Motoko Hunt has won the Inaugural President’s Award from the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO). Motoko has been a consistent and hardworking contributor to Multilingual-Search with great insights on the Japanese search market. We cannot think of anyone more … Read More
Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released the latest Internet population data in Japan. According to the report, there were more than 90.9 million Internet users in Japan as of January 2009, which is 2.8 million more than the … Read More
According to comScore Japan’s access ranking report on entertainment sites for February 2009, 45.7 million Japanese visited entertainment sites during the month of February, which is about 74% of Internet users in Japan. (The data includes the accesses from PC … Read More
On February 5, Google introduced its new top page with “Hot new keywords” below the search box. As I reported here before, Google in Asia (not only Japan but also Korea, China etc.) has added links with icon below the … Read More
Yahoo Japan announced that they will discontinue Yahoo video-cast services after April 5, 2009. Starting February 16, 2009, they will no longer accept new video uploading through the service. All of the uploaded videos will be deleted on April 5, … Read More
Even after mixi, gree, facebook and twitter, BBS sites are still popular in Japan. The biggest BBS site in Japan, “2ch” is where you can hear all the gossip about… just about everything you want to know. There was a … Read More
Friendfeed is now available in 6 new languages including Japanese and Chinese. Friendfeed currently works with 59 services including Facebook, Fricker, YouTube and Twitter, and 1/3 of the users are already using it with languages other than English. Facebook and … Read More
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, … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
