Japan’s Nikkei reported earlier this morning that Japanese telco KDDI will partner with 11 internet companies to provide the former company’s subscribers with an integrated portal menu. By integrating a user base of 40 million monthly visitors in total using services provided by these companies, KDDI wants to compete against Yahoo Japan which has one of the largest user bases in the Japanese internet industry.
These companies will share an integrated common menu and user profiles, where one can hop around web services by these companies without entering personal information even when required. Integrated services will be provided for KDDI subscribers in addition to smartphone users subscribing to other companies like NTT Docomo and Softbank.
Through this integration and partnership, for instance, once a business trip using a calendar app is arranged, it will provide seamless access for finding the best transit route or checking weather update for the destination using third-party services, similarly to what Google makes possible alone in a seamless single interface.
In a series of these partnering efforts, KDDI also announced that it has acquired Nanapi (lifehack site operator, we learned that it has been acquired for about $72.6 million through our recent interview.) and BitSeller (mobile app developer). Furthermore, KDDI said it has invested in internet startups like Jorte (calendar app developer) and Vasily (a company behind fashion coordination app iQON)The total amount of these investments is worth 12 billion yen (about $113 million).
See the original story in Japanese. Space Market lists unused or idle venues and allows users to pick one to rent on demand for business needs such as corporate meetings, shareholder meetings, training courses or other events. They won the top prize at Rising Expo 2014, an annual startup showcase event held by CyberAgent Ventures this August. The company announced today that it has fundraised 100 million yen (or $936,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and Mizuho Capital. According to Space Market’s CEO Daisuke Shigematsu, they will use the funds to strengthen engineering as well as sales forces, including developing apps and acquiring more venues, in addition to providing a concierge service. Furthermore, they plan to promote partnering with in-company training providers, event planners, ad agencies plus catering service providers. They have listed more than 775 venues to date, including sailing vessel Miraie, Excel Air Service‘s heliport, Tokyo Bay’s uninhabited island Sarushima, and old Japanese-style houses in the historic village of Shirakawa-go. They have partnered with established companies like Sumitomo Fudosan, Tokyu Land, and Culture Convenience Club. It will be interesting to see how they will proceed towards their vision where they want to create a new value by giving users access to any venue in the world.
Space Market lists unused or idle venues and allows users to pick one to rent on demand for business needs such as corporate meetings, shareholder meetings, training courses or other events. They won the top prize at Rising Expo 2014, an annual startup showcase event held by CyberAgent Ventures this August.
The company announced today that it has fundraised 100 million yen (or $936,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and Mizuho Capital. According to Space Market’s CEO Daisuke Shigematsu, they will use the funds to strengthen engineering as well as sales forces, including developing apps and acquiring more venues, in addition to providing a concierge service.
Furthermore, they plan to promote partnering with in-company training providers, event planners, ad agencies plus catering service providers. They have listed more than 775 venues to date, including sailing vessel Miraie, Excel Air Service‘s heliport, Tokyo Bay’s uninhabited island Sarushima, and old Japanese-style houses in the historic village of Shirakawa-go.
They have partnered with established companies like Sumitomo Fudosan, Tokyu Land, and Culture Convenience Club. It will be interesting to see how they will proceed towards their vision where they want to create a new value by giving users access to any venue in the world.
An old Japanese-style house in the historic village of Shirakawa-go.
See the original story in Japanese. In August, Tokyo-based financial advisory startup Zuu fundraised 105 million yen (about $1 million) from four angel investors including Japan’s mobile i-mode web service inventor Takeshi Natsuno. Another news recently came in from the company. Zuu recently announced that it has appointed Masaki Goto, the former CTO at Japanese learning startup Best Teacher, as CTO. In addition to the fact that Japan’s governmental IT promotion agency heralded him as a “talented genius” in the computer industry with his learning management system project, he’s also known for conducting at Ryukyu Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra in Okinawa. Goto joined Zuu as a technical advisor to the board in July but he committed to the team upon the appointment at this time. Since its launch last April, Zuu has not been exposed to media much, so I have had no opportunity to hear from them despite many years of acquittance with the company’s CEO, Kazunari Tomita. Inviting such a talented engineer like Goto, what is Zuu trying to do? We had an opportunity to hear from Tomita and Goto at their office. Financial services for consumers ranging from banking and brokerage to insurance are called retail finance. The internet penetration makes them possible to complete transactions online, in ways like online banking and online stock trading as well as online insurance…
From the left: Zuu CEO Kazunari Tomita, newly-appointed CTO Masaki Goto
In August, Tokyo-based financial advisory startup Zuufundraised 105 million yen (about $1 million) from four angel investors including Japan’s mobile i-mode web service inventor Takeshi Natsuno. Another news recently came in from the company.
Zuu recently announced that it has appointed Masaki Goto, the former CTO at Japanese learning startup Best Teacher, as CTO. In addition to the fact that Japan’s governmental IT promotion agency heralded him as a “talented genius” in the computer industry with his learning management system project, he’s also known for conducting at Ryukyu Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra in Okinawa.
Goto joined Zuu as a technical advisor to the board in July but he committed to the team upon the appointment at this time. Since its launch last April, Zuu has not been exposed to media much, so I have had no opportunity to hear from them despite many years of acquittance with the company’s CEO, Kazunari Tomita.
Inviting such a talented engineer like Goto, what is Zuu trying to do? We had an opportunity to hear from Tomita and Goto at their office.
Financial services for consumers ranging from banking and brokerage to insurance are called retail finance. The internet penetration makes them possible to complete transactions online, in ways like online banking and online stock trading as well as online insurance services. These are beneficial for providers in absorbing operational costs, in addition for consumers in terms of convenience in that they don’t need to visit a store.
However, this kind of financial products sold online requires consumers to have a high literacy in purchasing and ordering. It may give you a high flexibility of choice in favorable perspective, but you need to completely judge yourself in choosing which financial services you will adopt.
Seen globally, only 20% of financial services are provided via direct sales channels. The remaining 80% are sold via indirect sales channels from financial planners to insurance canvassers. It means the majority of consumers buying these financial products require someone’s advice upon purchase. No matter how things change along with time, the need to sell financial services via indirect sales channels will never disappear.
Zuu provides a matchmaking platform that connects consumers who want to buy financial services via indirect sales channels and providers like financial planners giving advice or selling these products. To date, while users have had to depend on their friends to find a good advisor, these advisors have had no way to approach their potential customers.
Having Goto as CTO, Zuu is trying to develop the core of this matchmaking platform. Tomita elaborated what they want to proceed from here:
Our business is connecting businesses and consumers. To make it possible, we developed a system of gathering advisors and launched 10 media sites for engaging consumers. We cannot disclose the details at the moment, but we’ll be working on a platform that keeps a tight grasp on consumers, which will be launched during the period from this year-end to the beginning of next year.
Zuu targets consumers with net financial assets worth ranging from $280,000 to $4.7 million, which means they are not super-millionaire but in the upper middle class that have some money in their bank accounts. In terms of market scale, they are 10 million out of all 50 million households in Japan, so 20% of all households in the country are Zuu’s potential customers.
Hearing from Tomita and Goto, I came up with an idea that there’s a tendency commonly seen in typical fintech startups. As we previously heard from Crowdcast about their business, there are typically existing giants that target the top tier of a pyramid of users. Those in the bottom layer manage themselves so they are unlikely to use convenient advisory services. Therefore startups can find a huge market potential in the middle range.
However, you wouldn’t expect so much on sales per customer in the middle-range tier. To make your business profitable, you will need to leverage crowdsourced forces and provide your services more efficiently. At the bottom line, Zuu targets the middle-tier customers in financial services while Crowdcast wants to acquire that in the expense reimbursement market.
Goto is devoting himself to development with his team members.
As you can easily assume from the fact that Zuu has as many as ten media sites, they have been focused on content development to date. They have exceeded one million monthly unique users in total, thus we can see they are one of the biggest operators of money issue-focused websites.
While Zuu is about a 25-person team including full-time and part-time workers as well as interns, only about five to six people out of them are being committed to systems development under Goto. However, to accelerate development of the aforementioned platform, they are currently strengthening the engineering team, so the number of their engineers will exceed that of non-engineers soon.
Goto elaborated how they will acquire talented engineers:
Engineers who want to keep up with trends typically start their careers at a systems integration company, then hop around giants like Google or gaming developers, and now they are set for fintch startups. They may go to the healcare or IoT (Internet of Things) space later on, but I think people who want to do something new are gathering around fintech startups.
While it’s quite difficult to hire engineers in the startup scene, fintech startups may be more likely to gather good people because this is the hottest space not only for entrepreneurs and investors but also for engineers. It will be interesting to see what service Zuu will launch during the period from this to next year.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Papelook, the company behind a photo collage app under the same name, announced today that it has raised 120 million yen (or $1.12 million) from Japanese investment firm Jafco. Since its launch of an iOS app in 2011 followed by an Android version in march of 2013, the company has acquired 13 million downloads in total to date worldwide. See also: With 10M downloads, Japan’s Papelook app knows how to get the girls With 4 million downloads for iPhone, popular Japanese collage app hits Android [Video] In our recent interview with Papelook CEO Ichiro Ozawa, he told us about their user demographics: We understand 96% of our users are female. we had no ideas about user demographics because our app require no user sign-up process. But our recent survey showed us “moms” account for 35% of our entire user base, so we are providing more stickers designed for moms. While there are only about 6.6 million downloads in Japan alone, they are trying to increase active users rather than downloads in country. Ozawa continued: Looking at the overseas markets, we have many downloads from Thailand and Korea in addition to North America. We’ll…
Tokyo-based Papelook, the company behind a photo collage app under the same name, announced today that it has raised 120 million yen (or $1.12 million) from Japanese investment firm Jafco.
Since its launch of an iOS app in 2011 followed by an Android version in march of 2013, the company has acquired 13 million downloads in total to date worldwide.
In our recent interview with Papelook CEO Ichiro Ozawa, he told us about their user demographics:
Papelook’s CEO Ichiro Ozawa
We understand 96% of our users are female. we had no ideas about user demographics because our app require no user sign-up process. But our recent survey showed us “moms” account for 35% of our entire user base, so we are providing more stickers designed for moms.
While there are only about 6.6 million downloads in Japan alone, they are trying to increase active users rather than downloads in country. Ozawa continued:
Looking at the overseas markets, we have many downloads from Thailand and Korea in addition to North America. We’ll be more focused on increasing downloads in the overseas market. We’ll be targeting the Chinese market next. […] Our localization efforts are yet limited in translating user interface. But because it will be difficult for Japanese designers to create stickers so that overseas users are willing to use them, we’ll be trying to encourage global designers to create their stickers for Papelook. We are thinking to launch a service where global designers can sell their stickers as well as real products.
Papelook’s geographical distribution in terms of users
Evernote has an e-commerce outlet called Evernote Market selling their products. Similarly, Papelook wants to gain a brand value by building a user community and developing analog products. Ozawa explained:
We will start an online printing service. If you create a photo collage using our app, you will be able to print it out via photocopiers at convenience stores around the country, such as Seven Eleven, Lawson, Family Mart, and Sunkus. New year’s card prints using photo collages will be also available in year-end. […] We will try to have our users see we can provide more than just an app through organizing user events focused on moms.
While Papelook will be more focused on adverting sales and service planning from now, we understand that they will use the funds raised at this time to strengthen sales forces rather than an engineering team.
See the original story in Japanese. Japanese “owned media” marketing company Somewrite fundraised 120 million yen (about $1.1 million) from Gree Ventures and other undisclosed investors. In May of 2013, Somewrite won the fifth batch of Incubate Camp, an intensive two-day business development program for entrepreneurs organized by Japan’s Incubate Fund. In July of 2014, the company announced a set of comprehensive “owned media” marketing services called Somewrite Networks, which provides content marketing, owned media distribution, and native advertising platform services. Somewrite Ad, the company’s native advertising network platform, picks up advertorial articles from owned media sites and distributes them to other partnering news media sites as a native ad so that these articles match the form with other regular articles in which they are placed. The platform has a tracking engine which learns the preference of users in real time. In a response to our request for comment upon this funding, Somewrite’s CEO Yasunari Shibata said: Because our Somewrite Ad service has been seeing good growth, we’ll be more focused on the ad network business. We’ve been running this on a test basis to date, but we’ll be shifting to a full-scale service from the middle of this month….
Japanese “owned media” marketing company Somewrite fundraised 120 million yen (about $1.1 million) from Gree Ventures and other undisclosed investors.
In May of 2013, Somewrite won the fifth batch of Incubate Camp, an intensive two-day business development program for entrepreneurs organized by Japan’s Incubate Fund. In July of 2014, the company announced a set of comprehensive “owned media” marketing services called Somewrite Networks, which provides content marketing, owned media distribution, and native advertising platform services.
Somewrite Ad, the company’s native advertising network platform, picks up advertorial articles from owned media sites and distributes them to other partnering news media sites as a native ad so that these articles match the form with other regular articles in which they are placed. The platform has a tracking engine which learns the preference of users in real time.
In a response to our request for comment upon this funding, Somewrite’s CEO Yasunari Shibata said:
Because our Somewrite Ad service has been seeing good growth, we’ll be more focused on the ad network business. We’ve been running this on a test basis to date, but we’ll be shifting to a full-scale service from the middle of this month.
They will use the funds to fulfill their management base as well as to strengthen system development and marketing expansion, in addition to hiring more people.
Japanese startup BHI announced today that it has launched a suite of mobile apps called Swingnow, which will prevent information overload in messaging. The company is based in Tokyo, but they have made these apps available on the iTunes app store in English-speaking and Nordic countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden. The Swingnow suite is comprising of three mobile apps of Swingmail (e-mail), Swingbook (contact book), and Swingcal (calendar). Swingmail is a minimalistic inbox and reply-only app that helps reduce information overload and clutter. The app aggregates messages from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and calls from phone and FaceTime, so that you have everything in one inbox. Swingmail will filter out junk, spam, and messages that don’t require your immediate attention, so that you can stay focused and only receive messages from people that are important. Swingbook is a prioritizing contact list seamlessly integrated with the Swingmail app. Based on past messaging patterns, current time and location, Swingbook learns, predicts and suggests the most likely contacts who you would want to get in touch with at any given moment. Swingcal is a minimalistic calendar app that thinks about your contacts. The app focuses…
From the left: Yasuhiro Himukashi (CEO), Jun Inoue (CMO), and Emelie Fågelstedt (public relations)
Japanese startup BHI announced today that it has launched a suite of mobile apps called Swingnow, which will prevent information overload in messaging. The company is based in Tokyo, but they have made these apps available on the iTunes app store in English-speaking and Nordic countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden.
The Swingnow suite is comprising of three mobile apps of Swingmail (e-mail), Swingbook (contact book), and Swingcal (calendar).
Swingmail is a minimalistic inbox and reply-only app that helps reduce information overload and clutter. The app aggregates messages from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and calls from phone and FaceTime, so that you have everything in one inbox. Swingmail will filter out junk, spam, and messages that don’t require your immediate attention, so that you can stay focused and only receive messages from people that are important.
Swingbook is a prioritizing contact list seamlessly integrated with the Swingmail app. Based on past messaging patterns, current time and location, Swingbook learns, predicts and suggests the most likely contacts who you would want to get in touch with at any given moment.
Swingcal is a minimalistic calendar app that thinks about your contacts. The app focuses on the agendas that you have with someone up to a week in the future.
BHI launched Swingmail out of these three apps late last year. In addition to developing two other apps in the suite, they abandoned the previous version of the Swingmail app and opted to develop it from scratch again for giving users a better experience.
Regarding the geographical limitation on the availability of these apps, I had assumed that it was because of a language-dependent algorithm in filtering messages. But BHI CMO Jun Inoue explained why this assumption was mistaken:
We are a startup, so our resources are limited. Filtering or analyzing algorithms used in our apps properly work in any language. But if we want to market to the global market, we need to optimize the user interface of the apps in every different language market to fit the preference of locals.
Compared to the Japanese market, we understand there’s obviously a larger potential in the entire English-speaking market. We know English is not a mother tongue for Nordic people, but they don’t feel uncomfortable using apps with an English-language interface. That’s why we started with these countries.
If the apps can receive good reaction in the countries where they have just launched, they will expand availability to other countries like Canada, South Africa, and Singapore. Based on feedback from users, they may also develop an Android version.
BHI fundraised an undisclosed amount of investment in a series A round from an undisclosed Japanese investor in April this year.
Masaru Ikeda
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Junya Mori
