story on Nico Nico Douga

Wired runs an interesting story on Nico Nico Douga and Hiroyuki.
Meet Hiroyuki Nishimura, the Bad Boy of the Japanese Internet

Infinity Ventures Summit Spring 2008 in Sapporo, Japan

I am attending Infinity Ventures Summit Spring 2008 in Sapporo, Japan. It is an invitation-only technology conference for technology start-ups. This year, about 320 CEOs and COOs of Japanese technology start-ups are attending. According to Mr. Masashi Kobayashi, a well-known venture capitalist who organizes this event, attendants from overseas more than doubled to 35 this year. US web 2.0 companies such as meebo, seasmic, admobs and others are here, and established tech companies from Taiwan, mainland Chine, and Korea are giving speeches. I spoke with a couple of Chinese entrepreneurs; they are SOOO interesting! One of them told me that the US companies will not be able to "rule the Chinese markets." According to him, a Chinese search company is way ahead of Google China in terms of search market share, and some top management in Google China left the company already. One Korean attendee told me that the US companies don't understand the local markets. "They hire English speaking local people who have had no experience in local tech industries, just because their English speaking ability. So most of them fail miserably." One Taiwanese company said Apple's iTunes have no significant presence in Chinese market. What matters in online businesses is community, and in order to establish self-sufficient communities in local markets, you have to understand the local culture, he said.

DoubleClick Interview

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by tsuruaki

The interview took place last year in Tokyo. The above video is a digest version. You can listen to the entire interview by clicking the download botton below.

「DoubeleClick interview MP3」

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This is a video clip I took when I interview Josh James, CEO of Omniture, in March.

digital Signage blog

My good friend Manolo Almagro let me know about this blog, Digital Out of Home.
Digital Signage is one of the fields that Japanese large electronics makers are interested in.
The blog will be a good source of information! Thanks Manolo-san.

Old and New merge on Nico Nico Douga

This is an example of Nico Nico Douga. What's different from YouTube is that you can post messages on screen. See the example above. Traditional Japanese song is mixed with techno-pops music. Nico Nico Douga is way more popular han YouTube among Japanese teenagers

Moba-ge-town

I have been saying that cell phones are the ultimate form of SNS because the phonebooks being real social graphs. If that's the case, all the development we see in the PC based web are going to apply to the cell phone space in the near future, especially new types of ad technologies such as social ads. What's more, cell phone being a bridge between virtual and real worlds, possibility of the cell phone web can go well beyond the PC web. That' why I have been keeping an eye on new developments in the cell phone SNS space.
One of the fascinating success stories in the space is Moba-ge-town run by DeNA, a net auction company in Japan. The site started as a free game site. Isao Moriyasu who is in charge of the site, told me that he had known Moba-ge-town would be successful. He knew users would flock to the site, because at that time most game sites in the cell phone space charged a fee to play a game. "But I didn't expect we would be this popular at such an early stage," said Moriyasu.
Moriyasu made a couple of fantastic moves. The first is that he made a site a SNS. Atracting young users with free games, Moba-ge-town then let users form communities. After establishing one of the largest SNS in the cell phone space, Moriyasu is transforming the site into a portal. "Rival is Yahoo!" says Moriyasu.
Another fascinating move he made was having both contents and a monetization process ready from the beginning. DeNA, being an auction and affiliate service provider, had a cell phone affiliate service called "Pocket Affiliate" ready and going when Moba-ge-town opened in 2006. Therefore form the first year of operation, Moba-ge-town was in black. Many contents providers I know tend to think "You build it, then money Will come." But usually it won't.
The third fascinating move is TV ads. Some Internet moguls criticised Moba-ge-town when it started running TV and magazine ads, saying the mobile users and TV viewers are demographically different. All the Internet businesses that run TV ads in the past lost their ad money, they said. However Moriyasu said advertisement pays off in terms of gaining new users. Also one online ad executive hails it is a marvelous move. "More and more national ad clients know that legacy media cannot reach teenagers. Even the Internet portals cannot reach them. They know teenagers' main medium is the cell phone. But they know nothing about cell phone web, except Moba-ge-town. National clients know the name because of Moba-ge-town's TV ads. Moba-ge-town is getting almost all the ad money that national clients have for the cell phone space" he said.
DeNA' financial statement of 2007 Q3 confirmed the ad executive's contention. "Advertisement by national clients growing continuously," the statement says.