Masaru started his career as a programmer/engineer, and previously co-founded several system integration companies and consulting firms. He’s been traveling around Silicon Valley and Asia exploring the IT industry, and he also curates event updates for the Tokyo edition of Startup Digest.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Beatrobo introduced its device called PlugAir back in October 2013. When installed on a smartphone, it recognizes a unique identification code embedded in the small gadget. So companies can deliver content to their targeted consumer segments using it. Since the company has been providing a music service, they are trying to sell the gadget to the music industry to help them better engage fans for their artist group. Beatrobo partnered with American mixture band Linkin Park late last year, and started offering the gadget to Japanese music artist Mihiro to sell it to his fans at his live concert venues. Our regular readers may recall that Beatrobo fundraised $1.1 million from Japanese music retailer chain Lawson HMV Entertainment back in April in order to strengthen the PlugAir business. And now, here’s big news again. The company offers PlugAir devices to ticket holders for live tour concerts of Japanese popular pop music band TM Network. If you buy a ticket, it will be delivered to you along with a PlugAir device, so you can enjoy special content using mobile prior to the event. They announced this is a world first that the device…
Tokyo-based startup Beatrobo introduced its device called PlugAir back in October 2013. When installed on a smartphone, it recognizes a unique identification code embedded in the small gadget. So companies can deliver content to their targeted consumer segments using it. Since the company has been providing a music service, they are trying to sell the gadget to the music industry to help them better engage fans for their artist group.
And now, here’s big news again. The company offers PlugAir devices to ticket holders for live tour concerts of Japanese popular pop music band TM Network. If you buy a ticket, it will be delivered to you along with a PlugAir device, so you can enjoy special content using mobile prior to the event. They announced this is a world first that the device is used as a reward for concert ticket holders.
Regardless of whether you want to buy a ticket with or without the device, it will be sold for the same price of 9,000 yen (about $90), which is made possible because of its highly functional but low-cost production. So live event organizers or music labels are more likely to better engage music fans who are using it without facing a heavy burden.
Beatrobo has been collaborating with Los Angeles-based creative think tank MachineShop which helped the former company partner with Linkin Park. So it is interesting to see how they will go forward in the music industry in the US from their starting point in Beverly Hills or Hollywood, as well as boosting their business in that of their home turf of Japan.
Bloomberg reported earlier today that Tokyo-based Gunosy, the company behind the curation news app under the same name, has secured funds worth 1.2 billion yen ($12 million) from Japanese telco KDDI (TSE:9433), investment firm Jafco, and B Dash Ventures. This follows their previous funds worth $12 million from KDDI back in March. Regarding the money raised back in March, the company used over 80% of it to broadcast a TV commercial to increase penetration of their news app among Japanese consumers. They recently launched the app in the US and UK markets over the last few months, and it is told that they plan to use the funds raised at this time to intensify their global promotion efforts. In this sector of the Japanese market, we’ve seen a number of competitors like SmartNews, NewsPick, Antenna, and Kamelio. In the US market, we’ve also seen that Flipboard surpassed 85 million users last year and acquired news reader app Zite from CNN back in March. In our recent interview with the company’s co-CEO Shinji Kimura, he told us that they are targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide in three years.
Bloomberg reported earlier today that Tokyo-based Gunosy, the company behind the curation news app under the same name, has secured funds worth 1.2 billion yen ($12 million) from Japanese telco KDDI (TSE:9433), investment firm Jafco, and B Dash Ventures. This follows their previous funds worth $12 million from KDDI back in March.
Regarding the money raised back in March, the company used over 80% of it to broadcast a TV commercial to increase penetration of their news app among Japanese consumers. They recently launched the app in the US and UK markets over the last few months, and it is told that they plan to use the funds raised at this time to intensify their global promotion efforts.
In our recent interview with the company’s co-CEO Shinji Kimura, he told us that they are targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide in three years.
See the original story in Japanese. ZenFotomatic is a cloud-based automated photo cropping and enhancement tool and was recently introduced by an Osaka-based startup called Glams. Since its beta launch back in September 2013, the service has acquired more than 1,200 accounts from Japan as well as over 600 accounts from abroad. Photos often need to be color corrected or trimmed before uploading to a website, regardless of how much carefully you consider camera settings like resolution or white balance when you take a photo. It is not difficult to enhance one or two photos manually. But for apparel e-commerce sites that list a number of item photos this task can be very time-consuming and even hinder their regular business operations. Glams has also its own online store in Japan’s largest online shopping mall Rakuten. In suffering from busy, yet non-productive, routine tasks every day, the Osaka outfit came up with the idea developing ZenFotomatic to improve the situation. The company’s co-founder and CEO Daisuke Miura told us a bit about it. Unlike big fashion e-commerce sites, in-mall online stores have to list a new item as soon as it arrives. Because the earlier you can list it, the higher…
ZenFotomatic is a cloud-based automated photo cropping and enhancement tool and was recently introduced by an Osaka-based startup called Glams. Since its beta launch back in September 2013, the service has acquired more than 1,200 accounts from Japan as well as over 600 accounts from abroad.
Photos often need to be color corrected or trimmed before uploading to a website, regardless of how much carefully you consider camera settings like resolution or white balance when you take a photo. It is not difficult to enhance one or two photos manually. But for apparel e-commerce sites that list a number of item photos this task can be very time-consuming and even hinder their regular business operations.
Glams has also its own online store in Japan’s largest online shopping mall Rakuten. In suffering from busy, yet non-productive, routine tasks every day, the Osaka outfit came up with the idea developing ZenFotomatic to improve the situation. The company’s co-founder and CEO Daisuke Miura told us a bit about it.
Daisuke Miura
Unlike big fashion e-commerce sites, in-mall online stores have to list a new item as soon as it arrives. Because the earlier you can list it, the higher rank in a search result your item will be listed in. So it’s more likely for you to acquire potential buyers.
However, the photo enhancement process is very tough for online stores, especially for the ones with a small team like us. We are a five-person team but were often forced to work overnight for enhancing photos. We thought that more than a few online merchants have the same problem. To address it, I was jestingly discussing with New Zealander engineer Blain Hosford in my team, and he subsequently completed ZenFotomatic.
If you set a certain threshold in the app, it can automatically detect the boundary of a object and its background in a photo using a proprietary algorithm, which is obviously the core technology. It has no feature yet to learn user preference, but if you claim that your picture is inappropriately processed, it will be transferred to the Glams engineering team and they will analyze it to optimize the algorithm.
Their service prices start from 2,500 yen (almost $25) for enhancing 100 photos. The service is originally designed for small-sized and shorthanded online stores, but now even several big e-commerce companies are using it as well, so it seems like they also have a monthly flat rate pricing plan for such heavy users.
We understand that they maintain its focus on the Japanese market for now but wants to begin global expansion as money can be raised while an appropriate operating officer in addition to good engineers can be hired. The Glams CEO added:
The e-commerce ratio in Japan is as low as 3%, which is obviously lower than that of the US (5 to 7%) and UK (9%). I think there will be more opportunities available outside the country. Our service is non-verbal so we really want to reach out to the global market in the future.
Image composite feature
The company recently added a new feature that allows you to composite your preferred images very easily. For online store owners, it makes you easier to add stickers or logos to a number of your existing photos in a batch operation.
When I heard about this feature for the first time, I couldn’t understand why there is a need for it because from the developer’s perspective, I thought these image composite features are usually supported on the e-commerce platform side. In a response to my question, Miura explained:
Our potential users are small and medium-sized online store owners. Many of their stores are located in a big online mall, where they have no way to generate composited images dynamically. They usually complete processing images on their desktops and upload such completed static images to the website. So we added the feature and enabled users to complete these processes in a batch operation on the ZenFotomatic cloud.
Talking about e-commerce solutions, we like to imagine big ones designed for big e-commerce players. But I think Glams added this feature in order to provide more convenience to in-mall store owners.
I often hear from Japanese e-commerce company NetPrice.com’s CEO Teruhide Sato, who’s best known for having invested in payments processors and logistics operators in Turkey, India, and Indonesia, that there’s a common pattern for the e-commerce industry in the process of spreading in any country. Now we see several fulfillment services for e-commerce operators in developing countries, so we may probably expect ZenFotomatic to become one of the standards and an essential item for all e-commerce players around the world soon.
See the original story in Japanese. Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore. Why so confident? Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors: Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20. Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region…
Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore.
Why so confident?
Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors:
Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20.
Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region because we’ve seen no competitors focused on such a niche space.
Adding multilingual options
Many of their users come from Japan and the Southeast Asian regions. To address a latency issue for them, the company’s cloud facilities are located in Singapore and Osaka, Japan. Using the funds raised this time, they plan to set up another facility in Palo Alto to prepare for their expansion to the US market and also add user support offices in Palo Alto and Indonesia to the existing locations in Singapore and Osaka. Fujimoto explained:
Since WordPress accounts for over 20% of all websites in the world, everyone knows how it’s sure to monetize. We’re still as young as six months old, but we’ve been receiving many takeover offers from companies like telcos in Asia and Silicon Valley-based companies expecting expansions to the Asian markets. But we have no intention to accept their offers for now.
Sova is also in talk with a undisclosed Japanese hosting company to provide a white label service for their customers. So you’ll be able to see a WordPress cloud hosting service branded with a major Japanese company pretty soon. The service is currently available in English and Japanese, but plan to add Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Spanish to its language options next month.
Launching freemium hosting plan
Earlier this week, the company started accepting applications for their freemium hosting plan called Sova WP Free. Now that they’ve got the funds and a measurable number of paying users, so they thought it’s good to launch the premium plan to gain their awareness amongst potential customers. Fujimoto added:
It’s a freemium service but has a feature to boost the capacity of your environment to withstand up to 1 million daily page views. We’re developing our own ad network platform, which will enables blog owners using our service to monetize their content. It’s also available for mobile browsing. Typical WordPress templates are limited in its variety of design, but we will provide many templates using responsive designs and give users more choices.
We understand that they are trying to secure a series A funding worth an amount ranging from $10 to $15 million by the end of October.
I was curious about how Fujimoto have been working prior to this business. He told me that he started his own business while he was attending Kyoto University. Subsequently he launched an IT business and sold it over to a big Japanese IT company back in 2009. He’s busy flying back and forth between Singapore and Palo Alto for setting up their first office in the US.
See the original story in Japanese. Some of our readers may know Japanese recruiting company LiveSense succeeded in IPO back in 2012 with the business model giving rewards to users when securing a new job using the company’s platform. This business model has been adopted at more than a few sites in this space, and such companies include Taiwan-based job search site Job178 which recently fundraised from Japanese internet company Mixi. Following this trend, Job Talents was officially launched back in March in Thailand. The service was launched by Yojiro Koshi who was previously working with Japanese mobile ad network company Nobot (acquired by Japanese telco KDDI’s subsidiary Mediba back in 2011) for their business developments in Thailand. He figured out that the new wave of innovation has not yet reached the Thai recruiting industry, and is trying to bring never-before-seen services to this space. Koshi told us how they plan to evolve their business from now: We plan to add a feature that helps our users create their resumes. Because many people are not used to create a resume or have no custom to attach their portrait to it. We recently invited a Thai consultant to our team. She…
Following this trend, Job Talents was officially launched back in March in Thailand. The service was launched by Yojiro Koshi who was previously working with Japanese mobile ad network company Nobot (acquired by Japanese telco KDDI’s subsidiary Mediba back in 2011) for their business developments in Thailand. He figured out that the new wave of innovation has not yet reached the Thai recruiting industry, and is trying to bring never-before-seen services to this space. Koshi told us how they plan to evolve their business from now:
We plan to add a feature that helps our users create their resumes. Because many people are not used to create a resume or have no custom to attach their portrait to it. We recently invited a Thai consultant to our team. She has been helping a lot of local people get employed again in Thailand. We will also give our users advice on creating a resume or an employment interview.
Japanese gaming publisher Donuts is hiring game designers for their local subsidiary in Thailand using Job Talents.
The company is currently a five-person team comprising of Japanese, Thai, and American staff. One of the biggest issues they are facing is that they are not able to roll out additional features and interface improvements so fast. In order to address this, they expect to raise money this summer for hiring new engineers, and are exploring funding opportunities for it now.
In this space in the Southeast Asian region, we’ve seen competitors like Jobtopgun (Thailand), jobsDB (Hong Kong), and JobStreet.com (Malaysia). Koshi is devoting himself to adjusting his service to the needs of the Thai job seekers, and he has receiving advice from famous Thai entrepreneur Natavudh Pungcharoenpon, CEO of Thai e-publication startup Ookbee which recently fundraised from Japanese system integration company Trans Cosmos.
Since its launched earlier this year, Job Talents has acquired about 1,000 job seekers and 100 companies, so they still need to work harder to show a more active presence amongst the Thai people. We understand that their marketing still depend only on Facebook ads Google Adwords, so I expect them to do it better making good use of the Line app which has the world’s second largest user population in Thailand.
Tokyo-based mobile app developer Ignis announced yesterday that it has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Market. The company will be listed on July 15th. Since its launch back in May of 2010, the company has surpassed over 50 million downloads by attracting users with more than 75 apps for iOS and Android. Their best selling apps include ‘AKB48 virtual phone’ ( iOS / Android ) which delivers new voice messages from the members of Japanese pop singer group AKB48 every month and allows you to enjoy listening to their messages in a way like talking over the phone with someone. Via IT Media, Venture Now
From the left: CEO Kon Sen, CTO Takaaki Suzuki (Image from Ignis’ website)
Tokyo-based mobile app developer Ignis announced yesterday that it has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Market. The company will be listed on July 15th.
Since its launch back in May of 2010, the company has surpassed over 50 million downloads by attracting users with more than 75 apps for iOS and Android.
Their best selling apps include ‘AKB48 virtual phone’ ( iOS / Android ) which delivers new voice messages from the members of Japanese pop singer group AKB48 every month and allows you to enjoy listening to their messages in a way like talking over the phone with someone.
Tokyo-based Social Recruiting, the startup that provides consultation about recruitment using social media services, announced today that it has fundraised from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Details of the investment were not disclosed but it’s likely worth around several million US dollars. The company was launched back in 2011 and subsequently secured a seed funding from Tokyo-based seed startup incubator Samurai Incubate. They have been serving about 400 companies and helping their recruitment activities. In terms of the size of their user base, the company has acquired more than 200,000 annual users which accounts for about one-third of all new graduates looking for jobs in Japan. The company’s CEO Hirofumi Kasuga explained that they plan to use the funds raised this time for their global business expansion, especially focused on the Southeast Asian region. via TechCrunch Japan
Tokyo-based Social Recruiting, the startup that provides consultation about recruitment using social media services, announced today that it has fundraised from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Details of the investment were not disclosed but it’s likely worth around several million US dollars.
The company was launched back in 2011 and subsequently secured a seed funding from Tokyo-based seed startup incubator Samurai Incubate. They have been serving about 400 companies and helping their recruitment activities. In terms of the size of their user base, the company has acquired more than 200,000 annual users which accounts for about one-third of all new graduates looking for jobs in Japan.
The company’s CEO Hirofumi Kasuga explained that they plan to use the funds raised this time for their global business expansion, especially focused on the Southeast Asian region.
See the original story in Japanese. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and the head of the WordPress project, visited Japan last week. He visited Tokyo on a promotion tour in the APAC region, following Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore. After attending their meet-up event with the local WordPress community where we spoke with him, he planed to visit Osaka, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. He explained: We have an office in SoMA, San Francisco, but I’ve not been there in the past four months. When you are in San Francisco, feel free to visit our office. But I may or may not be there when you visit us. Because we can work anywhere in the world. I can tell our headquarters is where I am. When he visited Japan last time five years ago, he saw many people using i-mode with their feature phone handsets, which is totally different from the current situation where smartphones are well penetrated. When we asked about the state of the WordPress community here in Japan, he said the blogging platform is still only for early adopters, which is very similar to the state of the WordPress community in the US back in 2005…
Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and the head of the WordPress project, visited Japan last week. He visited Tokyo on a promotion tour in the APAC region, following Korea, Indonesia, and Singapore.
After attending their meet-up event with the local WordPress community where we spoke with him, he planed to visit Osaka, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. He explained:
We have an office in SoMA, San Francisco, but I’ve not been there in the past four months. When you are in San Francisco, feel free to visit our office. But I may or may not be there when you visit us. Because we can work anywhere in the world. I can tell our headquarters is where I am.
When he visited Japan last time five years ago, he saw many people using i-mode with their feature phone handsets, which is totally different from the current situation where smartphones are well penetrated. When we asked about the state of the WordPress community here in Japan, he said the blogging platform is still only for early adopters, which is very similar to the state of the WordPress community in the US back in 2005 or 2006. He added:
If you compare the state of the community to a baseball game, it’s still one inning. So we want to more penetrate WordPress in Japan. That’s why we want to hire good people from Japan. That’s one of biggest reasons why I visited Japan this time.
Among their 250-person team, about one-third of them are committed to user support while the rest of them are engineers, designers and administration staff. ‘Working from everywhere’ is certainly one of their uniquenesses, so only 15 people are working in their headquarters in San Francisco. They have no Japanese employee other than Naoko Takano, their ‘globalizer‘ personnel based in Tokyo.
English would be one of obstacles when typical Japanese people work with them. However, Matt told us with laughter that “You will need to read English but no need to speak in English.” (since internal communication in his company is entirely web-based.) It is obvious that Matt is eager to hire more people from Japan to better serve the local WordPress community comprising of more than a few WordPress users.
We raised a larger amount of money than typical IPOs. We want to control our company by ourselves and have no need of an IPO for now. WordPress became eleven years old two months ago. The money raised this time is to prepare for our next ten years.
We understand that the company plans to use the funds to intensify system developments, especially for mobile optimization for iPhone and Android handsets. In a view of that, his intention hiring Japanese engineers is quite natural since Japan is more advanced in mobile than any western countries.
It is told that websites using WordPress as their platform account for over 20% in all sites in the world. With a limited number of 250 employees, they have generated such a big traffic share larger than that from internet giants like Facebook and Google. It will be interesting to see how their future employees from Japan and the rest of the world will bring WordPress beyond a blogging environment or a content management system to an entirely new concept.
Tokyo-based Metaps, the startup that operates mobile monetization platform for app developers, launched a flea market app called Spike Box yesterday. The app is available in English and Japanese for Android and was developed as a sister app of their freemium payments platform Spike launched back in April. It allows you to set your item in one of four statuses – for sale, trade, rent, or giveaway – and post it with a hashtag on Facebook for sharing with your friends. In this way, you don’t need to waste your unused item but can help other people obtain it from you without buying a new one. Busy people are unlikely to use auction sites because they consider submitting their items to these sites to be time-consuming. That’s why the company has developed this app and enables facilitated trading of items via Facebook social graph. Via Venture Now
Tokyo-based Metaps, the startup that operates mobile monetization platform for app developers, launched a flea market app called Spike Box yesterday. The app is available in English and Japanese for Android and was developed as a sister app of their freemium payments platform Spike launched back in April.
It allows you to set your item in one of four statuses – for sale, trade, rent, or giveaway – and post it with a hashtag on Facebook for sharing with your friends. In this way, you don’t need to waste your unused item but can help other people obtain it from you without buying a new one.
Busy people are unlikely to use auction sites because they consider submitting their items to these sites to be time-consuming. That’s why the company has developed this app and enables facilitated trading of items via Facebook social graph.
Tokyo-based Creema, the startup behind the C2C marketplace for handmade items, announced today that it has raised 100 million yen (about $1 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund. The company plans to use the funds for system development efforts to give users better experience. In this space, we’ve seen many startups like Etsy (US), Creatty (Japan), and Pinkoi (Taiwan). But Creema is one of the oldest companies among them. Since its launch back in June of 2010, the company has acquired 18,000 creators and they have submitted over 500,000 items on the platform. Their founder and CEO Kotaro Marubayashi explained why they have grown their platform business spending a long time: I think this kind of websites usually takes time to make users understand what’s interesting. That’s why we’ve been carefully developing this community. What makes us unique from other similar services is that most of our creators are making a living by selling their items here. Their items are completely different from what people create as their hobby in their spare time. In order to gain people’s awareness for handmade products, the company holds an exhibition called ‘HandMade in Japan Fes‘ every year as well as has a real…
Tokyo-based Creema, the startup behind the C2C marketplace for handmade items, announced today that it has raised 100 million yen (about $1 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund. The company plans to use the funds for system development efforts to give users better experience.
In this space, we’ve seen many startups like Etsy (US), Creatty (Japan), and Pinkoi (Taiwan). But Creema is one of the oldest companies among them. Since its launch back in June of 2010, the company has acquired 18,000 creators and they have submitted over 500,000 items on the platform.
Their founder and CEO Kotaro Marubayashi explained why they have grown their platform business spending a long time:
I think this kind of websites usually takes time to make users understand what’s interesting. That’s why we’ve been carefully developing this community. What makes us unique from other similar services is that most of our creators are making a living by selling their items here. Their items are completely different from what people create as their hobby in their spare time.
Creema’s flagship store in Shinjuku
In order to gain people’s awareness for handmade products, the company holds an exhibition called ‘HandMade in Japan Fes‘ every year as well as has a real flagship store in the Shinjuku Lumine department store. As a result of these efforts, they have surpassed 15 million monthly page views, and the amount of transactions through their platform grows at a pace of 400% every year. Some creators earn more than $10,000 a month despite the fact that most of items are one-off originals.
Coinciding the funding, the company drives user traffic from Au Smart Pass, the unlimited app download service by KDDI, planning to add several payment methods for KDDI’s smartphone subscribers. Marubayashi added:
We’ve been developing our service diligently and steadily. We have a good revenue stream but we can try out something new using the money raised this time. But we’re not interested in increasing page views using ads. We believe there’s a huge potential in the manufacturing culture. We’ll focus on improving our system infrastructure to better serve our users.
In view of the Japanese C2C market, this handmade item market can create new values while second-hand platforms are saturated with mobile apps like Mercari and Fril. Since Japanese manufactured items are favorably rated among foreign consumers, we can expect this marketplace to meet demands from outside the country as well.
