Hikaru Utada, a New-York born Japanese singer and songwriter, who is one of Japan’s all-time most successfull artists, came up with a new promotion concept for her second English album ‘This is the One’. Utalizing the Japanese Karaoke platform from Myspace, fans can upload their own video recording of Utada’s new lead single ‘Come back to me’. Utada’s Karaoke Contest is featured on the main page of Myspace Karaoke Japan till the end of the contest and Utada herself will select the winner. The grand prize will be a special karaoke party with additional 3 friends and Utada herself in Tokyo.
SNS, USER-GENERATED CONTEND and LIVE CONTACT with fans: that’s what we call ‘MARKETING 2.0.’ Respect!

P.S. Unfortunately the marketing concept got a hype from the ’swine flu panic’ in Japan. In the Kanto area (Osaka) all schools were closed for weeks. “Tens of thousand bored students at home?!”, thought some smart karaoke bar owners and offered special courses for collage students. This generated a big hype and most karaoke bars had long lines of students waiting to sing. Big gatherings of students was exactly the opposite of what authorities intended. Closing school definately didn’t protect students from the virus, but might have helped to the big success of Utada’s karaoke campaign. What a coincident!

The Merial Kimochi-1 photo campaign has started. Send in cat or dog photos for different themes and win one of over 100 fantastic prizes. Photos can be submitted via web browser or mobile phone, users can vote for their favorite and search for all contestants. Join the competition!

Kimochi-1

When the first Flashlite phones came out here in Japan in 2004, most mobile game developers just gave it a merciful smile. Sure not a true competitor in terms of technology and market share compared to for all those thousand of java powered mobile games in the market.

Over 80% of handsets support FLashlite
Looking at what mobile Flash was capable of at that time they might have been right. But time and technology has moved on. By the end of 2007 over 80% of all handset models could run mobile Flash applications and also mobile Flash evolved into a more powerful technology getting closer and closer to its PC based counterpart. DoCoMo in late 2007 launched its first mobile handset series which supports Flashlite 3.0, opening up the mobile platform to a wide range of rich media service.

It beats Java
Most of all mobile Flash has some very important benefits: compared to java, it is rather easy to develop applications for it. (It got easier with each version upgrade) And it can run on a wide set of handsets without the need to adapt it to specific handset models (a big cost factor for java based applications).

We and others love it
MobileGameTown from DeNA, one of Japans most successful mobile services with close to 7 million users relies fully on mobile Flash technology and offers hundreds of free mobile games.

Here at CB we decided in early 2005 that mobile Flash would be the way to go for mobile game development. We did not even want to hassle with java SDKs and endless testing for different handsets. We just wanted to create fun and enjoyable content for the users in a decent timeframe. And the developments in the last 3 years proved that this was the right way to go.

Others get scared
The boom of mobile Flash games even created the first counter measures from the carriers: KDDI au one -Japans second biggest carrier- recently forbid official sites to feature free mobile Flash games as they were afraid it could kill au’s mobile game revenues. (Most of the paid games are using java or BREW technology).

The Adelholzener Oxygen O2 yoga campaign has started. Fill out a simple survey on your mobile phone (in Japanese) and have the chance of winning one of ten yoga sets.

Get more information here or directly access the mobile site with your qr code reader.