Riding on the train here in Tokyo recently, I’m noticing more and more people using their smartphones, and less people using feature phones. It’s really interesting to see how things are changing. But for a more quantified view of what’s going on, let’s take look at a user survey conducted in March by IMJ exploring the current state of mobile in Japan.
According to this survey of 26,418 correspondents between the ages of 15 to 59, almost 52% say they own a feature phone, with about 41% owning a smartphone. 7.4% answered that they own both a feature phone and a smartphone. It’s interesting to note that before the smartphone network environment in Japan was really ready widespread public use, many people were forced to carry both kinds in order to make up for frequent bad reception.
In terms of age segement, teenagers and people in their 20s are more likely to own advanced smartphone in comparison to feature phones.
From markezine.jp, labels translated by SD Japan
When asked about switching from feature phones to smartphones, 39.4% of feature phone owners answered that they plan to changing to a smartphone, and 31% plan to do so within the next six months. But there are still some people who plan to stick with feature phones. Of those, 14.4% responded that they would even switch to another featured phone, and 44.4% have no plans to switch. About 56% of existing smartphone users wish to switch to an even newer smartphone.
Within two years, the number of feature phone user is estimated to decline to about 44%. By age segment, the smartphone penetration rate among teenagers and people in their 20s is predicted to go as high as 60%. But among the older generation, for example, 56% of people in their 50s will likely still carry feature phones two years from now. So even though almost all the mobile phones sold by the major carriers in Japan are now smartphones, feature phones will still linger because a high portion of Japan’s very old population doesn’t see any need to change.
For all you old school gamers out there, here’s a fun new photo app from Tokyo-based Mfro that will take you back to the early days of console gaming. It’s called Famikon Camera, an allusion to Nintendo’s first game system released in Japan in the early 80s [1]. What’s fun about this camera app is that parts of it actually feel like a game, taking on a faux Mario Bros look, with a choice of four pipes – each one corresponding to different kinds of photo framing options: nomikai (or drinking party), meals, going out, and other. From there you’ll be presented with a variety of photo frames and overlays that you can apply, with looks corresponding to many of your favorite classic games. When you add your own photo (it can be a picture taken live with your camera, or one from your album), you can then apply one of many pixelating filters so that it blends well with the 8-bit style. For example, below you can see a street scene with the fun Mario Bros frame applied. If you’d like to check out Famikon Camera, you can get it over on the App Store. The company has also…
For all you old school gamers out there, here’s a fun new photo app from Tokyo-based Mfro that will take you back to the early days of console gaming. It’s called Famikon Camera, an allusion to Nintendo’s first game system released in Japan in the early 80s [1].
What’s fun about this camera app is that parts of it actually feel like a game, taking on a faux Mario Bros look, with a choice of four pipes – each one corresponding to different kinds of photo framing options: nomikai (or drinking party), meals, going out, and other.
From there you’ll be presented with a variety of photo frames and overlays that you can apply, with looks corresponding to many of your favorite classic games. When you add your own photo (it can be a picture taken live with your camera, or one from your album), you can then apply one of many pixelating filters so that it blends well with the 8-bit style. For example, below you can see a street scene with the fun Mario Bros frame applied.
If you’d like to check out Famikon Camera, you can get it over on the App Store. The company has also recently released its HadoukenCamera camera app, which is somewhat similar to the Kame Camera app that we featured last week.
Or Famicom, as it’s usually referred to in English. ↩
It has been said many times that Japan’s mobile space is unique. And I’m repeatedly finding that this uniqueness extends to the kinds of mobile applications and content that the country produces. And while I don’t want to say that Japan has weird taste, some of the more exotic creations (we’ve highlighted many of them before) that have come from this country are mind boggling from my western point of view. But in a way, that also makes Japan’s app space sort of beautiful. Earlier today I mentioned Alpaca Evolution, which is a ridiculous game where you have to bash all your alpaca brothers and absorb them into your own body as you evolve. It’s a crazy concept, but the artwork is great, the game play is simple – and surprisingly it’s a lot of fun. Is it dumb? Definitely. Is it great? In its own way, it’s that too. Another iPhone game I came across today might be even more simple, and maybe more ridiculous too. It’s called Pluck Hair, and it tasks players with (you guessed it!) plucking hairs as fast as you can with a gentle swipe of your finger, but if you do it incorrectly or…
It has been said many times that Japan’s mobile space is unique. And I’m repeatedly finding that this uniqueness extends to the kinds of mobile applications and content that the country produces. And while I don’t want to say that Japan has weird taste, some of the more exotic creations (we’ve highlighted many of them before) that have come from this country are mind boggling from my western point of view. But in a way, that also makes Japan’s app space sort of beautiful.
Earlier today I mentioned Alpaca Evolution, which is a ridiculous game where you have to bash all your alpaca brothers and absorb them into your own body as you evolve. It’s a crazy concept, but the artwork is great, the game play is simple – and surprisingly it’s a lot of fun.
Is it dumb? Definitely. Is it great? In its own way, it’s that too.
Another iPhone game I came across today might be even more simple, and maybe more ridiculous too. It’s called Pluck Hair, and it tasks players with (you guessed it!) plucking hairs as fast as you can with a gentle swipe of your finger, but if you do it incorrectly or in the wrong direction, you’re charged with a time penalty.
In a way, it disturbs me that I played this game for about a half an hour. And it disturbs me even more than I bothered to record a video to show it to you (see below).
But there’s a very simple element of joy that exists in this game. I think it’s the same flavor of joy that exists in the Nameco series of games, where it just feels good to harvest mushrooms.
To put it in simpler terms, I think it’s the same reason we all like bubble wrap.
Undoubtedly many readers will dismiss it as stupid. It’s easy to say that this is just Japan being Japan. And I’m not saying that games like Pluck Hair aren’t stupid.
But I really like that somewhere in Japan there’s a developer who pensively said to himself, “A hair plucking game? F**k yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”
What’s big in the world of Japan technology these days? Well, if our Japanese language site is any indication, the following articles represent what our Japanese readers are most interested in over the last 30 days. Read on to find out more! And if you know of a tech story or a startup that’s big in Japan, be sure to let us know about it. 1. Japan loves Ginger Ginger is an personalized proofreader that checks your grammar and spelling, and it’s official launch in Japan was on April 24th. The service comes in the form of a Windows application or a browser extension, and our post about its launch had over 2,000 tweets and 5,000 likes, making it one of our most read articles ever. Read more in Japanese 2. Hero entrepreneurs, Ieiri and Horie Kazuma Ieiri is a serial entrepreneur known for being the youngest founder to go public on the JASDAQ securities exchange. Takafumi Horie is the former president of Livedoor, now a portal website operated by Line Corp. Horie is now on parole after spending 21 months behind bars having been charged with securities fraud (although he still claims innocence). The two are sort of entrepreneurial…
What’s big in the world of Japan technology these days? Well, if our Japanese language site is any indication, the following articles represent what our Japanese readers are most interested in over the last 30 days. Read on to find out more!
And if you know of a tech story or a startup that’s big in Japan, be sure to let us know about it.
1. Japan loves Ginger
Ginger is an personalized proofreader that checks your grammar and spelling, and it’s official launch in Japan was on April 24th. The service comes in the form of a Windows application or a browser extension, and our post about its launch had over 2,000 tweets and 5,000 likes, making it one of our most read articles ever.
Kazuma Ieiri is a serial entrepreneur known for being the youngest founder to go public on the JASDAQ securities exchange. Takafumi Horie is the former president of Livedoor, now a portal website operated by Line Corp. Horie is now on parole after spending 21 months behind bars having been charged with securities fraud (although he still claims innocence). The two are sort of entrepreneurial heroes for the younger generation, and they gave a talk at Ieiri’s book release party where they talked about developing new hardware together.
This post comes via Charlie Custer who responded to Marissa Mayer’s decision that working from home was not the right path for employees at Yahoo. He asserts that startups should allow people to work from home remotely, noting that hiring pro-active people and quantifying work by actual results rather than just hours will yield many benefits.
Moneytree is a newly released app that allows users to manage all their financial assets. You just need to register your bank account and it will automatically show balance and spendings for your different credit cards all in a single page. The startup works out of Shibuya’s co-working space, Co-ba, and its founder is Paul Chapman from Australia.
5. The travel industry is shifting from search to social
As we see change in consumer behavior, the travel industry is shifting accordingly. What is becoming increasingly important is not ‘where’ but ‘who’ – i.e. who among your friends have traveled to a given destination. As a result, the marketing budget for many travel companies is moving from Google to Facebook. The article cites TravelAdvisor as a good example of a company that does social well.
6. If an engineer’s job is to make 0 into 1, a designer’s job is to make 1 into 100
Ikumi Katayama is a user interface designer at Cookpad, a major recipe website in Japan. In this interview she talks about the user interface designing process within the company and how it is all about iterating over and over by testing hypotheses and reading numbers.
This post came out of the recent B Dash Camp 2013 event in Fukuoka. Surprisingly, many up-and-coming education startups came from the social games sector, such as Drecom and Quipper. Social gaming companies says that the features and techniques in social games (like operating events or connecting with friends) can be applied to education services as well.
E-commerce is getting a lot of hype in Japan recently, and Base is one of the more popular services out there, as it allows users to create their own online shop in a matter of minutes. The startups just launched Base Apps, which is a collection of plug-ins that can be added to shops created with Base. So far the app store includes an original domain, SEO, as well as shipping boxes for your merchandise – all for free. The startup plans to release a few plugins per week, attempting to follow Shopify’s monetization model.
Japanese chat application Line added another accomplishment to its growing list on April 8th, briefly nabbing the top spot in the Chinese App Store in the social network category. Line was released in Chinese back in December, needing less than four months to reach this milestone. At the time of the article, it ranked 7th among all free apps.
Another report from the B Dash event in Fukuoka summarized a panel discussing existing problems in the domestic advertising business. Key players from the Japanese online advertising industry talked about the impact of social media on the industry, problems in leveraging personal information in ads, as well as the possibilities of rich media advertisements.
Japanese mobile game publisher Cocosola has announced that its Alpaca Evolution game has surpassed the 4 million downloads mark. I was pretty surprised back in March when it was announced that the game had reached a million downloads, so naturally, 4 million is no small feat either. The object of the game, as I previously mentioned, is to bash your fellow alpacas and absorb them into your own body so you can evolve into something of an alpaca monstrosity. Yes, it’s very weird, but at the same time it’s sort of cool too. You can see more about how it works in our demo video above. While the gameplay is painfully simple, the character appears to have hit the same kimo-kawaii sweet-spot as Ponos’s Battle Cats. And like Ponos, which is capitalizing on the appeal of these cute characters by expanding into merchandising, Cocosola is selling game-related goods as well. If you pop over to runatown.com, for example, you can check out a wide assortment of Alpaca Evolution iPhone cases (pictured below). The game was originally released back in February, meaning that these four million downloads have come within the very short time span of less than three months. So…
Japanese mobile game publisher Cocosola has announced that its Alpaca Evolution game has surpassed the 4 million downloads mark. I was pretty surprised back in March when it was announced that the game had reached a million downloads, so naturally, 4 million is no small feat either.
The object of the game, as I previously mentioned, is to bash your fellow alpacas and absorb them into your own body so you can evolve into something of an alpaca monstrosity. Yes, it’s very weird, but at the same time it’s sort of cool too. You can see more about how it works in our demo video above.
4 million downloads in less than 3 months
While the gameplay is painfully simple, the character appears to have hit the same kimo-kawaii sweet-spot as Ponos’s Battle Cats. And like Ponos, which is capitalizing on the appeal of these cute characters by expanding into merchandising, Cocosola is selling game-related goods as well. If you pop over to runatown.com, for example, you can check out a wide assortment of Alpaca Evolution iPhone cases (pictured below).
The game was originally released back in February, meaning that these four million downloads have come within the very short time span of less than three months. So its pace thus far is impressive to say the least.
Cocosola says that new updates to the game are on the way very soon, bringing new evolutions for fans of this very strange game. (Cocosola, via VS Media)
Last year Japanese mobile gaming company GREE (TYO:3632) introduces a football battle card game for the North American market called NFL Shuffle. Despite a few bugs in early iterations of the title, I quickly became a fan, and have enjoyed the game ever since. Recently GREE announced an update that brought some interesting new elements into gameplay, leading up to the up the 2013 NFL season. A new “talents” feature has been introduced to certain players/cards, giving them special abilities that can be triggered at certain times in your game. For example, in the picture below you can see a LeSean McCoy card added ability that can be triggered at key moments. While I have enjoyed the game so far, I think that it is sorely missing an element of skill – and perhaps this new variable can fix that. I have yet to pick up a card that has to new feature, but I’ll keep you posted and perhaps follow this up with a video review. For me the early levels in season mode were painfully easy, and then when you reach “captain” level (particularly when you run up against the 49ers) the game becomes painfully difficult – almost…
Last year Japanese mobile gaming company GREE (TYO:3632) introduces a football battle card game for the North American market called NFL Shuffle. Despite a few bugs in early iterations of the title, I quickly became a fan, and have enjoyed the game ever since.
Recently GREE announced an update that brought some interesting new elements into gameplay, leading up to the up the 2013 NFL season. A new “talents” feature has been introduced to certain players/cards, giving them special abilities that can be triggered at certain times in your game.
For example, in the picture below you can see a LeSean McCoy card added ability that can be triggered at key moments.
NFL Shuffle’s new ‘talents’ feature
While I have enjoyed the game so far, I think that it is sorely missing an element of skill – and perhaps this new variable can fix that. I have yet to pick up a card that has to new feature, but I’ll keep you posted and perhaps follow this up with a video review.
For me the early levels in season mode were painfully easy, and then when you reach “captain” level (particularly when you run up against the 49ers) the game becomes painfully difficult – almost impossible, unless you buy premium cards, which may be GREE’s intention. But for users who opt not to pay, it has left the game somewhat crippled, so I hope the new update remedies that [1].
This game is an intriguing port of the Japanese card battle model into a game genre that traditionally sticks to other formats. GREE’s MLB Full Deck is a similar effort for those who prefer baseball. I’m curious to hear from other players of NFL Shuffle to get your impressions of the game so far. Can GREE iterate it into a hit game as the 2013 season progresses? The company is still in search of its first real overseas hit, so we’ll have to wait and see how the year plays out.
talent activated!
I count myself among that category of gamers who don’t want to pay for in-app purchases. Most of my iOS spending ends up (for better or worse) going towards productivity apps and text editors! ↩
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Rick Martin
