Many Japanese people commute to work by train. This is the core time when they use their mobile phones. Due to extended use on trains like this, people often run down their battery, resulting a big need for portable mobile phone chargers. One popular charging device is the Cheero Power Plus Danboard version. The product has proven very popular, and is currently sold out. But it will be available again in mid-June 1.
‘Danboard’ means ‘cardboard’ in Japanese, and this particular danboard is a character that appears in a famous manga called Yotsuba&! named Danbo. This manga started 10 years ago in 2003 and so far has sold 10 million books. Readers may be familiar with Yotsuba&! since it has been translated into 13 different languages and sold in 23 countries. So Japanese or even non-Japanese manga fans may be familiar with the cute looking cardboard character.
The Cheero mobile charger can recharge an iPhone 5 (or any other mobile phone) up to five times, and it takes about 11 to 13 hours for a full charge. It comes with a 75 cm micro USB cable and a linen bag. There are features to prevent overcharge and discharge, and there is also an automatic stop feature when temperature gets too high. There are two sockets, allowing users to charge tablets and some game consoles as well.
The Cheero Power Plus Danboard version is 3,750 yen (or about $37). But as previously mentioned, it is already sold out on Amazon. Such a mobile charger is good for everyday use, but it is also useful during earthquake or other natural disasters. Yostuba, the company behind the product has also released an Amazon branded version of its character Danbo in cooperation with an anime figure manufacturer Kaiyodo.
It seems that the product’s pre-order has ended already.↩
It was just back in April that Line announced it was venturing into the mobile e-book industry with its Line Manga service. Now the company is digging even deeper into the publishing industry, adding ‘Line Novel’ to its repertoire starting on June 4th. What’s interesting about Line Novel is that all publications on the platform will be written by well known authors, exclusively for this platform. These exclusive novels are to be provided for free. Updates about the new releases will be shared on the Line Novel official account @linenovel. To make this initiative, Line partnered with major Japanese publishing house Kodansha, a familiar face for Line from their partnership with Line Manga. Line users can enjoy the electronic publications of their choice by adding the official account of particular novel to their friend list. Two to three episodes of each novel will be delivered weekly. To celebrate the beginning of this service, the company will launch a contest to discover new authors. The winner of the contest will be decided by public voting from Line users. All novels must be previously unpublished, and applications are open until August 15th. Japanese people are accustomed to mobile novels, or ‘keitai shosetsu’…
It was just back in April that Line announced it was venturing into the mobile e-book industry with its Line Manga service. Now the company is digging even deeper into the publishing industry, adding ‘Line Novel’ to its repertoire starting on June 4th.
What’s interesting about Line Novel is that all publications on the platform will be written by well known authors, exclusively for this platform. These exclusive novels are to be provided for free. Updates about the new releases will be shared on the Line Novel official account @linenovel.
To make this initiative, Line partnered with major Japanese publishing house Kodansha, a familiar face for Line from their partnership with Line Manga. Line users can enjoy the electronic publications of their choice by adding the official account of particular novel to their friend list. Two to three episodes of each novel will be delivered weekly.
To celebrate the beginning of this service, the company will launch a contest to discover new authors. The winner of the contest will be decided by public voting from Line users. All novels must be previously unpublished, and applications are open until August 15th.
Japanese people are accustomed to mobile novels, or ‘keitai shosetsu’ since the days of feature phones which goes way back to year 2006. So in a way, this is a return to an already proven concept, likely an initiative that will be successful for Line.
For more information on the growth of Line and its vast repertoire of apps, including Line Novel, please check out our interactive Line Timeline which chronicles its growth from its launch back in 2011 up until the present day.
Mobile video has always been a somewhat perilous space for startups. I was a big fan of Seesmic back in 2008, which at the time proposed a sort of video equivalent of Twitter, with the capability of publishing short videos to a public timeline. Of course that service fizzled. But it looks like times have changed, with Twitter’s own video offering Vine racking up 13 million users in its first four months. One young startup hopes that there’s room for a mobile video messaging service too, and their app Unda is about to be released on the app store soon. But perhaps more interesting than the challenge that lies ahead of them is the story of how they got to where they are now. The startup was created by two Mexican and Japanese co-founders, a unique international collaboration that has led to Silicon Valley where they are now part of the 500 Startups incubation program. Oscar Yasser Noriega (from Mexico) and Nao Tokui (from Japan) originally met in Japan a few years ago. Eventually they decided that they wanted to do something together. Oscar had previously worked on a top Latin American video game site, but he liked the process…
L to R: Luis Lopez, Oscar Yasser Noriega, Nao Tokui
Mobile video has always been a somewhat perilous space for startups. I was a big fan of Seesmic back in 2008, which at the time proposed a sort of video equivalent of Twitter, with the capability of publishing short videos to a public timeline. Of course that service fizzled. But it looks like times have changed, with Twitter’s own video offering Vine racking up 13 million users in its first four months.
One young startup hopes that there’s room for a mobile video messaging service too, and their app Unda is about to be released on the app store soon. But perhaps more interesting than the challenge that lies ahead of them is the story of how they got to where they are now. The startup was created by two Mexican and Japanese co-founders, a unique international collaboration that has led to Silicon Valley where they are now part of the 500 Startups incubation program.
Oscar Yasser Noriega (from Mexico) and Nao Tokui (from Japan) originally met in Japan a few years ago. Eventually they decided that they wanted to do something together. Oscar had previously worked on a top Latin American video game site, but he liked the process of incubating new ideas within the company. Nao had been the founder of Qosmo, a mobile development company doing apps for big clients. Oscar proposed the idea of doing a video messaging app, but Nao was a little bit hesitant at first. Was there really room for this kind of product, especially as so many video startups had already failed so hard?
Taking the plunge
Eventually Nao came around to the idea. And when he did, he jumped in head first. He wanted to to meet up with Oscar, who was at that time in Mexico — so he flew straight over, and within two weeks had a prototype going. That was in December. And that’s when they thought that they might really be on to something.
After some interest from investors, the company’s third member and current chief creative officer, Luis Lopez, suggested that they should explore some more options. They took their idea to 500 Startups’ Mexico branch, and venture partner Cesar Salazar liked it a lot. Coincidentally 500 Startup’s founding partner Dave McClure had a talk in Mexico around that time, so they pitched the idea to him as well, and he loved it too. That was on a Wednesday, says Oscar, and they were on Silicon Valley by the following Monday. That was a little later than the most recent batch of startups, but great step forward for the young company.
As for the product itself, I personally have yet to see it. But from what I’ve heard, I’m optimistic. I’m told the UX/UI breaks with tradition, with no text, emoticons, or stickers — just video. They have focused on making the experience a good one even on slow networks. So of course while they plan to push this app in mature Asian mobile markets like Japan or Singapore, they will also target emerging markets in the region, as well as in Latin America — leveraging the advantage of having founders from both regions.
And hopefully unlike the video startup failures we’ve seen in the past, maybe the time is right for a service like Unda. Oscar explains:
Back around 2008 the timing was not right. Phones were fast, but not fast enough for a seamless experience. Networks weren’t so fast either, and there were less phones with front facing cameras. The timing was tricky for services back then. But now there are great examples of mobile video booming – not just things like YouTube and NicoNico Douga, but shorter format services like Vine, which is just six second videos. That’s a great signal that the market is embracing this right now.
So how will the market respond to Unda? It’s hard to say without seeing it first, but my initial impressions are that this is a pretty strong team, so I don’t think anyone should underestimate them. They did after all, make the cut for 500 Startups, a good indication that they’re on to something promising.
Recently I wrote a little about my favorite mobile writing apps, one of which was Poster, a beautifully designed iOS app that interfaces quite nicely with WordPress blogs. But there’s a similar app made here in Japan that almost made my list. PressSync Pro, while not as pretty as Poster is every bit as powerful, maybe more so. PressSync lets you do practically everything you can normally do with WordPress, with menu items to browse published articles, drafts, local articles, and media/images [1]. You can even edit things like the URL slug, the post’s featured image, and custom fields. PressSync does not access your entire archive of articles, but just the most recent ones. But you can adjust the setting to increase or decrease how many posts deep you’d like to dig into your archive if you wish. By default the font size in the PressSync editor is a little small, so you might want to bump it up a notch – and you can do so in the settings. There is snippet support for common HTML tags, and even Markdown. While this is handy, to me it requires a few to many button presses, and I will likely continue…
Recently I wrote a little about my favorite mobile writing apps, one of which was Poster, a beautifully designed iOS app that interfaces quite nicely with WordPress blogs. But there’s a similar app made here in Japan that almost made my list. PressSync Pro, while not as pretty as Poster is every bit as powerful, maybe more so.
PressSync lets you do practically everything you can normally do with WordPress, with menu items to browse published articles, drafts, local articles, and media/images [1]. You can even edit things like the URL slug, the post’s featured image, and custom fields. PressSync does not access your entire archive of articles, but just the most recent ones. But you can adjust the setting to increase or decrease how many posts deep you’d like to dig into your archive if you wish.
By default the font size in the PressSync editor is a little small, so you might want to bump it up a notch – and you can do so in the settings.
There is snippet support for common HTML tags, and even Markdown. While this is handy, to me it requires a few to many button presses, and I will likely continue to compose in another app, and maybe use an app like this one to publish. PressSync also has an AppLink maker function for bloggers who need to create affiliate links.
Overall I think it’s a pretty great app, and for anyone who needs to interface with WordPress on a mobile, its certainly worth the 450 yen ($4.99) price tag. You can get it over on the App Store.
I do have one complaint about tag input, which presents tag selection by listing all your tags (which can tag a while if you have many) with on/off sliders. Tags would be better input by simple writing them out separated by commas , I think. ↩
Back in April we mentioned that Japanese mobile video site NotTV had reached the 700,000 subscriber milestone, although at the time it had fallen short of its first year goal of a million. But now Mmbi, the company offering the service, has announced that this target has finally been reached as of June 1st, with subscribers still growing at a decent pace (see chart below). Even though NotTV is late hitting its target, the company still plans to celebrate the milestone with a quiz show this July where it plans to give away 4 million yen to participants and winners. The service originally started back in April of 2012, but in its first few months there weren’t as many NotTV compatible handsets available. The service is backed by Docomo, with many of its handsets offering NotTV. There are now 26 phone models offering the service, and that’s expected to rise to 33 by the end of July, according to Nikkei. The service is available in 33 prefectures, but they hope to offer it nationwide by March of next year. Mmbi has previously stated that its long term goal is to accumulate 10 million mobile video subscribers. It still has a…
Photo: RBB Today
Back in April we mentioned that Japanese mobile video site NotTV had reached the 700,000 subscriber milestone, although at the time it had fallen short of its first year goal of a million. But now Mmbi, the company offering the service, has announced that this target has finally been reached as of June 1st, with subscribers still growing at a decent pace (see chart below).
Even though NotTV is late hitting its target, the company still plans to celebrate the milestone with a quiz show this July where it plans to give away 4 million yen to participants and winners.
The service originally started back in April of 2012, but in its first few months there weren’t as many NotTV compatible handsets available. The service is backed by Docomo, with many of its handsets offering NotTV. There are now 26 phone models offering the service, and that’s expected to rise to 33 by the end of July, according to Nikkei. The service is available in 33 prefectures, but they hope to offer it nationwide by March of next year.
Mmbi has previously stated that its long term goal is to accumulate 10 million mobile video subscribers. It still has a very long way to go.
This beautiful blue dress is no ordinary dress. You’d never guess just by looking at it, but it’s made of synthetic spider silk. A Japanese biotechnology startup called Spiber recently announced that it has succesfully developed the technology to mass-produce spider silk, which they call Qmonos (‘kumonosu’ means ‘spider web’ in Japanese). According to the company, Qmonos is four times tougher than steel (of the same dimensions), and more elastic than nylon. The material is also heat resistant, up to 300 degrees celcius. The company says that there are many research groups all over the world working to commercialize synthetic spider silk, but they are the first to accomplish this goal. After through research on the gene sequencing of spider silk, the company implanted altered spider genes into microorganisms. Compared to their first successful production, they can now produce 2,500 times more spider silk than before. Spiber hopes to implement Qmonos technology into everything from clothing to cars. Kazuhide Sekiyama, the CEO of Spiber (and also a graduate student at Keio University), recently gave a speech at TEDxTokyo where he talks about how he and his teammates first came up with the idea while they were out drinking. He notes:…
This beautiful blue dress is no ordinary dress. You’d never guess just by looking at it, but it’s made of synthetic spider silk. A Japanese biotechnology startup called Spiber recently announced that it has succesfully developed the technology to mass-produce spider silk, which they call Qmonos (‘kumonosu’ means ‘spider web’ in Japanese).
According to the company, Qmonos is four times tougher than steel (of the same dimensions), and more elastic than nylon. The material is also heat resistant, up to 300 degrees celcius. The company says that there are many research groups all over the world working to commercialize synthetic spider silk, but they are the first to accomplish this goal.
After through research on the gene sequencing of spider silk, the company implanted altered spider genes into microorganisms. Compared to their first successful production, they can now produce 2,500 times more spider silk than before. Spiber hopes to implement Qmonos technology into everything from clothing to cars.
Kazuhide Sekiyama, the CEO of Spiber (and also a graduate student at Keio University), recently gave a speech at TEDxTokyo where he talks about how he and his teammates first came up with the idea while they were out drinking. He notes:
Chemical fiber is used in almost everything that surrounds us and it supports our lives. But what if our oil supply was used up one day and we lose the resources to create fiber? We thought that It would be a true innovation if we could invent spider silk with as much as or even better capability than chemical fiber. Such spider silk could be implemented in many products and would change the world. ¶
Spiber has taken the first step towards making this a reality. The company will launch a pilot research plant sometime this year in cooperation with auto-parts manufacturer Kojima Industries. The goal is to produce over 100 kilograms of Qmonos spider silk a month.
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Rick Martin
