Technology giant Z Holdings Corp. is aiming to boost its services in Asia, co-chief executive officers Kentaro Kawabe and Takeshi Idezawa said in a recent interview. Z Holdings, which brought messaging app provider Line Corp. under its wing for business integration Monday, will also make efforts to discuss ethical issues regarding the use of artificial intelligence, they said. Z Holdings, the parent of internet portal Yahoo Japan Corp., will mainly aim to expand Line's Asia operations. "It's difficult to win a market share with a messaging app," said Idezawa, also Line's president. He expressed interest in developing and releasing a "superapp" that covers interactions, shopping and other services familiar to people in Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan, where the Line app has already made inroads.

Z Holdings Corp., operator of Yahoo Japan online services, and messaging app provider Line Corp. merged on Monday to expand their online services globally as they aim to better compete with U.S. and Chinese tech giants. With a combined user base of about 150 million in Japan, the merger of Z Holdings, a SoftBank Group Corp. subsidiary, and Line will make it one of the biggest information technology companies in the country. "We would like to launch a global smartphone app" in the future to expand online services worldwide with the help of global tech firms in which SoftBank Group's nearly $100 billion Vision Fund has invested, said Takeshi Idezawa, Z Holdings co-CEO and former Line president, at a news conference. Kentaro Kawabe, the other Z Holdings co-CEO said, "We can offer a wider range of services, such as search engine, e-commerce and online financial operations, than those provided by GAFA -- Google LLC, Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com The surviving entity is Z Holdings, under which Yahoo Japan and Line operate their respective businesses.

Since its messaging app debuted in June 2011, Line Corp. has shaken up the online communications landscape in Japan and morphed into a player in smartphone communications infrastructure. So Line is planting the seeds of success for what it thinks will be the next big thing: voice-based "AI agents." While this artificial-intelligence quest will pit the smaller Line against IT powerhouses Google, Apple and Amazon, among others, Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa likes his chances. "We are taking on a new challenge because we believe we have the assets to win the battle," Idezawa told The Japan Times in a recent interview. This is quite a change for a firm that owes its success to a prescient bet on smartphones less than a decade ago.

Line Corp., owner of Japan's most popular messaging service, is getting into the artificial intelligence market in a big way by outlining an ambitious plan that pits it against the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon. According to a report in Bloomberg News, Line Corp. is gearing up to launch a suite of AI software tools that will enable a digital assistant that speaks in Japanese and Korean. The assistant will be able to converse with users and provide weather and news via a dedicated smartphone app or a speaker that sits on the table and is called Wave, similar to Amazon's Echo. Line Corp., which unveiled the strategy during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, this week, said both the app and the speaker will come to the market between April and June. While Line faces a lot of competition, the company thinks it can stand out from the pack because of its local knowledge about the markets in which it is operating, including South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.

It's not a stretch to say we'll all be speaking to AI-powered digital assistants in the future. But who will build the assistants we use the most? Till now that battle has been waged by tech giants in e-commerce, search and mobile hardware, through Amazon's Alexa, Google Now and Apple's Siri. Now a popular chat app in Asia is throwing its hat into the ring. LINE, the messaging app owned by South Korea's Naver and with 700 million registered users, wants to take a step beyond smartphones and towards screen-less technology, the company's chief executive, Takeshi Idezawa said at Mobile World Congress (MWC) on Wednesday, with its own digital assistant powered by machine learning. Moving past the smartphone screen is a wise strategy for any tech company these days, even those who were born on mobile.

Focusing on what you know best often makes the most sense. In an interview with VentureBeat's editor in chief, Blaise Zerega, Line CEO Takeshi Idezawa explained his decision to focus on four Asian markets: Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. A few years ago, Line sought to enter Western markets. The messaging app known for cute anime stickers encountered stiff competition from overlapping services in an overcrowded market -- from WhatsApp to Snapchat, from Twitter to Instagram, from iMessage and SMS, as well as China's WeChat, to say nothing of Facebook Messenger. Line scaled back its expansion, shelved a planned IPO, and narrowed its focus to four Asian markets.

Line Corp. plans to use part of the 130 billion it garnered from last month's initial public offering to bankroll acquisitions of content and technology, transforming its messaging service into a one-stop shop for Asian social media users. Japan's most popular messaging service is gunning for companies in areas ranging from artificial intelligence chatbots and advertising to video streaming and games, including those with augmented reality features, Chief Executive Officer Takeshi Idezawa said in an interview. The Tokyo-based company has assembled a dedicated team to scope out and review possible targets across the globe. The idea is to build Line into a "smart portal," supplementing its mainstay features of chatting, stickers and games with commercial services such as food delivery, job searches and travel reservations in main markets. "We are very open-minded about the size and geography" of potential acquisitions, Idezawa said.