Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

It was between Softbank and DoCoMo. DoCoMo commented that they were “disappointed” about the results, following the announcement by iPhone regarding the Japanese market contract with Softbank. This means that iPhone will have Yahoo search as it’s official search engine. Yahoo’s search team already 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.

One of Japan’s popular mobile portal sites “Club Donpen (http://www.donpen.com/)” reported that their membership reached 1 million in April. They commented that the mobile coupon services started last September helped increasing the membership. With the coupon service, the members can receive additional discounts at participating stores in Japan.

More and more shops and restaurants are participating in mobile coupon services such as above. Often times, it allows the user to use coupons without printing it out, which is very convenient.

DoCoMo.com has conducted mobile video sharing site survey against their mobile users (1400+) in Japan. The results show that 67% of them knew about video sharing sites for mobile, and 20% have used these mobile sites. The popular sites are YouTube and NicoNicoDouga.

On the other hand, Web Marketing Guide’s research with Net Asia Research shows 58% has used mobile video sharing sites. Again, MyTube mobile and NicoNicoDouga mobile are the two popular sites, and 70% of them watch music videos.

In Japan’s web version of video sharing market, currently YouTube is the most popular site followed by NicoNico Douga and Google Video. The service is most popular among teenagers in Japan.

Seed Planning’s report shows that Japan’s mobile advertising market (including mobile affiliate ads) grew to 81.5 billion yen in 2007. The mobile affiliate advertising market grew 184.5% to 17.9 billion yen from the previous year.

They predicts that the mobile advertising will grow to 100 billion yen market in 2008 with further improvements on the mobile devices and with the services such as video sharing, which help increase the mobile e-commerce users.

According to Softbank and Humancapital’s research, more than 73% of survey participants purchase products/services online (PC) more than once a month, and spend about $120/month.  The most popular items were “Books and Magazines” followed by “CDs and DVDs”. Unlike Western markets, music and video sharing sites don’t have negative effects on the music/movie sales in Japan even though Japanese are one of the heavy users of these sharing sites.

Rakuten, one of Japan’s popular e-commerce sites and current top 3 property in Japan, and Norway’s Fast Search and Transfer announced their mobile search engine site, “Rakuten-Fast Mobile Search”. (http://m.rfms.jp)

This mobile search site use their original mobile search engine “RF Search”, which analyze the meaning of the search term (keyword), and find the pages that are most relevant to the keyword from their data base of more than 200 million page index.

It is exciting to see that Japanese companies coming up with their own search engines while many people just focus on Yahoo and Google. Japanese language is very different from Western languages, and mobile market in Japan is different from any other markets in the world. It just make sense to have Japan’s original engines. Having another engine with different algorithm (different search results) would benefit the users.

One of Japan’s giant corporations, Softbank’s president, Mr. Son said, “The one who conquers Asia and mobile markets would conquer the Internet market in the world.” Softbank owns Yahoo Japan, Softbank mobile (Vodaphone), and MySpace Japan (tie-up) among many other organizations in Japan. Recently, they’ve been aggressively going after other Asian markets.

He also said, “Mobile phone is now an Internet device. I believe that Google will become one of our major competitors within 5 to 10 years.” Google has won the tie-up contract with “au” and NTT’s “DoCoMo”, and has became one of the major players in Japan’s mobile industry in last year.

He added that Yahoo would work with China’s Baidu and S. Korea’s Naver to keep Google from becoming a market leader in Asia.

As you may heard, there are more Internet access from mobile phone than from PC in Japan. According to the latest survey about the mobile search and Internet access done by Japan.internet.com and CrossMarketing, more than 30% of the people took the survey said that they search the words in ads using their mobile phone. The data also shows that more than 95% of people are somewhat satisfied with the mobile search results.

Q1: Have you accessed the sites on the advertisement you saw, using mobile search? (multiple answers)

• Yes, by using QR code - 42%
• Yes, by sending an e-mail to the address on ads - 35%
• Yes, by typing the URL on ads - 33%
• Yes, by searching for the words on ads - 31%

Q2:  When you searched for the words you saw in ads, did you find the information you were looking for?

• Yes, easily - 44%
• Yes, with some efforts - 52%
• No, I didn’t find the site - 4%

Q3. How do you usually access the sites using mobile phone? (multiple answers)

• Bookmark - 69%
• Top menu - 52%
• QR code - 36%
• Word search - 24%
• Type URL - 24%

Now, these numbers are related to the actions triggered by ads, and therefore, the numbers for using QR code and typing in URL are higher, but it still shows that people are using mobile search engines, and the fact that most of them are somewhat happy with the search results is very encouraging to the mobile search market in Japan.