Motoko’s weblog

One of the latest news items in Japan’s mobile market is that the iPhone will be available through Softbank in July, which means that Yahoo is set as the official search engine for iPhone in Japan. Yahoo’s search team has developed iPhone/iPod Touch search services, which has functions to switch between iPhone/iPod Touch screen and PC screen. The functions on iPhone/iPod Touch screen have been adjusted to provide better usability and the search experiences. It also has image search function.

The mobile Internet and mobile search started back in the ’90s in Japan when Japan’s NTT DoCoMo created “i-Mode” service, which was to provide a mobile Internet browser and the connection to view mobile websites from DoCoMo’s cell phone. The mobile Internet market has grown rapidly in Japan since then, and now the stats show that there are more access to Internet from mobile than from PC in Japan. Many Japanese conduct all of their Internet activities from mobile! Continue Reading »

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 »

When I was speaking at SES London, I started to lose my voice after 5 min. or so in. Yes, it’s just my luck. I apologize to people came to the session, I didn’t sound good at all. While I was speaking, I couldn’t help myself but calling “riiiiicolaaaaa” in my head. Now, that’s the power of advertising and marketing, isn’t it? The search is great, and it’s going to be even better, but in my opinion, it will never replace TV ads. Through the search, the businesses can only connect to people if and when they happen to search what you offer. On the other hand, TV ads push what they want you to know, again and again. Then I was thinking, what would be the closest thing on Internet to TV ads… Perhaps it’s the banner ads, but we all know that many banner ads are ignored, people skip right over the ads and read what they want to read on the page. Continue Reading »

SES Paris was a success with increase in attendance and well received sessions. I spoke about the search market in Japan at “Search Around The World” session on the first day. It’s the only session at SES Paris that was in English. (Phew! I took French as the third language at college for a year, but unfortunately, nothing I learned stuck with me.) There were 5 speakers at this session. Each of us was given 5 min to present. The intent was to provide a quick overview of the market from each Continue Reading »