8 Japanese startups join Orange’s new accelerator program

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Photo by Orange Labs Tokyo

See the original article in Japanese

Last November, we reported that the Japanese edition that France’s major telecommunications corporation Orange would launch a startup accelerator program in Tokyo. Dubbed Orange Fab, its first batch of participating startups was announced on February 12th.

The eight startups below were selected out of a group of 50:

  • Abeja: IT solution for stores that uses video recognition technology
  • Jin-Magic: Internet traffic optimization technology.
  • livepass: Push-ads platform
  • Locarise: Analytics service for retail stores (Related)
  • Mushroom: Telecommunications device for touch-screen devices
  • NetLED: Network LED control system
  • pigmal: Push button interface for smartphones (Related)
  • sMedio: Screen-sharing service for smart devices

These startups will have a three-month mentorship and the possibility to explore business collaboration with Orange group in the future. The batch is officially named “Orange Fab Asia 1st Season”.

I asked Hiroshi Nishikawa, the partnership manager of Orange Labs Tokyo, why the name specifies Asia instead of Tokyo or Japan:

hiroshi-nishikawa_portraitThe startups for this first batch are all Japanese startups. However, we plan to expand the program to the other Asian countries, so we called it Orange Fab Asia. Orange Labs Tokyo spans other Asian countries too, so in the future, we’d like to call on startups in countries like Korea and Taiwan to join the program.

While we have previously reported on the startup scene in Paris (for our Japanese edition), Japanese startups have little relatively little presence in Europe. Perhaps Orange Fab Asia can help Japanese startups establish more of a footprint in Europe.

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