This week Rakuten Marketing, a New York-headquartered arm of Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, acquired PopShops, an affiliate product feed aggregator founded back in 2006. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
PopShops serves up-to-date information on retail products from affiliate programs like Commission Junction, Avant Link, eBay, and Amazon. And Rakuten Marketing noted in its announcement that such feeds are “a fundamental part of e-commerce.”
Rakuten Marketing already had a relationship with Seattle-based PopShops via Rakuten LinkShare, as the technology was already integrated into the latter’s affiliate marketing network. With this acquisition, clients can still opt for another feed technology if they choose.
Now known as ‘Rakuten PopShops’ (logo below), the acquired service will now be housed under the Rakuten Markering umbrella, right along side Rakuten LinkShare and Rakuten Mediaforge. PopShop employees will remain in the company’s Seattle headquarters.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Gocro, the startup behind news curation app SmartNews, announced today it has raised 420 million yen (approximately $4.2 million) from Globis Capital Partners. Smartnews is a mobile app that curates trending news stories based on Twitter data, analyzed with its own original technology. To date the startup has partnered with 43 news services and 25 companies for content syndication, and is exploring more partnerships in many business sectors. With this funding, the company plans to hire engineers and data scientists, and will increase its headcount from six to 40 over the next year. In this news app space here in Japan, we’ve seen more than a few competitors including Vingow and Gunosy. It is an interesting sector to watch, especially now that Line has thrown its hat in the ring as well with its own news app.
Tokyo-based Gocro, the startup behind news curation app SmartNews, announced today it has raised 420 million yen (approximately $4.2 million) from Globis Capital Partners.
Smartnews is a mobile app that curates trending news stories based on Twitter data, analyzed with its own original technology. To date the startup has partnered with 43 news services and 25 companies for content syndication, and is exploring more partnerships in many business sectors.
With this funding, the company plans to hire engineers and data scientists, and will increase its headcount from six to 40 over the next year.
In this news app space here in Japan, we’ve seen more than a few competitors including Vingow and Gunosy. It is an interesting sector to watch, especially now that Line has thrown its hat in the ring as well with its own news app.
Thanks to Serkan Toto for pointing out some updated user numbers for Facebook in Japan. He cites the company’s managing director in Japan, Atsushi Iwashita, who disclosed to The Nikkei that the social network has 21 million monthly active users in Japan. That’s up from 19 million back in February. Serkan relays lots of other juicy stats (check them out here), but perhaps the most interesting tidbit was that Facebook plans to double its sales force in the country over the next year, and start TV advertising in the country. In Japan, TV advertising often proves as a key catalyst for social services (see Line) and games (see Puzzle and Dragons). If it does the same for Facebook then this could means a huge boost for Zuckerberg’s network. We have seen lots of interesting social media campaigns in Japan leveraging Facebook recently, and that’s only going to continue. In terms of Facebook’s own ad business, COO Sheryl Sandberg pointed out recently that companies here are really starting to come on board: I was actually in Japan and Korea, meeting with advertisers just a few weeks ago, and we are seeing companies that really weren’t doing much with us a year…
Thanks to Serkan Toto for pointing out some updated user numbers for Facebook in Japan. He cites the company’s managing director in Japan, Atsushi Iwashita, who disclosed to The Nikkei that the social network has 21 million monthly active users in Japan. That’s up from 19 million back in February.
Serkan relays lots of other juicy stats (check them out here), but perhaps the most interesting tidbit was that Facebook plans to double its sales force in the country over the next year, and start TV advertising in the country.
In Japan, TV advertising often proves as a key catalyst for social services (see Line) and games (see Puzzle and Dragons). If it does the same for Facebook then this could means a huge boost for Zuckerberg’s network.
We have seen lots of interesting socialmedia campaigns in Japan leveraging Facebook recently, and that’s only going to continue. In terms of Facebook’s own ad business, COO Sheryl Sandberg pointed out recently that companies here are really starting to come on board:
I was actually in Japan and Korea, meeting with advertisers just a few weeks ago, and we are seeing companies that really weren’t doing much with us a year ago increasingly adopt us as part of a core part of their spend. So I remain very optimistic about our growth across Asia and the rest of the world.
Another Facebook exec Brad Smallwood, the company’s head of measurement and insight, will be speaking at AdTech Tokyo 2013 next month as well, recently announced as a keynote speaker. So if you’re in town at the time, be sure to check it out.
Back in July, we wrote about Japan’s Colopl and its geolocation conquest game Keitai Kunitori Gassen. And now just recently, Colopl has announced the release of Enish’s Boku-no-restaurant II (meaning ‘My restaurant’ in Japanese) on its platform. Boku-no-restaurant is a simulation geo-location game where users open up a restaurant and aspire to make it into a first-class establishment. You can cook a variety of (virtual) food, such as Japanese, French, or Chinese cuisine, or even sweets. The game works just as if you were opening a restaurant in real life. It’s about creating unique menus, promoting the restaurant, and working to increase sales. There are mini games that allows users to enhance their experience points to make their restaurants more popular. Because there are tips in the game that let users learn about food and restaurants (such as the origin of a certain menu item or details about the ingredients) the game can be pretty educational. There are collaborative features too, where people can help each to cook better food, or chat on bulletin boards to share tips. Initially released back in 2009 by two ex-Yahoo employees, the game is available on all possible platforms including Gree and Mobage, but…
Back in July, we wrote about Japan’s Colopl and its geolocation conquest game Keitai Kunitori Gassen. And now just recently, Colopl has announced the release of Enish’s Boku-no-restaurant II (meaning ‘My restaurant’ in Japanese) on its platform.
Boku-no-restaurant is a simulation geo-location game where users open up a restaurant and aspire to make it into a first-class establishment. You can cook a variety of (virtual) food, such as Japanese, French, or Chinese cuisine, or even sweets. The game works just as if you were opening a restaurant in real life. It’s about creating unique menus, promoting the restaurant, and working to increase sales. There are mini games that allows users to enhance their experience points to make their restaurants more popular.
Because there are tips in the game that let users learn about food and restaurants (such as the origin of a certain menu item or details about the ingredients) the game can be pretty educational. There are collaborative features too, where people can help each to cook better food, or chat on bulletin boards to share tips.
Initially released back in 2009 by two ex-Yahoo employees, the game is available on all possible platforms including Gree and Mobage, but it was first made available on Mixi. The game acquired over 500,000 users in the two weeks after its release.
The geolocation aspect of the game is called ‘Osanpo Gacha,’ where ‘Osanpo’ means to take a walk in Japanese. By actually traveling some distance and checking in to a new location, users can get special items. In the past, there were O2O campaigns at stores like Gyukaku (a Korean barbecue chain) or Lawson (a major convenience store), by ordering a specific food, users got special cards with a code that let them download special game items.
Boku-no-restaurant can be played on iPhone, Android, as well as feature phones. These geolocation games are a fun way for people to enjoy their everyday life a little more, especially if they have to commuting from their home to the office.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based United, the company behind homescreen decoration app CocoPPa, announced today that it has partnered with Kouzoh. You may recall that Kouzoh is the mobile commerce company which recently developed a flea market app called Mercari. As part of this partnership, United will invest 300 million yen (approximately $3 million) in the flea market company, thus taking a 14.5% stake in the company. The partnership will be made official on August 28th, when United’s managing director Hiroki Teshima will join the Kouzoh’s management board. In addition, United announced it is also planning to establish a local subsidiary in the US to intensifying global marketing efforts for its CocoPPa app. We heard from both United’s Hiroki Teshima and Kouzoh’s founder and CEO Shintaro Yamada. According to Yamada, his main reason to enter this partnership was the prospect of a business collaboration with CocoPPa, which is showing rapid user growth. From his perspective, CocoPPa and Mercari overlap in their user demographics, and he figures the partnership will help Mercari accelerate its growth as well. Teshima explained that United plans to treat Mercari as a ‘sister app’ and collaboratively work on driving user traffic and run joint…
Tokyo-based United, the company behind homescreen decoration app CocoPPa, announced today that it has partnered with Kouzoh. You may recall that Kouzoh is the mobile commerce company which recently developed a flea market app called Mercari.
As part of this partnership, United will invest 300 million yen (approximately $3 million) in the flea market company, thus taking a 14.5% stake in the company.
The partnership will be made official on August 28th, when United’s managing director Hiroki Teshima will join the Kouzoh’s management board. In addition, United announced it is also planning to establish a local subsidiary in the US to intensifying global marketing efforts for its CocoPPa app.
We heard from both United’s Hiroki Teshima and Kouzoh’s founder and CEO Shintaro Yamada.
Kouzoh’s Shintaro Yamada
According to Yamada, his main reason to enter this partnership was the prospect of a business collaboration with CocoPPa, which is showing rapid user growth. From his perspective, CocoPPa and Mercari overlap in their user demographics, and he figures the partnership will help Mercari accelerate its growth as well.
Teshima explained that United plans to treat Mercari as a ‘sister app’ and collaboratively work on driving user traffic and run joint promotional campaigns. The company is experienced in the smartphone ad business, and expects to bring some of that to Mercari to help it succeed.
Mr. Teshima also explained to us a little about their expansion to the US:
In terms of marketing CocoPPa in the US, this launch will be very speedy. We will renew the service in September, and add a paid service in October. I’ve been visiting the US to find potential partners which can provide attractive paid content for our app.
Regarding international expansion of the Mercari app, we need to focus on the domestic market for the time being and look to launching it in the US later on. When Mercari starts global expansions, CocoPPa will have a certain following in the US so that it can help Mercari to acquire users there. We’ll work closely together since United expects to let Kouzoh be one of its group companies.
According to the announcement, United’s US subsidiary CocoPPa Inc. will be established in New York where Mr. Naka Imuta, the general manager at CocoPPa business, will be named as the CEO. United’s CEO Yozo Kaneko and managing director Hiroki Teshima also join the management board for the NY company.
Drawing apps like Draw Something and French Girls are still wildly popular all around the world. I recently came across a similar service here in Japan called Draw Me, and if you like the aforementioned apps, you’ll want to try this one too. Draw Me was launched back in April of this year as a sort of crowdsourcing platform where users can get professional illustrators to draw their portraits. There are over 160 professional illustrators registered on the site, some from Japan and even some from overseas. To date, there are over nine million people who have used the platform to create portraits. Examples can be viewed in the gallery over on the Draw Me website. By looking at the profile pages of these professionals, users can choose who they want to draw their portraits, and then upload their photo to place an order. It usually takes about a week to complete a portrait. A one-person portrait of Twitter icon size is 980 yen, for two people it’s 1,480 yen, and for more people or for post card size, the price is set at 3,980 yen (or about $41). There is also a neat feature where you can ask anybody…
Drawing apps like Draw Something and French Girls are still wildly popular all around the world. I recently came across a similar service here in Japan called Draw Me, and if you like the aforementioned apps, you’ll want to try this one too.
Draw Me was launched back in April of this year as a sort of crowdsourcing platform where users can get professional illustrators to draw their portraits. There are over 160 professional illustrators registered on the site, some from Japan and even some from overseas. To date, there are over nine million people who have used the platform to create portraits. Examples can be viewed in the gallery over on the Draw Me website.
By looking at the profile pages of these professionals, users can choose who they want to draw their portraits, and then upload their photo to place an order. It usually takes about a week to complete a portrait. A one-person portrait of Twitter icon size is 980 yen, for two people it’s 1,480 yen, and for more people or for post card size, the price is set at 3,980 yen (or about $41). There is also a neat feature where you can ask anybody to draw your portrait for free, although there is no guarantee of when the picture will be submitted.
The paying method is pretty convenient too, allowing users to pay at the nearest convenient stores, or by mobile carrier billing (only available on NTT Docomo). Users can also pay with PayPal, and that is likely a big reason why 20% of their orders come from outside Japan. This is interesting, considering that the website is currently available only in Japanese. So far international orders have been made from countries such as the United States, England, Canada, Australia, and Asian countries like Taiwan or Singapore.
Rick Martin
Junya Mori
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Takeshi Hirano
