Tokyo-based English learning platform Rarejob has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market today.
Since its launch back in October of 2007, the company has hired native speakers (mainly students from high profile universities in the Philippines) as English conversation teachers who instruct Japanese students over Skype. As of last August, the company had provided over 10 million lessons to over 200,000 Japanese users.
Some of our readers may recall the company raised 330 million yen (or about $3.3 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund, YJ Capital, and CyberAgent last June [1].
See the original story in Japanese, part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Sapporo 2014. Tokyo-based Cerevo, the Japanese startup best known for its Cerevo Cam and IoT crowdfunding site Cerevo Dash, announced today that it will invite Osamu Ogasahara to the company’s board pending approval at their board meeting on June 2nd. We had a chance to speak with the company’s co-founder and CEO Takuma Iwasa, as well as Ogasahara, at the Infinity Ventures Summit 2014 happening right now in Sapporo, Japan. Ogasahara is the co-founder of Japanese internet service provider Sakura Internet as well as owner for the popular entrepreneur hub Awabar and co-working space Nomad New’s Base [1]. The Bridge: Since it’s a complicated topic, would you like to clarify what’s happening with your company right now? Iwasa: Sure. As we published on our blog, Ogasahara will join our board pending approval at our board meeting on June 2nd. Shares of our company held by Inspire Technology Innovation Fund, Neostella Capital, Voyage Ventures, and Inova [2] will be handed over to Ogasahara. We’re also planning a big funding round as well. The Bridge: Your company has developed consumer electronics like Cerevo Cam and enterprise hardware…
Tokyo-based Cerevo, the Japanese startup best known for its Cerevo Cam and IoT crowdfunding site Cerevo Dash, announced today that it will invite Osamu Ogasahara to the company’s board pending approval at their board meeting on June 2nd.
We had a chance to speak with the company’s co-founder and CEO Takuma Iwasa, as well as Ogasahara, at the Infinity Ventures Summit 2014 happening right now in Sapporo, Japan. Ogasahara is the co-founder of Japanese internet service provider Sakura Internet as well as owner for the popular entrepreneur hub Awabar and co-working space Nomad New’s Base[1].
The Bridge: Since it’s a complicated topic, would you like to clarify what’s happening with your company right now?
Iwasa: Sure. As we published on our blog, Ogasahara will join our board pending approval at our board meeting on June 2nd. Shares of our company held by Inspire Technology Innovation Fund, Neostella Capital, Voyage Ventures, and Inova [2] will be handed over to Ogasahara. We’re also planning a big funding round as well.
The Bridge: Your company has developed consumer electronics like Cerevo Cam and enterprise hardware like LiveShell. How does the funding and the change of the board member influence your plans?
Iwasa: First, we’ll step up marketing of our brand and accelerate global expansion. Second, we’ll have an incubation project focused on hardware startups.
The Bridge: Your business heavily depends on international sales, right?
Iwasa: Yes, some of our products receive over 40% of all orders from overseas. We will try to raise this to 80%. We also plan to expand our range of products, especially in the IoT and ‘high amateur’ spaces.
The Bridge: What do you mean when you say ‘high amateur’ space?
Iwasa: It’s difficult to explain since it’s a relatively new concept. It means a series of products ranging in a space where professional and hobbyist use overlap. Our video and still camera products are categorized there.
I know the market can grow explosively where low-end products for professional use and high-end products for hobbyist use intersect. That’s what I mean by ‘high amateur’ space. It’s not a huge market because it targets a niche. Successful examples in this area include DJI’s Phantom 2 and GoPro.
The Bridge: Your company is a 10-person team but we heard you’re planning to enlarge it to about four times that.
Iwasa: We’re planning to increase our head count up to 50. Our strategy is to target niche markets and produce a variety of products. […] We think our business is scalable as long as we have a sufficient number of talented people. We are hiring engineers in many fields like electrical engineering, design, mechatronics, app development, and infrastructure.
The Bridge: Let’s talk about the incubation project. Regarding the IoT fund you are planning, who will be in charge of forming this? We heard that Cerevo got money from an investment fund. Is that correct?
Ogasahara: I am the general partner of the fund. We’ll be forming a fund worth $20 million this coming summer, and will invest in Cerevo from that. It’s sort of like a growth fund that I was eager to raise money from when I founded my internet service provider company many years ago.
The Bridge: So you will invest not only in Cerevo but also in other hardware startups. You also have another investment initiative at ABBALab, where you have specifically invested in startups which have succeeded in raising money on crowdfunding sites. How are the funds different?
Ogasahara: For that initiative, we’ll keep seeking young entrepreneurs and help them create prototypes and launch their businesses in a hands-on manner. People are unlikely to create hardware products as easily as they would create smartphone apps. ABBALabs aims to remove the financial or environmental obstacles for ambitious entrepreneurs.
The Bridige: So what does Cerevo expect by launching this incubation business?
Iwasa: Our main focus is to help crowdfunding efforts in Japan and the rest of the world, and to help crowdfunding project owners manufacture their products. We’ll set up a garage and shared office in Akihabara, and we are also planning to organize hardware-focused workshops and hackathon events too.
Ogasahara: By giving knowledge of mass production to entrepreneurs who already succeeded in creating their products, we really want to eliminate barriers for them. I believe it can really help a lot of people.
Iwasa: Looking at posts on bulletin boards, you can see that many entrepreneurs succeed in raising money on Kickstarter, but many of them run into difficulties in mass production. But the biggest obstacle for them will come after production. We help them sell, we support them, and we encourage them to develop the next model of their product. This is where our experience can help.
Ogasahara: We’re running a site called DMM.make in partnership with The Bridge, as you know. This is also part of our effort to encourage businesses to create hardware products. We want to provide opportunities where people can learn, make, share, sell, and buy what they create.
Iwasa: So if you’re interested in this space but don’t know what to do, don’t hesitate to come and join us.
The Bridge: Thanks for your time.
Disclosure: The Bridge has a business partnership with Nomad, the company that Ogasahara has managed. We are providing selected articles to DMM.make, a news curation site by Japanese internet company DMM. ↩
A few days ago we told you about Hong Kong-based online brokerage service 8 Securities which just recently made moves to expand its business to Japan. For aspiring traders out there who might need a little practice, or for someone looking to make some money on a slightly smaller scale, you might want to check out the fantasy trading platform Spark Profit. Launched by Tokyo-based Nous back in January, Spark Profit lets you simulate trading in your browser (pictured above), using an iOS or Android app. Just yesterday the company announced that it has added Nikkei 225 support, as well as a new global sentiment indicator for all markets. One of the more interesting claims that Nous makes about Spark Profit is that even if you have never traded before, you can learn and develop strategies to outperform the market. Nous CEO Justin Short explains the advantage of their new indicator in the announcement: The purpose of our new free sentiment indicator is to help market participants improve their trading strategies by showing them the average person’s viewpoint, from right now all the way back to Spark Profit’s launch in January. How does the company pay high-performing fantasy traders? I…
A few days ago we told you about Hong Kong-based online brokerage service 8 Securities which just recently made moves to expand its business to Japan. For aspiring traders out there who might need a little practice, or for someone looking to make some money on a slightly smaller scale, you might want to check out the fantasy trading platform Spark Profit.
Launched by Tokyo-based Nous back in January, Spark Profit lets you simulate trading in your browser (pictured above), using an iOS or Android app. Just yesterday the company announced that it has added Nikkei 225 support, as well as a new global sentiment indicator for all markets.
One of the more interesting claims that Nous makes about Spark Profit is that even if you have never traded before, you can learn and develop strategies to outperform the market. Nous CEO Justin Short explains the advantage of their new indicator in the announcement:
The purpose of our new free sentiment indicator is to help market participants improve their trading strategies by showing them the average person’s viewpoint, from right now all the way back to Spark Profit’s launch in January.
How does the company pay high-performing fantasy traders? I noticed on their site that Nous started out by trading based on player data, essentially copying what the good players do to earn money. But Short tells me that they’ve since moved to a different idea:
We’ve changed the business model slightly since [then]: rather than find and trade on the signal ourselves, we are concentrating on user (= data) growth at this time. Instead we will sell the data to large hedge funds for them to build a signal from.
I’m told they have started trials of this feed, called ‘Spark Data’, with some funds already. I understand that the company previously raised is in process of raising an angel round of about $600,000, and to date $30,000 in prizes have been paid to fantasy traders on Spark Profit.
The platform has 29,000 users spanning 194 countries, with 3,000 new users signing up every month.
Today Pinterest Japan announced that it will ally with Japanese advertising giant Dentsu to expand its business in Japan, as the social image curation service would potentially offer a new marketing alternative to local advertisers. Pinterest recently localized for Japan a few months back, and CEO Ben Silbermann recently expressed a hope that Japanese people can try to express more about their culture (things like art, food, and architecture) through pinned images. Ostensibly, Silbermann has that very same hope for Japanese advertisers, who might more effectively reach global audiences in a more visual manner. Pinterest has tested promoted pins over the past year in the US market, and looks poised to charge top dollar from advertisers. Via Venture News
Today Pinterest Japan announced that it will ally with Japanese advertising giant Dentsu to expand its business in Japan, as the social image curation service would potentially offer a new marketing alternative to local advertisers.
Pinterest recently localized for Japan a few months back, and CEO Ben Silbermann recently expressed a hope that Japanese people can try to express more about their culture (things like art, food, and architecture) through pinned images. Ostensibly, Silbermann has that very same hope for Japanese advertisers, who might more effectively reach global audiences in a more visual manner.
Pinterest has tested promoted pins over the past year in the US market, and looks poised to charge top dollar from advertisers.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Bracket, the startup operating the Shopify-like e-commerce platform Stores.jp, announced today that it has partnered with Japanese department store chain Parco. Through this partnership, the e-commerce company will assist over 3,000 tenant retailers in the department stores establish their online presence. Since its launch back in 1969, Parco has rolled out 19 stores nationwide in Japan, recently reporting over $2.6 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2013. Stores.jp began its e-commerce platform service back in August of 2012, and has acquired over 90,000 merchants since then. All Parco retailers are encouraged to establish their e-commerce sites using Stores.jp, with plans to drive user traffic from the store’s blog where retailer staff can introduce merchandise and products. Retailers are to set up a pre-order button in their online storefront, where customers can buy a product online in addition to picking it up at retail stores. To date, we’ve never witnessed a high-profile shopping complex like Parco roll out such a quantity of e-commerce sites for tenant retailers. Stores.jp’s CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto elaborated on the partnership: We’ve seen that some retailers from Parco can generate as much as 25% of their entire revenue from online…
Tokyo-based Bracket, the startup operating the Shopify-like e-commerce platform Stores.jp, announced today that it has partnered with Japanese department store chain Parco. Through this partnership, the e-commerce company will assist over 3,000 tenant retailers in the department stores establish their online presence.
Since its launch back in 1969, Parco has rolled out 19 stores nationwide in Japan, recently reporting over $2.6 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2013. Stores.jp began its e-commerce platform service back in August of 2012, and has acquired over 90,000 merchants since then.
All Parco retailers are encouraged to establish their e-commerce sites using Stores.jp, with plans to drive user traffic from the store’s blog where retailer staff can introduce merchandise and products. Retailers are to set up a pre-order button in their online storefront, where customers can buy a product online in addition to picking it up at retail stores.
To date, we’ve never witnessed a high-profile shopping complex like Parco roll out such a quantity of e-commerce sites for tenant retailers. Stores.jp’s CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto elaborated on the partnership:
We’ve seen that some retailers from Parco can generate as much as 25% of their entire revenue from online sales. We’ll be more focused on coordinating blogs and syndicated e-commerce business. We want to enable all retailers in Parco successfully launch e-commerce sites.
This morning I want to share a little about a really incredible typography initiative from Japan called the Noramoji Project. Ongoing for a few month now, the project’s goal is to capture older, interesting fonts seen in the real world (on store fronts, for example), and then analyze their characteristics to extrapolate a complete font set. Here’s a short (lightly edited) excerpt from the project website: Original fonts used in the signs of local stores may not be sophisticated as a precisely designed commercial font, but have a unique charm. This project’s starting point was to rediscover the appeal of craftsmanship and the aging of the materials. After rediscovering and analysis, fonts are reproduced from them. Distribution of the font will make it possible for people to know about the font. […] Profits from the font will be refunded to the owner of the signs, helping the font and the sign to survive. Why not give it a try? If you like this idea, consider getting behind it buy purchasing some fonts (there’s a donate option that gives back to store owners), or one of the many cool t-shirts from their web store.
This morning I want to share a little about a really incredible typography initiative from Japan called the Noramoji Project. Ongoing for a few month now, the project’s goal is to capture older, interesting fonts seen in the real world (on store fronts, for example), and then analyze their characteristics to extrapolate a complete font set.
Here’s a short (lightly edited) excerpt from the project website:
Original fonts used in the signs of local stores may not be sophisticated as a precisely designed commercial font, but have a unique charm. This project’s starting point was to rediscover the appeal of craftsmanship and the aging of the materials. After rediscovering and analysis, fonts are reproduced from them. Distribution of the font will make it possible for people to know about the font. […] Profits from the font will be refunded to the owner of the signs, helping the font and the sign to survive. Why not give it a try?
If you like this idea, consider getting behind it buy purchasing some fonts (there’s a donate option that gives back to store owners), or one of the many cool t-shirts from their web store.
Masaru Ikeda
Takeshi Hirano
Rick Martin
Yukari Mitsuhashi
