Digital River Global Sales Summit 2007

Last week I gave a keynote presentation at the annual Digital River Global Sales Summit in Hong Kong. My presentation covered all things new and exciting in the Japanese mobile commerce field. Since the summit is attended by Digital River Asian clients I had an opportunity to demonstrate how many in the audience could start tapping into the Japanese mobile market to help increase sales of their downloadable software. The presentation was well received and there was a lot of interest in the Japanese mobile channel. Besides presenting the usual facts about mobile usage and sales figures, I suggested a few ideas for using mobile sites to push traffic to PC web sites with the aim of increasing trial offer downloads. There is no doubt, software sellers are desperate to get their products in Japan. Many have gone as far as to localize both their sales site and the applications but the challenge continues to be how to get the Japanese to download and pay for their products. Now that more Japanese are accessing the Internet through their cell phones than their PCs, marketers will need to approach the sale cycle from a different perspective. We shouldn’t view the mobile device as a competitor to the PC but rather as an alternative marketing and media channel.

Sunfinity Handsover Affiliate Partner Network to FullSpeed

Sunfinity KK plans to hand over operation of their ASP (Affiliate Partner) to FullSpeed KK at the start of December. Sunfinity’s decision to hand over the network to FullSpeed will allow it to focus on their mobile SEO business. FullSpeed owns Affiliate-B (a small scale affiliate network for Web) as well as various media sites. In addition to Affiliate Partner, Sunfinity will also handover AffiliatePortal.net (a general information site for affiliate marketing).

Read about it here (Japanese)