Back in Feburary, we wrote about Smapo, the Japanese equivalent of Shopkick. Today, the company announced that it has joined Rakuten group, giving it access to Rakuten’s 80 million+ members.
Smapo was initially launched back in September of 2011. By checking into physical stores, users receive points (one point is worth one yen), which can be exchanged to rewards such as gift certificates and dinner tickets. Smapo can be used at over 700 participating stores and over 90 brands. Stores are required to pay comission on a pay-per-performance basis.
Joining the Rakuten family will empower Smapo to expand its partnerships with stores.
As we wrote in a previous article, what differentiates Smapo from its US counterpart is that it uses a sort of inaudible audio signal to detect users walking in, via the required in-store hardware which is about the size of a matchbox. There are many tech companies trying to tackle the same O2O market, such as Showcase Gig. But the type of technology leveraged by Smapo is a notable advantage.
Yo Shibata, the CEO of Spotlight (the company behind Smapo), elaborates on the new partnership with Rakuten:
Smapo began under the mission of bringing surprises and discoveries to people’s everyday shopping experience. As the very first smarphone-based points service, we have accomplished to tremendous growth in the past two years. The spread of smartphones is truly changing the way we shop. By becoming a part of the Rakuten group, Spotlight, will continue to innovate on people’s shopping experiences.
Smapo is available for download on both iOS and Android.
Japanese fashion e-commerce website Factelier just celebrated its one year anniversary. As we have mentioned in a previous post, Factelier creates made-in-Japan quality apparel products by partnering directly with well-established Japanese factories. By skipping middlemen such as distributors and retailors, these high quality products are made available to consumers at affordable price. To mark its one year anniversary, Factelier shared an impressive statistic: 70% of people using its service are returning users. That’s an amazing number for any type of e-commerce. The company has formed partnerships with five different factories in Japan to date. On the website, there are special contents dedicated to its one year annivesary, where it features the voices of participating factories. Factelier has built its name by collaborating with companies old and new. Back in December of 2012, the startup joined forces with a Japanese factory Kuska, a location three hours away from Kyoto. The beauty of Kusaka’s products is that they are completely hand-made. This time-consuming process only allows a few pattern variations to be produced. However, the resulting high-quality silk ties are one of a kind. Factelier has also made original products in collaboration with Zozotown, and it has opened its first show-room to showcase…
Japanese fashion e-commerce website Factelier just celebrated its one year anniversary. As we have mentioned in a previous post, Factelier creates made-in-Japan quality apparel products by partnering directly with well-established Japanese factories. By skipping middlemen such as distributors and retailors, these high quality products are made available to consumers at affordable price.
To mark its one year anniversary, Factelier shared an impressive statistic: 70% of people using its service are returning users. That’s an amazing number for any type of e-commerce.
The company has formed partnerships with five different factories in Japan to date. On the website, there are special contents dedicated to its one year annivesary, where it features the voices of participating factories.
Factelier has built its name by collaborating with companies old and new. Back in December of 2012, the startup joined forces with a Japanese factory Kuska, a location three hours away from Kyoto. The beauty of Kusaka’s products is that they are completely hand-made. This time-consuming process only allows a few pattern variations to be produced. However, the resulting high-quality silk ties are one of a kind. Factelier has also made original products in collaboration with Zozotown, and it has opened its first show-room to showcase quality apparel products to potential customers.
It will be interesting to see how the company progresses from here, as it continues to connect factories and consumers.
It has been a while since we checked in on Japanese personal finance app Zaim. So I was surprised and delighted to bump into the service’s creator Takako Kansai at an event in Osaka last week. In addition to being a mainstay app on my mobile, letting me scan my receipts and track my spending, Zaim also has one of the best founder stories ever, as Takako developed her app during her subway commute to and from work. She informed me that Zaim has recently surpassed one million downloads, and is expected to reach two million sometime next year. Takako says that their relationship with Cookpad, after raising 42 million yen from the company, is “very good”. She adds that when you use Zaim to scan a receipt with your mobile, the supermarket information is saved to their database. But they can also connect to the Cookpad database, and get more information from there to serve their users as well. In this way, users are provided special bargains or promotions about local supermarkets via Cookpad’s bargain search service. When I asked what the next step is for Zaim, Takako could only say that it was a secret. So we know…
It has been a while since we checked in on Japanese personal finance app Zaim. So I was surprised and delighted to bump into the service’s creator Takako Kansai at an event in Osaka last week. In addition to being a mainstay app on my mobile, letting me scan my receipts and track my spending, Zaim also has one of the best founder stories ever, as Takako developed her app during her subway commute to and from work.
She informed me that Zaim has recently surpassed one million downloads, and is expected to reach two million sometime next year. Takako says that their relationship with Cookpad, after raising 42 million yen from the company, is “very good”. She adds that when you use Zaim to scan a receipt with your mobile, the supermarket information is saved to their database. But they can also connect to the Cookpad database, and get more information from there to serve their users as well. In this way, users are provided special bargains or promotions about local supermarkets via Cookpad’s bargain search service.
When I asked what the next step is for Zaim, Takako could only say that it was a secret. So we know there’s something, although it’s hard to guess what that might be. So far the app has been focused on slow incremental improvements, but thankfully it has managed to retain the simplicity and ease-of-use that made it strong to start with. Given Zaim’s continued focus on the user, I expect that any upcoming new features will make it easier to use, and help solidify it’s foothold as one of Japan’s dominant finance apps.
You can check out our short interview with Takako in the video above. And if you have yet to check out Zaim, you can get it for iOS, Android, and on the web.
See the original story in Japanese. This is a part of our coverage of B Dash Camp Osaka 2013. Two Japanese startups that have experienced an strong growth in the last several months are Coach United, the startup behind private lesson portal Cyta.jp, and Bracket, which operates instant e-commerce platform STORES.jp. On day two of B Dash Camp Osaka last week, we had a chance to hear from Coach United CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu and Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto. Also on the panel were Rakuten executive officer Takeshi Homma, and KDDI general manager Shigeki Matsuno. This year Ariyasu sold his startup to Japanese recipe site Cookpad, and Mitsumoto sold his startup to leading Japanese fashion commerce company Start Today. Moderator Hiroyuki Watanabe started the sessions with asking about their recent exits. When did you start preparing for buyouts? Ariyasu explained: When we launched our company back in 2007, I had no idea about funding or M&As. We couldn’t help but enjoy developing our product at that time. Two or three years later, we finally could make our business profitable, and had a chance to receive offers from some people [1]. The company kept using bank loans but were exploring funding opportunities…
Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto and Coach United CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu
Two Japanese startups that have experienced an strong growth in the last several months are Coach United, the startup behind private lesson portal Cyta.jp, and Bracket, which operates instant e-commerce platform STORES.jp. On day two of B Dash Camp Osaka last week, we had a chance to hear from Coach United CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu and Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto. Also on the panel were Rakuten executive officer Takeshi Homma, and KDDI general manager Shigeki Matsuno.
This year Ariyasu sold his startup to Japanese recipe site Cookpad, and Mitsumoto sold his startup to leading Japanese fashion commerce company Start Today. Moderator Hiroyuki Watanabe started the sessions with asking about their recent exits.
When did you start preparing for buyouts?
Ariyasu explained:
When we launched our company back in 2007, I had no idea about funding or M&As. We couldn’t help but enjoy developing our product at that time. Two or three years later, we finally could make our business profitable, and had a chance to receive offers from some people [1].
The company kept using bank loans but were exploring funding opportunities for the next stretch.
Bracket is not an old company but has been running a number of businesses for about five years. In contrast to his past businesses, Mitsumoto was aggressively exploring funding opportunities to boost their e-commerce platform. He attributes this to the many competitors in that space [2].
What’s the most impressed in the entire session was the following interaction between the pair.
Ariyasu asked Mitsumoto,
If Base (Bracket’s main competitor) wasn’t around, would you still sell your startup to Startup Today?
Mitsumoto answered, saying:
Without them, we probably might have not achieved the revenue we have.
Why not aim for an IPO?
Since these two startups were rapidly growing but self-funded, their founders could probably consider IPOs as possible options. But they emphasized a good match with the companies that acquired them.
Ariyasu explains:
I’m not really a person who drives after an IPO. It’s all up to you to determine whether an IPO and an M&A is a better choice for you. … I actually got an offer from Murakami (Livesense CEO) but I think it was not so aggressive. I’m close with him, and we have been fishing together. The reason why we partnered with Cookpad was I thought the both companies have something common in their corporate culture.
In a explanation about how Bracket’s Mitsumoto decided to sell his startup, he unveiled it was finally decided over the phone with Start Today’s CEO Yusaku Maezawa, which surprised the audience.
Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto
The decision was surprisingly smooth. I’ve been in touch with Maezawa for almost three years since he sent us an inquiry via our website. … I’ve handled four different businesses in the past, and I finally managed to find success in my fifth. The recent announcement that Yahoo Japan made of making its e-commerce platform free this year will be a big turning point in the Japanese e-commerce industry, where more players will make more bold decisions to defeat competitors.
Buyer’s perspective, seller’s perspective
KDDI’s Matsuno was involved in Mediba’s [3] acquisitions of startups such as Nobot and Scaleout. In a response to moderator Watanabe’s question about criteria around M&As, he says:
You probably need the perspectives of both a buyer and a seller. When your company is acquired by 100%, you will totally lose your ownership. In an extreme case, you might lose your position as the CEO. When you think of a company that you could sell your business to, you will need to build a good relationship of mutual trust (not to be asked to step down).
Rakuten’s Homma concluded the session with saying that:
Both for a seller and a buyer, the more experience you have, the better you can understand how you should proceed.
We previously featured Ariyasu and Cyta in this article.↩
Our readers may recall that we visited the Bracket office just last month, and had a chance to speak more with Mitsumoto about Stores.jp.)↩
Mediba is a mobile advertising-focused subsidiary of KDDI.↩
Creofuga is a startup from Japan’s western city of Okayama which has been providing an online community platform for amateur or semi-professional music composers. The company recently announced that it will launch a crowdsourcing and licensing platform for soundtracks, sound effects, and other audio. It’s called AudioStock and it is expected to launch later this month, serving social game developers. Notable clients will include SummerTime Studio, Nagisa, Tokyo Tower, and Fuji TV. Since the company started back in 2007, it has enlisted over 10,000 amateur music composers, and has partnered with Bandai Namco Games and a Japanese record company to help them promote a game title and music artist. For game developers who intend to use soundtracks or effects composed by the third parties in your apps, it may be a challenge obtain rights from license holders. But with this platform, you can buy exclusive rights for the reproduction of a music piece for 2,000 yen ($20) each or nonexclusive rights for 500 yen ($5) each. At the time of the launch, there will be 10,000 pieces of music available, varying from soundtracks to narrated samples. In addition to these, you can have your narration or music tasks crowdsourced among…
Creofuga is a startup from Japan’s western city of Okayama which has been providing an online community platform for amateur or semi-professional music composers.
The company recently announced that it will launch a crowdsourcing and licensing platform for soundtracks, sound effects, and other audio. It’s called AudioStock and it is expected to launch later this month, serving social game developers. Notable clients will include SummerTime Studio, Nagisa, Tokyo Tower, and Fuji TV.
Since the company started back in 2007, it has enlisted over 10,000 amateur music composers, and has partnered with Bandai Namco Games and a Japanese record company to help them promote a game title and music artist.
For game developers who intend to use soundtracks or effects composed by the third parties in your apps, it may be a challenge obtain rights from license holders. But with this platform, you can buy exclusive rights for the reproduction of a music piece for 2,000 yen ($20) each or nonexclusive rights for 500 yen ($5) each. At the time of the launch, there will be 10,000 pieces of music available, varying from soundtracks to narrated samples. In addition to these, you can have your narration or music tasks crowdsourced among workers on the platform. When a deal is closed between you and a worker, the startup will take a 30% commission and the rest goes to the worker.
Shuichiro Nishio
The company has also partnered with Japanese stock photo giant Amana Images, and will use them as a sales channel to better reach potential clients in need of music and sound effects. Regarding the platform’s global expansions, the startup’s CEO Shuichiro Nishio unveiled that his team is currently developing an English version expected to launch by the end of this year. He says there’s likely to be huge potential in the overseas market since many foreign developers also are in need of high quality music from Japan.
See the original story in Japanese. I’m not sure why, but recently we’ve heard about many online box-office or event reservation services. We’ve also seen many sites that let users arrange travel plans with destination locals, such as Trippiece, Meetrip, Kitchhike, and Voyagin.com. On Thursday, a new company has popped up in this space. Japanese startup Playlife launched an online portal that aims to help you better entertain yourself. The website lets you to share what you’ve experienced on weekends or in your leisure time, focusing on what’s happening in your local neighborhood rather than the aforementioned travel planning sites. I have a sort of deja vu feeling about this kind of service. Several years ago, more than a few startups promised to help you share things around you, ranging from your purchase history to the outfits in your closet. Most of us have probably seen something similar to Playlike several years ago. But I still look forward to seeing how the startup will evolve since its founder/CEO Taichi Sato is such an impressive personality. Sato is one of those post-80s entrepreneurs. He elaborated on his unique career thusly: When attending Aoyama Gakuin University, I was a leader of the…
I’m not sure why, but recently we’ve heard about many online box-office or event reservation services. We’ve also seen many sites that let users arrange travel plans with destination locals, such as Trippiece, Meetrip, Kitchhike, and Voyagin.com.
On Thursday, a new company has popped up in this space. Japanese startup Playlife launched an online portal that aims to help you better entertain yourself. The website lets you to share what you’ve experienced on weekends or in your leisure time, focusing on what’s happening in your local neighborhood rather than the aforementioned travel planning sites.
I have a sort of deja vu feeling about this kind of service. Several years ago, more than a few startups promised to help you share things around you, ranging from your purchase history to the outfits in your closet. Most of us have probably seen something similar to Playlike several years ago. But I still look forward to seeing how the startup will evolve since its founder/CEO Taichi Sato is such an impressive personality.
Sato is one of those post-80s entrepreneurs. He elaborated on his unique career thusly:
When attending Aoyama Gakuin University, I was a leader of the Shibuya Chapter in the Guardian Angels, an international organization of volunteer crime patrollers. I was interested to know what gangster teenagers were interested in. It’s a wonderful experience to work on something with your colleagues, even at the risk of your life [1].
Hospital bed perspective
And it was indeed a risky endeavor. While patrolling the town Sato also even got beat up and suffered a fractured rib.
But would go on to graduate school in the US to learn about the national security issues. He was aspiring to be a UN official but decided against it when he later realized the job description was much more clerical than he had expected.
After graduating from the school, in order to discover what he really wanted to do, he moved around to many jobs, including a consulting firm, DeNA, and Accenture. As a result of these busy posts, he was tired from overwork back in June of 2011.
When I felt sick, I was thinking what’s most important in my life. Then I realized it’s probably the moments having fun with my friends.
He created his concept for Playlife. And after leaving the hospital, he went to the US and spent two years and four months to launch the service.
I think the service still has much room to be improved. It is said that a web service depends on the personal character of the founder than how mature your idea is. So it will be interesting to see how this one fares.
Sato, above all, hopes to give people a chance to explore what’s the most important in their own lives too.
This might be a Japanese value, and working on something at the risk of your life is a virtue for typical Japanese. Perhaps in the spirit of Samurai.↩
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Smapo was initially launched back in September of 2011. By checking into physical stores, users receive points (one point is worth one yen), which can be exchanged to rewards such as gift certificates and dinner tickets. Smapo can be used at over 700 participating stores and over 90 brands. Stores are required to pay comission on a pay-per-performance basis.
Rick Martin
Takeshi Hirano
Masaru Ikeda
