September 14th, 2011

Via Local Telco KDDI: Website Builder Jimdo Lands Deal With Google In Japan

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It doesn’t happen too often that a European web startup (or any foreign startup, for that matter) makes it in Japan, but Jimdo is one of the very few examples of those that did. After reading an article on the website building service from Germany on TechCrunch Japan a few years back, a team at Tokyo-based telecommunications giant KDDI (over 30 million mobile subscribers, US$40 billion revenue)… → Read More

February 13th, 2009

Google Japan Apologizes For Awkward PR Campaign, Gets Punished With PageRank Reduction

On Monday, we covered an embarrassing pay-per-post campaign Google launched in Japan with the aim of boosting awareness of a new keyword hitlist box on the Google Japan top page. It now turns out the move, which was (to my knowledge) first brought to light by Japanese super bloggers Masato Kogure and Akky Akimoto, triggered a number of repercussions.

The aftermath in a nutshell: The campaign is… → Read More

August 31st, 2008

Google's Strategy In Japan: Avoid Yahoo And Take Over The Mobile Web First

Google may be the leader in the worldwide search engine market, but in Nippon, it has some catching up to do: In 2007, Yahoo Japan saw a whopping 76% of the nearly 350 billion search engine and portal-related pageviews registered in the country, clearly outperforming Google (second with 5.4%, according to Nielsen Japan). More recently, ComScore shows that in July, Yahoo Japan had ten times as… → Read More