Meet the 13 startups from Movida Japan’s incubation program (part 2)

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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 2 of our quick rundown (See this article for part 1). Let’s have a look at the last six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months.

Movie Lovie

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Keisuke Nakamura

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There are many events like public viewing or group jogging where you can share your fun time with other participants. But Movie Lovie founder Keisuke Nakamura wondered how we can share an experience with others when we watch a movie at a cinema theater. There are difficulties in “sharing” because the experience is heavily dependent on the content of the movie.

Movie Lovie is an online platform and allows you to create a bulletin board for a movie you like, where you can enjoy interactions with other users before watching the movie. Movie distributors or theater owners can also create their boards online for encouraging consumers to come and watch their movies. The service will go live next month.

Combinator

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Takumi Shimizu

Combinator is an online job site for startups which allows them to find their potential employees from a pool of people who have their current jobs and are not aggressively finding their next jobs. For engineers, you can sign up for the service and tag yourself with your skill sets so that other users can easily touch base with you.

Since the launch of its alpha version back in late March, notable startups such as Vinclu and Wizpra have succeeded in hiring eleven workers in total. The hiring platform has currently 72 projects and 2,000 users registered.

What differentiates it from other similar platforms is that it encourages users to switch to work for a new company by attracting such users to one of the company’s projects rather than the company itself.

Tabi no Tatsujin

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Tabi no Tausjin (literally meaning ‘travel experts’ in Japanese) is an online marketplace for international travel, aiming to connect Japanese travelers with Japanese locals living in foreign travel destinations.

In terms of startups giving users similar experience, we’ve seen many startups including Meetrip, but most of these services require you to communicate with locals in English or their languages. So it will be difficult to use for Japanese users who are not good at speaking in unfamiliar languages.

With the service, their guides can help keep the traveler from being nervous while better enjoying their travel, even for those less familiar with local culture at the destination or worried about safety conditions there. The company has 150 select guides in 12 cities worldwide based on qualification checks via online interviews.

4meee!

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Arisa Sakanashi

Women are always looking for tips regarding clothing dress-up or make-up. They used to get information from magazines but now they depend on online media. There are many curation sites offering useful tips for them, but these typically require much time to finish reading. That’s why Arisa Sakanashi and her team invented 4meee!, a user-generated content site in a four-panel comic strip style, specifically targeting teenage girls and women in their 20s.

They plan to monetize it by advertising, publishing advertorial posts, and embedding affiliate links to e-commerce sites. As of this writing, they have published 1,000 articles and surpassed 1 million monthly pageviews. They are currently planning to translate all articles into Chinese and start serving the Chinese markets.

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Aorb

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Jumpei Ikeda

Aorb is a mobile app that allows users to present two pictures and ask others to choose the best one. For example, when you can’t decided between two outfits, you can take pictures and upload them using the app. Subsequently, you will be able to see a list of responses from other users.

Every question posted gets 70 answers on average. Almost a half of their users are teenagers, and about 60% of them are females. So their primary users are high school girls. They have acquired users from 20 countries around the world because the app uses pictures, requiring no verbal communication. In view of a huge user base from the Asian regions, they are planning to add an English interface by the end of this month.

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Hima Switch

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Takuya Moriguchi

When you have spare time, this app helps you interact with other users who are also free. Takuya Moriguchi, the inventor of this app, had difficulty in finding someone who has time to spare via Facebook. The app allows you to chat using as short as 10 Japanese characters, while storing as little as past five sets of interactions.

They are planning to add a new feature of simple games this coming weekend (June 7-8). In order to improve their 7-day user retention rate to over 80%, they also plan to roll out a new gamification feature – the more you enjoy chatting with other users using the app, the more characters you are allowed to use in the chat feature – as well as proposing topics to discuss so as to keep them using the app.

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