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Japanese stock photo service Pixta files for IPO

Pixta

Takeshi Hirano 2015.08.10

See the original story in Japanese.

Japan’s Pixta, a Tokyo-based company providing online stock photo service under the same name, had its IPO application with the Tokyo Stock Exchange approved today. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 14 September with plans to offer 180,000 shares for public subscription and to sell 68,400 shares in over-allotment options for a total of 277,900 shares. The underwriting will be led by Nomura Securities. Its share price range will be released on 3 September, bookbuilding is scheduled to start on 27 August.

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According to the consolidated statement as of December 2014, they posted a revenue of 1.07 billion yen ($8.6 million) and an ordinary profit of 98 million yen ($790,000). Their latest quarter revenue was 649 million yen ($5.2 million) with an operating profit of 74 million yen ($594,000). Major shareholders include Pixta CEO Daisuke Komata (29.27%), Global Capital Partners (22.19%), and PE&HR (16.45%).

Pixta was incorporated in August 2005 as the previous name of Onboard, followed by the launch of the Pixta online stock photo service in 2006. The website allows amateur and professional photographers to upload and sell their photos online, which is the largest service in this sector in the Japanese market. According to Tech in Asia’s report of April 2014, the company has a staff of 70 and has attracted over 120,000 photographers.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by Kurt Hanson

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Mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings partners with Philippines’ largest telco PLDT/Smart

Masaru Ikeda 2015.08.09

See the original story in Japanese. Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind PopSlide, a rewards platform for smartphone users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, recently partnered with Voyager Innovations (hereafter called Voyager), a subsidiary of Philippine Communications giant PLDT/Smart, and started offering Popslide’s service geared toward users of Voyager’s free internet service, SafeZone. In partnership with 19 major brands like Zalora, Skyscanner, Philippine Airlines , SafeZone offers free mobile internet service in exchange for using these brands’ online services. In countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Nigeria, free mobile internet connection services are being offered as part of service promotions from Facebook, Google, and others, but SafeZone, in emulation of these concepts, has made it possible for multiple brands to offer connection service over a shared platform led by the telecom company. See also: Telkomsel and Google Bring Free Mobile Internet to Indonesia (Tech in Asia) Facebook’s Internet.org app brings free mobile internet to the Philippines (Tech in Asia) Airtel, Google give customers free internet service (Vanguard) Through PopSlides participation with SafeZone, SafeZone users in the Philippines who have accumulated reward points on PopSlide by seeing ads displayed on their lock screen, will be able to easily use those points…

See the original story in Japanese.

Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind PopSlide, a rewards platform for smartphone users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, recently partnered with Voyager Innovations (hereafter called Voyager), a subsidiary of Philippine Communications giant PLDT/Smart, and started offering Popslide’s service geared toward users of Voyager’s free internet service, SafeZone.

In partnership with 19 major brands like Zalora, Skyscanner, Philippine Airlines , SafeZone offers free mobile internet service in exchange for using these brands’ online services. In countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Nigeria, free mobile internet connection services are being offered as part of service promotions from Facebook, Google, and others, but SafeZone, in emulation of these concepts, has made it possible for multiple brands to offer connection service over a shared platform led by the telecom company.

See also:

Telkomsel and Google Bring Free Mobile Internet to Indonesia (Tech in Asia)
Facebook’s Internet.org app brings free mobile internet to the Philippines (Tech in Asia)
Airtel, Google give customers free internet service (Vanguard)

Through PopSlides participation with SafeZone, SafeZone users in the Philippines who have accumulated reward points on PopSlide by seeing ads displayed on their lock screen, will be able to easily use those points to enjoy free mobile internet service. Currently there are 800,000 PopSlide users in the Southeast Asia region, but with the development of this partnership, they can expect an influx of some percentage of the Philippines 2 million SafeZone users to begin using the PopSlide service.

Yoyo Holdings co-founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada commented on the partnership with SafeZone.

Both PopSlide and SafeZone(or YOYO and Voyager) have the same vision of inspiring progress in society by providing free access to the internet through its products and partners. I’m sure that this partnership will foster more impactful collaborations through the union of business and technology.

I am so glad to be able to start providing bigger opportunities in the Philippines through our partnership with SafeZone. This is just the beginning. I believe that this is just our first step in creating disruptive innovations in user experience across the region.

Voyager COO Benje Fernandez also commented on the new partnership.

With SafeZone, brands have the opportunity to be ever-present in the lives of users through a device they always carry with them wherever they go.” said Benjie Fernandez, COO of Voyager Innovations Inc.

Our latest partnership with PopSlide is inline with our vision of working with global startups to offer the complete digital lifestyle to the Filipino for free. Now PopSlide users can be rewarded with no data charges.

As for Yoyo Holdings, surely they will be working overtime with the increase in recognition of their service by partnering with the biggest local telco. In an interview with Fukada in May of this year, it was made clear that together, there are 1,000,000 users of Popslide and Candy, a service for getting points that can be exchanged for telephone charges, in southeast Asia, and that expansion into the Indian market will be within the year.

Translated by Connor Kirk
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

news

Illuminated wooden box for drinking Japanese sake launches crowdfunding campaign

Hikari Masu

Junya Mori 2015.08.08

See the original story in Japanese. In central Japan’s Gifu Prefecture, there is a graduate university called the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, or IAMAS, which has turned out many well known creators. Recently, a new product has been introduced by the university. That product is the “Hikari Masu”, a wooden box for drinking Japanese sake featuring built-in LED lights that can be controlled through a special smartphone app to light up in different colors and patterns. The crowdfunding campaign for the “Hikari Masu” project began on July 7th and has now reached 60% of their funding goal with 54 days remaining. Funding will go towards mass production of the product. The “Hikari Masu” team was formed of graduates of IAMAS and professor Shigeru Kobayashi in September 2013 at an ideathon/hackathon aimed at new product development organized by established ventures in the area. It’s said that one day, when one member of the team who wanted to make a “masu” that lights up no matter what it took, suddenly built a prototype at home and brought it in, that was the deciding factor. Manufacturing will be handled by Gifu-based hand-crafted wooden box manufacturer Ohashi Ryoki, design and photography…

See the original story in Japanese.

In central Japan’s Gifu Prefecture, there is a graduate university called the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, or IAMAS, which has turned out many well known creators. Recently, a new product has been introduced by the university.

That product is the “Hikari Masu”, a wooden box for drinking Japanese sake featuring built-in LED lights that can be controlled through a special smartphone app to light up in different colors and patterns.

The crowdfunding campaign for the “Hikari Masu” project began on July 7th and has now reached 60% of their funding goal with 54 days remaining. Funding will go towards mass production of the product.

The “Hikari Masu” team was formed of graduates of IAMAS and professor Shigeru Kobayashi in September 2013 at an ideathon/hackathon aimed at new product development organized by established ventures in the area. It’s said that one day, when one member of the team who wanted to make a “masu” that lights up no matter what it took, suddenly built a prototype at home and brought it in, that was the deciding factor.

Manufacturing will be handled by Gifu-based hand-crafted wooden box manufacturer Ohashi Ryoki, design and photography by local printing company Sun Messe, hardware development by Trigger Device, and project management and software engineering by Pasona Tech.

The movement from ideathons and hackathons, to prototyping, to finally creating a finished product is a very interesting process to follow. The amount of companies carrying this kind of technological strength in Japan is quite impressive.

If we continue to see the spread of this pattern of using crowdfunding platforms to turn ideas into tangible things, surely we’ll be seeing more and more interesting products coming from many different areas of the country.

Translated by Connor Kirk
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

news

Japan’s WOVN.io helps websites improve search engine visibility in any language

WOVN.io

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2015.08.05

See the original story in Japanese. WOVN.io instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment only by adding a single Javascript code to the website source. They started providing a premium edition in February, followed by participating in the pitch competition at Echelon in Singapore this July as the only team from Japan. We were told that the service has been adopted into more than 4,500 websites in the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Spain and other countries. Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies, the Japanese startup behind WOVN.io, recently made two announcements: partnering with Recruit Communications, a marketing-focused subsidiary under Japan’s Recruit Holdings (TSE:6098), and launching SEO-enabled library WOVN++ in beta. Based on a partnership with Recruit Communications, WOVN.io will be implemented into various media websites provided by Recruit Holdings group companies. Coinciding with leveraging the company’s in-house online dictionary, the solution will be used to translate 12 websites into several languages, starting with English, Chinese and Korean, in 2015 Q3. In our previous articles covering WOVN.io, we have heard many voices from users concerned about how the solution will have an impact on SEO results. To address this issue, the company introduced a library called WOVN++ in Ruby and PHP, which creates a static HTML source code rather than dynamically generating a translated webpage so…

See the original story in Japanese.

WOVN.io instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment only by adding a single Javascript code to the website source. They started providing a premium edition in February, followed by participating in the pitch competition at Echelon in Singapore this July as the only team from Japan. We were told that the service has been adopted into more than 4,500 websites in the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Spain and other countries.

Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies, the Japanese startup behind WOVN.io, recently made two announcements: partnering with Recruit Communications, a marketing-focused subsidiary under Japan’s Recruit Holdings (TSE:6098), and launching SEO-enabled library WOVN++ in beta.

Based on a partnership with Recruit Communications, WOVN.io will be implemented into various media websites provided by Recruit Holdings group companies. Coinciding with leveraging the company’s in-house online dictionary, the solution will be used to translate 12 websites into several languages, starting with English, Chinese and Korean, in 2015 Q3.

In our previous articles covering WOVN.io, we have heard many voices from users concerned about how the solution will have an impact on SEO results. To address this issue, the company introduced a library called WOVN++ in Ruby and PHP, which creates a static HTML source code rather than dynamically generating a translated webpage so that translated pages are also scanned for search engine results.

Minimal Technologies CEO Takaharu Hayashi said that typical Japanese companies are less likely to forget SEO measures when establishing a media site or an e-commerce site which targets overseas markets.

Hayashi explained:

Even Google does not have much market share in China or Korea as well as in Japan; China is dominated by Baidu and Korea by Naver, where different SEO measures may be required respectively. WOVN++ can work well with these different local search engines, driving user traffic from many other countries. We will focus on optimizing our solution to more search engines in the Southeast Asian region.

One can use the WOVN++ library in beta regardless of which service plan subscribed to. Going forward, the company wants to support an additional feature allowing users to display their website in the upper level of search results.

WOVN.io earns 90% of its entire revenue stream from their enterprise plan users. Currently payable in Japanese yen, however, the company recently registered a branch office in California to enable accepting payments in US dollars; they can now improve the new feature to better serve users in Japan and the rest of the world.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by Masaru Ikeda and “Tex” Pomeroy

news

Japan’s Factelier starts global shipping, serving the world with quality apparel products

factelier

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2015.08.05

See the original story in Japanese.Kyushu-based fashion e-commerce website Factelier creates made-in-Japan quality apparel products by partnering directly with well-established Japanese factories. By eliminating the middlemen in fashion distribution by working directly with manufacturers, the resulting products can be purchased at a third of the department store prices. See also: Skipping the middleman: Japanese startup goes to the source for high-quality shirts Japanese ecommerce service boasts 70% returning users The website rolled out an English-language interface and started global shipping earlier this week. International users can purchase Factelier’s products on the website and receive them in more than 120 countries by paying the extra flat-rate shipping fee of 2,800 yen (about $22.5). Since before the roll-out of the English-language interface, Factelier has been receiving orders from more than 100 countries including Asian countries like Taiwan, China, Indonesia and Thailand, in addition to the U.S., UK and France. When one visits the website from outside Japan, a language switcher widget will pop up onscreen so that the preferred language (English or Japanese) can be selected. Japan is known globally for its high-level offerings, from customer service to product quality. Living in Los Angeles, I often realize the brand value of made-in-Japan and from-Japan products. So there is a high demand for Japanese apparel products worldwide. Factelier is planning to add more supporting…

See the original story in Japanese.Kyushu-based fashion e-commerce website Factelier creates made-in-Japan quality apparel products by partnering directly with well-established Japanese factories. By eliminating the middlemen in fashion distribution by working directly with manufacturers, the resulting products can be purchased at a third of the department store prices.

See also:

The website rolled out an English-language interface and started global shipping earlier this week. International users can purchase Factelier’s products on the website and receive them in more than 120 countries by paying the extra flat-rate shipping fee of 2,800 yen (about $22.5).

Since before the roll-out of the English-language interface, Factelier has been receiving orders from more than 100 countries including Asian countries like Taiwan, China, Indonesia and Thailand, in addition to the U.S., UK and France. When one visits the website from outside Japan, a language switcher widget will pop up onscreen so that the preferred language (English or Japanese) can be selected.

Japan is known globally for its high-level offerings, from customer service to product quality. Living in Los Angeles, I often realize the brand value of made-in-Japan and from-Japan products. So there is a high demand for Japanese apparel products worldwide.

Factelier is planning to add more supporting languages in the future.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

news

Japanese stock photo service Pixta opens in Taiwan, sees 500% YoY increase

Pixta

Shintaro Eguchi 2015.08.05

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Pixta provides royalty-free stock photography, illustrations, and videos. Seeing an increase in downloads of five times last year’s numbers, the company is now looking to expand into the Taiwanese market. They announced the establishment of a new location in Taiwan which began business operations on July 16th. This is Pixta’s 2nd overseas location after their Singapore office. Pixta released its English and Chinese versions in 2013, and in November of the same year established a location in Singapore, expanding their business into Asia. Meanwhile, this year picture downloads in Taiwan have increased rapidly. Results of studies have shown that in addition to a high interest in fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, there is a particularly large demand for materials featuring Japanese models. Due to the coming influx of tourism to Japan along with the need to present a new image for the nation, they have created a special Japan Page featuring only images of Japan and its people. With a new location in Taiwan, Pixta will expand their marketing efforts to establish themselves locally while continuing to focus on these sorts of user needs. In conjunction with this change, the Japanese images page has…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Pixta provides royalty-free stock photography, illustrations, and videos. Seeing an increase in downloads of five times last year’s numbers, the company is now looking to expand into the Taiwanese market. They announced the establishment of a new location in Taiwan which began business operations on July 16th. This is Pixta’s 2nd overseas location after their Singapore office.

Pixta released its English and Chinese versions in 2013, and in November of the same year established a location in Singapore, expanding their business into Asia. Meanwhile, this year picture downloads in Taiwan have increased rapidly. Results of studies have shown that in addition to a high interest in fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, there is a particularly large demand for materials featuring Japanese models.

Due to the coming influx of tourism to Japan along with the need to present a new image for the nation, they have created a special Japan Page featuring only images of Japan and its people. With a new location in Taiwan, Pixta will expand their marketing efforts to establish themselves locally while continuing to focus on these sorts of user needs.

In conjunction with this change, the Japanese images page has now also been made available for the traditional Chinese version of Pixta. The page features travel locations that are popular amongst Taiwanese such as Tokyo, Mt. Fuji, Kyoto, Hokkaido, as well as other destinations in Japan. Using photos and other materials, the company hopes to show the appeal of Japan and meet the needs of the increasing demand.

Due to all of the attention being focused on Japan with to the coming Olympic games and other events, many industries are concentrating their efforts on dealing with the influx of people, which is why businesses are moving to present the appeal of Japan through photos and illustrations. On that front you could say that Pixta is hitting the iron while is hot.

Translated by Connor Kirk
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

Japanese stock photo service Pixta files for IPO

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