Google, Jimdo, and KDDI Get Japanese Businesses Online

Jimdo is Official Partner of Google Initiative minbiz.jp

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Sep 14, 2011, 03:46 ET

TOKYO and HAMBURG, Germany, Sept. 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Jimdo and the telecommunications-giant KDDI - Jimdo's partner in Japan - launched http://www.minbiz.jp with Google Japan and other industry leaders. Their goal: to get small businesses in Japan onto the web.

Starting today, the project helps Japanese small and medium-sized companies create a successful Internet presence. Despite a high Internet use rate of 78% in Japan(1), according to Google Japan, only 24% of small and medium-sized enterprises have their own website. In a recent survey, 36% of Japanese small business owners believed that getting their business online would be expensive. 26% cited lack of knowledge, and 25% believe that setting up their own website would be too difficult and time-consuming.

The project partners are changing all that: with the help of Jimdo Japan, businesses participating in the project can create their own website (including a top level domain) for free in just a few minutes. Google Japan will support the project participants with several offerings, including AdWords packages for advertising the websites.

"We're very happy to be chosen as a partner for Google Japan's project," said Jimdo co-founder Fridtjof Detzner. "Our teams in Japan, Hamburg, and San Francisco worked together very closely on the initiative. Now we're excited for the launch and looking forward to many more Japanese users with successful websites." The project partners expect about 150,000 businesses to build websites in the first year.

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About Jimdo

Jimdo – Pages to the People (http://www.jimdo.com) was founded in February 2007 by three young entrepreneurs–Christian Springub, Fridtjof Detzner, and Matthias Henze–in an old farmhouse. The technology powering Jimdo was developed as a content management service for business clients, but frequent requests from friends gave the founders the idea to offer free JimdoPages. In just a few minutes, anyone–no technical knowledge required–can get a website online, complete with blog, photo galleries, video, online store, and social media integration. Funding from industry leaders like the Samwer brothers (CityDeal/Groupon, Facebook, LinkedIn), allowed Jimdo to scale quickly, and it is now available in 11 languages. In May 2011, the 4,000,000th Jimdo site went online. Follow us on Twitter @jimdo.

(1) Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm

SOURCE Jimdo