DeNA Gets a Playful Rebranding, Plans to Release Social Music App in Japan

Recently we looked back on what was a pretty busy year for Japan’s DeNA (TYO:2432). The internet and social games company has expanded aggressively both at home and abroad. And today the company kicked off 2013 with a few interesting changes, including a brand new logo as you can see on the right, and a new slogan “Delight and Impact the World.” This means that DeNA’s global subsidiaries will uniformly referred to by their region name, i.e. ngmoco in the US will be called DeNA San Francisco. You can see a list of all locations here.

Included in this rebranding are its Bidders.jp e-commerce service, which will now be called DeNA Shopping. It now lives on a new URL, at dena-ec.com. DeNA’s Skygate travel service will subsequently be known as DeNA Travel.

The company also unveiled plans for a new social music called Groovy. It will be available in Japan for both iOS and Android. This comes as a result of DeNA acquiring an existing music app, Discodeer, from Japanese tech company United. Launched in December of 2011, that app once held the top spot in the music category on the Apple App Store, passing one million downloads in its first four months, and 1.5 million after 10 months. DeNA says that it will add social networking and music distribution features and launch the app within the quarter.

More than 20 content partners on board for Groovy, including Sony Music, Universal Music, and EMI Music Japan, and will feature over a million songs. It remains to be seen exactly how the app will be a social one, but we look forward to finding out.

5 Million Downloads for Comm ¶

DeNA also announced that its Comm mobile messenger service has surpassed the 5 million downloads milestone, which is pretty impressive considering that the service only just launched back in October. The app was promoted heavily in Japan with television ads, and that strategy appears to have paid off.

Today’s press conference (in Japanese) can be replayed via DeNA’s Ustream channel.