How to sell 16 iPhone Apps At Once

A year ago, we reviewed Yahoo! Japan’s 16 free iPhone applications which icons will show a (especially in Japan and Asian countries) popular Anime character Doraemon on your home screen.

A Japanese blog iPhone Games [J] lists more of similar iPhone apps set, like Gundam, which is offered also by Yahoo! Japan,

Yahoo! Japan published Evangelion [J] ones, too.

A series of gamble e-comics Kaiji [J] has issued about 100 episodes on iPhone, and icons can make 6 character faces now.

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Moedroid – Android Apps Review Site Only For “Moe” Apps

Moedroid [J] is a Japanese Android review site which introduces “moe” applications only. “Moe” is a Japanese slang which means “little, adorable and cute” mostly in the context of Anime. So the site is dedicated for introducing cute Android applications.

The main content is “moe” Android app reviews. There are app rankings, featured corner to teach how to customize your Android with cute themes, icons, etc. So far, 80 applications and 7 comics are reviewed, all “moe” but no pornographic.

Unfortunately, this niche review site is only serviced in Japanese.

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Google Has Another Spam Challenge And Nobody is Talking About It Yet

Remember your first experience with Gmail? Apart from a much different user experience, what we all liked about Gmail was its spam filtering capability.

While Yahoo Mail, Hotmail were more about pushing banner ads all over your Inbox, Gmail had this awesome neat look to the service (plus storage).

Fast forward to 2011 and this is how my Inbox looked this morning (a typical morning, I’d say)

Marking an email as spam doesn’t work anymore – I have been marking the gorkhana alert US sender for the last 3-4 months and have now given up on this (reminds me of the Yahoo/Hotmail days).

Moreover, my job as a consumer is not to improve Gmail’s spam filter. This is the same ass-umption Yahoo and Hotmail lived up with (and lost out, though not in market share, but surely in mind share).

Why not use Priority Inbox? Well, given my job (of running Pluggd.in), we get a lot of anonymous email, PR etc to rely solely on Google’s algorithm to filter unimportant emails [like I said, my job is not to train any service. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, move on*.]

Aside, a research by Fraunhofer Institute shows that Gmail users receive twice as much spam as Yahoo! Mail users.

The Fraunhofer Institute, an independent research firm, found that Yahoo! Mail users saw the least amount of spam out of the five providers tested, with nearly 40% less spam than Hotmail and 55% less spam than Gmail – meaning Gmail users in the study saw more than twice as much spam as Yahoo! Mail users.” [ymail blog]

Maybe its time to give the new Hotmail a try (after the powerful email alias feature)?

Fundamental question: is Google another Yahoo in making?

* Note to Product Startups: Do not assume that your users will do your job. Predictability of product/feature makes the cut [read: What Separates Startup Men from Poys ]. Even if 1% of your users do help you with your job, show them an instant gratification [Tell me Google, will you please block that gorkhana email from tomorrow?]

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Entrepreneur, What If You Die Today? [Family & Personal Finance]

Apologies if the title comes as a shocker. But, a very dear friend of mine, Sanjay Thakur passed away couple of days back.

Sanjay was a pass out of IITK/IIML and started his business, after a stint with Accenture. Around 2009, he came to know that he was suffering from Cancer, took medications, improved, but then Cancer relapsed (4th stage). Sanjay lost the battle, 2 days back.

Coming to the title of this article, entrepreneurs are too busy building their business and often ignore their families/personal finance.

But lets face this tough question – What happens to your family when you are gone ? Assuming that you are injecting a lot of your personal money in the venture (and some of you are still running against EMI demon), have you planned for the D-day?

I am not talking about life insurance etc – but a more fundamental question – i.e. plan for family stuff 20 years from now (kid’s education etc)?

While Sanjay did ensure that his family’s finance is taken care of (to a great extent), but life doesn’t always give a chance (sometimes the deed happens in a second).

So ask yourself – what are you doing to secure your family’s future, dear entrepreneur?

Recommended Read: 5 personal finance mistakes that first time entrepreneurs must avoid

[And apologies if the article title comes with negative tone, but lets face it - that’s life.]

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Groupon Japan’s Osechigate Still Smoldering

The poor traditional holiday food (osechi) delivery happened on New Year’s day around Groupon Japan, followed by media bash then Groupon world CEO’s sincere but delayed video apology 17 days later, must affected somewhat on their Japanese penetration and pitching daily deal business itself.

Even though a month passed, media rushing on this issue has not ceased. On Friday 3rd, Japanese economic newspaper Nikkei’s online released 6 pages, intensively researched long article that explains from what this coupon service is, to osechi and several other problems happening [J]. I have never seen other news which dug down such deep on this topic. Nikkei pointed out that too-pushy sales caused the troubles, and it is needed to check if only coupon services get fruit against shops and consumers.

Then, Saturday night, national public TV NHK broadcasted 24 minutes documentary, “Kyukakudai! Gekiyasu Ku-pon Saito”(Booming! Heavily-discounted coupon sites) in their weekly program Tsuiseki(Chasing) A to Z.

The program began with explaining what coupon service is as well. NHK interviews some of service providers and let them talk how much it reduces marketing cost with getting social buzz, however, the tone of the program were negative overall, at least web users felt so (from Tweets and 2-channel board
s).

NHK aired the closed Bird Cafe, the osechi vendor. Then they introduced shop-side anecdotes. A hamburger shop in Nagoya, who claims to be forced by sales persons to issue 2,622 tickets, with the price below the cost and they can only serve 30 set per day. The shop served 700 in 2 month but resulted in cancelling the rest. Another Izakaya (Japanese food bar) shopkeeper told that a sales person posted photos of dish which were not theirs (taken from somewhere).

Nikkei and NHK are the ones of the most trusted news sources in Japan, especially mid-to-old generations. Those people might know the coupon business and its bad reputations at the same time by these.

On the web, someone made a half sized figure of the Bird Cafe’s poor osechi set,

and the osechi T-shirt is sold, too.

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January 2011 Japan IT Links (Part 3)

Continued from (Part 2). Last part of January news which we did not write as a dedicated article.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Akihabara Free-Of-Vehicle Sunday Held First Time In 2.5 Years Since Serial Killer Incident
• Many Ameblo Celebrity Bloggers Found To Write Their Successful Purchases On Penny Auction Services – More details
• National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan(NCAC) Alerts About Penny Auction Services via Sankei
• Cut Apple Vending Machine [En] – Banana’s one [En]
• Jiji Press Reporter Copies An Article From Kyodo News But Forget Erasing The “(Kyodo)” Credit At The End
• Small Spa Town in Nagano Gets New Visitors By Mimicing A Town In A Game
• Akihabara Hobby PC Assemble Space With Maid Massage
• Microsoft Taiwan collaborate with Japanese illustration SNS pixiv
• Facebook Japanese Active Users Passed 2 Million (on Socialbakers)
• Softbank Introduces Android Market Payment Integration On Their Cellphone Bills – it was the key for Japanese mobile services on feature phone being so profitable. it should affect good on Android, too.
• Toppan, Intel and Bitway to e-book store BookLive!
• KDDI au to start simulcast service of 52 FM radio stations for their smartphone subscribers. – chasing Radiko[En]
• Yahoo! Japan Records Strongest Q3 Sales And Profits Ever
• SoftBank rents iPad in Special school gratis
• URL Shortener Makes An URL In Japanese Phrase “I’ll Kill (your custom subdomain)”
• Takafumi Horie’s Groupon Clone Hangaku Tokyo To Launch Hangaku Bankok For Thai via Horie’s tweet
• Shared – Facebook Hot Entries Ranking – It counts most shared URLs from Japanese Facebook users.
• Rakuten Recipe Aims To Take Over The Top From Cookpad By The End Of 2011 – “That would be bad news for cookpad.”(@Serkan)
• Tenga Gift Service
• prime minister’s blog had an English version – it was not much announced to Japanese.
• Smart.fm To Be Changed Back To iKnow!. they are changing to a 100% paid service from march 31
• “Let it Sleep”—The smartphone application that can tape somniloquy
• Google Japan Defends Google Maps Showing Hanged Underware Against A Japanese Suer
• Google Translate Hates Facebook
• [Groupon issue] Flash Magazine Reports Groupon Japan Sales Increased Overlimit Coupons Without Shops’ Permission
• KDDI Releases CMs Critisize Softbank – 1, 2, 3
• Research: 79% Of Japanese Facebook Users (who are already using it) Use Real Name. 18% Think Facebook Will Be Widely Used In Japan
• Shiseido Runs J/E Bilingual Makeup Streaming Program For Asia via Markezine
• AR Fishing Toy Virtual-Masters-Real
• AmebaPigg Users broke through 6M, Virtual currency supply is about 600 million yen scale during month.
• Anime Usavich Car And Twitter Campaign Around Japan
• The China’s Imitation Gundam Statue Comes Back To Be Original – Kotaku covered[En]
• Japanese Version Of Baidu Library Blamed As Piracy – Nobuyuki Idei(ex-Sony CEO) Tweets He Would Discuss Baidu Library Copyright Issue At Board Meeting
• RecoCheck – Recruit Enters Geo Location Service via TechCrunch Japan
• SoftBank made SMS with Egypt free.
• Japan Ground Self Defense Force Enters Simple Game Competition, Both On PC And Mobile via Slashdot Japan
• “The Social Network” Movie ranked 3rd In 3rd Week
• Digital Garage Invests in US Mobile social network Path
• Nobot partners with Smaato
• Luna Luna Passed 2 Million Paid Members, Added French/German/Chinese/Korean Versions – Asiajin’s cover on Luna Luna
• Facebook Japanese Official Page Ranking
• Nikkei’s report on Groupon and clones in Japan – This is a great article. Covers all daily deal business and news in Japan.

If you want to know any specific news more, but unable to find them in other English blog/media, please let us know.

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Clwit Develops Interactive Infomercial Widget That Will Never Bore E-Shoppers

Clwit[J], a Tokyo-based company developing social web services and Internet security countermeasures, announced it would start an e-commerce platform using Ustream in April.   It allows you to integrate your website with Ustream and Twitter by just adding a line of iframe tag.

Mr. Yasuhiro Kunimine, the representative director of Clwit says, in their beta test, they confirmed adding the feature to classic e-commerce websites had gained their conversion rate by 10%-15% in average and 28% in the best case.   The service is provided on a revenue-sharing model, and no initial fee is required to apply.

Clwit has agreed with Ustream Asia, and you can choose an option of using the ad-free version of Ustream for the informercial video streaming.  Mr. Tomotaka Nakagawa, the representative director of Ustream Asia, says, “This is the first e-commerce platform where consumers can buy something after learning it via social media interaction.   I hope it will be a new business model using Ustream.”

The company expects to engage 1,000 corporate users by April, 2012.

Via: Venture Now [J]

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