Moff launched its Kickstarter campaign for its wearable wristbank smart-toy almost a month ago. The project nearly reached $80,000, four times its initial goal of $20,000.
According to the product’s creator, Akinori Takahagi, they have even surpassed smart toy Ubooly (backed by TechStars) in funds raised on Kickstarter. Ubooly secured seed funding of about $2.5 million from several investors back in November, and recently started sales at Softbank stores in Japan. So the Moff team considers Ubooly the benchmark in their growth strategy.
The team is working on many business opportunities. This includes developing content for the device and partnering with content holders with popular characters or mascots, and delivering the product as soon as possible.
Moff was initially launched at a hackathon in Osaka last year, and we understand that they attracted much attention at SXSW in Austin. It will be interesting to see how their product is received by consumers beyond the Japanese market.
Japanese mobile payments startup Coiney has just begun selling Coiney Reader smartphone/tablet attachment over on Amazon Japan. The credit card reader device (pictured above, not dissimilar to that of Square) can be purchased as of today for 2580 yen (or about $25). The company is expanding its business, and just moved into a new office in Ebisu, Tokyo this week (also pictured below).
Japanese mobile payments startup Coiney has just begun selling Coiney Reader smartphone/tablet attachment over on Amazon Japan. The credit card reader device (pictured above, not dissimilar to that of Square) can be purchased as of today for 2580 yen (or about $25).
The company is expanding its business, and just moved into a new office in Ebisu, Tokyo this week (also pictured below).
From Nikkei Asian Review, there’s news that Yahoo Japan will support the use of popular Chinese electronic money solution Alipay, starting in June: To make a purchase on Yahoo Shopping from China, a buyer must use the Tenso.com brokerage service. Tenso.com ships products bought on the e-commerce site once buyers have completed purchase procedures on the broker’s site. Until now, payment options were limited to credit cards and U.S. electronic payment service PayPal. By adding Alipay, which is widely used in China, Yahoo hopes to expand sales through Yahoo Shopping by making it easier for Chinese consumers to buy merchandise. Alipay claims 550 million registered users, and about 8.5 million daily transactions.
From Nikkei Asian Review, there’s news that Yahoo Japan will support the use of popular Chinese electronic money solution Alipay, starting in June:
To make a purchase on Yahoo Shopping from China, a buyer must use the Tenso.com brokerage service. Tenso.com ships products bought on the e-commerce site once buyers have completed purchase procedures on the broker’s site. Until now, payment options were limited to credit cards and U.S. electronic payment service PayPal. By adding Alipay, which is widely used in China, Yahoo hopes to expand sales through Yahoo Shopping by making it easier for Chinese consumers to buy merchandise.
Alipay claims 550 million registered users, and about 8.5 million daily transactions.
This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e. Day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo included a panel about how governments in the Middle East and European regions motivate local entrepreneurs. Speakers included: David Heller, managing partner of Vertex Venture Capital Talmon Marco, CEO of Viber Peter Vesterbacka, Mighty Eagle at Rovio Entertainment Chris Wade, venture capital advisor of UK Trade and Investment Heller kicked off the panel describing how his company has evolved the local startup scene in Israel. Since its launch back in 1997, Vertex has invested in 108 companies, and over 30 went on to an exit. The most recent was Waze, a community-based, real-time traffic and navigation app, acquired by Google last year. He emphasized that one of the most interesting things about the Israeli startup ecosystem is the amount of VC investment per person is much higher than that of any other developed country. Marco then introduced himself by encouraging the audience to call Viber a Japanese company, since they were acquired by Japan’s Rakuten earlier this year. Despite the fact that they started business in…
Day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo included a panel about how governments in the Middle East and European regions motivate local entrepreneurs. Speakers included:
David Heller, managing partner of Vertex Venture Capital
Talmon Marco, CEO of Viber
Peter Vesterbacka, Mighty Eagle at Rovio Entertainment
Chris Wade, venture capital advisor of UK Trade and Investment
Heller kicked off the panel describing how his company has evolved the local startup scene in Israel. Since its launch back in 1997, Vertex has invested in 108 companies, and over 30 went on to an exit. The most recent was Waze, a community-based, real-time traffic and navigation app, acquired by Google last year. He emphasized that one of the most interesting things about the Israeli startup ecosystem is the amount of VC investment per person is much higher than that of any other developed country.
David Heller
Marco then introduced himself by encouraging the audience to call Viber a Japanese company, since they were acquired by Japan’s Rakuten earlier this year. Despite the fact that they started business in Belarus and then moved on to London, they have an especially large user base in South East Asia, especially in Myanmar and the Philippines. His advice for Japanese entrepreneurs? You need to encourage your employees to respect individualism and think out of box.
Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka explained that his company initially started out as a gaming company, but is now focused on three Es: entertainment, education, and entrepreneurship. As part of these efforts, they have been involved in organizing Finland’s largest tech conference Slush[1]. He encouraged Japanese entrepreneurs in the audience to create global success stories, pointing out that Tokyo alone has a larger population than all of Finland. He says startups have to stand out and differentiate from others, and that his company respects the diversity of employees. After launching an office here in Tokyo, they hope to be more Japanese than Japanese people, he says.
UKTI’s Chris Wade explained that his organization has been helping to grow the local startup community in East London by eliminating obstacles for entrepreneurs who are launching a company, providing them with the necessary mentorship. He says the UK government has also deployed several measures to accelerate entrepreneurship, including tax incentives for seed investments and issuing an entrepreneur visa to helps startups more easily hire talented people from outside the country.
He noted that every entrepreneur has to fail fast and keep trying. That’s the must-have mindset not only for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but for people all over the world who are keen to launch a business.
Peter Vesterbacka, Chris Wade
Update: We’re told the largest tech conference in Eurasia, in fact. ↩
Cookpad, the operator of Japan’s leading recipe sharing website, announced today that downloads of its mobile apps (for iOS and Android) have surpassed 20 million. In addition, the service now boasts 40 million monthly users, of which six percent engage using smartphones. You can see the chart above for a more detailed breakdown of Cookpad user access across devices. Cookpad
From Cookpad
Cookpad, the operator of Japan’s leading recipe sharing website, announced today that downloads of its mobile apps (for iOS and Android) have surpassed 20 million.
In addition, the service now boasts 40 million monthly users, of which six percent engage using smartphones. You can see the chart above for a more detailed breakdown of Cookpad user access across devices.
This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e. The morning session on day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo opened with a panel on how companies can spur innovation, and it boasted an all-star panel of speakers: Matt Wilsey, entrepreneur and investor Akira Morikawa, CEO of Line Corporation Jerry Yang, Co-founder, AME Cloud Ventures Morikawa-san started off the panel with an introduction to Line (which we have covered extensively, a service that has now reached 400 million users. From his perspective, regardless of the scale of your organization, everyone can create a disruptive business. The problem is that every organization has nay-sayers when you come up with a new idea, and that is typically the biggest obstacle when trying to executing. Japanese people tend to follow a plan, and avoid changing it once it’s in place. So at his company, they make no detailed plan for the long term, and that helps their employees stay ready for unexpected changes based on user responses. He emphasized that it is not their management but rather their users who should decide if a new…
The morning session on day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo opened with a panel on how companies can spur innovation, and it boasted an all-star panel of speakers:
Matt Wilsey, entrepreneur and investor
Akira Morikawa, CEO of Line Corporation
Jerry Yang, Co-founder, AME Cloud Ventures
Morikawa-san started off the panel with an introduction to Line (which we have covered extensively, a service that has now reached 400 million users. From his perspective, regardless of the scale of your organization, everyone can create a disruptive business. The problem is that every organization has nay-sayers when you come up with a new idea, and that is typically the biggest obstacle when trying to executing.
Line CEO Akira Morikawa
Japanese people tend to follow a plan, and avoid changing it once it’s in place. So at his company, they make no detailed plan for the long term, and that helps their employees stay ready for unexpected changes based on user responses. He emphasized that it is not their management but rather their users who should decide if a new idea is good or bad.
Jerry Yang is best known as the founder of search giant Yahoo, but he’s currently working as an investor in Silicon Valley. His company, AME Cloud Ventures, has invested in over 50 startups, many of which are running data-driven businesses. He’s expecting huge potential in this sector since a big data methodology will enable any industry to rethink and rebuild things in our world. His strategy is based on an assumption/prediction about what will happen in the near future, and from there he decides what kind of startups to invest in.
Jerry Yang
In a response to the moderator’s [1] question about how to promote an entrepreneurial mindset at a company, Jerry explained there has to be a sense of urgency. Startups have obviously have it, but established companies also require it in order to make something new happen from the inside.
Matt noted that we can’t force anyone to be innovative. All we can do is create an environment that is friendly to innovation. Innovations typically happen in a place you’d never expect. And one of the biggest failures for companies when they have no time to create an environment or a culture that permits employees to try and fail.
Matt Wilsey
The panel was moderated by Takeshi Natsuno, a professor at Keio University. ↩
Takeshi Hirano
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
