Pocket Concierge is a website that allows users to book popular restaurants, even if they are fully booked several months in advance. Tokyo-based startup Pocket Menu, the startup behind the service, yesterday launched a pre-payment service via credit card for restaurant reservations called the Pocket Experience function.
By registering credit card information when booking, a user will not need to check the bill and pay at the restaurant. So if you take your girlfriend or fiancée to a restaurant, you can avoid letting her know the amount of the bill—thus avoiding the risk of spoiling the mood.
Using this function, participating restaurants can shorten the payment process after serving customers, in addition to curtailing the reservation cancellations risk. Tests at 20 restaurants in Japan convinced Pocket Menu that the new function improves the operational efficiency of restaurants. Now available at 25 restaurants, the company plans to roll out this function to more restaurants soon.
The primary age group of their customers is from the mid-30s to 50s, with the average customer spending $150 per dining experience. To better serve international users, they plan to introduce an English version and expand to overseas cities, such as Paris.
See also the original story in Japanese. Japan-based American serial entrepreneur Kristopher Tate has developed many web services to date. I’ve used many of them including AM6 (morning news delivery service co-developed with Beatrobo co-founder Hiroshi Asaeda) and t.free (tether enabling service for tether-free smartphone handsets without requiring jailbreak). These services have shut down due to some reasons. Kristopher subsequently moved to Kyoto, so I’ve been curious about his next product launch. And we have a news update about him. ConnectFree, the startup that Kristopher has been running, announced today that it has fundraised from Japanese VC firm East Ventures. Details of the investment have not yet been disclosed but he will use the funds raised to disrupt the IoT (Internet of Things) space. We’ve seen several different approaches aimed at motivating people to develop more connected devices by eliminating obstacles. A big problem is that many software engineers are not familiar with how to develop hardware devices. Our readers may recall that London-based Berg has unveiled such a service to accelerate the IoT space where software and hardware products intersect. Kristopher told us what differentiates his project from other solutions like Berg, despite the fact that his project is…
Japan-based American serial entrepreneur Kristopher Tate has developed many web services to date. I’ve used many of them including AM6 (morning news delivery service co-developed with Beatrobo co-founder Hiroshi Asaeda) and t.free (tether enabling service for tether-free smartphone handsets without requiring jailbreak). These services have shut down due to some reasons. Kristopher subsequently moved to Kyoto, so I’ve been curious about his next product launch.
Kristopher Tate
And we have a news update about him. ConnectFree, the startup that Kristopher has been running, announced today that it has fundraised from Japanese VC firm East Ventures. Details of the investment have not yet been disclosed but he will use the funds raised to disrupt the IoT (Internet of Things) space.
We’ve seen several different approaches aimed at motivating people to develop more connected devices by eliminating obstacles. A big problem is that many software engineers are not familiar with how to develop hardware devices. Our readers may recall that London-based Berg has unveiled such a service to accelerate the IoT space where software and hardware products intersect.
Kristopher told us what differentiates his project from other solutions like Berg, despite the fact that his project is in stealth mode:
Berg uses their cloud-based technology to absorb what typical hardware startups are not good at. But we will take a different way because that approach cannot guarantee the sustainability and the security level of your service since it’s dependent on the cloud. We will develop a chip to be embedded in your device so that it can guarantee an end-to-end secure communication between your device and your web-based system.
Similarly to browsing SSL-enabled websites using a proxy server, if you use the cloud to connect your device with your web service, it cannot guarantee a secured communication between the both sides with each other. But this approach has been a usual tactic to ease the development of connected devices, where it is difficult for convenience and high security to co-exist.
In my recent discussion with our IoT-focused contributor Yasunori Okajima, he told me that security issues in the IoT space have not received much attention, but he believes there are huge opportunities out there. We have no idea how Kristopher will make it all possible with only a tiny chip, but he can definitely make it happen with a great idea, which the average person like me can never come up with.
See the original story in Japanese. Yokohama-based Gamba, the startup that provides business reporting tool under the same name, announced today it has raised 40 million yen (about $400,000) from two Japanese investment firms; East Ventures and Skyland Ventures. This follows their previous funding of $200,000 from Skyland Ventures back in October 2013. Gamba was launched back in December 2012 by Masahiro Morita, who previously worked for Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten as a business development producer. Gamba recently partnered with Japanese internet company Nifty, where Gamba’s cloud-based reporting tool was added to the series of Nifty’s business software packages called Hakokura, which is sold at more than 17,000 computer stores nationwide in Japan with the aim to give internet-unfamiliar SME owners more opportunities to learn and try a variety of cloud-based services. Gamba is in talks with other companies to create more sales channels to users they have not yet reached. From my point of view, most companies using cloud-based services typically have their CEOs or operations managers who are early adopters. However, startups have to reach late adopters as well in order to build a bigger user base. Thus, if you have developed an awesome service but are struggling…
Yokohama-based Gamba, the startup that provides business reporting tool under the same name, announced today it has raised 40 million yen (about $400,000) from two Japanese investment firms; East Ventures and Skyland Ventures. This follows their previous funding of $200,000 from Skyland Ventures back in October 2013.
Gamba was launched back in December 2012 by Masahiro Morita, who previously worked for Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten as a business development producer. Gamba recently partnered with Japanese internet company Nifty, where Gamba’s cloud-based reporting tool was added to the series of Nifty’s business software packages called Hakokura, which is sold at more than 17,000 computer stores nationwide in Japan with the aim to give internet-unfamiliar SME owners more opportunities to learn and try a variety of cloud-based services. Gamba is in talks with other companies to create more sales channels to users they have not yet reached.
From my point of view, most companies using cloud-based services typically have their CEOs or operations managers who are early adopters. However, startups have to reach late adopters as well in order to build a bigger user base. Thus, if you have developed an awesome service but are struggling to acquire users, you should study and learn from Gamba as it increases touch points with potential customers.
Moi Corporation, the company behind Japanese mobile live streaming app TwitCasting, announced that it has fundraised $5 million from Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Group leading and Japanese seed investor East Ventures also participating. Our readers may recall that the company raised $634,000 from East Ventures back in May 2013. See our past articles featuring this startup: Live-streaming app TwitCasting surpasses 2 million users, but founder is a little distressed Japan’s livestreaming app TwitCasting to soon hit 3M users, is now winning fans overseas 15 Japanese startups pitch at Rising Expo 2013, TwitCasting takes top prize Video sharing in Japan: Twitcasting and Vine prove popular among teenagers Japanese livestreaming app TwitCasting to support collaborative broadcasting via TechCrunch
Moi Corporation, the company behind Japanese mobile live streaming app TwitCasting, announced that it has fundraised $5 million from Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Group leading and Japanese seed investor East Ventures also participating.
Our readers may recall that the company raised $634,000 from East Ventures back in May 2013.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Toreta, the startup that provides the reservation management system for restaurants, announced today it has raised 200 million yen (about $2 million) from Silicon Valley-based investment company WiL (World Innovation Lab). See also: Toreta: A new reservation management app for restaurants in Japan Coinciding with this announcement, the company also unveiled that Kengo Yoshida, the former executive at Japanese internet giant GMO Pepabo, will join the board of management on July 1st. They will use the funds to strengthen their engineering and marketing forces. Since its launch in December, the company has acquired more than 1,000 restaurants as users. The service’s monthly charge is 9,000 yen (about $90) a restaurant, so its easy to figure out how much money they are making every month. According to the company’s CEO Hitoshi Nakamura, about 500,000 restaurants annually generate $226 billion in the Japanese restaurant industry. He said that the company will target the top 20% of restaurants in Japan, which will bring in revenue of about $98 million. But I think their investors will not be satisfied with this figure. How do they evolve the restaurant business? Many restaurants that use a conventional online reservation…
From the left: COO Kengo Yoshida, CEO Hitoshi Nakamura
Tokyo-based Toreta, the startup that provides the reservation management system for restaurants, announced today it has raised 200 million yen (about $2 million) from Silicon Valley-based investment company WiL (World Innovation Lab).
Coinciding with this announcement, the company also unveiled that Kengo Yoshida, the former executive at Japanese internet giant GMO Pepabo, will join the board of management on July 1st. They will use the funds to strengthen their engineering and marketing forces.
Since its launch in December, the company has acquired more than 1,000 restaurants as users. The service’s monthly charge is 9,000 yen (about $90) a restaurant, so its easy to figure out how much money they are making every month.
According to the company’s CEO Hitoshi Nakamura, about 500,000 restaurants annually generate $226 billion in the Japanese restaurant industry. He said that the company will target the top 20% of restaurants in Japan, which will bring in revenue of about $98 million. But I think their investors will not be satisfied with this figure.
How do they evolve the restaurant business?
Many restaurants that use a conventional online reservation platform, like OpenTable, check a reservation book and manually input reservations to the online system. This process is time-consuming and can cause booking errors.
However, Toreta can check the status of table availability of participating restaurants using the platform and help them fill their vacancies by sending them customers in an efficient way. Nakamura explained:
We can manage the table availability of restaurants as our inventory using the system. In this way, we are more likely to receive reservations through foodie websites and send them to the restaurants. We are planning to develop an API to integrate with marketing websites (such as Tabelog or Gurunavi).
Because many competitors are targeting this market, Nakamura understands that the company will have to acquire the top spot within a couple of years to survive. The company has been steadily acquiring users, but they invited Yoshida to join the team to strengthen their online marketing strategy. Yoshida told us how he will proceed:
Our revenue is still dependent on the efforts of our sales representatives. But we will explore what to do for our online marketing from now. But people working in the restaurant industry can be very digitally challenged. So we may need to make offline efforts as well.
It will be interesting to see how the company will evolve the restaurant business with the digital technology.
Disclosure: The author’s wife has a business relationship with Toreta.
See the original story in Japanese. Vasily, a Tokyo-based startup which runs online fashion coordination service iQON, announced today that it has surpassed 1 million users. Coinciding with this announcement, the company rebranded its logo design. Since its launch back in April 2010, the service has acquired over 1 million coordinated outfits and listed over 4 million fashion items. Each item introduced on the website is linked to other e-commerce sites where you can buy it, and they drive over 1 million times the traffic to these affiliated e-commerce sites a month. They also announced that some of these sites earn over $1 million in their monthly revenue from iQON users. Will iQON disrupt the fashion e-commerce landscape? Over this past year, we’ve seen many startups have been competing with each others to gain as much time of smartphone users as possible with their mobile services, which is truly remarkable in the space of curated information sites for females. These sites are easy to launch because they don’t need to prepare resources but can be created through use of content from other media sites. But I think this concept does not apply to iQON since the curated fashion site is…
Vasily, a Tokyo-based startup which runs online fashion coordination service iQON, announced today that it has surpassed 1 million users. Coinciding with this announcement, the company rebranded its logo design.
Since its launch back in April 2010, the service has acquired over 1 million coordinated outfits and listed over 4 million fashion items. Each item introduced on the website is linked to other e-commerce sites where you can buy it, and they drive over 1 million times the traffic to these affiliated e-commerce sites a month. They also announced that some of these sites earn over $1 million in their monthly revenue from iQON users.
Will iQON disrupt the fashion e-commerce landscape?
Vasily CEO Yuki Kanayama
Over this past year, we’ve seen many startups have been competing with each others to gain as much time of smartphone users as possible with their mobile services, which is truly remarkable in the space of curated information sites for females. These sites are easy to launch because they don’t need to prepare resources but can be created through use of content from other media sites.
But I think this concept does not apply to iQON since the curated fashion site is not one where users consume content passively like other curated content sites. In response to this idea, the company’s CEO Yuki Kanayama told us their service motivates users to act impulsively upon understanding the fashion trends and buying new outfit. This perspective can be proven by the fact that some of their affiliated e-commerce sites obtain 25% of the user traffic from iQON, and others generate a monthly revenue worth over almost $1 million.
All media sites have to make money to survive. So they have to establish intimate relationships with their users and provide them with values enough so that the users are willing to pay fees. As proven by iQON with their business, we have to be more focused on metrics and results. Through its integration efforts with e-commerce sites, it will be interesting to see how iQON can bring a new concept upon generating revenue streams to curated content sites.
Junya Mori
Masaru Ikeda
Takeshi Hirano
