We’ve had another fun week here at SD, doing our best to bring you interesting tech stories going down in Japan. But in case you missed any of it, here’s a wrap up below. If you’d like to get this weekly summary plus other bonus content, we hope you’ll check out our shiny new newsletter here.
Features
- Japan increasingly turning to Facebook to reach potential tourists 03/24
- 5 photo apps with fantastic skin filters that Japanese women prefer 03/23
- ‘Super lettuce’ grown under LED lights in Japan 03/18
Business
- How one Japanese fashion brand is using smartphones to connect with customers 03/22
- Japan’s members-only discount site LUXA raises $5.32M 03/21
- 2012 was Apple’s first year on top of Japan’s mobile market 03/21
- Fabless printing startup Raksul partners with Stores.jp, fulfills printing needs for e-store owners 03/21
- Japanese fashion e-commerce service Laso raises $2.1M from DCM 03/20
- Language Cloud gets investment boost from CyberAgent Ventures 03/19
- Japanese hit game ‘Puzzle and Dragons’ gets its own online store 03/18
Design
- New transparent, foldable material could be the future of e-paper 03/20
- Sony TVs through the years [Timeline] 03/19
Apps
- So you’re the new Japanese prime minister, eh? There’s an app for that! 03/23
- A big year for Japanese card battle game Rage of Bahamut [Infographic] 03/22
- With 4 million downloads for iPhone, popular Japanese collage app hits Android [Video] 03/21
- Awesome Japanese iPhone app serves up surprise centaur photobombs 03/20
- Alpaca bashing game inexplicably popular in Japan with 1 million downloads 03/19
Startups
- 5 more fun startups from Japan’s KDDI Mugen Labo 03/24
- 14 standout financial solution startups from Japan 03/22
- How a Japanese stealth startup plans to push small business accounting to the cloud 03/19