NHN Corp.’s Japanese unit said Monday that it has bought portal service provider Livedoor Co. from Japan’s LDH Corp. for Y6.3 billion ($67.6 million), which will help the Korean company strengthen its presence in the Japanese portal segment. NHN, the owner of Naver, South Korea’s biggest Internet search engine by revenue, said in a regulatory filing that it will pay for the purchase some time before May 15.
Posted on MobiThinking, via our local research partner at Infinita Inc., this guide provides a great review of what mobile might look like someday in markets elsewhere.
MarkeZine has a great selection of mobile industry insider materials, all in Japanese, now also available on the iPhone.
According to this post, the proposed NEC Corporation, Casio Computer Co., Ltd., and Hitachi, Ltd. agreement to merge their respective mobile phone businesses for the launch of a new joint venture in April 2010 will be slightly delayed.
We recently submitted this article – as pasted below – to our friend, and long-time outside adviser, Alan Moore. It’s an honor and privilege for us to be included on his SMLXL site, noting that we’re also thrilled to be invited recently to join as an Opinion Leader on the Canvas8 platform.
The annual Mobidec gathering was on here yesterday and the Jpn web is full of related post event reports. Perhaps one of the most interesting presentations came from Yuka Harada, DoCoMo consumer service division contents director, who shared some real – current – details. For starters, their current flat-rate subscriber ratio is closing in on 1/2 the total base at 21.5M, with 80-90% in the teens to 20’s age bracket. Also noted usage activity on iMenu in October was running about 20M unique page views per day and that their pay contents information fees, with music leading the way, hit about $250M last month.
