Vili Lehdonvirta

researcher, HIIT and Waseda University, Tokyo

Vili Lehdonvirta is a researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology where he studies emerging virtual economies and virtual item trading. Since 2006 he has been a visiting researcher at Waseda University, Tokyo, and is currently working on a Ph.D thesis on virtual consumption. Before embarking on an academic career Vili developed casual multiplayer online games at Jippii Mobile Entertainment.

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    Top 5 Internet Services You’ve Never Heard About

    It is in Japan, China and Korea you find the real money trading of virtual property.

    SPEAKER: Vili Lehdonvirta (FIN), researcher, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Waseda University, Tokyo
    MODERATOR: Eva Steensig (DK), business sociologist and founder, LIGHTHOUSE CPH

    Technorati sees more blog posts written in Japanese than in English. Koreans spend more money on virtual items than Finnish people spend on shoes. Behind surprisingly high barriers of language and culture, there lies a set of webospheres radically different from our own.
    In this session Vili Lehdonvirta introduces some highly popular internet services from the Far East, including Mixi, QQ and Cyworld, and he discusses virtual item sales as a revenue model for online services.

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