Published by Motoko on 08 Dec 2009
I just posted my presentation about the Search in Japan from International Search Summit in London last month.
As you can see, my presentation shows bunch of numbers, which don’t mean much to you unless you were in the audience. Here’s what I talked about.
Market:
94 million Internet users
75.3% Penetration rate
4% access Internet from TV and gaming devices
73.4% on Broad Band
90% of Continue Reading »
Published by Motoko on 22 Oct 2009
It seems that Social Media market is still growing in Japan as both Gree and Mixi posted great Q2 results in October. In this quarter, Gree’s sales went up 94.3% from Q1, and Mixi adjusted their Q4 forecast upward by 3.3%. Since both are doing well, and attracting more advertisers, you may think that you should be at both places to get the most exposures. But, when the average advertising budget shrinking in US, you may not have a luxury of advertising everywhere you want to be. Even if you have, are these and other popular social media sites all good match to your services and the target market? When it comes to mobile sites, the user market seems to have clearer differences than web sites.
(Top: Male, Bottom: Female, Blue: Gree, Red: MobagaTown, Yellow: Mixi – 2009?C?UPDATE inc. MMD Labo. )
Published by Motoko on 06 Oct 2009
Baidu Japan started its mobile search service. In addition to mobile sites, it searches web, images/photos and videos. The unique service of this new search engine is that it lets you search with “Emoji” (emoticon) , too! Some of you may remember that iPhone struggled to gain the market share in Japan when it was introduced to the market. One of the biggest reasons why people didn’t want to use iPhone was that you couldn’t use “Emoji” with iPhone. Since then, Softbank added this Emoji function to iPhone, and now it’s the most popular mobile phones in Japan. In fact, Emoji is a big part of communication method for Japanese people not only with instant messaging, but with blogs, SMSs, etc. One of the first functions added to mixi (Japan’s popular SNS site) was a list of emoticons, too.
However, enabling Emoji search on mobile is much more than a “fun” factor, it helps search experiences. For example, Continue Reading »
Published by Motoko on 10 Sep 2009
Japan’s leading product review and pricing site, Kakaku.com, announced the results of their Smartphone survey done in Japan. (6,149 samples, Male:88.4% / Female:11.6%)
The report shows that more than 20% have Smartphone, and more than 25% of people under 39 have Smartphone. I was surprised to see that more than 28% of teens responded that they had Smartphone. Note that 14.5% of teens said that they didn’t have any cell phones.
Smartphone users in Japan
