A Hokkaido-based startup recently unveiled its mobile app SekaiMenu, which helps restaurants give readable menus to customers in 20 languages. It supports European and Asian languages including English, Chinese, Korean, and Thai, and lets customers browse a menu and then place an order by scanning a QR code printed on that menu.
The company recently started rolling out their solution, testing it at six restaurants in Sapporo. Founder and CEO Nobuyasu Fukunishi explained a little more about it:
International travelers are rapidly increasing here in the Sapporo area since airline companies added flights from South East Asian regions. And many local restaurants have deployed in-store public wi-fi service for customers as well. Considering that the Tokyo Olympics are coming in 2020, I think we have to provide an environment that helps international visitors enjoy their time here in Sapporo.
The startup aims to help restaurants nationwide provide travelers with service equal to what typical Japanese customers experience. Interestingly, they also plan to provide overseas restaurants this sort of solution to help them better serve Japanese travelers.
This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this: Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile. While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1]. But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the…
Scared?
This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this:
Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile.
While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1].
But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the side of caution by showing the original webpage content in their app, as is, without any effort to ensure that it’s readable on mobile [2]. They have purposefully chosen to not disrupt or challenge current content models.
Let’s look at a few examples from some of Japan’s leading news apps. Here’s Gunosy:
Gunosy does what most Japanese news apps do. They serve up the original web page when the title is clicked, whether its very readable or not. Other Japanese apps that do this are Presso, Romly, Vingow, Mynd, and Kamelio[3]. These news apps are primarily aggregators or curation tools. I wouldn’t go so far as to call any of them ‘news readers’, because technically, you’re just being directed to a traditional reading experience on the source site.
SmartNews’s approach is an interesting one, maybe the only one that is even a little daring. They are one of the few companies to present a readability mode, boasting offline caching as a feature for Japanese users who might be beyond internet signal on the subway. When you tap to read an article on SmartNews, you are flashed an option to read in ‘SmartMode’. This is SmartNews’s more readable view, but it’s presented as something the user must choose to view deliberately. What’s more, when you press back, the app sneakily presents the original source page (see this below). This is a clever way of giving both the publisher and the user what they want, and I’m sure it took them a while to figure out this compromise.
Line News is also mildly daring, showing longer excerpts relating to one story, collected from various sources. Tapping on any of those sources brings you to the original source, however (see lower left), including ads and undesirable cruft (lower right).
Overall I think it is pretty clear that the relationship that exists between content publishers and news apps that tiptoe around their requirements/expectations is not good for innovation in the content space. Publishers cling to old monetization models instead of searching for new ones, and Japanese readers are denied the kind of beautified reading experience that the rest of the world enjoys [4].
Mobile-friendly news sites are far more common in Japan than in other countries, so if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that. the original page view on mobile is typically not so bad. ↩
Kamelio does some interesting things with timelines which I think are admirable, but they still opt to show the original source in this way. ↩
Unless they use something like Pocket, of course, which many do. ↩
Thanks astute Redditor fodawim for pointing out a folder full of translated command strings in Japanese in the GlassVoice apk file (see image below). There’s no word one when Google Glass might come to Japan of course, but this is an indication that Japan will be among the first countries. Considering Google’s recent Maps/Pokemon experiment, this bodes well for my dream of a real-life Pokemon game! On the other hand, we can expect some controversy to surround Glass whenever it does get here, in much the same way that smartphone cameras have been adjusted to combat pervy pictures on trains. Reddit, via Appllio
On the other hand, we can expect some controversy to surround Glass whenever it does get here, in much the same way that smartphone cameras have been adjusted to combat pervy pictures on trains.
Line has just opened up its Creators Market (at creator.line.me), allowing users to register and submit stickers for review as of today. If Line approves your submission, then they will go on sale in May. According to the company’s announcement, users in Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand will be able to purchase at that time, with plans for more regions to come in the future. A set of 40 stickers will sell for 100 yen (or about a dollar), of which 50% goes to the creator. Line is already making a fortune from stickers, as we have pointed out before, and this new initiative will boost that revenue stream even more, and spur more user engagement, Line
Line has just opened up its Creators Market (at creator.line.me), allowing users to register and submit stickers for review as of today. If Line approves your submission, then they will go on sale in May. According to the company’s announcement, users in Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand will be able to purchase at that time, with plans for more regions to come in the future.
A set of 40 stickers will sell for 100 yen (or about a dollar), of which 50% goes to the creator. Line is already making a fortune from stickers, as we have pointed out before, and this new initiative will boost that revenue stream even more, and spur more user engagement,
Singapore-based Viddsee, the operator of an online platform that showcases short films from Asia, announced this week that it has surpassed five million unique viewers since launching in February 2013. The company has also rolled out an editorial feature called Viddsee Buzz, which is a sort of blog/news channel that highlights selected films with greater context. Viddsee aims to bring Asian short films to global audiences, and it will be interesting to see how it can grow from here. I don’t think this genre benefits from a wide fan base as a startup like Tokyo Otaku Mode (which showcases just anime, manga, and cosplay), but no doubt there are many people who wish to explore Asian films in depth, and so its good to have a centralized repository like this on the web. The service has a strong following over on its Facebook fan page so far, with over 42,000 fans. That growth, we understand, has been entirely organic. Viddsee features a selection of video channels, many of which have a regional focus, including Node Japan, which highlights movies from Keio Media Design’s indie film portal, Node.
Singapore-based Viddsee, the operator of an online platform that showcases short films from Asia, announced this week that it has surpassed five million unique viewers since launching in February 2013. The company has also rolled out an editorial feature called Viddsee Buzz, which is a sort of blog/news channel that highlights selected films with greater context.
Viddsee aims to bring Asian short films to global audiences, and it will be interesting to see how it can grow from here. I don’t think this genre benefits from a wide fan base as a startup like Tokyo Otaku Mode (which showcases just anime, manga, and cosplay), but no doubt there are many people who wish to explore Asian films in depth, and so its good to have a centralized repository like this on the web.
The service has a strong following over on its Facebook fan page so far, with over 42,000 fans. That growth, we understand, has been entirely organic.
Viddsee features a selection of video channels, many of which have a regional focus, including Node Japan, which highlights movies from Keio Media Design’s indie film portal, Node.
Japanese gaming powerhouse GungHo Online Entertainment, the maker of the hit mobile game Puzzle & Dragons, announced this week that Princess Punt Sweets – its second most popular smartphone game – has has surpassed eight million downloads in Japan. The only other region where this title is available is in Korea, having launched back in July of 2013 (iOS and Android). I’m surprised that GungHo has not expanded this game to English regions [1], because I think it really has the kind of cute appeal that has helped so many other Japanese apps succeed in overseas markets in the past year or two. It might be an easier sell to overseas markets than Puzzle & Dragons, I think. If you’d like to try out the Japanese version, you can get it as a free download for iOS and Android. GungHo, CNet Japan Note, I’m not counting the game’s prequel, which GungHo has published in English. ↩
Japanese gaming powerhouse GungHo Online Entertainment, the maker of the hit mobile game Puzzle & Dragons, announced this week that Princess Punt Sweets – its second most popular smartphone game – has has surpassed eight million downloads in Japan.
The only other region where this title is available is in Korea, having launched back in July of 2013 (iOS and Android). I’m surprised that GungHo has not expanded this game to English regions [1], because I think it really has the kind of cute appeal that has helped so many other Japanese apps succeed in overseas markets in the past year or two.
It might be an easier sell to overseas markets than Puzzle & Dragons, I think.
If you’d like to try out the Japanese version, you can get it as a free download for iOS and Android.
Masaru Ikeda
Rick Martin
