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Game of Dragons: How Japan’s GungHo is quietly winning in North America

Rick Martin 2014.01.14

I experimented with a lot of mobile games in 2013. But the one that I kept coming back to again and again was GungHo Online Entertainment’s hit title Puzzle & Dragons. The game is most popular is its home market of Japan, where it has seen 23 million downloads to date. But like many Japanese online services, the domestic market is near saturation for P&D, and GungHo has been making efforts push the game abroad. The North American version – the version that I play – doesn’t look like it has had the same success, with only 2 million downloads as of November. But it’s slowly making progress, especially in terms of revenue, and I’d like to take a look at how exactly it’s doing that. Most recently P&D saw a holiday boost in revenue, largely thanks to two smart promotions: 48-hour Godfest – This New Year’s promotion gave players a 3x chance of getting rare and powerful cards, including the game’s coveted god-type cards, using the game’s Rare Egg Machine (a sort of in-game lottery where you can earn rare monster cards). To use the machine, you either need to have accumulated five magic stones (P&D’s in-game currency) or…

Puzzle & Dragons exhibit, Tokyo Game Show 2013

I experimented with a lot of mobile games in 2013. But the one that I kept coming back to again and again was GungHo Online Entertainment’s hit title Puzzle & Dragons. The game is most popular is its home market of Japan, where it has seen 23 million downloads to date. But like many Japanese online services, the domestic market is near saturation for P&D, and GungHo has been making efforts push the game abroad. The North American version – the version that I play – doesn’t look like it has had the same success, with only 2 million downloads as of November.

But it’s slowly making progress, especially in terms of revenue, and I’d like to take a look at how exactly it’s doing that.

Most recently P&D saw a holiday boost in revenue, largely thanks to two smart promotions:

48-hour Godfest – This New Year’s promotion gave players a 3x chance of getting rare and powerful cards, including the game’s coveted god-type cards, using the game’s Rare Egg Machine (a sort of in-game lottery where you can earn rare monster cards). To use the machine, you either need to have accumulated five magic stones (P&D’s in-game currency) or buy stones with actual money. As you can see in the App Annie chart below, the game’s revenue shot up over New Year’s, in both the US and Canada, thanks to this enticing promotion.
Rare Egg Machine was adjusted/renewed – This recent adjustment decreases the chances of a three-star card and increases your chance of a four-star card. This took place on December 10, and the effects of the adjustment are pretty clear as you can see below, for both the US and Canada (note that I’ve varied the scale for clarity).

Puzzle & Dragons, US market, grossing rank, Dec 29 – Jan 13

Puzzle & Dragons, Canada market, grossing rank, Dec 29 - Jan 13 — Puzzle & Dragons, Canada market, grossing rank, Dec 29 – Jan 13

On a bit of a sidenote, it always really surprises me to see how active English-speaking fans on the game’s Facebook page, as well as on forums and discussion pages dedicated to the game. That’s not a very tangible measurement of the game’s success, of course, but for me it has always been a good indication that the game, which is very Japanese in both concept and design, has not been lost in translation.

In addition to activities like the ones we saw during the holidays, a number of cross-brand collaborations have helped P&D over the past year as well, most notably the Clash of Clans promotion that it held with Finnish gaming powerhouse Supercell.

But if we look at the game’s progress over the past year in terms of revenue alone (see below), then it’s easy to see what a productive year this has been for GungHo.

Let’s see what 2014 holds for the company.

Puzzle & Dragons, US market, grossing rank over 2013

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How to search for the best places to eat in Japan

SCORE 1,101

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.01.13

If you’re looking for places to eat here in Japan, there more than a few options available to help you in your search. Tabelog, a Japanese restaurant review site (much like Yelp) is one, and its rival Gurunavi is another popular option. But over the years an abundance of alternatives have emerged to challenge these two leading services. I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at just a few. Retty is a popular mobile service, where you can get restaurant recommendations from your online friends. Readers may recall that we previously featured it leading up to the recent CNet Japan Awards. On mobile, you can also look to location-based apps like Tab that suggest nearby points of interest, including restaurants. Another interesting option is through customer relations platforms like Kanban Musume (roughly translates as ‘store representative girl’) which lets consumers communicate with store staff online. By becoming a regular at restaurants, people receive exclusive offers as a bonus. Although the name suggests female staff, Kanban Musume includes staff of both genders. Moving on to other services, a new website called ‘Kono-ko-ni-aitai’ (meaning ‘I want to see her’ ) recently launched. According to the site, male users can…

If you’re looking for places to eat here in Japan, there more than a few options available to help you in your search. Tabelog, a Japanese restaurant review site (much like Yelp) is one, and its rival Gurunavi is another popular option. But over the years an abundance of alternatives have emerged to challenge these two leading services. I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at just a few.

Retty is a popular mobile service, where you can get restaurant recommendations from your online friends. Readers may recall that we previously featured it leading up to the recent CNet Japan Awards. On mobile, you can also look to location-based apps like Tab that suggest nearby points of interest, including restaurants.

Another interesting option is through customer relations platforms like Kanban Musume (roughly translates as ‘store representative girl’) which lets consumers communicate with store staff online. By becoming a regular at restaurants, people receive exclusive offers as a bonus. Although the name suggests female staff, Kanban Musume includes staff of both genders.

Moving on to other services, a new website called ‘Kono-ko-ni-aitai’ (meaning ‘I want to see her’ ) recently launched. According to the site, male users can look through photos of female staff at various establishments to find where they’d like to go.

Now this could be for restaurants, hair/esthetic salons, or even night clubs. The site was only launched this past week, so there’s not much data registered at this point. If you want to promote your store, you can add up to three staff registrations for free.

Other ways to discovering new places to eat include websites like Meshitomo, Social Lunch or Coffee Meeting. These websites are built to provide working people or job-seeking students a chance to connect with each other through casual lunches or dinners. While the purposes of these websites are more social, they may also be an interesting way to discover new places to eat and drink.

With so much information out there, it’s good to have so many options to turn to besides just Google. If you’re hungry, these are just a few ways that you can find new and interesting discoveries. If you know of others, let us know in the comments!

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This Chinese company built $120M per year business delivering ducks necks to geeks

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.13

In China, duck necks are a popular food. And if you’re looking to find some, you might try the nearest Hahajing restaurant, a chain with over 1600 outlets in China. It’s main menu is duck meat, and even if you can’t visit the restaurant in person, the company prides itself on very fast delivery time, with food usually being delivered within 30 minutes. Hahajing opened just four years ago, but its annual sales amount to 700 million yuan (or about $120 million). As a comparison, Japan’s highest-grossing pizza chain, Pizza-La, has 535 outlets, and the company took 20 years to achieve 57 billion yen ($560 million) in the total annual sales, and that’s including the sales from its restaurant business. When you compare these two, it’s easy to see why speed of Hanhanjing growth is so impressive. We should clarify that you aren’t likely to see many people eating duck necks when you visit China. The company says that their main demographic/target is (for lack of a better word) geeks, or those who prefer to stay at home or in their room during the weekend. If you’d like to learn more about Hahajing, you can check out their website and…

In China, duck necks are a popular food. And if you’re looking to find some, you might try the nearest Hahajing restaurant, a chain with over 1600 outlets in China. It’s main menu is duck meat, and even if you can’t visit the restaurant in person, the company prides itself on very fast delivery time, with food usually being delivered within 30 minutes.

Hahajing opened just four years ago, but its annual sales amount to 700 million yuan (or about $120 million).

As a comparison, Japan’s highest-grossing pizza chain, Pizza-La, has 535 outlets, and the company took 20 years to achieve 57 billion yen ($560 million) in the total annual sales, and that’s including the sales from its restaurant business. When you compare these two, it’s easy to see why speed of Hanhanjing growth is so impressive.

We should clarify that you aren’t likely to see many people eating duck necks when you visit China. The company says that their main demographic/target is (for lack of a better word) geeks, or those who prefer to stay at home or in their room during the weekend.

If you’d like to learn more about Hahajing, you can check out their website and order page for more details. Or if you think you might be a frequent customer, you can also check out their iOS and Android apps for duck necks on the go should you ever need them.

hahajing-xbxbxbb — WWDC just not the same with ducks necks, packaged in foreground. (from Weibo user @xbxbxbb)

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Can this new Japanese app become the top online Otaku marketplace?

Junya Mori 2014.01.12

See the original article in Japanese Tokyo-based startup 7-bites has launched a new service called A2mato, a C2C flea market app focused on goods relating to Japanese subculture. It’s a smartphone marketplace where individuals can buy and sell things like self-published works, cosplay costumes, gaming, manga, and pop idol goods. When the startup raised funds last June, the CEO told us about this plan, and now it has finally gone online. This ‘otaku’ market includes other things like dating simulations and other online games, vocaloid voice synthesizing, cosplay, figures, novels, electronic comic books, and even railway models. According to a study by Yano Research Institute, this otaku market is getting more customers in Japan beyond its core fan group. In 2011, the market size was valued at 892 billion yen ($8.5 billion). The CEO of Bushiroad, Takaaki Kidani, mentioned that the market for card gaming alone is almost 100 billion yen ($9.5 billion), big enough to get the attention of many businesses. Recently I had a chance to interview with 7bites CEO Shota Sawada about why he thinks there’s potential in this market. He explained there are two main reasons why he started A2mato: One reason is that there is…

See the original article in Japanese

Tokyo-based startup 7-bites has launched a new service called A2mato, a C2C flea market app focused on goods relating to Japanese subculture. It’s a smartphone marketplace where individuals can buy and sell things like self-published works, cosplay costumes, gaming, manga, and pop idol goods. When the startup raised funds last June, the CEO told us about this plan, and now it has finally gone online.

This ‘otaku’ market includes other things like dating simulations and other online games, vocaloid voice synthesizing, cosplay, figures, novels, electronic comic books, and even railway models.

According to a study by Yano Research Institute, this otaku market is getting more customers in Japan beyond its core fan group. In 2011, the market size was valued at 892 billion yen ($8.5 billion). The CEO of Bushiroad, Takaaki Kidani, mentioned that the market for card gaming alone is almost 100 billion yen ($9.5 billion), big enough to get the attention of many businesses.

Recently I had a chance to interview with 7bites CEO Shota Sawada about why he thinks there’s potential in this market.

He explained there are two main reasons why he started A2mato:

One reason is that there is a market. The other reason is that I wanted to support creators.

At Comiket (a large comic convention) visitors cannot get enough information on the groups that are participating, and they turn to other media like Twitter or websites to get information. Because information is not easily accessible, comic fans pay attention only to major groups or circles. So it is difficult to find new talented creators. With A2mato I’d like to make information on new talents more easily accessible and support long-tailed creators.

While mobile C2C marketplace and flea market apps attracts many consumers today, there was no flea market app focused only on subculture. So Sawada thought there would be potential to grow.

Today many of online marketplaces for self-published works charge users high service charges. For example, when a creator sells their work on websites like DLsite or Melonbooks, the company charges the creator 30 percent of the price as a service charge. But on A2mato, it’s only 5.25%.

On A2mato, users can follow hashtags for each genre and see that content on their timeline. There is also a feature called ‘remart’, similar to Twitter’s retweet, and users can save their favorite items as well.

The UI was developed based on Sawada’s assumption that the many users with interest an in subculture might be Twitter users too.

Just like other flea market apps, users can list their items on A2mato from their smartphone app. Payments can be made using credit cards, money transfer at convenience stores and banks, or with A2mato points.

Unlike most flea market apps, A2mato has a web version of its marketplace as well. This is because the company expected that linked web content will be important to bring traffic/users from Twitter.

A2mato is targeting a half million users and 500 million yen ($4.8 million) in monthly transactions. If you’d like to try out the app, it is available for the download here. Currently it’s in Japanese only.

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Japanese robotics entrepreneur forms $20M fund for bio and energy startups

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.10

Our readers may recall that Japanese robotics company Schaft was recently acquired by Google and won the DARPA robotics challenge trials. Bloomberg reported yesterday that the company’s co-founder Takashi Kato will form a new 2 billion yen fund (approximately $19 million) for Japanese startups focused on biotechnology and energy efficiency segments. It will be called 246 Capital. In the process of negotiating with Google during the acquisition process, he tried to get funds from 10 investment firms and the state-run fund Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ). But his efforts didn’t work out. In response to this disappointing experience, he plans to launch a scheme to help Japanese engineers and scientists get funding to complementary to their research and development expenses. Kato hopes to invest in companies developing cancer treatment devices and analytics technology for genetics since his own mother died from skin cancer. Efforts from successful entrepreneurs that help others in the ecosystem is really a great thing to see in Japan. Our readers may recall that we recently featured a number of up-and-coming robotics startups from Japan, many of whose founders grew out from the creative digital company TeamLab. Via Bloomberg

Our readers may recall that Japanese robotics company Schaft was recently acquired by Google and won the DARPA robotics challenge trials. Bloomberg reported yesterday that the company’s co-founder Takashi Kato will form a new 2 billion yen fund (approximately $19 million) for Japanese startups focused on biotechnology and energy efficiency segments. It will be called 246 Capital.

In the process of negotiating with Google during the acquisition process, he tried to get funds from 10 investment firms and the state-run fund Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ). But his efforts didn’t work out. In response to this disappointing experience, he plans to launch a scheme to help Japanese engineers and scientists get funding to complementary to their research and development expenses. Kato hopes to invest in companies developing cancer treatment devices and analytics technology for genetics since his own mother died from skin cancer.

Efforts from successful entrepreneurs that help others in the ecosystem is really a great thing to see in Japan. Our readers may recall that we recently featured a number of up-and-coming robotics startups from Japan, many of whose founders grew out from the creative digital company TeamLab.

Via Bloomberg

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Big data startup Hapyrus rebrands as FlyData, raises $1.6M

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.10

See the original story in Japanese. Silicon-valley based Hapyrus, a Japanese startup focused on developing big data solutions, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million from investors in Japan and the US, including 500startups. Coinciding with these funds, the startup will rebrand itself as FlyData and set up a local subsidiary in Japan. The company is led by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa, who previously worked with a number of prominent Japanese startups like Dennotai (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2000), Simplex Technology (TSE:4340), and Sirius Technology (also acquired by Yahoo Japan, 2010). They launched a new service called ‘FlyData for Amazon Redshift’ back in February, allowing automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data-warehouse service. The decision to rebrand reflects the company’s intention to focus on providing and developing its FlyData service. Fujikawa explained the rationale behind this change at a press briefing yesterday: We’ve been originally developing middleware solutions for Hadoop, but I was so surprised when I saw Amazon Redshift for the first time. I thought that no other options besides Hadoop could deliver big data solutions that work, but in fact Amazon Redshift can do it for about $1,000 an year –…

hareyama-fujikawa-saito — From the left: Kei Hareyama (country manager), Koichi Fujikawa (founder/CEO), and Daniel Saito (vice president)

See the original story in Japanese.

Silicon-valley based Hapyrus, a Japanese startup focused on developing big data solutions, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million from investors in Japan and the US, including 500startups. Coinciding with these funds, the startup will rebrand itself as FlyData and set up a local subsidiary in Japan.

The company is led by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa, who previously worked with a number of prominent Japanese startups like Dennotai (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2000), Simplex Technology (TSE:4340), and Sirius Technology (also acquired by Yahoo Japan, 2010).

They launched a new service called ‘FlyData for Amazon Redshift’ back in February, allowing automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data-warehouse service. The decision to rebrand reflects the company’s intention to focus on providing and developing its FlyData service.

Fujikawa explained the rationale behind this change at a press briefing yesterday:

We’ve been originally developing middleware solutions for Hadoop, but I was so surprised when I saw Amazon Redshift for the first time. I thought that no other options besides Hadoop could deliver big data solutions that work, but in fact Amazon Redshift can do it for about $1,000 an year – extremely cheaper than conventional technology. When Amazon’s mentor team came to visit 500startups where we were residing, they gave us a complimentary account for Amazon Redshift. When we tried it, it yielded 10 to 100 times better performance than Hadoop. It was then that we were convinced that we could not win with Hadoop.

While an abundant of solutions for cloud data processing are available, many companies have difficulty in uploading their data, and for many, their data remains in an on-premises environment. We found that there will be a pressing need to solve this issue, which led us to focus on our FlyData business.

But it wasn’t easy reaching this conclusion. Fujikawa’s co-founders left the company because of a gap in their ideas about business strategy. But he believed in the potential of his business and raised $925,000 from investors in Japan and the US last summer. He succeeded in hiring competent workers through Japanese social recruiting platform Wantedly.

For companies, since FlyData technology uploads your data from an on-premise RDBMS (rational database management system) to cloud-based data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, you need to install a FlyData component on your RDBMS server. The component for MySQL is available for now, and components for PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server will follow soon.

Since the 2013 launch, FlyData for Amazon RedShift has acquired more than 40 corporate users and has over 40% growth in sales every month. They’ve seen a striking increase in the growth here in Japan, across sectors like social gaming, ad tech, and digital marketing. Fujikawa noted that they have prominent clients like Brightroll, Upworthy, Datalot, Enish, and Tokyo Otaku Mode.

FlyData is also a qualified member of the Amazon Redshift Partners program, where we can find a number of their competitors, including Informatica, Talend, Attunity, and SnapLogic. Fujikawa explained a little more about their advantage over these competitors:

From my perspective, Informatica and Talend has many problems in supporting cloud platforms. And Attunity and SnapLogic have not yet made an impact in the Japanese market. In terms of a presence in Japan and the Asia Pacific region, I believe we have an advantage.

Furthermore, Amazon is good at cloud computing but is not as good with data located that’s located in a client’s on-premise environment. But we can handle it, so that we think we’re a good complementary service to Amazon. For the time being, we are currently providing the service for Amazon, which is leading this space, but partnering with other platforms like Google Big Query might be a potential option for us in the future.

Along with the launch of their subsidiary in Japan, a number of notable individuals have joined their management team. Their vice president of sales and international growth Daniel Saito co-founded Rimnet (one of Japan’s oldest internet providers, later acquired by PSINet) and was involved in launching MySQL K.K. Kei Hareyama was appointed as the country manager for the Japanese market, bringing over 12 years experience in the data analytics sector to the table.

In Japan, we’ve seen quite a few startups providing business centric services for global markets. On a related note, Treasure Data, another notable Japanese startup focused on big data solutions, also received angel investment worth $2.75 million back in 2012, with funds coming from several investors including Jerry Yang (Yahoo co-founder) and Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto (the inventor of the Ruby programming language).

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Traveloco matches first-time Japanese travelers with their countrymen abroad

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.01.10

Traveloco is a travel service for Japanese people who are traveling outside the country for the first time. It aims to connect Japanese travelers with Japanese residents at their travel destinations, so as to enhance their travel experiences. The site was launched in an early alpha phase back in May of 2013. According to the site, there are over one million Japanese people who reside outside of Japan, and over 17 million Japanese people travel to foreign countries. The common and unvoidable problem for these travelers is the language barrier that often restricts them from certain discoveries. To avoid such missed opportunities, Traveloco facilitates Japanese foreign residents to assist Japanese travelers. By registering on Traveloco, travelers can ask questions to local guides about local information. You can ask for general recommendations, or ask specific questions such as what dish is the best choice at certain popular restaurants. Sending private messages is free, but further assistance (such as a guided tour or acting as a translator) will require a premium user account that can be purchased with a credit card or by PayPal. Currently, there are 60 Japanese foreign residents on the service, spanning 30 major cities like New York and…

Traveloco is a travel service for Japanese people who are traveling outside the country for the first time. It aims to connect Japanese travelers with Japanese residents at their travel destinations, so as to enhance their travel experiences. The site was launched in an early alpha phase back in May of 2013.

According to the site, there are over one million Japanese people who reside outside of Japan, and over 17 million Japanese people travel to foreign countries. The common and unvoidable problem for these travelers is the language barrier that often restricts them from certain discoveries. To avoid such missed opportunities, Traveloco facilitates Japanese foreign residents to assist Japanese travelers.

By registering on Traveloco, travelers can ask questions to local guides about local information. You can ask for general recommendations, or ask specific questions such as what dish is the best choice at certain popular restaurants. Sending private messages is free, but further assistance (such as a guided tour or acting as a translator) will require a premium user account that can be purchased with a credit card or by PayPal.

Currently, there are 60 Japanese foreign residents on the service, spanning 30 major cities like New York and Paris. Traveloco aims to acquire as many as 1,000 registered local guides in over 100 cities by the end of 2014.

Traveloco is aspiring to be a sort of virtual Japanese town in the future. Let’s wait and see if it can succeed.

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Chinese online flower shop forces men to choose their favorite girl

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.10

Based on our previous article, in Japanese China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site. The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive. But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date. So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even…

Based on our previous article, in Japanese

China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site.

The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive.

But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date.

So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even after a user breaks up with his girlfriend, he cannot send RoseOnly roses to a new girlfriend. In a way, that makes them extra special for anyone who receives them.

On Chinese Valentine’s Day, the sales on RoseOnly reached 11 million yuan ($1.8 million). Approximately 11,000 men sent roses using the service. And this success led the company to raise $10 million from Tencent in its series B round, and they opened their first brick-and-mortar stores in September.

The company says that it plans to launch a new service for men to send chocolates to women. I am sure that they are targeting for February 14th with this initiative. For more information, you can check out the RoseOnly promo video below.

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Japan’s Adways partners with Korean growth hacking startup 5Rocks

Junya Mori 2014.01.10

See the original story in Japanese. Japanese internet company Adways (TSE:2849) announced on Thursday that it has invested an undisclosed sum in and partnered with Korean startup 5Rocks. The latter develops growth hacking solutions for mobile apps, and launched services for Japanese app developers last year. Our readers may recall that 5Rocks raised 230 million yen (approximately $2.3 million) from Japanese VC Global Brain. It was reported last month that 5Rocks had sold its restaurant booking app Poing to fellow Korean startup Trust Us so it could focus more on its growth hacking tool business. Adways has developed a performance analytics solution for mobile apps called PartyTrack, and they plan to integrate their suite with 5Rocks’ solution, aiming to provide more efficient mobile ad marketing services for clients. Another Japanese startup, Sirok, also introduced a growth hacking tool called Growth Point last month. A series of such service launches indicates this sector will likely be a trending space this year.

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese internet company Adways (TSE:2849) announced on Thursday that it has invested an undisclosed sum in and partnered with Korean startup 5Rocks. The latter develops growth hacking solutions for mobile apps, and launched services for Japanese app developers last year.

Our readers may recall that 5Rocks raised 230 million yen (approximately $2.3 million) from Japanese VC Global Brain.

It was reported last month that 5Rocks had sold its restaurant booking app Poing to fellow Korean startup Trust Us so it could focus more on its growth hacking tool business.

Adways has developed a performance analytics solution for mobile apps called PartyTrack, and they plan to integrate their suite with 5Rocks’ solution, aiming to provide more efficient mobile ad marketing services for clients.

Another Japanese startup, Sirok, also introduced a growth hacking tool called Growth Point last month. A series of such service launches indicates this sector will likely be a trending space this year.

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Explosive potential: Nitrous puts pre-configured development environments in the cloud

Rick Martin 2014.01.09

As someone who has been trying to learn programming over the past few years, one of the biggest issues that I continue to run into is getting my local development environment to function properly. For a beginner, an amazing amount of stamina is required to power through the inevitable command line errors that often come up when you’re getting started [1]. But while interviewing a well-known designer/developer recently, he suggested that I check out Nitrous.IO, a cloud-based development environment platform that he assured me would make the process much easier [2]. And sure enough, it did. After signing up, you can create a development environment, or ‘box’, for one of four languages/frameworks: Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, NodeJS, or Go — all with little more than a button click. From there you’re presented with the familiar green-on-black terminal interface, all ready to go from the comfort of your web browser, letting you focus on writing code rather than fumbling with environment configurations. I got in touch with Nitrous co-founder A.J. Solimine to find out more about how their product came about. While I find it a helpful tool for my own beginner-level learning, Nitrous was built to make software configuration easier not just…

As someone who has been trying to learn programming over the past few years, one of the biggest issues that I continue to run into is getting my local development environment to function properly. For a beginner, an amazing amount of stamina is required to power through the inevitable command line errors that often come up when you’re getting started [1]. But while interviewing a well-known designer/developer recently, he suggested that I check out Nitrous.IO, a cloud-based development environment platform that he assured me would make the process much easier [2].

And sure enough, it did.

After signing up, you can create a development environment, or ‘box’, for one of four languages/frameworks: Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, NodeJS, or Go — all with little more than a button click. From there you’re presented with the familiar green-on-black terminal interface, all ready to go from the comfort of your web browser, letting you focus on writing code rather than fumbling with environment configurations.

I got in touch with Nitrous co-founder A.J. Solimine to find out more about how their product came about. While I find it a helpful tool for my own beginner-level learning, Nitrous was built to make software configuration easier not just for novices, but for everyone.

A.J. explains:

We’ve set out to make development easier and more enjoyable by eliminating the complexities that come with setting up and configuring software. On Nitrous.IO, you just write code, you don’t really need to know about Linux, and Ruby, and Rails, or Postgres configuration flags.

A.J. and his team began working on Nitrous (initially named Action.io) back in the summer of 2013 from a small shop in Singapore. The other cofounders are Peter Kim and Arun Thampi, who both studied at the National University of Singapore. While working on web and mobile apps, Arun and A.J. ran into difficulties keeping their development environments up to date for their many projects. They looked into Quora’s published explanation of their EC2 development, in an effort to see if a cloud solution might be the answer.

They found there were many configuration tools out there, but most with a steep learning curve and none built specifically for development [3]. The alternative that they devised (see a screenshot of the browser interface below) is one that has attracted a lot of attention and admiration from the development community, and from investors as well.

Nitrous raised $1 million in seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and other investors back in late 2012, and I’m told that since they launched their public beta in June 2013 they’ve averaged a stunning 500 new registered users per day. And in December they announced a beta ‘Nitrous for Business’ program, targeting larger teams that need a way to simplify their development and collaboration.

nitrous-jekyll — A Nitrous ruby box in the browser

The business model is very smart as well, in my view, with a number of upgrade plans (announced just yesterday) that give you access to more CPU share and virtual memory, as well as things like premium support, no automatic shutdowns (free boxes are shutdown after a period of inactivity), and direct SSH access.

But even free users can earn additional resources through Nitrous’s referral plan [4]. A.J. tells me that this strategy has served them very well so far:

The referral strategy has been a strong catalyst for growth for us – we don’t spend any money on marketing or advertisements, so all of our growth thus far has been due to our users sharing Nitrous.IO with their friends.

With an office now in the US as well as Singapore, it will be interesting to see how Nitrous progresses over the next year or so. They have made some astounding strides in a very, very short amount of time, so I think there’s really a lot of potential here. Nitrous is hiring too, for anyone out there who would like to get involved.

Expect big things.

Nitrous's US team after a go-kart outing — Nitrous’s US team after a go-kart outing

I’m sure that many experienced programmers might assert that powering through such errors is an essential part of your learning, and understanding the development environment is important. And I think that’s very true. But with more and more people learning programming on their own these days, as opposed to in a classroom, a tool like this makes the learning process a little more accessible in my view. ↩
I’m referring to Sacha Greif, and my conversation with him is upcoming in a future article. He has written an informative post about running Meteor apps using Nitrous here. ↩
They also found some big companies centralized infrastructure in place for remote development, but that was usually the exception and not the norm. ↩
I’m going to shamelessly drop my own Nitrous referral link right here. ↩

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