Naviblog featured in Tokyo IT News

"The leading GPS navigation marketing company" is how the Tokyo IT Newspaper presented us in a feature on emerging technologies in last week's edition. With a cute picture of a girl holding a mobile phone, the article detailed how Naviblog's location-based mobile marketing solution was being introduced by an increasing number of business clients from social networking portal heavyweight Lococom to beer brand marketing for Guinness Beer. Not sure if you can find it online, but you can look around at the Tokyo IT Newspaper's site at http://itnp.net.

Voice actors energize mobile books in Tokyo

According to their press release last Friday, two Japan-based startups have launched a site that matches user-generated mobile books with voice actors to provide professional-sounding audio books for the mobile. Mobile books are booming in Japan, rising quickly to become a $283m industry in 2008, up from $46m in 2005, and representing 70% of all digital book consumption. The industry is widely expected to expand to $1.4bn by 2010.

The service called "MazeNama Gakuen" invites users to create mobile novels based on a set of 22 pre-defined characters. The panel selects 8 quality novels among the entries, then lets the community pit the novels against each other. The final selected novels will then be enacted by Japan-famous voice actors and released as podcasts.

The two startups effectively joined forces on their separate mobile offerings, the free user-generated mobile voice-post site "Mazeteyo Mobilevoice" by Tokyo-based Visual Works and the user-generated mobile book-post site "Forest Novel" by Hokkaido-based Crypton Future Media. The service launched last Friday is currently only available on Japanese mobiles on the three main carriers in Japan.

Naviblog Europe site opens

The Naviblog website is now open! The new naviblog.co.uk site will be the center for the international expansion of Naviblog, and will fuse its roots - deep in the tradition of Tokyo-based companies for innovation in new technologies - with new visions of mobile development in the booming European market and worldwide.

Naviblog strongly believes in sticking to the areas where it has worked to the greatest effect, that is, working with advertisers and advertising agencies to provide complete, multi-channel and multimedia experiences to brands and their users. From Guinness beer to our upcoming advertising partnerships, Naviblog believes that it can help bridge the gap between brands and the online consumers of cool services. We believe that the mobile phone is central, and will become more and more central to this experience.

In a departure from the past, Naviblog will also look to empower associations related to social development, ie. working to strengthen social and economic development in developing/emerging nations worldwide. We believe that Naviblog has a role to play in enabling communities in unfavored economic situations to leverage the mobile phone and the mobile web to help themselves and build an ecosystem of systems that can help their basic life and sustenance.

We are also working on a number of other projects at Naviblog, all of them mobile technologies that will make people's life easier and drive adoption of cool services on the mobile phone.

Go to the new site here: http://naviblog.co.uk