Since being established in 2001, Hatena has been one of Japan's most innovative and influential Intenet service companies. The first service offered by Hatena was a Q&A service where users responded to each other's question. much like a human-run search engine. In Japanese the word "hatena" stands for the "?" mark, and the site was named after this first Q&A service.
Hatenna Antenna, a tool that automatically checks website updates was released in 2002 and and Hatena Diary, a blog hosting service was introduced in 2003. Hatena Diary works on an innovative and original wiki-based keyword system, where keywords in a blog entry are automatically linked to other pages with the same keyword. This keyword function has been a driving reason behind the popularity of Hatena Diary which has grown to 400,000 users as of the summer of 2007. Hatena Bookmark, a social bookmarking service was launched in 2005. With over 100,000 users, Hatena Bookmark is the most popular social bookmarking service in Japan.
Currently, Hatena has 9 million unique visitors per month and 600,000 registered users, and is one of the leading Internet service companies in Japan. Hatena works in cooperation with major Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon, and is a profit-turning enterprise with most of its income derived from advertisements.
About Hatena Inc.
Hatena Inc., is the fully owned American subsidary of Hatena that was founded in the summer of 2006 in Silicon Valley. Hatena launched Hatena Star in 2007 and plans to launch Hatena World in the summer of 2007 as their first English language services. Hatena has aspirations of developing into a global Internet services company. Hatena "hopes/is planning" to become an important part of the global Internet community by expanding beyond Japan and releasing their services to the world.
