Motoko’s weblog

People have been saying that “mobile is the next big thing” for a while in US, but mobile has been “happening” in Japan for years and continues to grow.

According to Seed Planning’s report, the mobile advertising will become 100 billion yen (US$1 billion) market in 2008 in Japan from 81.5 billion yen in 2007. The number includes all of the advertising activities on mobile platform such as banner ads, affiliate ads, search paid ads and mailing ads. If it continues to grow at the same pace, the mobile advertising market will reach 250 billion yen by 2011.

The similar advertising is available for both PC version of the web and mobile version of the web. However, what works on PC market doesn’t always work the best with mobile market. For example, Continue Reading »

Yes, it’s true. I’m not joking here. According to the survey I just saw, more than 40% of people participated in the survey (16000 people) bring a cell phone to a bath when they soak in the tub. (In Japan, people soak in tub pretty much every day.)

Many of them said that they e-mail/text in a tub, and also listen to the music with cell phone. Though not many said that they browse web sites at this time, I’m sure it will catch up especially since many of them are already checking e-mails. All they need is to receive some e-mails from friends about some interesting sites. They may soon searching a product they just saw on TV commercials before they came to take a Continue Reading »

DeNA owns Japan’s most popular mobile portal site, “Mobaga Town”, and their stock is falling rapidly for the past several weeks.

Late last year, Japanese government put out a statement requesting all the mobile service providers to use a filtering system to stop children under 18 to access certain sites*. And, in early December, Japanese Telecommunications Carriers Association and Continue Reading »

One of Japan’s largest mobile portal sites, “mobile@nifty”, opened its shopping search services. The users can search products from 10,000 shops participating the service.

More and more people are accessing Internet from their cell phones. In June 2006, research by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication showed that there were more mobile Internet users (approx. 69.23mil) than PC Internet users Continue Reading »