), and Vietnam (11th). While this is data from only one ad company, and so might not be representative of broader web browsing and ad tapping habits in the nations as a whole, it’s still interesting to see. Across the whole Opera Mediaworks ad platform, North America as a whole was way ahead:

Across the globe, Opera reports:

The fourth quarter represented more than a two-times increase in impressions
and revenue to publishers compared to any other quarter in 2012.

The most number of ad impressions came from music, video, and media-related ads, and was also the top in terms of generating revenue.

While you’re here, you might also like to see Opera’s findings in terms of mobile platforms. The company noted that “iOS continues to outperform other device platforms” and accounted for 51.02 percent of mobile ad revenues despite only clocking up 41.91 percent of all ad clicks. Android didn’t quick bring in such a proportion of ad revenue despite its rocketing usage:

If you’d like the whole Opera State of Mobile Advertising report, you can find it here.

Japanese mobile gaming company, DeNA Co., Ltd. (2432.T), just released its third quarter fiscal result for the year ending December 31, 2012. DeNA hailed a “record” quarter in several respects, including hitting $567 million in revenue which was 52 percent higher than the same quarter in the previous year. Operating profit hit $216 million which was 54 percent higher than the same time the year before.

The company’s financials look healthy, crediting continual growth in overseas markets typically in its Mobage West game platform for the North American market. Several hit titles which helped bump up financials include Blood Brothers, Marvel:
War of Heroes, and Rage of Bahamut. Blood Brothers was the number one ranking game on Google Play’s top-grossing chart in 33 countries and regions. Another record high came in sales of its virtual currency, called Moba-coins, thanks to overseas consumption reportedly approaching $50 million.

During the third quarter fiscal year, DeNA has been active in expansion and partnerships. Last November DeNA purchased 20 percent of Cygames, the makers of Rage of Bahamut. DeNA also partnered with Nexon, Mixi, Yahoo Japan, and Yahoo Kimo. It was also reported that DeNA also expanded its Mobage gaming platform to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

DeNA’s $216 million operating profit actually took a 3 percent dip due to its aggressive approach to promoting Comm. DeNA’s Comm is a chat and voice mobile application (who prides itself in providing the best voice calls), and is a direct answer to popular chat apps such as WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk.

Comm has five million users at last count in December 2012. When asked if Comm is targeting overseas markets, a DeNA PR representative said that the company has test marketed the app in the US with stickers tailored for Western audiences. No other market expansion plan for Comm was revealed.

See also: Japanese Mobile Social Gaming: 2012 in Review

Japanese telco NTT Docomo (NYSE:DCM) announced today that the company is ready to open the 10 billion yen (US$109 million) venture fund that it teased back in October. To make it happen, Docomo, through its US-based subsidiary Docomo Capital, will make an investment in the US-based incubation fund 500 Startups so as to help its incubated mobile-related startups get some traction in overseas markets.

The incubation program that it announced before has actually opened today, and is taking startup registrations up until March 11th. Selected companies will receive various resources and guidance, including seed funding of up to 2 million yen ($23,000) in convertible notes, office space, and mentorship. Dave McClure and the 500 Startups team will also provide guidance to the selected incubation participants, with a clear emphasis on gaining an edge in North American markets.

Docomo’s $100 million fund will be allocated across a period of 10 years. Now that its so-called Incubation Village is open to submissions, all that’s left is the official opening of its new Venture Fund company later this month.