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Rakuten was the winner on Cyber Monday in Japan

Since we don’t have Thanksgiving holiday in Japan, we don’t have the Black Friday nor the Cyber Monday. But, on December 7 (OK, it was Sunday), Rakuten had the record sales of more than 3 billion yen in one day, which was 40% up from the same time last year.

Top Japan website rankings for October 2008

ComScore, Inc. just announced top Japan website rankings for the month of October 2008. The ranking information is based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service. The rankings of the largest and fastest growing Internet properties and site categories in Japan shows that Business/Finance sites saw visitation

New Japanese domain ".日本" will be available in 2009

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced its plan to introduce Japanese Kanji character domain “.日本” or “.日本国” as early as Summer 2009. Currently, Japanese characters can be used as “郵便局.jp”. There are about 1 million “.jp” domains registered and about 140,000 of them use Japanese characters.

40% of Japanese online visited Music site

comScore, Inc. released a study of music related sites in Japan. It shows that nearly 40% of the Japanese online population visited an entertainment music site such as iTunes in the month of August in 2008. The study also revealed that Japan recorded the highest penetration of users of Apple

Top Japan Web Site Rankings for August 2008

comScore just released its August 2008 rankings of the largest and fastest-growing Internet properties and site categories in Japan, based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service. During a month of August, travel sites had much growth as many planned trips for vacation season. The 2008 Olympics

Overture Japan's new face and new services

On July 4th, Overture Japan launched its updated website with both Overture and Yahoo logos. URL is also changed from “overture.co.jp” to “ov.yahoo.co.jp”. Last week, they announced the changes with minimum bidding cost, which is currently 9yen (35yen for some categories). Starting in August, the minimum bidding cost will be

New Yahoo Japan for iPhone

iPhone goes on sale on July 11 in Japan, and I heard that there was a short line (not long at all compared to the line forming in front of the Apple shop in New York city) forming in front of the store in Tokyo. As you may know, Softbank

Asia-Pacific search engine rankings for April 2008

comScore just released an interesting data about the search rankings in Asia-Pacific region. According to their data, Google and Yahoo were the regional leaders as “top search properties” followed by China’s Baidu. “Because Google and Yahoo! have a strong presence in many Asia-Pacific countries, they account for the majority of

Internet: a major player in Japanese's purchasing decision making

The latest report on information gathering in Japan shows that Internet plays a big part in people’s information gathering and decision making process. 95% of 500 survey participants said that they use Internet to gather information prior to purchasing products and services. 89.6% of them use “search engines” and 59%

Facebook Japan to begin services

On May 19th, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Japan. During the interview, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook was different from mixi or MySpace where you can connect with anyone, and believed that they can obtain a good market share in Japan. The majority of Facebook revenue comes