Meet the 13 startups from Movida Japan’s incubation program (part 1)

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Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program.

This is the part 1 of our quick rundown. Let’s have a look at the first six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months.

Eigooo!

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From the left: Eigooo co-founders Peter Rothenberg, Mizuno Nozue

Eigooo is an online chat-based English learning service. When they initially launched its mobile app back in February, it initially marked a conversion rate of 1.85%. But we understand that they succeeded in improving it to 2.627% after its interface and function adjustment.

In similar services using Skype or other teleconferencing tools, a learning course is typically provided on a person-to-person basis, but is likely to require advance booking and charge users per hour. But Eigooo uses a text-based chat, so its teachers can interact with up ten students simultaneously, which requires no advance booking from students but pay a higher compensation to the teachers.

They are also planning to expand to mainland China and Korea in the future, aiming to hit an annual revenue of $60 million and go IPO in five years.

BrainWars

BrainWars is a social quiz app and pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. See these articles to learn how it works.

Categorific

Categorific is a data-mining service using the image recognition technology. Ikkyo Technology, the startup behind the service, initially started their business with providing a content monitoring service for web service companies, helping them eliminating pirated content from their web services using the same technology.

They have been consulted by their clients about the possibilities of a new business using an enormous collection of images stored for the aforementioned countermeasure application. As a result of that, their team has invented Categorific.

They explained that the new service can be adopted for many purposes. For example, if you sell a sticker for a messaging app like Line, you can help users choose other stickers that they may like, by giving them a recommendation based on the service.

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Graph

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Shunsuke Takahashi

In Japan, people are trying to find statics over 100 million times an year. Even if you could successfully find the one you wanted, you would need more than an hour to edit or visualize it to be used in your presentation deck.

Graph allows you to find the statistics you want easily and embed it on your blog post. They understand that there are several competitors in this space but most of their platforms have difficulties in search accuracy or usability. So the company plans to focus on increasing the variety of statistics and easy-to-understand infographics. They expect to acquire 1 billion annual page views and monetize it by launching a premium service.

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Pedal Forge

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Takakazu Nakamura

Pedal Forge aims to allow users to test out a musical instrument before they but it. They will launch a web service enabling users to play the guitar virtually, with aiming to help them choose at home before visiting a guitar shop.

The service will be available in Japanese, English, and French this month. Since musical instrument makers learn that this will help them promote better their products, they are seen willing to provide sampling tone data to the platform.

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Sttir

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Ryo Tsukahara

When you think about how to compose a song, some people create it from scratch but others would remix songs created by someone else. Sttir wants to focus on serving the latter users and help them easily obtain songs and remix them in a way, as in sharing open source codes in the programmer community. They want to be called a GitHub for musicians.

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Live3

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Kyohei Tejima

When you have no plan to hang out after hours, it’s likely hard to find an event you may like using conventional ways like typical search engines. Live3 is a mobile app and allows you to match with your nearby events whose organizers still have many tickets unsold.

The service gives you 10 choices of live performances happening nearby every day, and you can buy it on the Live3 website or app if you like it. They plan to monetize it by charging 10% of the ticket price as a commission fee to event organizers. Their average conversion rate is as high as 7.39%.

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