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Translation startup Conyac partners with World Jumper, introduces new API

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.10

Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, announced today that it has partnered with Yaraku, the provider of website translation tool World Jumper. Since its launch back in 2009, Anydoor has been providing translation services between multiple languages using crowdsourced workers. The company recently set up its first overseas office in San Francisco, and is intensifying its global expansion efforts to better serve users worldwide and diversify the language base of its crowdsourced workers. To date the startup has raised a total of approximately 40 million yen ($431,000) from several Japanese investors. World Jumper was launched last year, and has been a translation service mainly for website owners. The company outsources orders to third-party agencies (such as Conyac or Gengo), but it also accumulates frequently-used translation requests and results in its database for future reference. This results in better translation results without the need to outsource to agencies, and it helps keep translation costs down while the quality improves as time goes by. The company raised 110 million yen (about $1.1 million) from several Japanese investors back in May. By joining forces, the two startups expect to serve more translation needs, but at affordable rates. Surely this sector…

Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, announced today that it has partnered with Yaraku, the provider of website translation tool World Jumper.

Since its launch back in 2009, Anydoor has been providing translation services between multiple languages using crowdsourced workers. The company recently set up its first overseas office in San Francisco, and is intensifying its global expansion efforts to better serve users worldwide and diversify the language base of its crowdsourced workers. To date the startup has raised a total of approximately 40 million yen ($431,000) from several Japanese investors.

World Jumper was launched last year, and has been a translation service mainly for website owners. The company outsources orders to third-party agencies (such as Conyac or Gengo), but it also accumulates frequently-used translation requests and results in its database for future reference. This results in better translation results without the need to outsource to agencies, and it helps keep translation costs down while the quality improves as time goes by. The company raised 110 million yen (about $1.1 million) from several Japanese investors back in May.

By joining forces, the two startups expect to serve more translation needs, but at affordable rates. Surely this sector will be positively impacted by recently announced Tokyo Olympic Games coming up in 2020. With the partnership, Conyac also changed its web interface today and released a new API that allows third-party developers to integrate the translation solutions with their apps.

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Japan’s Mixi motivated for mobile with these 6 apps

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.09.10

Back in August, we wrote about Japanese social network Mixi and its Nohana photobook app. The service has seen rapid growth and was recently spun off as a wholly-owned subsidiary.When it comes to mobile apps, Mixi is taking a somewhat experimental approach with its Mixi Lab initiative. So we thought that it might be fun to take a look at the list of apps that the company has in line for us. At first glance, the following list of mobile apps doesn’t seem to indicate any unifying strategy. But having been the dominant social network in Japan for so long before Facebook and Twitter came along, Mixi really has lots of information about online communities. And thus, Mixi is now in a unique position to create many apps around those long established communities. In fact, there are over 2.7 million such communities registered on the social network, and some of its mobile apps can be thought of as being natural extensions of these. Read on to learn more about them! Nohana Nohana is a photo booklet printing service. Users receive one photo booklet for free (90 yen shipping cost not included) every month, and a second booklet on can be…

Back in August, we wrote about Japanese social network Mixi and its Nohana photobook app. The service has seen rapid growth and was recently spun off as a wholly-owned subsidiary.When it comes to mobile apps, Mixi is taking a somewhat experimental approach with its Mixi Lab initiative. So we thought that it might be fun to take a look at the list of apps that the company has in line for us.

At first glance, the following list of mobile apps doesn’t seem to indicate any unifying strategy. But having been the dominant social network in Japan for so long before Facebook and Twitter came along, Mixi really has lots of information about online communities. And thus, Mixi is now in a unique position to create many apps around those long established communities. In fact, there are over 2.7 million such communities registered on the social network, and some of its mobile apps can be thought of as being natural extensions of these. Read on to learn more about them!

Nohana

Nohana is a photo booklet printing service. Users receive one photo booklet for free (90 yen shipping cost not included) every month, and a second booklet on can be purchased for 500 yen per book. Last month, Mixi revealed that the total number of uploaded photos amounts to 3.8 million, and there have been 100,000 photobooks published by 200,000 people.

Spinan

Spinan is the very first game app by Mixi, hitting the market today. It is a simple card game that works very similar to solitaire. In the given time of 90 seconds, your goal is to get rid of as many cards as possible. The results are not measured just by wins and losses, but it calculates the number of mistouches and the amount of time left, making the game more complex and addictive.

Plannah

The most common place that mobile users go to look back on their photos is their photo library. But the more photos you take, more of a mess you make. Plannah can be a convenient app because it allows you to see your photos in albums. They can be organized by dates or themes, or be shared with selected friends.

PiqCole

PiqCole is a neat iOS app that lets you create photo albums as folders on your mobile home screen. The idea here was to create a service for moms that can be used daily. Just tap on the icon on your home screen and you can access your kids photos instantly. You can see how simple the app is in the video below.

Cheering

Cheering is an app that — as the name suggests — encourages you by cheering. Users can chose a photo and a phrase, and every time they open the app, perhaps your dog or a friend or significant other will cheer you up. This was a little playful item that the team at Mixi created, and it was later made into this app. You can learn more about it in this interview on the Mixi blog.

Coscam

Considering that there are many young people on Mixi, it’s only natural for the company to have a large community dedicated to cosplay culture. Coscam is an app made especially for this segment that lets users print name cards on their mobile phones. There are over 30 design themes available and you can print ten cards for 300 yen. The app can be used without user registration.

Minimo

Minimo is Mixi’s most recent app planned for release this fall, serving to match up hairdressers with models. Many hairdressers needs to practice haircutting with real people. Back in the old days, they used to find their models in the streets, since lots of regular people might be willing to get a hair cut for free. This activity of searching for ‘Cut models’ is one of the most actively used communities on Mixi – so popular that it seems that the company decided to spin it off as a standalone app.

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Japan’s top education app teaches English with ‘Super Subtitles’

Rick Martin 2013.09.10

We’ve written about a number of services in the past that help Japanese people study English. For example, language learning startup Rarejob raised $3.3 million this year to help continue its efforts in providing English lessons over Skype. Choujimaku is a popular English learning software, published by Source Next Corporation in Japan. It helps students learn English by watching movies, referring to English and Japanese subtitles as they go (hence the name, which translates as ‘Super Subtitles’). Back in 2011 the company moved into the app space with its Choujimaku movie app for iOS. And thanks to a new promotional campaign, the app is now number one in the education category in the Japanese App Store. Movies are currently priced at ¥1200 (or about $12), which is a promotional discount from the regular ¥1800. But like much online media in Japan, the movies are still painfully overpriced in my view, even with the added value of bilingual subtitles and the useful dictionary. That’s about the same price as an evening at the cinema, or two months worth of Hulu Plus (which in Japan includes subtitled movies and TV). But nevertheless, it might hit a sweet spot for busy folks who…

We’ve written about a number of services in the past that help Japanese people study English. For example, language learning startup Rarejob raised $3.3 million this year to help continue its efforts in providing English lessons over Skype.

Choujimaku is a popular English learning software, published by Source Next Corporation in Japan. It helps students learn English by watching movies, referring to English and Japanese subtitles as they go (hence the name, which translates as ‘Super Subtitles’). Back in 2011 the company moved into the app space with its Choujimaku movie app for iOS. And thanks to a new promotional campaign, the app is now number one in the education category in the Japanese App Store.

Movies are currently priced at ¥1200 (or about $12), which is a promotional discount from the regular ¥1800. But like much online media in Japan, the movies are still painfully overpriced in my view, even with the added value of bilingual subtitles and the useful dictionary. That’s about the same price as an evening at the cinema, or two months worth of Hulu Plus (which in Japan includes subtitled movies and TV).

But nevertheless, it might hit a sweet spot for busy folks who don’t have time to mess around with organizing their own study through movies. The controls are pretty handy with the ability to toggle either language off or on. There’s also a dictionary function that lets users dig deeper and find out the meaning of individual words.

If you’d like to check it out, you can pick it up over on the App Store as a free download. There’s a sample movie if you’d like to try it out before moving on to the 200+ in-app movie purchases available.

news

Japan’s Studio Ousia to launch new affiliate solution for bloggers

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.09

Studio Ousia is the Tokyo-based startup known for its smartphone browser add-on Phroni. That service scans whatever website you’re browsing and augment the keywords with links to useful information resources such as Wikipedia or YouTube. The startup is currently developing a new affiliate solution for bloggers called Linkplaza, which is scheduled to launch by the end of the year. Today the startup began gathering 100 beta users who can try out the technology and give feedback. The new service is a server-side solution instead of what they’ve been doing with Phroni on the client-side. For media publishers or bloggers, you can easily add affiliate links to texts in your post by inserting a few lines of code to your blogging application. When your reader mouses over any of the links, a menu featuring supplementary links will be pop up on screen. In this space, we’ve seen several competitors develop similar technologies, such as Skimlinks and Viglink. Back in April, Kyodo News Agency reported that Skimlinks had raised an unknown amount of investments from NYC-based Greycroft Partners, Texas-based blog network Forum Foundry, Japanese angel investors Hiro Maeda, and Ryota Matsuzaki to expand to global markets, including Japan. This seems to indicate…

Studio Ousia is the Tokyo-based startup known for its smartphone browser add-on Phroni. That service scans whatever website you’re browsing and augment the keywords with links to useful information resources such as Wikipedia or YouTube. The startup is currently developing a new affiliate solution for bloggers called Linkplaza, which is scheduled to launch by the end of the year. Today the startup began gathering 100 beta users who can try out the technology and give feedback.

The new service is a server-side solution instead of what they’ve been doing with Phroni on the client-side. For media publishers or bloggers, you can easily add affiliate links to texts in your post by inserting a few lines of code to your blogging application. When your reader mouses over any of the links, a menu featuring supplementary links will be pop up on screen.

In this space, we’ve seen several competitors develop similar technologies, such as Skimlinks and Viglink. Back in April, Kyodo News Agency reported that Skimlinks had raised an unknown amount of investments from NYC-based Greycroft Partners, Texas-based blog network Forum Foundry, Japanese angel investors Hiro Maeda, and Ryota Matsuzaki to expand to global markets, including Japan. This seems to indicate that the space will pick up momentum in the Japanese blogsphere soon as well.

Studio Ousia is an standout graduate from Keio University SFC’s incubation program. The company raised 70 million yen (about $864,000) from Nissay Capital back in February of last year.

news

Hot new mobile game from Okinawa rides an early wave

Rick Martin 2013.09.09

Thanks to the folks over on Gamebiz for pointing out that a new made-in-Japan mobile game, Ancient Surfer, has surpassed 100,000 downloads in its first four days. The title launched last week (on September 5th) for both iOS and Android, and since then has done fairly well in its home market of Japan (currently third in the iOS sports category), as well as other big markets like the UK, Brazil, and Thailand. The title features dead-simple two-button controls for turning, a button each for right and left, and with the Unity game engine the graphics are very impressive. The iOS version is plagued by a really irritating ad in the upper right, however, perhaps enough to keep me from coming back to the game. I’d consider paying to remove it, but I saw no such option readily available. Ancient Surfer comes from SummerTime Studio based in Okinawa. We don’t often have the pleasure of featuring companies from that part of Japan, so it’s certainly great to see a game like this one do well. According to Gamebiz, we can expect to see another new title from the studio in the coming weeks. If you’d like to give Ancient Surfer a…

Thanks to the folks over on Gamebiz for pointing out that a new made-in-Japan mobile game, Ancient Surfer, has surpassed 100,000 downloads in its first four days. The title launched last week (on September 5th) for both iOS and Android, and since then has done fairly well in its home market of Japan (currently third in the iOS sports category), as well as other big markets like the UK, Brazil, and Thailand.

The title features dead-simple two-button controls for turning, a button each for right and left, and with the Unity game engine the graphics are very impressive. The iOS version is plagued by a really irritating ad in the upper right, however, perhaps enough to keep me from coming back to the game. I’d consider paying to remove it, but I saw no such option readily available.

Ancient Surfer comes from SummerTime Studio based in Okinawa. We don’t often have the pleasure of featuring companies from that part of Japan, so it’s certainly great to see a game like this one do well. According to Gamebiz, we can expect to see another new title from the studio in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to give Ancient Surfer a try yourself, feel free to pick it up from the App Store or from Google Play. Or check out our demo video above.

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Translation startup Conyac partners with World Jumper, introduces new API