Edy E-money Now Accepted for the Purchase
of Ameba’s Online Virtual Currency

bitWallet, Inc., manager of the electronic money service “Edy” and member of the Rakuten Group (“bitWallet,” CEO: Yoshihisa Yamada, Head Office: Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo) announced today that Ameba, a site operated by CyberAgent, Inc. (“CyberAgent;” President & CEO: Susumu Fujita; Head office: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo), will begin accepting payments made with Edy e-money for its Amegold virtual currency starting today, January 17, 2011.

This service enables the 20 million Ameba users in Japan to use Edy e-money to purchase Ameba’s virtual currency online, which can be used in games provided on Ameba Mobile or for avatar items for the Ameba Pig in Ameba’s avatar community service. Since they are able to make payments using Edy on either smartphones with the Osaifu Keitai® (“wallet phone”) feature or conventional mobile phones, Ameba users now have access to an added payment option in addition to the conventional payment methods of credit card and billing from their mobile provider. As a result, this greatly enhances Ameba user convenience.

Edy’s main user demographic is males between the ages of 30 and 50, while Ameba’s user demographic is concentrated on males and females between the ages of 20 and 40. With online payments made by Edy e-money seeing strong growth (150% year on year in December 2011), Edy e-money provider bitWallet expects that the roll out of this service will help it capture more new users and encourage the greater use of Edy for online payments.

Plans call for more new services and new functions customized to different user environments to be rolled out for Edy e-money in the future.

Note 1: “Osaifu-Keitai” is a registered trademark of NTT DOCOMO, INC.

Note 2: Edy is a pre-paid electronic money service managed by bitWallet of the Rakuten Group.