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Fashion commerce is heating up in Japan

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.06.18

Fashion commerce is a fast-growing industry in Japan, a 104 billion yen market (over a billion dollars) according to the nation’s Ministry of Economy. Many companies are trying to get a piece of this very fruitful internet sector. And here are just a few of the ones that have caught our eyes recently.

Emoclo Marketplace is a shopping site that works similar to Locondo, allowing users to try on clothes before they buy. Users can try clothes at home and send them back (at no cost) if they don’t meet expectations. You can buy up to five items at once and have a week to decide. At the time of launch, there are over ten fashion shops on Emoclo, with over 500 items available.

We previously mentioned popular fashion site Zozotown in our previous article about Japan’s hottest online shopping malls. The company is expected to release its Wear app sometime soon, and that will certainly help its mobile strategy (see their promo video below). The app allows users to archive items that they like in offline shops by scanning the price tag, and then sharing and discussing these fashion items with other users.

Another Japanese fashion e-commerce service with a long history is Buyma. It launched back 2004 and will expand to the U.S. market as Avenue K. At Buyma, Japanese people who reside in overseas countries function as local buyers. Imported brand items are often more expensive in Japan, but by using Buyma, people in Japan have access to the most recent items that have not yet been sold in Japan — and at a cheaper price too. Avenue K will be operated by their partner ImageNetwork. Beyond Japan, Buyma has already expanded to Korea.

These are just a few of the companies that are active in online fashion these days. Hopefully in the future we can continue to tell you about even more.

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7 services cooked up at Cookpad’s recent hackathon in Tokyo

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.06.18

Cookpad is the biggest recipe portal in Japan. We mentioned it in our recent post titled 5 internet services Japanese women can’t do without. The company is considered one of the most successful internet business in the nation, with over 30 million monthly users and a profit margin that exceeds 50%. Cookpad is also well-known for its international team, especially it’s development and design departments. With such a background, the company’s hackathons often turn out to be very popular events. The company held its 24-hour Hackathon Contest back in April. This event aimed to create solutions for everyday problems, with a focus on making the time between waking up and going to the office/school more useful. The winners of this 24-hour Hackathon Competition included some interesting services. We thought we’d share a few of them here. 1. Decopochi ¶ Decopochi nabbed first place with its DIY design service. It allows users to create their own original pochi-bukuro, or special bags used to give monetary gifts in Japan. The developer is a designer himself and wanted to develop a service to let older people be more creative. (Pochi-bukuro is often used to give children their allowance.) 2. Workout Relief ¶ Workout…

Cookpad is the biggest recipe portal in Japan. We mentioned it in our recent post titled 5 internet services Japanese women can’t do without. The company is considered one of the most successful internet business in the nation, with over 30 million monthly users and a profit margin that exceeds 50%. Cookpad is also well-known for its international team, especially it’s development and design departments. With such a background, the company’s hackathons often turn out to be very popular events.

The company held its 24-hour Hackathon Contest back in April. This event aimed to create solutions for everyday problems, with a focus on making the time between waking up and going to the office/school more useful.

The winners of this 24-hour Hackathon Competition included some interesting services. We thought we’d share a few of them here.

1. Decopochi ¶

Decopochi nabbed first place with its DIY design service. It allows users to create their own original pochi-bukuro, or special bags used to give monetary gifts in Japan.

The developer is a designer himself and wanted to develop a service to let older people be more creative. (Pochi-bukuro is often used to give children their allowance.)

2. Workout Relief ¶

Workout Relief is a simple service that aims to assist people with some kind of physical pain. It allows users to do light stretches and exercises, and they can post their original moves as well as vote for the most effective excercises. This product emerged from a real need, as the developer’s father ran into this sort of problem.

3. Shumi Search ¶

Shumi means ‘hobby’ in Japanese. And this service is especially for seniors with more time on their hands after retirement. Shumi Search attempts to solve such problems allowing its users to find hobbies that they can enjoy.

4. Urlife ¶

Time becomes more valuable as we get older. The Urelife app, which won second place at the competition, very conveniently allows you to see how precious the rest of your life is. You can set goals like meeting your parents at least twice a year, and it will then tell you how many times you are projected to meet them in your lifetime. This is a very handy tool for getting a big-picture overview of your life!

5. Journey ¶

There are lots of apps out there that measure how far you have moved or walked in a day. Journey does this too (by connecting to Fitbit), but it will introduces different countries of the world according to your distance travelled. For example, if you have walked 17,785 steps in a given day, the app will take you to Falkland Islands which is 17,785 kilometers away.

6. Okusuri Nonda? ¶

This app’s name can be translated as ‘Have you taken your meds?!’ It adds a gamification element to the mundane task of taking your medecine. Sometimes it can be hard to remember when to take your medicine. By tapping on the medicine drawing on the screen, you can keep track of how many meds you have taken so far.

7. MaybeTodo ¶

MaybeTodo won a special award for its very creative concept. These days everyone is running around to check things off their to do list. But MaybeTodo wants you to forget your tasks so you can truly enjoy life. Enter your task and the due date, and as time passes, the task gets lighter in color and automatically dissapears on the due date.

The winners of the 24-hour Hackathon Competition won a total of 500,000 yen (or about $5,000) in rewards, with the first prize being 300,000 yen.

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Japan’s Street Academy raises $420,000

Takeshi Hirano 2013.06.18

See the original story in Japanese. IntheStreet, the startup behind private lesson marketplace Street Academy, announced today that it has raised 40 million yen (approximately $420,000) from CyberAgent Ventures, Genuine Startups [1], and other angel investors. The service gives users an opportunity to teach something to someone else. By listing the topic that you can teach, you can then easily create a page announcing your lecture. When you teach your lesson, you will receive a fee from the student, and pay 15% as a commission to the startup. The startup’s CEO Takashi Fujimoto started his carrier as an engineer, and he was involved in major projects at an investment fund company. As AirBnB-like offline services have emerged, he wanted to launch a long-tail C2C business by himself. As he started exploring how he could execute his business, the learning community site Skillshare was launched in the US in 2011. Mr. Fujimoto explains: I thought this is it. We are told that the private lesson market is worth 2 trillion yen ($21 billon) in Japan. My wife provides a lesson where she’s teaching how to bake a cake, but she has a problem in terms of acquiring students. Small cooking schools…

See the original story in Japanese.

IntheStreet, the startup behind private lesson marketplace Street Academy, announced today that it has raised 40 million yen (approximately $420,000) from CyberAgent Ventures, Genuine Startups [1], and other angel investors.

The service gives users an opportunity to teach something to someone else. By listing the topic that you can teach, you can then easily create a page announcing your lecture. When you teach your lesson, you will receive a fee from the student, and pay 15% as a commission to the startup.

The startup’s CEO Takashi Fujimoto started his carrier as an engineer, and he was involved in major projects at an investment fund company. As AirBnB-like offline services have emerged, he wanted to launch a long-tail C2C business by himself. As he started exploring how he could execute his business, the learning community site Skillshare was launched in the US in 2011.

Mr. Fujimoto explains:

I thought this is it. We are told that the private lesson market is worth 2 trillion yen ($21 billon) in Japan. My wife provides a lesson where she’s teaching how to bake a cake, but she has a problem in terms of acquiring students. Small cooking schools still rely on distributing hand-outs for their promotion. This caused me to launch the startup.

In terms of marketplace sites connecting users with private lessons, Cyta.jp is still ahead of Street Academy. What’s the difference between the two services? Street Academy does not check whether teachers can provide the lessons/skills they claim. In contrast to that, Cyta.jp allows teachers to post the description after an interview, in an effort to verify the quality of lessons presented on the website. Fujimoto adds:

In terms of managing quality, our service relies on market principles, which is similar to what Tabelog (a Japanese restaurant review site) is doing. We understand it’s really hard to catch up with our competitors. However, we expect to overcome this by giving users more useful information such as what they have learned in the past, and what background a teacher has.

With these funds, the startup plans to intensify its marketing efforts with the goal of acquiring more than 10,000 students in a year.

Genuine Startups is an investment fund spun off from Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan. ↩

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Kyoto startup unveils a simple alternative to Google Reader

Masaru Ikeda 2013.06.17

As many of our readers likely already know, Google will retire Google Reader on July 1st. More than a few startups and developers around the world have put forth alternatives to the dying de-facto standard. Which one will emerge as the new front runner? Kyoto-based startup Modelor today unveiled a new RSS reading app called Presser, which is available both on the web and for iOS. It will follow with versions for Android, Mac, and iPad soon. The Presser team is mostly comprised of students attending Kyoto University. In addition to the general RSS reading feature, the app will learn your preferences and recommend several news articles you may like every day. Modelor was founded by Kyoto-based UI/UX designer Yosuke Nishida. He previously co-founded and worked with Reventive, the startup behind Close, a social networking app. He recently decided to begin his own startup, as Reventive recently managed to secure funding from Mixi.

Kyoto-based startup Modelor today unveiled a new RSS reading app called Presser, which is available both on the web and for iOS. It will follow with versions for Android, Mac, and iPad soon. The Presser team is mostly comprised of students attending Kyoto University.

In addition to the general RSS reading feature, the app will learn your preferences and recommend several news articles you may like every day.

Modelor was founded by Kyoto-based UI/UX designer Yosuke Nishida. He previously co-founded and worked with Reventive, the startup behind Close, a social networking app. He recently decided to begin his own startup, as Reventive recently managed to secure funding from Mixi.

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Japan’s Green Funding enables DIY crowdfunding for web publishers

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.06.16

This is part of our Crowdfunding in Japan series (RSS). Services like KickStarter have become a global phenomenon with the power to let creative individuals take their ideas to new heights. It’s happening here in Japan too. Below is one example. Green Funding is a service that can be integrated into websites, allowing anyone to create crowdfunding project pages. Tokyo Calendar is a well-known Japanese lifestyle magazine, and it has recently used the service to launch a website called ‘Tokyo Calender Fund’, which showcases original crowdfunding projects. The most recent project aims to bring back the once famous and now very scarce Sri Lankan coffee bean. According to the project page, the making of Sri Lankan coffee is a national project and the country plants 20,000 trees per year as part of the production process. Unfortunately the amount exported to Japan is very scarce at 700 kg per year. For this project, Tokyo Calendar plans to develop its own original Sri Lankan coffee blend, collecting funds starting at 1,000 yen (or about $10). The project will run until July 15th, with the target sum being 100,000 yen (or about $1,000). Other interesting projects from Tokyo Calendar includes things like developing…

Green Funding is a service that can be integrated into websites, allowing anyone to create crowdfunding project pages. Tokyo Calendar is a well-known Japanese lifestyle magazine, and it has recently used the service to launch a website called ‘Tokyo Calender Fund’, which showcases original crowdfunding projects. The most recent project aims to bring back the once famous and now very scarce Sri Lankan coffee bean.

According to the project page, the making of Sri Lankan coffee is a national project and the country plants 20,000 trees per year as part of the production process. Unfortunately the amount exported to Japan is very scarce at 700 kg per year. For this project, Tokyo Calendar plans to develop its own original Sri Lankan coffee blend, collecting funds starting at 1,000 yen (or about $10). The project will run until July 15th, with the target sum being 100,000 yen (or about $1,000).

Other interesting projects from Tokyo Calendar includes things like developing original wine glasses shaped like a flamingo, or importing 20 kinds of tequila to Japan. Green Funding has also been used by a popular fashion magazine Nylon Japan.

Traditional media in Japan has been experiencing decreased readership, but publishers can leverage Green Funding to publish books and magazines on demand, and thus be less dependent on advertisements. It will also allow publishers to support creators or artists that they have interviewed or written about.

Hopefully services like this one can have a positive impact for publishers in the country.

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Japanese news curation app Vingow boasts 250% growth in two months

Takeshi Hirano 2013.06.15

See the original story in Japanese. A recent survey by Japanese ad agency Hakuhodo indicated that consumers in Tokyo have very saturated contact with media these days. So perhaps it’s no wonder that online news curation services are getting lots of attention recently. The technology behind these services seems to be only getting better. Tokyo-based startup JXPress is providing one such service, a news curation app called Vingow. Earlier this week, the startup added an interesting new feature to its iOS app, pulling the lead portion of curated news articles, creating handy abstracts for users. The startup’s founder and CEO Katsuhiro Yoneshige explained: If you look at a service like Summly, they’re doing this pretty easily (creating abstracts from curated articles), because in English and they can detect which part of the article is the lead, by finding key nouns, verbs, and finding the frequency of spaces or finding a period in a sentence. However, this process is very difficult to do in Japanese. To solve this problem, they needed to use natural language processing technology. The team initially thought this would take a lot of time, but things proceeded far better than they expected. Some of our readers may…

See the original story in Japanese.

A recent survey by Japanese ad agency Hakuhodo indicated that consumers in Tokyo have very saturated contact with media these days. So perhaps it’s no wonder that online news curation services are getting lots of attention recently. The technology behind these services seems to be only getting better. Tokyo-based startup JXPress is providing one such service, a news curation app called Vingow.

Earlier this week, the startup added an interesting new feature to its iOS app, pulling the lead portion of curated news articles, creating handy abstracts for users.

The startup’s founder and CEO Katsuhiro Yoneshige explained:

If you look at a service like Summly, they’re doing this pretty easily (creating abstracts from curated articles), because in English and they can detect which part of the article is the lead, by finding key nouns, verbs, and finding the frequency of spaces or finding a period in a sentence. However, this process is very difficult to do in Japanese.

To solve this problem, they needed to use natural language processing technology. The team initially thought this would take a lot of time, but things proceeded far better than they expected.

Some of our readers may recall that Yahoo has recently acquired the aforementioned news curation app Summly, which was developed by a 17-year-old in UK. The Vingow app was developed by students attending Waseda University, and is very similar to the Summly app, not only in function but also in that it was created by young developers.

In order to prevent possible copyright issues (which sometimes occur with news curation apps) the team is discussing with their legal advisor and news media companies.

Since their launch back October of 2012, the app has been growing well, seeing a 250% increase in downloads over the last two months. Their users read as many as 22 articles at a time on average. Yoneshige adds:

In terms of duration of visits, a typical user will stay on general news sites for a few minutes. But on our app they stay for as long as 40 minutes. […] Since our launch last year, we’ve been tagging articles to improve accuracy, giving better recommendations to users. From now, we’ll focus on making it easier to find interesting articles. These two approaches will definitely help our users save their time.

JX Press was founded back in 2008, and introduced the first edition of the Vingow app in 2011. The startup has previously received investments from Cyber Agent, NetAge, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and others.

In the Japanese media landscape, they will definitely be one to watch moving forward.

Fashion commerce is heating up in Japan

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