THE BRIDGE

Masaru Ikeda

Masaru Ikeda

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.

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Japanese company unveils mobile UI component generator

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Tokyo-based system developer Asial announced today that it has launched a component generator for mobile app developers called Onsen CSS components. It’s available in English and Japanese. While HTML5 technology lets developers create for multiple platforms, it remains difficult to develop the kind of user experience found in native apps. To address this problem, their solution lets you to generate user interface components and download them for free. So you don’t need to develop a user interface from scratch when you develop a HTML5 app. The component generator has more than 20 design framework patterns, and you can choose your prefered color scheme for the interface, with an the inspection function that lets you inspect HTML and CSS code. You can migrate the interface to your app under development by simply copying the generated codes. Asial is perhaps best known for having created the mobile development environment Monaca, which won the second place in pitch competition at Global Brain’s showcase event last year.

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Tokyo-based system developer Asial announced today that it has launched a component generator for mobile app developers called Onsen CSS components. It’s available in English and Japanese.

While HTML5 technology lets developers create for multiple platforms, it remains difficult to develop the kind of user experience found in native apps. To address this problem, their solution lets you to generate user interface components and download them for free. So you don’t need to develop a user interface from scratch when you develop a HTML5 app.

The component generator has more than 20 design framework patterns, and you can choose your prefered color scheme for the interface, with an the inspection function that lets you inspect HTML and CSS code. You can migrate the interface to your app under development by simply copying the generated codes.

Asial is perhaps best known for having created the mobile development environment Monaca, which won the second place in pitch competition at Global Brain’s showcase event last year.

Japan’s Crowd Cast partners with UK-based global expense firm SpendVision

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Tokyo-based Crowd Cast is the developer a mobile app that helps business people complete expense reimbursement at their companies. In an effort to expand its business, the startup announced earlier this week that it has partnered with UK expense firm SpendVision. The company plans to integrate its solution with SpendVision’s platform that matches expense history with credit card billing and submits it to accounting for approval. Crowd Cast will also co-develop solutions with SpendVision and start global marketing expansion focused on Europe and Asia. Crowd Cast’s founder and CEO Takashi Hoshikawa explained: By tying up with a global company like SpendVision, we can even beat Concur, the leading company in this space. I believe financial technology is a space where Japanese startups can defeat US companies. Crowd Cast launched an expense reimbursement iOS app called BizNote Expense late last year, introducing an Android version last month. They are planning to establish an office in London later this year, primarily for the purpose of hiring talented people and learning about cutting edge trends from the global financial hub.

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Tokyo-based Crowd Cast is the developer a mobile app that helps business people complete expense reimbursement at their companies. In an effort to expand its business, the startup announced earlier this week that it has partnered with UK expense firm SpendVision.

The company plans to integrate its solution with SpendVision’s platform that matches expense history with credit card billing and submits it to accounting for approval. Crowd Cast will also co-develop solutions with SpendVision and start global marketing expansion focused on Europe and Asia.

Crowd Cast’s founder and CEO Takashi Hoshikawa explained:

By tying up with a global company like SpendVision, we can even beat Concur, the leading company in this space. I believe financial technology is a space where Japanese startups can defeat US companies.

Crowd Cast launched an expense reimbursement iOS app called BizNote Expense late last year, introducing an Android version last month. They are planning to establish an office in London later this year, primarily for the purpose of hiring talented people and learning about cutting edge trends from the global financial hub.

Japanese video app MixChannel surpasses 10 million monthly plays

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Tokyo-based app developer Donuts announced yesterday that its mobile video community app MixChannel has surpassed 10 million monthly movie plays. The app allows you to record and edit a short 10-second movie, and then share it with other users on the platform. To differentiate from similar apps, it lets you to add audio after shooting, or you can create entirely new movies by mixing those posted by others. The iOS app was launched back in December and recently added an English-language interface with the goal of building the biggest movie-sharing platform in Asia. To help achieve this, they will launch an Android app this summer. (For Android users, a lite version is available in Japanese.) In this space, we’ve already seen Japanese movie app SlideStory which lets you to share a 32-second slideshow movie with others. Japanese startup Cinammon is also targeting the region with its picture-with-audio sharing mobile app. via Venture Now

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Tokyo-based app developer Donuts announced yesterday that its mobile video community app MixChannel has surpassed 10 million monthly movie plays.

The app allows you to record and edit a short 10-second movie, and then share it with other users on the platform. To differentiate from similar apps, it lets you to add audio after shooting, or you can create entirely new movies by mixing those posted by others.

The iOS app was launched back in December and recently added an English-language interface with the goal of building the biggest movie-sharing platform in Asia. To help achieve this, they will launch an Android app this summer. (For Android users, a lite version is available in Japanese.)

In this space, we’ve already seen Japanese movie app SlideStory which lets you to share a 32-second slideshow movie with others. Japanese startup Cinammon is also targeting the region with its picture-with-audio sharing mobile app.

mixchannel_screenshot1 mixchannel_screenshot2

via Venture Now

Japanese location-based search engine Pathee raises $1.3 million

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Tokyo-based Trietrue, the startup that operates location-based (Japanese) search engine Pathee, announced yesterday that it has raised 130 million yen (about $1.3 million) from Japanese digital marketing company Opt and Daiwa PI Partners. Pathee is a search engine focused on helping users obtain more relevant search results using the location detection technology. You may have sometimes seen such location-specific results when using search services like Google or Yahoo. For example, when you need to find a bathroom, you can simply enter ‘toilet’ in a search bar of the app, and it will navigate you to any of the bathrooms within a five-minute walk from where you are. What’s unique here is the result includes the locations of bathrooms in shopping complexes or other public premises, despite the fact that Google Maps can only show you a list of intentionally designated ‘public bathrooms’. The service currently is available only as a mobile web app, but an iOS app will be coming at the end of May. via TechCrunch Japan

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Tokyo-based Trietrue, the startup that operates location-based (Japanese) search engine Pathee, announced yesterday that it has raised 130 million yen (about $1.3 million) from Japanese digital marketing company Opt and Daiwa PI Partners. Pathee is a search engine focused on helping users obtain more relevant search results using the location detection technology. You may have sometimes seen such location-specific results when using search services like Google or Yahoo.

For example, when you need to find a bathroom, you can simply enter ‘toilet’ in a search bar of the app, and it will navigate you to any of the bathrooms within a five-minute walk from where you are. What’s unique here is the result includes the locations of bathrooms in shopping complexes or other public premises, despite the fact that Google Maps can only show you a list of intentionally designated ‘public bathrooms’.

The service currently is available only as a mobile web app, but an iOS app will be coming at the end of May.

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via TechCrunch Japan

Task management tool ‘Jooto’ targets Japanese businesses

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See the original story in Japanese. While startups and freelancers tend to be more agile and flexible, they might fall behind in task management if team members work at different locations or have communication issues. There are a wide range of business tools out there for messaging or knowledge sharing, but we still find ourselves taking notes or writing on post-its and sticking them around the office. Of course, you can’t share updates with team members efficiently in this way. To address this problem, a new task management tool emerged earlier this year, featuring a beautiful graphical interface and drag-and-drop operability. It’s called Jooto. The development team has been improving the app based on feedback from test users since its launch of its closed beta back in January. The official launch was earlier this month. While the app is unique in its own right, the team behind it is also worthy of mention. They have their design and operations team in Singapore, system development in Hanoi, but they have chosen to target the Japanese market only. Interestingly their marketing team is not based in Tokyo, but instead on the remote island of Ishigaki, at the south-western end of the Japanese…

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See the original story in Japanese.

While startups and freelancers tend to be more agile and flexible, they might fall behind in task management if team members work at different locations or have communication issues. There are a wide range of business tools out there for messaging or knowledge sharing, but we still find ourselves taking notes or writing on post-its and sticking them around the office. Of course, you can’t share updates with team members efficiently in this way.

To address this problem, a new task management tool emerged earlier this year, featuring a beautiful graphical interface and drag-and-drop operability. It’s called Jooto. The development team has been improving the app based on feedback from test users since its launch of its closed beta back in January. The official launch was earlier this month.

While the app is unique in its own right, the team behind it is also worthy of mention. They have their design and operations team in Singapore, system development in Hanoi, but they have chosen to target the Japanese market only. Interestingly their marketing team is not based in Tokyo, but instead on the remote island of Ishigaki, at the south-western end of the Japanese archipelago.

Tomoko Devidal, the head of Nano Marketing who manages the app’s marketing efforts, told us why they operate in this way:

Since our app Jooto is developed for multilingual use, our global expansion is not so challenging from an engineering perspective. But since every startup has limited resources, we have to narrow our marketing focus. The app was developed by Skipforward in Singapore, a place where we couldn’t see a huge market opportunity. That’s why we decided on Japan as our initial target.

Despite the fact that they’ve not yet localized it to languages other than Japanese and English, they received some attention from internet users in Korea because of the highly intuitive user experience.

Japanese scheduling and appointment booking solution Coubic raises $500,000

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This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Coubic (pronounced ‘coo-bic’), which launched a cloud-based solution earlier this month, has raised 50 million yen (approximately $500,000) from DCM and GREE Ventures last week. Their app helps companies and retailers receive booking requests from their customers, as well as manage their schedules on any device. Some might say that using a simple web form would be an adequate way to collect booking requests from your customers. So how can Coubic can add value here? We had a chance to visit their new office in Shibuya to speak with the company’s co-founder and CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka to find out more. Over the last few years, many startups have launched cloud-based services to serve business’ back office operations. Some of them include: Freee, Money Forward (accounting) BizNote Expense by CrowdCast (expense reimbursement) MakeLeaps, Misoca (invoicing) What’s unique about these services is that users don’t require technical expertise, and time-consuming work can be done even on tablets or smartphones. So what about front office operations? When companies or retailers set up an online form to receive appointment requests from customers, they typically use a web form and sort received…

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This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup Coubic (pronounced ‘coo-bic’), which launched a cloud-based solution earlier this month, has raised 50 million yen (approximately $500,000) from DCM and GREE Ventures last week. Their app helps companies and retailers receive booking requests from their customers, as well as manage their schedules on any device.

Some might say that using a simple web form would be an adequate way to collect booking requests from your customers. So how can Coubic can add value here? We had a chance to visit their new office in Shibuya to speak with the company’s co-founder and CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka to find out more.

Over the last few years, many startups have launched cloud-based services to serve business’ back office operations. Some of them include:

What’s unique about these services is that users don’t require technical expertise, and time-consuming work can be done even on tablets or smartphones. So what about front office operations? When companies or retailers set up an online form to receive appointment requests from customers, they typically use a web form and sort received requests using a tool like Excel, and import them to SalesForce or other enterprise systems for customer relationship management. As for marketing, it’s also difficult to find an easy-to-use solution.

So there isn’t really any stand-out cloud service that lets businesses complete all their front office operations. This space is a so-called red ocean because there are many ways to address the problem, but many of solutions are not technically easy to implement. So the company has developed a solution that focuses on appointment reception.

Their users include a variety of business, including hair salons, yoga studios, cooking schools, lawyers, and accountants. Customers can book appointments on your Coubic page, typically linked from your own web site. If you have the Coubic iOS app on your mobile, you will receive a push notification when a customer requests an appointment. When you launched the app, you can make a follow-up call to the customer and add the appointment to Google Calendar. Kuraoka explained:

Coubic's Hiroshi Kuraoka
Hiroshi Kuraoka

The app’s user interface delivers a responsive web design to customers, so that they can book appointments on smartphones or tablets as well as via desktop browser. The dashboard for businesses is also available on mobile. You can complete every task on mobile, from setting up a reception page to managing appointments.

Their dashboard lets you view appointments, with each appointment associated with the profile of the customer that made it. So you can easily learn how many times a customer has visited your shop, or how many months have passed since the last visit. In other words, it becomes a CRM (customer relationship management) asset.

Back office operations are essential for any companies regardless of scale. Front office operations can help make make your business more profitable, but things will work even without them.

Cases studies
Case studies

Compared to cloud-based back office services like accounting SaaS, our service is less essential for business and so we can’t charge so much. That’s why we have to take a big share of the market. Appointment booking is needed everywhere in the world. […] So I think global expansion would be relatively easy.

With that in mind, their platform was already available in English and Korean as well as Japanese at the time of launch. They are exploring the possibility of global expansion beginning with Asian countries.

In this space, we’ve already seen BookFresh a service acquired by mobile payments processor Square back in February. But I think Coubic has no direct competitors even in the global arena. The funds from DCM and GREE Ventures could certainly help with their global business expansion.

Japan’s news curation app Gunosy launches English version for the UK

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Tokyo-based Gunosy, the startup behind the news curation app of the same name, launched an iOS app for the UK market this week. This version lets you to curate updates and articles from about 500 publications including UK-based news resources, such as The Register, BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph. The company plans to launch an Android app for the UK market next month, and an app for the US market will follow soon. They aim to reach 80 million downloads in the global market three years from now. via TechCrunch Japan

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Tokyo-based Gunosy, the startup behind the news curation app of the same name, launched an iOS app for the UK market this week. This version lets you to curate updates and articles from about 500 publications including UK-based news resources, such as The Register, BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph.

The company plans to launch an Android app for the UK market next month, and an app for the US market will follow soon. They aim to reach 80 million downloads in the global market three years from now.

via TechCrunch Japan

3 great startup ideas from the latest Samurai Venture Summit in Tokyo

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See the original article written in Japanese Last weekend at the Microsoft Japan Office here in Tokyo, the ninth edition of the Samurai Venture Summit took place. This is a semi-annual startup event organized by Samurai Incubate, and is a great opportunity for investors to find startups in the early seed stages. Here is a quick rundown of the startups that caught our eye at the event. Wine It! Wine It is an app that identify the kind of wine you are drinking by taking picture of the label with a smartphone camera. The app contains data for nearly 11,000 wine brands, including information such as grape variety, the place of production, and cuisines that match the wine. There is an app called Sakenote that helps you to keep track of Japanese sake that you drink. But the main feature of Sakenote is to keep a record of your experience, Wine It is more like a wine encyclopedia. If you can’t find a certain brand of wine in the app, the information will be transferred to a sommelier, and it will be added to the database later on. Wine It! has not succeeded in monetizing just yet, but it could…

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See the original article written in Japanese

Last weekend at the Microsoft Japan Office here in Tokyo, the ninth edition of the Samurai Venture Summit took place. This is a semi-annual startup event organized by Samurai Incubate, and is a great opportunity for investors to find startups in the early seed stages. Here is a quick rundown of the startups that caught our eye at the event.

Wine It!

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Wine It is an app that identify the kind of wine you are drinking by taking picture of the label with a smartphone camera. The app contains data for nearly 11,000 wine brands, including information such as grape variety, the place of production, and cuisines that match the wine.

There is an app called Sakenote that helps you to keep track of Japanese sake that you drink. But the main feature of Sakenote is to keep a record of your experience, Wine It is more like a wine encyclopedia. If you can’t find a certain brand of wine in the app, the information will be transferred to a sommelier, and it will be added to the database later on.

Wine It! has not succeeded in monetizing just yet, but it could be possible to create an e-commerce service such as a Sake subscription service.

This initiative began as an incubated startup at D2C, a joint venture of NTT Docomo and ad agency Dentsu.

STARted

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Many aspiring fashion designers have dreamt of launching their own brand. But doing so requires a very complicated process. In addition to creating your designs, you need to look for factories and then convince retailers or online stores to sell it.

But using a service like STARted, you need only upload a hand-drawn design of your dress, and STARted takes over the rest of the process. It’s a little early to talk about the potential of the service since it is still in the closed testing phase right now, with plans to launch this summer.

However, if the startup successfully builds a solid platform, perhaps implementing a crowdfunding system, it could become a place that helps designers do business without the usual required capital or risk.

Edulio

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Edulio is an online learning platform that launched in Japan earlier this month. The first ‘O’ in MOOC stands for ‘open’, but in contrast, Edulio is a platform that runs closed online courses. It has about 180 clients including training companies and private preparatory schools. The platform lets clients to provide online courses for a closed group of users, and it has a dashboard where clients can track the learning progress of the participants and manage tests and results.

As Youngme Moon, the dean of Harvard Business School’s MBA program, mentioned at the recent New Economy Summit, the audience is not forced to engage, so it is important to build a system that motivates them to participate in learning. Edulio currently lets users who are taking the same course share their achievements, with future plans to strengthening this feature later on.

ShouldBee wins OnLab Demo Day in Tokyo with automated web app testing solution

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Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the eighth batch of its incubation program. A “Best Team” and “Special” award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubation period. Let’s take a quick look at those two, and take a look at the other startups that graduated from the program as well. ShouldBee (‘Best Team’ award winner) It is said that typical software development requires that you spend almost 50% of time just testing. What the ShouldBee team provides is an automated testing process for web-based systems that are under development. By using this solution, developers can automate the process of filling and submitting forms on their web app, and it can complete testing 12 times faster than human testers, and reduce cost to one-sixtieth of what would normally be required for conventional human-based testing. Since its launch several months ago, it has acquired 105 companies as users without any significant promotional effort. Jidoteki (‘Special’ award winner) There are many convenient SaaS-based tools out there, such as DropBox or Evernote. But often many corporations resist using…

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Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the eighth batch of its incubation program.

A “Best Team” and “Special” award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubation period. Let’s take a quick look at those two, and take a look at the other startups that graduated from the program as well.

ShouldBee (‘Best Team’ award winner)

shouldbee-pitch

It is said that typical software development requires that you spend almost 50% of time just testing. What the ShouldBee team provides is an automated testing process for web-based systems that are under development.

By using this solution, developers can automate the process of filling and submitting forms on their web app, and it can complete testing 12 times faster than human testers, and reduce cost to one-sixtieth of what would normally be required for conventional human-based testing.

Since its launch several months ago, it has acquired 105 companies as users without any significant promotional effort.

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From the left: ShouldBee’s Hidehito Nozawa, Reo Mori, and Digital Garage CEO Kaoru Hayashi

Jidoteki (‘Special’ award winner)

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There are many convenient SaaS-based tools out there, such as DropBox or Evernote. But often many corporations resist using such tools because of their internal guidelines or security reasons. Jidoteki lets SaaS vendors to create a virtual appliance having their apps. It encourages enterprise users to adopt a such SaaS tools by setting up such an appliance behind their firewall.

The Jidoteki team
The Jidoteki team

Orange Magazine

orangemagazine-pitch

Orange Magazine is a mobile content platform that targets relatively older female users. In contrast with many mobile services that go after the younger generation these days, this team learned that senior women are having difficulties finding information about things like movies, health, travel, and much more.

To address this, they have developed a mobile app that is easy to use, and comfortable to read even for seniors. In order to provide a good user experience and content likely to fit their preference, they asked several older women to curate news articles as well.

For their monetization strategy, they considered partnering with existing book or magazine publishers to distribute their content to premium users through the app.

Astero

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Astero is a notification-focused news delivery app that aspires to bring you what you want to know at the right time. Typical users subscribe to many resources or visit many websites to collect things you want to know about. It could be things like appointments, weather updates, public transit updates, or when your favorite publication is on sale in stores.

In order to keep you from missing something important, they have developed an app that focuses on following three factors:

  1. Curation – Opt out of updates likely to be unnecessary to you.
  2. Recommendation engine – They’ve developed an engine using own original algorithm
  3. Notification management – Users can adjust the frequency of notification updates, or even receive a single ‘digest’ of many notifications at once.

They are considering monetizing their service by partnering and integrating with third-party apps.

StudyPact

studypact-pitch

Our readers may recall that we told you a bit about StudyPact during our recent coverage of the HackOsaka event. It is a service that lets users set a study goal with monetary stakes as a sort of bet with themselves. For example, you can set a goal of studying English for two hours a week, and then set the target stakes at $5. If you reach that goal, you get $5, but if not, you have to pay $5. In the event that you have to pay, the fee is split in half among users who supported the goal and the rest will go to StudyPact.

To realize more effective learning platforms, the startups plans to tie up with other educational platforms and services like like Duolingo, Anki, Memrise, Coursera and Edx. They launched an Android version of the app several weeks ago, and they have learned their users’ completion rate for online courses has reached 85%. Typically the completion rate for MOOCs is somewhere around a lowly 5%.


Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the next batch of its incubation program starting in July. The application deadline is May 19th.

Japanese social marketing company Allied Architects sets up shop in Singapore

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Tokyo-based Allied Architects(TSE:6081) announced yesterday it has set up a subsidiary in Singapore. It’s called Allied Asia Pacific, and it will administrate operations around the company’s marketing services in the region, including the ‘Monipla for Facebook’ marketing platform in Vietnam and Taiwan. Our readers may recall that the company recently partnered with Silicon Valley-based growth hacking startup AppSocially. So I expect this expansion is intended to assist such partner services in reaching out to local businesses in the region. via Venture Now

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Tokyo-based Allied Architects(TSE:6081) announced yesterday it has set up a subsidiary in Singapore. It’s called Allied Asia Pacific, and it will administrate operations around the company’s marketing services in the region, including the ‘Monipla for Facebook’ marketing platform in Vietnam and Taiwan.

Our readers may recall that the company recently partnered with Silicon Valley-based growth hacking startup AppSocially. So I expect this expansion is intended to assist such partner services in reaching out to local businesses in the region.

via Venture Now