Tokyo-based Donuts, a mobile game developer and the creator of the video app MixChannel, announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Nagisa. Details of this investment were not disclosed but it appears to be worth about $1 million according to Nagisa’s corporate profile and past funding history.
Slide Movies
Launched back in 2010, Nagisa operates a messaging app called Balloon, and previously raised 100 million (or about $1 million) from Nissay Capital. Subsequently, they also produced the photo effects app Kame Camera, the diary app Livre, and a virtual idol app The 49th Girl — all of which have surpassed five million downloads cumulatively.
The company also tells us that their movie app Slide Movies has acquired over 700,000 downloads in the two months since its launch back in December, and its monthly downloads surpassed 1 million in April alone. The company’s CEO Yoshiyuki Yokoyama told us that they are planning to expand their business to other sectors including C2C (consumer-to-consumer), fashion e-commerce, and games, thus making the most of their rapidly growing user base.
As an investor, Donuts is interested in that user base, and is exploring synergy around Donut’s hit movie app MixChannel through this investment.
Yesterday we told you about Mixi’s investment in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. It turns out that this was not the company’s only recent activity in Taiwan, as it has also just launched a localized version of its hit mobile game Monster Strike. The Chinese name for the game is Guàiwu Dànzhū (or ‘Monster Marbles’) and currently it’s only available on Android, but an iOS version will be coming soon. Mixi is partnering with So-net Entertainment Taiwan to launch and market the game in the region. A Monster Strike homepage has been launched at monster-strike.com.tw along with a ‘how to’ page for new users. Interestingly the company is calling this its first overseas deployment of Monster Strike, so I’m going to interpret that as an indication that Mixi’s efforts to bring Monster Strike to mainland China via a partnership with Tencent have not yet come to fruition yet. I expect that perhaps Taiwan is a dry run of sorts before launching the game on the mainland. Mixi has also announced that Monster Strike now has accumulated over six million downloads. We figure that this is still largely due to heavy TV advertising here in Japan, as we mentioned back in April.
Yesterday we told you about Mixi’s investment in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. It turns out that this was not the company’s only recent activity in Taiwan, as it has also just launched a localized version of its hit mobile game Monster Strike. The Chinese name for the game is Guàiwu Dànzhū (or ‘Monster Marbles’) and currently it’s only available on Android, but an iOS version will be coming soon.
Mixi is partnering with So-net Entertainment Taiwan to launch and market the game in the region. A Monster Strike homepage has been launched at monster-strike.com.tw along with a ‘how to’ page for new users.
Interestingly the company is calling this its first overseas deployment of Monster Strike, so I’m going to interpret that as an indication that Mixi’s efforts to bring Monster Strike to mainland China via a partnership with Tencent have not yet come to fruition yet. I expect that perhaps Taiwan is a dry run of sorts before launching the game on the mainland.
Mixi has also announced that Monster Strike now has accumulated over six million downloads. We figure that this is still largely due to heavy TV advertising here in Japan, as we mentioned back in April.
I Mercury Capital, the investment arm of Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121), announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Taiwan’s Loyal Sun Holdings, the operator of Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. Prior to this funding, the Taiwanese company raised funding (the sum also undisclosed) from Japanese investment companies Inspire and ICP last August. The company charges advertisers based on a performance basis, so you don’t actually need to pay anything if you don’t hire anyone using the platform. As for job seekers, they can get a cash reward from the company when successfully hired using the platform. The company has been rapidly growing and has acquired more than 3,000 Taiwanese companies as clients. This strategy is similar to that of Japanese recruiting site Livesense (TSE:6054), which has had promising results in terms of acquiring both advertisers and job seekers. Interestingly, Job178 has been leveraging the Line messaging app for marketing and has successfully attracted more than 5.2 million users with their original Line stickers. Mixi has been running its own recruitment site ‘Find Job’, and is considering a possible synergy with the Taiwanese job site. via Mixi
I Mercury Capital, the investment arm of Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121), announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Taiwan’s Loyal Sun Holdings, the operator of Taiwanese recruitment site Job178.
Prior to this funding, the Taiwanese company raised funding (the sum also undisclosed) from Japanese investment companies Inspire and ICP last August.
The company charges advertisers based on a performance basis, so you don’t actually need to pay anything if you don’t hire anyone using the platform. As for job seekers, they can get a cash reward from the company when successfully hired using the platform.
The company has been rapidly growing and has acquired more than 3,000 Taiwanese companies as clients. This strategy is similar to that of Japanese recruiting site Livesense (TSE:6054), which has had promising results in terms of acquiring both advertisers and job seekers.
Interestingly, Job178 has been leveraging the Line messaging app for marketing and has successfully attracted more than 5.2 million users with their original Line stickers. Mixi has been running its own recruitment site ‘Find Job’, and is considering a possible synergy with the Taiwanese job site.
I’m late to the party on this one, but after Evernote hit 100 million users earlier this week (101 million to be specific), I was surprised to see that the Asia Pacific was the company’s biggest regional market, accounting for about 35 million of its users (see above). This prompted me to reflect on when Evernote CEO Phil Libin dropped the following numbers about their Japan users a year ago: About 20% of our users and 30% of our revenue comes from Japan. The Japanese aesthetic really influences us. We have said from the beginning that we want to make it a 100 year startup, and that was influenced by Japan. Japan understands this idea of long term thinking, and we hope to combine that with the best of Silicon Valley. It’s a nice sentiment, and it’s good to see they’ve paid so much attention to Japan. Assuming that those percentages haven’t changed much over the past year, Japan may very well be Evernote’s biggest national market (or at least second biggest) in terms of both users and revenue. Via Evernote Read about this in Japanese
I’m late to the party on this one, but after Evernote hit 100 million users earlier this week (101 million to be specific), I was surprised to see that the Asia Pacific was the company’s biggest regional market, accounting for about 35 million of its users (see above).
This prompted me to reflect on when Evernote CEO Phil Libin dropped the following numbers about their Japan users a year ago:
About 20% of our users and 30% of our revenue comes from Japan. The Japanese aesthetic really influences us. We have said from the beginning that we want to make it a 100 year startup, and that was influenced by Japan. Japan understands this idea of long term thinking, and we hope to combine that with the best of Silicon Valley.
It’s a nice sentiment, and it’s good to see they’ve paid so much attention to Japan. Assuming that those percentages haven’t changed much over the past year, Japan may very well be Evernote’s biggest national market (or at least second biggest) in terms of both users and revenue.
Many Japanese companies have launched services that aim to better serve travelers coming to Japan. Of course, one of the biggest obstacles for such travelers is probably the language barrier. And today we’d like to tell you about a new service that aims to address the problem using smartphones. Tokyo-based company Demo recently unveiled a video chat app called Lacu which helps travelers find crowdsourced interpreters and helps them communicate with locals who cannot speak your language. The app is currently available for iOS (there’s an app for travelers and for interpreters), but they may develop an Android version too if all goes well. Using the app, you can easily find a crowdsourced interpreter to help you communicate using the video chat feature. Every interpreter can establish a price for their service ranging from 20 yen to 100 yen per minute, and volunteer interpreters can even do it for free. 40% of the fee goes to the interpreter, and 30% will be collected by both the company and the App Store. Demo has previously worked with web services like usability analytics tool Ghostrec from Sweden and a content management system from Serbia, bringing them to Japanese and Asian markets. During…
Many Japanese companies have launched services that aim to better serve travelers coming to Japan. Of course, one of the biggest obstacles for such travelers is probably the language barrier. And today we’d like to tell you about a new service that aims to address the problem using smartphones.
Tokyo-based company Demo recently unveiled a video chat app called Lacu which helps travelers find crowdsourced interpreters and helps them communicate with locals who cannot speak your language. The app is currently available for iOS (there’s an app for travelers and for interpreters), but they may develop an Android version too if all goes well.
Using the app, you can easily find a crowdsourced interpreter to help you communicate using the video chat feature. Every interpreter can establish a price for their service ranging from 20 yen to 100 yen per minute, and volunteer interpreters can even do it for free. 40% of the fee goes to the interpreter, and 30% will be collected by both the company and the App Store.
Demo has previously worked with web services like usability analytics tool Ghostrec from Sweden and a content management system from Serbia, bringing them to Japanese and Asian markets. During the localization process, the company invited engineers to their office in Tokyo, but the visitors had trouble communicating with locals, especially on weekends. As a result of this experience, Demo started developing their app.
We’ve seen similar services in the past, such as Babelverse or SmileCall. Babelverse is a low-cost but convenient simultaneous service for conferences, but it is less fitting for casual dialogues between people. SmileCall helps you communicate with a receptionist at public venues such as hotels, but it’s provided at a venue owner’s expense, so you couldn’t really bring it with you sightseeing.
Demo started acquiring interpreters prior to the app’s launch and has already seen more than 500 downloads and 300 sign-ups from interpreters. The company’s president and CEO Yoshiyasu Tsunoda told us they are ready to accept over 100,000 users requesting interpretations.
I often hear people complain that there is a lack of good contact manager apps available of smartphones. I personally have experimented with a few, most recently Contact Sync for Gmail – which is good, but doesn’t quite cut it for me. So I was delighted to hear recently from the folks at Tokyo-based startup Wantedly that they were working on a contacts management app for iPhone [1]. That app, appropriately dubbed Contact, has just gone public today in the Japanese App Store, so I’m happy to tell you a little about it after having a chance to test it pre-release. When you initially fire up the Contact app, you’ll be asked to authorize access to your mobile’s contacts, and after that your Facebook contacts as well. Note that by authorizing Facebook, you also get a chance to view Wantedly contacts as well (since the Wantedly job platform connects with Facebook), marked with a big blue ‘W’ in the app. Contacts can also be added manually to the app if you wish. Once your contacts have all been added, you can get down to organizing them into handy groups. Like any contact app, groups could be based around anything. But…
I often hear people complain that there is a lack of good contact manager apps available of smartphones. I personally have experimented with a few, most recently Contact Sync for Gmail – which is good, but doesn’t quite cut it for me. So I was delighted to hear recently from the folks at Tokyo-based startup Wantedly that they were working on a contacts management app for iPhone [1]. That app, appropriately dubbed Contact, has just gone public today in the Japanese App Store, so I’m happy to tell you a little about it after having a chance to test it pre-release.
When you initially fire up the Contact app, you’ll be asked to authorize access to your mobile’s contacts, and after that your Facebook contacts as well. Note that by authorizing Facebook, you also get a chance to view Wantedly contacts as well (since the Wantedly job platform connects with Facebook), marked with a big blue ‘W’ in the app. Contacts can also be added manually to the app if you wish.
Once your contacts have all been added, you can get down to organizing them into handy groups. Like any contact app, groups could be based around anything. But the most important group, labeled with a phone icon, are the people you call on a regular basis. So once you have this group created, you can call out in a flash from within the contacts app.
Beyond the phone group, you might organize a group for work (see my The Bridge group above), doing so using simple drag-and-drop, with various icons assigned to each group. If you add someone by mistake, just drag them out of the group and into a trash can that conveniently appears. Wantedly has built in a clever marketing device into its group label icons, letting users earn as many as 120 new icons by sharing about the app on Facebook and Twitter.
Check out the video demo below for a closer look at how the app works:
I was a little curious to hear why Wantedly was branching out to do a contacts app, given that the business of the Wantedly platform is helping people find fitting jobs by leveraging their social graph. During a recent visit to Wantedly HQ, the company’s CEO Akiko Naka explained to me:
Most people recognize Wantedly as a job searching site. But many people are starting to use it as their profile. Not only people who are searching for jobs, but for people who are working. So our team started to think we should start building something for everyone, not just people who are searching for jobs. Organizing your contacts is one of the biggest problems people have. There are many contacts grouping apps, but not of them are that cool, perhaps lacking in design or user interface. I thought we could do it better.
Wantedly CEO Akiko Naka
And personally, I think they have done it better, because the app looks pretty incredible. Perhaps the only feature additions I would request are data sync or export (perhaps to Dropbox), and maybe a batch delete/move contact option to manipulate multiple contacts, instead of having to drag and drop contacts one-by-one.
Given that the app is only available in Japanese right now [2], I had to ask Akiko the obvious question of whether or not they plan to publish an English version – to which she replied with a very short “Yup.”
Wantedly is a service that I’ve been expecting to launch in overseas markets at just about any moment now. They already have an English interface, so I’m looking forward to seeing them branch out when that day comes. But Akiko noted that if a contacts app like theirs is to succeed in a certain region, it helps if they are a trusted and recognized name in that region:
In Japan people know Wantedly pretty widely, so they aren’t scared to connect your contacts with it. In the US, maybe, then there might be a bit of a hurdle. Maybe Southeast Asia first.
If you have access to the Japanese App Store, I encourage you to give Contact a try. I’ve tried a lot of contact management apps in the past, and this has turned out to be one of my favorites.
But if you can download it from the App Store, I think there’s no reason you can’t use it even if you don’t speak Japanese. The app is very simple, with very little text. ↩
Takeshi Hirano
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
