news

Big data startup Hapyrus raises $925,000 from Japanese investors

Masaru Ikeda 2013.06.23

Silicon Valley-based big data startup Hapyrus announced this week that it has raised $925,000 from several investors in Japan and the US. This follows its previous round of seed funding from CyberAgent back in November of 2011. The investors this time are:

Shigeru Urushibara (president of Japanese systems integrator UL Systems)
Shogo Kawada (co-founder of DeNA)
CyberAgent Ventures
Kiyoshi Nishikawa (president of NetAge)
Nissay Capital
William Lohse (former president of Ziff-Davis publishing, angel investor for Pinterest)

The startup was launched back in March of 2011 by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa. He previously worked at Yahoo Japan and at Japanese location-based ad platform startup Sirius Technology (acquired by Yahoo Japan in 2010). Japan’s governmental IT promotion agency heralded him as a “genius talent” in the computer industry with his Hadoop middleware project for scripting Ruby DSL (domain specific language).

The startup launched a new service called FlyData for Amazon Redshift back in April, which allows automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, the data-warehouse service that can scale to petabyte size. For developers, the service allows you to control and send log files on your server to your own Amazon Redshift cluster over Amazon S3 at a frequency of once every five minutes. This helps you easily conduct an almost realtime-like big data analysis over the cloud.

They have another service called FlyData for Heroku, which also allows the automatic upload of log data on Heroku to Amazon EC3.

On a related note, Treasure Data, another notable Japanese startup focused on big data solutions, also received angel investment worth $2.75 million back in 2012, with funds coming from several investors including Jerry Yang (Yahoo co-founder) and Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto (the inventor of the Ruby language).

news

CocoPPa partners with Tokyo Otaku Mode on anime-themed decorations for your smartphone homescreen

Junya Mori 2013.06.22

See the original story in Japanese. CocoPPa, a smartphone wallpaper/icon decoration app from Japanese web conglomerate United, has tied up with Tokyo Otaku Mode (TOM) to allow Cocoppa users to bring their favorite illustrations from TOM to their smartphone homescreens. This is the first such collaborative business endeavor for Cocoppa. Both Cocoppa and TOM are popular sites among young people, and both have succeeded in spreading Japanese culture around the world. For TOM, this partnership gives its users more chances to show off their works as well. CocoPPa recently surpassed 8 million downloads worldwide, and TOM has accumulated more than 12.5 million likes on its Facebook. We expect that this partnership between two globally influential startups can bring about great results and more awareness about the two companies worldwide.. On a related note, we reported earlier today that has also just released a new smartphone app called Tokyo Otaku Mode mini. It’s a busy week for the up-and-coming company!

See the original story in Japanese.

CocoPPa, a smartphone wallpaper/icon decoration app from Japanese web conglomerate United, has tied up with Tokyo Otaku Mode (TOM) to allow Cocoppa users to bring their favorite illustrations from TOM to their smartphone homescreens.

This is the first such collaborative business endeavor for Cocoppa. Both Cocoppa and TOM are popular sites among young people, and both have succeeded in spreading Japanese culture around the world. For TOM, this partnership gives its users more chances to show off their works as well.

CocoPPa recently surpassed 8 million downloads worldwide, and TOM has accumulated more than 12.5 million likes on its Facebook. We expect that this partnership between two globally influential startups can bring about great results and more awareness about the two companies worldwide..

On a related note, we reported earlier today that has also just released a new smartphone app called Tokyo Otaku Mode mini. It’s a busy week for the up-and-coming company!

news

Tokyo Otaku Mode releases new Otaku news app for iPhone and Android

Junya Mori 2013.06.22

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo Otaku Mode announced Thursday that it has introduced a new smartphone app called Tokyo Otaku Mode mini, which is available for both iOS and Android. The new app delivers news updates on otaku culture, including Japanese anime, manga, and games. Users can set what time they want to receive news updates each day. And once a news article is downloaded, it can be read offline on the app as well. Previously, TOM released Otaku Camera which we’re told has accumulated 3.5 million downloads since its release back in December of 2012. More than 90% of all downloads are from outside Japan. The app also provides lots of illustrated frames using famous anime characters. If you’d like to try out the new Tokyo Otaku Mode mini app, you can get it over on the App Store or on Google Play.

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo Otaku Mode announced Thursday that it has introduced a new smartphone app called Tokyo Otaku Mode mini, which is available for both iOS and Android.

The new app delivers news updates on otaku culture, including Japanese anime, manga, and games. Users can set what time they want to receive news updates each day. And once a news article is downloaded, it can be read offline on the app as well.

Previously, TOM released Otaku Camera which we’re told has accumulated 3.5 million downloads since its release back in December of 2012. More than 90% of all downloads are from outside Japan. The app also provides lots of illustrated frames using famous anime characters.

If you’d like to try out the new Tokyo Otaku Mode mini app, you can get it over on the App Store or on Google Play.

news

Japan’s Chatwork brings its business chat tool to Europe

Junya Mori 2013.06.21

See the original story in Japanese. Chatwork Inc., a Japanese startup that operates a cloud-based chat tool for business, has announced that it would start expanding service operations to the European region from Luxembourg. This follows its international expansion to North America last year, and the Asian region this past spring. The Chatwork app was launched back in March of 2011, providing a business chat environment for corporate users, with features like group chat, task management, file management, and video conferencing. Luxembourg is known for having a very low tax rate, and has succeeded in inviting a number of multinational companies to set up shop there. It’s surrounded by Germany, France, and Belgium, and most local citizens can speak English, Luxembourgish, German, and French. Chatwork has decided to start its European operations here because of these geographical and linguistic advantages. The company was in attendance at ICT Spring 2013, an annual tech startup conference in the country taking place this week. The startup recently unveiled that it has acquired more than 200,000 users as of this month. In terms of the ratio of paid to unpaid users, Chatwork has performed even better than services like Dropbox or Evernote, which are…

See the original story in Japanese.

Chatwork Inc., a Japanese startup that operates a cloud-based chat tool for business, has announced that it would start expanding service operations to the European region from Luxembourg. This follows its international expansion to North America last year, and the Asian region this past spring.

The Chatwork app was launched back in March of 2011, providing a business chat environment for corporate users, with features like group chat, task management, file management, and video conferencing.

Luxembourg is known for having a very low tax rate, and has succeeded in inviting a number of multinational companies to set up shop there. It’s surrounded by Germany, France, and Belgium, and most local citizens can speak English, Luxembourgish, German, and French. Chatwork has decided to start its European operations here because of these geographical and linguistic advantages. The company was in attendance at ICT Spring 2013, an annual tech startup conference in the country taking place this week.

The startup recently unveiled that it has acquired more than 200,000 users as of this month. In terms of the ratio of paid to unpaid users, Chatwork has performed even better than services like Dropbox or Evernote, which are said to be around 4 to 4.5%. More than 50,000 users visit the service every day, and more than 100 million messages have been exchanged using the platform.

The startup unveiled a screen-sharing feature called ChatWork back in May. And from here, it will be interesting to see how much traction it can build in the country where Skype started its journey.

news

Japanese makeup tips and tutorials prove popular online

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.06.21

We’ve written about the popular cosmetics and makeup review portal @Cosme on a few occasions. i-Style, the company behind the giant portal announces its most popular cosmetic products twice a year. The award-winning cosmetics are selected purely from generated user-reviews on the portal, and also factors in @Cosme’s own metrics [1]. @Cosme also has some hair and make-up video tips on its Cawaii Channel where they give out specific how-tos on products that rank well — tips like how to make cat-eyes, or how to put on fake eye-lashes. Many Japanese women prefer to buy cosmetics at stores — at least the first time, since they can get good advice on how to use the products. Cawaii channel is simple but serves a similar purpose. But other Japanese companies are trying to meet the demands in this market as well. There is another make-up video portal called Minna no Make, (roughly translated as Everyone’s makeup) which is a close equivalent to Beautylish. The site provides make-up tips by popular professional makeup artists for makeup as well as nails. Users can get advice or post their own tips and make friends around makeup and nail products. The most popular video on…

@Cosme also has some hair and make-up video tips on its Cawaii Channel where they give out specific how-tos on products that rank well — tips like how to make cat-eyes, or how to put on fake eye-lashes. Many Japanese women prefer to buy cosmetics at stores — at least the first time, since they can get good advice on how to use the products. Cawaii channel is simple but serves a similar purpose.

But other Japanese companies are trying to meet the demands in this market as well. There is another make-up video portal called Minna no Make, (roughly translated as Everyone’s makeup) which is a close equivalent to Beautylish. The site provides make-up tips by popular professional makeup artists for makeup as well as nails. Users can get advice or post their own tips and make friends around makeup and nail products. The most popular video on the site (as we write this) is how to put on red eyeliner (see video below).

Minna no Make is interesting in that users can find the makeup or nail products of their choice, and then find videos that show how to use those products. There is also a premium membership where members work as ambassadors of the site, and are given dedicated pages with more designs, original name cards to hand out to friends, and invites to exclusive events.

If you would like to see the list of winning products, you can check it out on their website in Japanese or Chinese. ↩

news

First Hacker News Nagoya meetup to take place this Saturday, June 22

Rick Martin 2013.06.21

There are lots of fun tech-focused community events springing up around Japan. Of course, for us here in Tokyo it’s sometimes easy to overlook what’s happening beyond the capital. Hacker News events have been held in various cities around Japan (and of course, the world), and tomorrow Nagoya will be added to that list, with the city’s first Hacker News meetup being held in the afternoon [1]. The venue will be Adea (find a detailed map over on the Doorkeeper.jp page), and the time has been set for 2pm to 6pm, so that anyone who visits from out of town can catch a train back home. If you can’t make it, you can follow the discussion on Twitter on the #hnnagoya hashtag. For more details about the Hacker News events, check out Hacker News Tokyo or Hacker News Kansai. I shamefully have to confess that I’ve not attended one of these events yet. But I hope to do so soon. ↩

There are lots of fun tech-focused community events springing up around Japan. Of course, for us here in Tokyo it’s sometimes easy to overlook what’s happening beyond the capital.

Hacker News events have been held in various cities around Japan (and of course, the world), and tomorrow Nagoya will be added to that list, with the city’s first Hacker News meetup being held in the afternoon [1].

The venue will be Adea (find a detailed map over on the Doorkeeper.jp page), and the time has been set for 2pm to 6pm, so that anyone who visits from out of town can catch a train back home. If you can’t make it, you can follow the discussion on Twitter on the #hnnagoya hashtag.

For more details about the Hacker News events, check out Hacker News Tokyo or Hacker News Kansai.

I shamefully have to confess that I’ve not attended one of these events yet. But I hope to do so soon. ↩

Big data startup Hapyrus raises $925,000 from Japanese investors

Recent Articles

Trends

CocoPPa partners with Tokyo Otaku Mode on anime-themed decorations for your smartphone homescreen

Tokyo Otaku Mode releases new Otaku news app for iPhone and Android

Japan’s Chatwork brings its business chat tool to Europe

Japanese makeup tips and tutorials prove popular online

First Hacker News Nagoya meetup to take place this Saturday, June 22

Related news

Recent Articles

Trends

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news