is a Japanese Internet media company with headquarters in the

Roppongi Hills Mori Tower is a 54-story mixed-use skyscraper in Roppongi, Minato, Tokyo. Completed in 2003 and named after builder Minoru Mori, it is the centerpiece of the Roppongi Hills urban development. It is the sixth-tallest building in Tokyo at . The tower has a ...

Roppongi is a district of Minato, Tokyo, Japan, famous for the affluent Roppongi Hills development area and popular night club scene. A few foreign embassies are located near Roppongi, and the night life is popular with locals and foreigners alike. It is ...

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

. It has been operating the social network service

GREE GREE (derived from an abbreviation of the "Six degrees of separation" concept) is a Japanese social networking service founded by Yoshikazu Tanaka and operated by GREE, Inc. GREE focuses primarily on mobile games and over ninety percent of its ...

since its establishment in December 2004.

History

* Feb. 2004 Release of GREE alpha to the public by Yoshikazu Tanaka as a personal hobby * Mar. 2004 Exceeds 10,000 users * Dec. 2004 Established GREE, Inc. * Nov. 2006 Launches EZ GREE (now au one GREE) as a

KDDI () is a Japanese telecommunications operator formed on October 1, 2000 through the merger of DDI Corp. (Daini-Denden Inc.), KDD (Kokusai Denshin Denwa) Corp. (itself a former listed state-owned enterprise privatized in 1998), and IDO Corp. It h ...

Mobile official service * Feb. 2007 Launches GREE as a NTT Docomo official service * Mar. 2007 Exceeds 1 million users * Aug. 2007 Launches GREE as a

Softbank is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs the ...

official service * Dec. 2008 Listed on the Market of the High-Growth and Emerging Stocks * Apr. 2009 Exceeds 10 million users * Jun. 2010 Exceeds 20 million users * Jun. 2010 Listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange * Jun. 2010 Release of third-party applications on "GREE Platform" * Jul. 2010 Relocates Company headquarters to

, Tokyo * Nov. 2010 Announcement of investment in Project Goth, Inc. * Dec. 2010 Launches "GREE Platform for smartphone" * Dec. 2010 Exceeds 23.8 million users * Jan. 2011 Establishment of a subsidiary, GREE International, Inc. in the US * Jan. 2011 Acquisition of Atlantis Co., Ltd. * Jan. 2011 Announcement of business collaboration with

Tencent Tencent Holdings Ltd. () is a Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate and holding company headquartered in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world based on revenue. It is also the w ...

* Apr. 2011 Buys US social mobile gaming platform

OpenFeint OpenFeint was a social platform for mobile games for devices running on Android or iOS. It was developed by Aurora Feint, a company named after a video game by the same developers. The platform consisted of an SDK for use by games, allowing ...

for $104 million * May 2012 GREE purchased the mobile game developer Funzio for $210 million

Origin of the name GREE

The company name GREE comes from a hypothesis, Six Degrees of Separation postulated by social psychologist

Stanley Milgram Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.Blass, T. (2004). ''The Man Who Shocke ...

in 1967. "

Six degrees of separation Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also k ...

" is a hypothesis that everyone is approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth. If a chain of "a

friend of a friend In sociology, a friend of a friend is a human contact that exists because of a mutual friend. Person C is a friend of a friend of person A when there is a person B that is a friend of both A and C. Thus the human relation "friend of a friend" is ...

" statements are made, on average, any two people in the world can be connected in six steps or fewer. The name symbolizes GREE’s hope to "create and provide any new possibilities of the Internet" and to "create new forms of fun, convenience, and excitement."

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://gree.co.jp/jp/en/ Mass media companies based in Tokyo Software companies based in Tokyo Mass media companies established in 2004 Japanese brands Japanese companies established in 2004 Companies formerly listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Internet in Japan Internet technology companies of Japan