Clear is a study notes organizer app and has attracted over 500,000 students in Japan. Tokyo-based Arcterus, the company behind the app, has fundraised 130 million yen (about $1 million) from Japanese system integration company Startia (TSE:3303), Dentsu Digital Fund, Korea’s BonAngels, and others. The company will use the funds to add new app functions as well as aiming to expand globally.
Students have started adapting their smartphone for their studies. Japan’s Recruit Marketing Partners recently unveiled a list of trending keywords that includes the Japanese word “sumaben” meaning studying via smartphone.
Over 3 million notes are published and shared
The Clear app allows students to publish their handwritten study notes and share them with other users. There are over 3 million published notes available on the platform so far. Clear has two main usage styles:
When students get something they can’t understand at school classes, they can try to figure out by looking at notes by classmates rather than relying on Google search or study-aid books.
Finding well-summarized notes to better understand materials upon preparing for exams at school.
Goichiro Arai, CEO of Arcterus, says that the Clear app aims to be a study notes version of GitHub or online recipe app Cookpad. Compared to being taught by teachers, private tutors, or study-aid books, the app helps students enrich their understanding of their studies.
The company gets feedback from students such as: “The app has motivated me to study harder,” and “It has lowered a psychological hurdle in studying.”
The app helps to connect and motivate students across the country by allowing them to share and comment on handwritten study notes.
Expanding into Southeast Asia and North America
Arcterus wants to liven up the learning field with the app while ensuring the quality and boosting the sharing of study notes. In addition to serving students in Japan, the company wants to expand into other Asian countries in 2015, followed by expansion into North and South American markets in 2016. They launched the Clear app in Thailand back in April, receiving positive responses from the market as the number of users and shared study notes have been both increasing.
In a previous interview with the team of Penpal Schools, a Texan online penpal-based studying platform that has acquired over 7 million students from more than 70 countries, I was so surprised to learn that many students feel lonely studying at school even when they study together in a classroom. Arai agreed and said that is why many students come together at a diner and study together after school.
Arai concluded:
Studying for exams is likely to make you feel lonely. In class, you need to concentrate on grasping a new concept, which can be a lonely task. By compiling an extensive database of shared study notes, we aim to help students from around the world succeed in their studies.
Translated by Chieko Frost via Mother First Edited by Masaru Ikeda and Kurt Hanson
Proofread by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. This is part of our ‘Tokyo Office Tour’ series (RSS), a modest attempt to better understand how folks in the local startup scene are working every day. The town of Shibuya is said to be constantly producing new trends but actually is in contrast surprisingly old. Go down any narrow alley and you will find decades-old crowded office space buildings crammed together in rows. In Shibuya, the center of Bit Valley, fresh out of the gate startups are many, but as these companies grow they often relocate to surrounding areas such as Ebisu or Yoyogi. It seems that the rather unique office condition in Shibuya might also have an effect on this. In Shibuya, meeting and co-working spaces aren’t scarce per se, but finding a place that can accommodate large numbers of people is difficult. If you’re planning on holding a modestly large event, you could of course borrow a conference room at a big company, but the majority of those will be thoroughly managed modern office buildings making it difficult to freely allow guests to come and go as they please. I payed a visit to the new event and community space ‘dots.’,…
This is part of our ‘Tokyo Office Tour’ series (RSS), a modest attempt to better understand how folks in the local startup scene are working every day.
The town of Shibuya is said to be constantly producing new trends but actually is in contrast surprisingly old. Go down any narrow alley and you will find decades-old crowded office space buildings crammed together in rows. In Shibuya, the center of Bit Valley, fresh out of the gate startups are many, but as these companies grow they often relocate to surrounding areas such as Ebisu or Yoyogi. It seems that the rather unique office condition in Shibuya might also have an effect on this.
In Shibuya, meeting and co-working spaces aren’t scarce per se, but finding a place that can accommodate large numbers of people is difficult. If you’re planning on holding a modestly large event, you could of course borrow a conference room at a big company, but the majority of those will be thoroughly managed modern office buildings making it difficult to freely allow guests to come and go as they please.
I payed a visit to the new event and community space ‘dots.’, which opened on the 1st of August near the intersection of Fire Street and Park Street in Shibuya. The first thing I was surprised by was how open it was and how nicely the space was laid out in terms of visibility, and in spite of the 126 square foot interior, there are no pillars or anything obstructing your view. This what’s called a supportless open space floor plan, characteristic of new construction methods. The space can accommodate 200 to 250 people seated and, if you were holding a lecture, even people in the very back of the room would probably be able to make direct eye contact with the speaker.
I was able to ask dots. producer Yuko Narukama about the reasoning behind the creation of this space.
A year after we started up our engineer event information service dots., we were doing 2 to 4 events a month. We rented a company seminar room and were managing it, but it started becoming a real hassle negotiating renting the space, setting everything up, and dealing with security management and stuff, so that’s when we decided to make our own event space.
In addition to dots. functioning as a work space, they often hold hands-on programming study sessions geared towards engineers on weeknights and weekends. The space is laid out so that there are a lot of large panel displays installed around the room, so wherever you are seated you can clearly see the code that the lecturer is explaining while being able to follow along.
In my experience, when selecting a venue to hold a programming study session for engineers, the space should be able to hold at least 150 participants; dots. can accommodate more than 200. Another feature of dots. is that the event space and the co-working space are connected, so for example it’s possible for people who are co-working at dots. to casually jump into an ongoing study session or event they’re interested in without having necessarily registered for the event beforehand.
Going forward we want to make it so that high quality events and output continue being hosted here.
Narukama and community manager Hiromi Ozawa have also begun offering various event series drawing on their social network and knowhow accumulated over more than a year of event organizing experience. One event series features discussions with and talks from the CTOs of famous companies over lunch called “Lunch with a CTO”. Another series, “Allstars”, features hints and tips from top runners in many different technology fields such as iOS, HTML5, big data, Android, and more.
I wondered if operating such a luxurious open space in Shibuya, one of most premium areas of Tokyo, wasn’t a little over optimistic, but with dots. fees running at 500 yen/hour or 2,500 yen/day for their co-working space, and also with personnel hiring opportunities, seminars for IT company branding, sales promotion exhibitions for IT vendor business, displaying videos and merchandise from sponsor companies, and more, it seems like they can at least expect to break even.
Use of dots. co-working space is free of charge during their August promotion, so if you happen to be in the Shibuya area we hope you’ll stop by and check it out.
This is a guest post authored by Connor Kirk. He is a Kyoto-based writer/translator specializing in tech and startups. All pictures in this post are courtesy of Chihiro Taniguchi. Startup Weekend, the 54-hour event series bringing together entrepreneurs, developers, and designers to pitch ideas, form teams, and build new products and services, began as the creation of writer and entrpreneur Andrew Hyde and is now a Google and Microsoft-sponsored Seattle-based NPO that has come to hold more than 1,500 events in 726 cities around the world. This month, Kyoto’s 5th Startup Weekend was held at the Kyoto Research Park with a lively group of young entrepreneurs, coaches, and industry professionals in attendance. The event followed the standard structure laid out by Startup Weekend, featuring rounds of pitching, beer drinking, voting, and development. The first round of pitches were held to a strict 60-second time limit in which participants frantically and sometimes theatrically explained their concepts, with focuses on merit, feasibility, and potential economic value of their ideas. Quite a few of the participants were surprisingly young with several college freshman and even one 3rd-year highschool student stepping behind the microphone. After the first round of pitching there was a vote,…
This is a guest post authored by Connor Kirk. He is a Kyoto-based writer/translator specializing in tech and startups. All pictures in this post are courtesy of Chihiro Taniguchi.
Startup Weekend, the 54-hour event series bringing together entrepreneurs, developers, and designers to pitch ideas, form teams, and build new products and services, began as the creation of writer and entrpreneur Andrew Hyde and is now a Google and Microsoft-sponsored Seattle-based NPO that has come to hold more than 1,500 events in 726 cities around the world.
This month, Kyoto’s 5th Startup Weekend was held at the Kyoto Research Park with a lively group of young entrepreneurs, coaches, and industry professionals in attendance. The event followed the standard structure laid out by Startup Weekend, featuring rounds of pitching, beer drinking, voting, and development. The first round of pitches were held to a strict 60-second time limit in which participants frantically and sometimes theatrically explained their concepts, with focuses on merit, feasibility, and potential economic value of their ideas. Quite a few of the participants were surprisingly young with several college freshman and even one 3rd-year highschool student stepping behind the microphone.
After the first round of pitching there was a vote, and the top few ideas were singled out. 15 minutes were then allotted for the creation of teams in which the five groups scrambled to form a group with as balanced a skillset as possible. The remaining time was given to development, designing, and coaching, culminating in the final presentations of each group’s MVP (minimum viable product), followed by feedback and final judgement from this year’s judges Questetra CEO Genichi Imamura and Lockon CEO Susumu Iwata.
The following are brief statements given by each of the four teams’ leaders explaining their services, starting with this year’s winning team, WithYou.
WithYou is an app and a platform that allows travelers to virtually connect with crowdsourced bilingual locals who can help them out with translation / interpretation, navigation, or even cultural explanations. Imagine sitting in a restaurant with no English menu and no one who speaks your language, trying to take meditation lessons from a Japanese monk, or getting your haircut from one of Paris’s best hair stylists. What are you going to do? Don’t let language be the barrier to your adventures. Connect with locals, expand your horizons.
Team: Masaki Tominami, Rio Fujimoto, Kouki Onishi, and ‘Taro’ Urashima
1mile is an app for getting recommendations on a variety of different restaurants, shops, and businesses within walking distance of your location, thus the name “1mile”. Designed for people who either have trouble finding good stores, feel that searching around is a pain, or aren’t normally the adventurous type, our service helps you discover great businesses and enjoy what your area has to offer!
Team: Yoshinori Ashikaga, Souichiro Tsue, and Taiki Sugino
What is the value of hearing someone’s painful story? It can be funny, or teach some kind of valuable lesson, or maybe even reveal a business opportunity. “Let’s make the world a better place by bringing together the stories of those who have tried and failed.” That was the concept that we tried to build this startup around.
Gamey
Startup name: Gamey
Team: Shingo Yonemura, Midori Harada, Naoto Ando, Yuta Goseki, and Eiji Iwatani
Gamey is an online platform offering a variety of afterschool programs for elementary school children relating to sports, culture, nutrition and more, with professional instructors, for a monthly fee of 5,000 yen. Hundreds of different types of programs will be available through the website which parents can choose from along with their preferred day, time, and location, and have their kids participate in valuable learning activities.
While I did find the scarcity of actual programmers in participation seemed to pose a noticeable imbalance in team structure, each team worked tirelessly through the weekend to present their products with a surprisingly high level of professionality and completion. I think the Kyoto startup scene needs more events like these, and seeing as how Startup Weekends are now being held in Tokyo as often as once a month, I think we can expect these events will only continue to grow in popularity in the future.
See the original story in Japanese. Working on the weekends or whenever they have free time, Team Houchimin is, from the content of their services to their name itself, quite a unique group. Their service Waaaaay!, a mobile navigation app (available for Android / iOS) designed for people with bad sense of direction, was released at the end of January 2014 and now has more than 600,000 downloads (as of early August 2015). Now the team has released a guide app geared for travelers called Pilot. Usable wherever you are, even in offline mode Pilot can help travelers with things such as discovering new destinations to getting information about local establishments without using roaming data or having to get a SIM card. Being able to function in offline mode is a very big difference between this and already existing apps such as Google Maps or Navitime. Also, it’s often said that one of the biggest struggles of travelers is battery life. By not using battery-draining background operations like GPS and network transmission, Pilot is able to dramatically prolong battery life. Pilot has 3 main features. The first is its large amount of content. Within the app you can search from…
Working on the weekends or whenever they have free time, Team Houchimin is, from the content of their services to their name itself, quite a unique group. Their service Waaaaay!, a mobile navigation app (available for Android / iOS) designed for people with bad sense of direction, was released at the end of January 2014 and now has more than 600,000 downloads (as of early August 2015). Now the team has released a guide app geared for travelers called Pilot.
Usable wherever you are, even in offline mode
Pilot can help travelers with things such as discovering new destinations to getting information about local establishments without using roaming data or having to get a SIM card. Being able to function in offline mode is a very big difference between this and already existing apps such as Google Maps or Navitime. Also, it’s often said that one of the biggest struggles of travelers is battery life. By not using battery-draining background operations like GPS and network transmission, Pilot is able to dramatically prolong battery life.
Pilot has 3 main features. The first is its large amount of content. Within the app you can search from over 6,000 restaurants, tourist spots, shopping malls, and other destinations in the supported cities. For places that are particularly popular with travellers, the app can be used to see photos, price range, business hours and other information.
The second is the ability to search for information regarding train transfers between you and where you’re trying to go by locally storing the data for every train station within the city you are visiting.
The third main feature is, similar to Waaaaay!, rather than looking at a map, travellers can arrive at their destinations just by looking at the direction and the remaining distance. By inputting your desired destination, the app will display the direction to and the remaining distance from the destination. Follow the direction displayed in the app, and when the remaining distance is zero, you know you’ve arrived.
Also useful for travellers who like to wing it
Pilot was born from a collection of more than 6,500 cases of user feedback from Waaaaay! With Waaaaay!, there was a search history feature that would save the locations you had searched before, so you could access those saved searches without being connected to a network, but even so there were a lot of requests from users to make the service available even when mountain climbing or abroad.
Ryota Ayaki, a member of Team Houchimin, explained:
Unless there’s any obstacle that interrupts radio waves from satellites, GPS signals can be received and it can be used anywhere in the world. Even so, there were a lot of people who misunderstood that it would necessary to have cellphone reception to use GPS. To us, that was common sense, but that wasn’t the case for general society. There were already some navigation apps that had offline capabilities but none of them had really caught on yet, so we thought maybe we can compete in this territory too.
In January of this year, one member of the team traveled to India to collect local data and information on New Delhi and make a prototype. By entering the place you want to go in the form at the top of the screen, the app will tell you the direction and the distance to that point. Other than the feature allowing users to search locally, the rest of the prototype was mostly the same as Waaaaay! Even so, by actually using the app, they recognized that it wasn’t enough to help foreign travelers.
With Waaaaay!, while there are some destinations that users will know to search for like Roppongi Hills or Shibuya Station, for travelers who are overseas, if you haven’t really planned out your trip in detail you might not know what to search for in the first place. So with Pilot they have decided to focus on two areas based on their findings from experiments in unfamiliar locations, bringing the most popular destinations among foreign travelers to the front, and providing guidance for using public transportation.
Starting in familiar territory with a Tokyo version
The direction of the new app was decided around Summer of last year. After which development began in December 2014 through the implementation of Android Wear as well as the improvements made to Waaaaay! itself. According to an acquaintance, in addition to the aforementioned India version, the team has also developed versions of the app for Singapore, Hong Kong, and Barcelona, working out all the kinks and making improvements.
For now, the team has decided to focus their efforts on territory that is familiar to them, the Tokyo area, in an effort to offer a more finely tuned and accurate user experience through trial and error. They have collected data on popular destinations by hand, and for transportation guidance purposes have purchased public transportation data and information for every station and train line in Japan from ekidata.jp. However the one area that is lacking in regards information is the sorting of that data. They have developed a train line guidance feature that combines latitude and longitude data with train line data, and additionally they have increased the speed of their search algorithm and UI display in order to create a more fluid user experience.
Going forward they are planning on developing versions of the app for other cities based on the feedback they will gather from the Tokyo release. Kyoto, London, Taipei, New York, and Paris are all possible candidates. The Tokyo version of the app will be free to use, but they are considering putting a price on future releases. Also they say they’re planning to try promoting the Tokyo release to English speaking users.
When it comes to design and development, Team Houchimin is in their element, but this time with Pilot, their challenge will be that this is not just about reading a map. Their original release of the app featured the actual title misspelled as “Pirot”. Even now there still is one part inside the application that shows the spelling mistake, which may just be for our brief entertainment. Anyway I’m really looking forward to trying this this app out once the international version is released. You can download Pilot and try it for yourself here.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Plaid, a startup developing a real-time analytics platform for e-commerce sites called Karte, announced last week that it has fundraised 500 million yen (about $4 million) from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan and Femto Growth Capital. David Milstein, Head of Japan for Fidelity Growth Partners, will join the team as its outside director. Femto Growth Capital invested about $1.5 million in the startup during the previous round. Karte allows e-commerce site owners to grasp their visitors’ demographics just by adding a few lines of codes to their websites. In addition to analyzing the behaviors of e-commerce site visitors in real time, the service allows the owners to send out promotional campaigns to potential buyers in form of message notifications or pop-up windows. Plaid CEO Kenta Kurahashi explained how Karte came into being: It had been difficult for e-commerce sites to treat their visitors according to their status or behaviors as sales representatives do at real retailers. We have developed a technology that enables e-commerce site owners to provide such a hospitality and a new customer experience for their visitors. While existing platforms conduct analysis based on metrics from the past, such as pageviews, unique…
Tokyo-based Plaid, a startup developing a real-time analytics platform for e-commerce sites called Karte, announced last week that it has fundraised 500 million yen (about $4 million) from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan and Femto Growth Capital. David Milstein, Head of Japan for Fidelity Growth Partners, will join the team as its outside director. Femto Growth Capital invested about $1.5 million in the startup during the previous round.
Karte allows e-commerce site owners to grasp their visitors’ demographics just by adding a few lines of codes to their websites. In addition to analyzing the behaviors of e-commerce site visitors in real time, the service allows the owners to send out promotional campaigns to potential buyers in form of message notifications or pop-up windows.
Plaid CEO Kenta Kurahashi explained how Karte came into being:
It had been difficult for e-commerce sites to treat their visitors according to their status or behaviors as sales representatives do at real retailers. We have developed a technology that enables e-commerce site owners to provide such a hospitality and a new customer experience for their visitors. While existing platforms conduct analysis based on metrics from the past, such as pageviews, unique users and residence time, Karte uses real-time access data and enables website owners to take appropriate measures to their visitors on the spot.
E-commerce sites, typically collecting private information on users to enable item purchases, can associate the real-time response from Karte with their customer database so that site owners can easily specify who is visiting their website and how he/she is behaving there, regardless of which browsing device he/she is using.
Karte allows users to customize how the platform responds to each of their visitors upon demographics and behaviors. For instance, an e-commerce company uses Karte to improve the awareness of their anniversary campaign, letting a banner sign pop up upon check-out to encourage their visitors to buy more; as such they can take a give-away if the purchases add up to a certain amount.
In cases of other use, for customers who are interested in a certain product category but have not decided which item to buy, some e-commerce site owners take them to a comparison chart of similar items with details. We were told that many site owners have succeeded in improving conversion rates by leveraging the platform.
Kurahashi added:
In addition to e-commerce sites, our solution allows recruiting sites to present a banner to their users seeking a position in a specific business category. Meanwhile it lets real estate companies show a pop-up message to visitors who are searching properties in a certain area or a specific type of room layout. Our product is used by many businesses including hotels and English conversation schools. Thus our clients can create a fully customized service corresponding to their business so that it can help building unique types of royalty with every single customer.
What kind of information will better work to motivate what kind of user? Kurahashi told us that’s what users have to be focused on figuring out leveraging their imagination while the Karte engine semi-automates the analyzing process of web access statistics.
Kurahashi concluded:
We hope our solution supports designing a true user experience, which is not just a customer experience but that tailored for each individual user.
We were told that the latest investment will be used to help hiring engineers, improving a user support structure for users as well as launching consulting services. They will also polish their product, developing additional functions and integration with other third-party services such as online shopping cart providers, online marketing tools, chat tools and online survey tools.
Upon solidifying its market share in Japan by expanding its market reach to enterprises and SMEs in addition to local retailers, the company is looking to expand globally.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by Masaru Ikeda and “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo- and Tel Aviv-based startup accelerator Samurai Incubate announced last week that they have begun recruiting Japanese companies to participate in the Accelerate Program Israel, their goal being to accelerate M&A as well as R&D of the latest technology in the region by fostering Israeli startups. Accelerate Program Israel will be a three-month program run on the basis of Samurai Incubate’s wealth of experience in the incubation of startups in both Japan and Israel. The company says that they will be able to make use of their co-working space in Tel Aviv, Samurai House in Israel, as well as the large social network they have built in the country. In July 2014, Samurai Incubate expanded into Israel, establishing their incubation office Samurai House in the city of Tel Aviv. In January of this year they established a new fund called the Samurai Incubate Fund No.5 and has been investing in Israeli pre-seed round startups. Additionally, the company invested in Tel Aviv-based startup incubator Startup East in May, and has been strengthening exchange between the Japanese and Israeli startup communities and cooperation between the two ecosystems. Samurai Incubate director Shouta Morozumi says that compared to…
Tokyo- and Tel Aviv-based startup accelerator Samurai Incubate announced last week that they have begun recruiting Japanese companies to participate in the Accelerate Program Israel, their goal being to accelerate M&A as well as R&D of the latest technology in the region by fostering Israeli startups.
Accelerate Program Israel will be a three-month program run on the basis of Samurai Incubate’s wealth of experience in the incubation of startups in both Japan and Israel. The company says that they will be able to make use of their co-working space in Tel Aviv, Samurai House in Israel, as well as the large social network they have built in the country.
In July 2014, Samurai Incubate expanded into Israel, establishing their incubation office Samurai House in the city of Tel Aviv. In January of this year they established a new fund called the Samurai Incubate Fund No.5 and has been investing in Israeli pre-seed round startups. Additionally, the company invested in Tel Aviv-based startup incubator Startup East in May, and has been strengthening exchange between the Japanese and Israeli startup communities and cooperation between the two ecosystems.
Samurai Incubate director Shouta Morozumi says that compared to China and Korea, Japan’s business presence in Israel is relatively small.
Acquisition cases of Israeli startups by Chinese businesses such as Alibaba are increasing, and Samsung is now launching an accelerator program in Israel called Runway, so compared to those kinds of developments the movement of Japanese business is quite small as of now.
In Japan there are precedents of incubation programs such as IBM BlueHub which is carried out together with IBM Japan, but the company is hoping they’ll be able to elect five or so startups with a similar framework and successfully hold a three-month accelerator program in Israel.