MIXI feeling the heat?

[Russell]

We need to get back to basics of what the Interweb/net was designed for.
1) Lookin' at pictures of naked women that take 5 minutes to download.
2) Sending chain e-mails/jokes to friends and people you want to annoy.
3) Meeting girls....social intercourse, so to speak.

4) Disagreeing with McTojo on FG...

[IparryU]

4) Disagreeing with McTojo on FG...

5) Upgrading 1) to the J-Babe Appreciation Thread with no DL required.

[Mike Oxlong]

‘Monster Strike’ Gives Former Social Media Giant Mixi a Second Act

It was a familiar trajectory for a social network like Facebook that did not happen to be Facebook: One moment there were tens of millions of users and a multibillion-dollar stock market valuation. The next, a plunge toward whatever-happened-to-it oblivion.

But the Japanese technology company Mixi, once the dominant social network in its consummately Internet-connected home market, is rewriting the ending to its story, thanks to a striking act of self-reinvention.

Abandoned by most of its users and investors a year ago, Mixi has come storming back in a new field: mobile video gaming. The company is profiting from a hit smartphone game that it started marketing in late 2013 in what looked like a desperate attempt to stave off collapse.

The game, Monster Strike, has been downloaded more than 20 million times, mostly in Japan, and it is earning Mixi about $2 million a day in revenue. It was the company’s first foray into game development — a success that feels as unlikely as, say, Myspace creating the next Angry Birds...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/29/busin ... .html?_r=0

Former rival Mixi acquires C2C ticket marketplace for $95M

Winter is finally loosening its grip on Japan, just in time for the 15 employees of Hunza to get the spring break treat of a lifetime. Mixi, the Japanese social network scorched by Facebook and resurrected as a gaming giant, is acquiring their firm for JPY 11.5 billion (US$95 million).

Founded just over two years ago by two Zynga Japan veterans, Hunza operates Ticket Camp, a consumer-to-consumer ticket marketplace. It’s caught on quickly, recording JPY 800 million (US$6.63 million) in merchandise sales for December 2014. That’s a 603 percent rise from the previous December according to Mixi. 80 percent of the traffic comes from mobile. It is available on both Android and iOS.

This is the second acquisition Mixi has made in 2015, following its US$14.8 million splurge on fashion ecommerce site Muse&Co.

These acquisitions are reminiscent of Gree and DeNA’s bids to diversify through acquisitions last year. It appears that Mixi is aware that Monster Strike, the game that has propelled it back to a US$1 billion market cap, is a gift that will eventually stop giving...

https://www.techinasia.com/mixi-acquires-hunza/

Lessons on Rebooting Your Business from Japan's Richest

If any literary type were tempted to observe that there are no second acts in social media, the notion would be refuted by the experience of Kenji Kasahara (No. 24). He returns to Japan’s 50 Richest after a hiatus of four years. The University of Tokyo economics graduate was inspired by the start up energy of Silicon Valley and launched an online job site before moving to social networking. After a meteoric rise in 2004 his social networking site, Mixi, could not keep enough of its online “friends,” and investors drifted away. Kasahara, however, took the user data he had collected and refocused the site on e-commerce, dating, apartment hunting and lucrative mobile gaming. Mixi’s stock price has shot up 350% over the past year and puts Kasahara up at a cool $1.5 billion...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tatianasera ... hara-mixi/

[Coligny]

Bubble bubble bubble...