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Singapore’s DropMySite secures partnership with Japanese hosting provider Paperboy & co.

Masaru Ikeda 2013.11.20

See the original story in Japanese. Singapore-based DropMySite, a startup providing cloud-based website and database backup solutions, recently announced that it has partnered with Japanese hosting provider Paperboy&co. as a solution provider. Paperboy is a subsidiary of Japanese internet conglomerate GMO Internet Group. For DropMySite, this partnership in Japan follows a previous partnership with GMO Cloud, another GMO service. We had a chance to speak with DropMySite’s CEO Charif El-Ansari in Tokyo, recently appointed to this position in late October. Before joining the team, he previously worked at Google as the head of its business development team in the South East Asian region. The Bridge: Congratulations on your taking up the new post and for the partnership with Paperboy&co. Why did the company change its CEO? Charif: Our previous CEO John Fearon moved to Gilcrux Holding, which owns multiple companies including DropMySite. He’s good at creating a new business from the scratch and raising money from investors. I was appointed since our business is in the growth phase. But John will be still involved in the business as a strategic consultant. John and I complement each other in terms of our skills. The Bridge:: A large company like GMO Internet…

charif_el-ansari_and_kentaro_sato — From the left: Paperboy&co. CEO Kentaro Sato, DropMySite CEO Charif El-Ansari

See the original story in Japanese.

Singapore-based DropMySite, a startup providing cloud-based website and database backup solutions, recently announced that it has partnered with Japanese hosting provider Paperboy&co. as a solution provider. Paperboy is a subsidiary of Japanese internet conglomerate GMO Internet Group.

For DropMySite, this partnership in Japan follows a previous partnership with GMO Cloud, another GMO service. We had a chance to speak with DropMySite’s CEO Charif El-Ansari in Tokyo, recently appointed to this position in late October. Before joining the team, he previously worked at Google as the head of its business development team in the South East Asian region.

The Bridge: Congratulations on your taking up the new post and for the partnership with Paperboy&co. Why did the company change its CEO?

Charif: Our previous CEO John Fearon moved to Gilcrux Holding, which owns multiple companies including DropMySite. He’s good at creating a new business from the scratch and raising money from investors. I was appointed since our business is in the growth phase. But John will be still involved in the business as a strategic consultant. John and I complement each other in terms of our skills.

The Bridge:: A large company like GMO Internet can develop backup solutions by themselves. Why did they choose yours?

Charif: We have acquired our own knowledge especially in this space. In comparison to development from the scratch, they judged it would be better to take our white-label service.

The Bridge: When I visited DropMySite headquarters in Singapore, John showed me a service called E-mail Insights, which was under development. How is that service coming along?

Charif: Yes, E-mail Insights enhances our e-mail backup features, and helps you easier analyze how your employees are interacting with their colleagues and customers. This is very useful for management especially with the current BYOD trend where employees do work on their own devices. This service can be used as a sort of CRM solutions, where you can easily hand over an interaction with a customer to a sales representative, even if someone quits your team suddenly. Our backup solutions and E-mail Insights will come together to help companies in their business operations.

The Bridge: Are you currently working on anything new?

Charif: We’re currently a new service called DropMyMobile. It’s an Android app that is currently in the alpha stage, and we can introduce it publicly in the middle of December. This app will allow you to backup your history of sent and received calls, contacts, SMS, media, calendar, apps, and app data from your smartphone to our cloud. This will be also convenient when you buy a new handset and need to copy data from your old one. In contrast with DropMyEmail and DropMySite, we may be partnering with mobile carriers to promote DropMyMobile.

The company is developing their systems in Singapore, but has been working closely with engineers from Paperboy&co. in Tokyo and Fukuoka through a number of teleconferences. This kind of partnership with a big hosting provider will help the startup acquire more engineering and operational experiences. It is another good example in terms of a Japanese internet company helping a startup in the South East Asian region boost its business.

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Candy: A sweet mobile rewards solution from Singapore’s Yoyo Holdings

Rick Martin 2013.11.20

Candy (www.can-dy.ph) is a mobile rewards platform, created by Singapore-based startup Yoyo Holdings [1]. It’s a solution that rewards users for performing micro-tasks – such as surveys, app installs, banner clicks, or review submissions – by giving them airtime, or prepaid phone credit. Of course, in emerging markets where credit card penetration and online payments is especially low, there is much opportunity for such an offering to excel. Candy, which launched in the Philippines back in March, has seen promising results thus far. The service, which only accepted new users up until the end of April, saw 30,000 users in its first three weeks, and now has 47,000 subscribers with another 18,000 wait-listed. So far most of the users are in their teens or 20s, with a 64% majority of those being male. I recently had a chance to catch up with Yoyo’s executive officer Arnab Gupta, who explained how their service offers something that many mobile carriers in emerging markets currently lack. Above all else it offers a place to collect and store detailed user information not usually available to telcos. This includes, of course, information like name, telephone number, and age, but also things like education, industry, income,…

Candy (www.can-dy.ph) is a mobile rewards platform, created by Singapore-based startup Yoyo Holdings [1]. It’s a solution that rewards users for performing micro-tasks – such as surveys, app installs, banner clicks, or review submissions – by giving them airtime, or prepaid phone credit. Of course, in emerging markets where credit card penetration and online payments is especially low, there is much opportunity for such an offering to excel.

Candy, which launched in the Philippines back in March, has seen promising results thus far. The service, which only accepted new users up until the end of April, saw 30,000 users in its first three weeks, and now has 47,000 subscribers with another 18,000 wait-listed. So far most of the users are in their teens or 20s, with a 64% majority of those being male.

I recently had a chance to catch up with Yoyo’s executive officer Arnab Gupta, who explained how their service offers something that many mobile carriers in emerging markets currently lack. Above all else it offers a place to collect and store detailed user information not usually available to telcos.

This includes, of course, information like name, telephone number, and age, but also things like education, industry, income, and employment.

So when it comes to things like surveys, questionnaires, or reviews, what Candy offers will likely be more appealing to advertisers or corporate clients looking to learn more about an emerging market like the Philippines.

Their client list looks pretty impressive so far with a number of large notable Japanese companies already under its belt. Their initial goal is to succeed in the Philippines, in the hopes of becoming the top mobile platform in emerging markets like this one. To that end, the team is currently working out of Manilla, and there are plans to expand outwards to Thailand and Indonesia by the end of this year. The see lots of potential in the smartphone market especially, and will be focusing their efforts on that front.

Readers may recall that we briefly mentioned them in our coverage of Rising Expo a few weeks back. If their initial success continues, I expect we’ll likely hear much more from the Candy team in the coming months.

It’s encouraging to see that the folks at Yoyo are also being good citizens too, launching a program to send free airtime to many of those affected by the devastating Typhoon Haiyan earlier in the month. You can find out more about that initiative here.

To learn more about Candy, check out the video above, featuring CEO and co-founder Yosuke Fukada.

Incorporated in Singapore. ↩

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Kyoto-based startup gives us virtual glimpse of yesterday with time machine app [Video]

Rick Martin 2013.11.19

Readers may recall a few months back when we wrote about Kyoto-based startups Qooq, and its very clever augmented reality app Yesterscape. At the time, we saw a brief bump in our incoming traffic when science fiction author William Gibson happened to re-tweet the article. I recently had a chance to speak with the creator of Yesterscape, and CEO of Qooq Inc, who goes by the name of ‘Hide Nu’. While chatting with me in his Kyoto office, he mentioned estaticly that he’s a huge fan of Gibson, saying he’s read all his novels, pulling one off the office shelf to show me. For those unfamiliar with the app, Yesterscape lets you take pictures and save them virtually in a specific location. Then, if you return to that location later, you can revisit your memory using your smartphone. The app surpassed the 100,000 downloads mark earlier this month, and they continue to build and improve it. The most recent additions to the service include the ability to get a notification when a picture of someone you know is posted nearby, as well as the option to let others see your photos using AirDrop or Line. They also hope to implement…

Readers may recall a few months back when we wrote about Kyoto-based startups Qooq, and its very clever augmented reality app Yesterscape. At the time, we saw a brief bump in our incoming traffic when science fiction author William Gibson happened to re-tweet the article. I recently had a chance to speak with the creator of Yesterscape, and CEO of Qooq Inc, who goes by the name of ‘Hide Nu’. While chatting with me in his Kyoto office, he mentioned estaticly that he’s a huge fan of Gibson, saying he’s read all his novels, pulling one off the office shelf to show me.

For those unfamiliar with the app, Yesterscape lets you take pictures and save them virtually in a specific location. Then, if you return to that location later, you can revisit your memory using your smartphone. The app surpassed the 100,000 downloads mark earlier this month, and they continue to build and improve it. The most recent additions to the service include the ability to get a notification when a picture of someone you know is posted nearby, as well as the option to let others see your photos using AirDrop or Line. They also hope to implement markerless AR in the future as well [1].

Nu tells me that they do plan to promote this service outside of Japan, and to that end, they will be headed to SXSW next year.

I also had a chance to meet with the company’s CTO, Mexican-born Oscar Peredo. He’s a very enthusiastic personality, with a deep love for Japan, and development skills to match. He told me that what they are trying to do is make entirely new products:

We try to create things that have not been created before. We specialize in developing things that are useful for daily life, that people can enjoy using. We also try to surprise them.

Initially, while I was a big fan of the idea of Yesterscape, I was skeptical about its business potential. But after speaking with Nu, it seems to me that a service like Yesterscape is almost certain to be a fixture in our future. When he mentioned that it could even be used by conventional digital cameras, I started thinking about how easy it would be for even wi-fi enabled compacts and DSLRs to implement something like Yesterscape. Ideally it could manifest itself as a hardware ‘Yesterscape’ switch on a camera, but more realistically it would be more like a social share to the web.

Personally, I really admire this project, especially the idea of executing it here in Japan where the elderly demographic is so huge. The possibility of old people’s memories dying as they die can be thought of as a sort of cultural crisis. And I really think that governments should be on board sponsoring something like this, getting their own archives transferred into Yesterscape.

Markerless augmented reality uses parts of our environment as a tracking target, rather than some black and white graphic as we typically see in traditional AR. ↩

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Japan’s AirIntern helps startups improve their branding, hire new staff

AirIntern

Junya Mori 2013.11.19

See the original story in Japanese. Startups are typically shorthanded when it comes to man-power. But if your brand is not very popular yet, and you may have a tough time hiring new talent. Tokyo-based startup Humandyne launched a new service today which might be a good answer for startups struggling with this the issue. The service is called AirIntern, but it’s not actually focused on getting interns. Rather it introduces your company by showcasing company profiles, the working environment, voices from your employees, and job descriptions. In comparison with conventional recruiting sites, AirIntern contains rich content like pictures from offices and video interviews with employees (In this way, it seems more like US-based The Muse). You can see an example below, featuring an interview with Kazuo Ikari, the CEO of Whyteboard, a startup that operates a flea market app Listor. These video clips are created around positive feedback from people like executives, hiring personnel, and public relations staff at a company. The startup plans to stand out from competitors by using rich media content to clearly describe a company’s culture. To make shooting video interviews efficient, the company plans to enlist available cameramen and writers using a cloud-based system….

See the original story in Japanese.

Startups are typically shorthanded when it comes to man-power. But if your brand is not very popular yet, and you may have a tough time hiring new talent. Tokyo-based startup Humandyne launched a new service today which might be a good answer for startups struggling with this the issue.

The service is called AirIntern, but it’s not actually focused on getting interns. Rather it introduces your company by showcasing company profiles, the working environment, voices from your employees, and job descriptions. In comparison with conventional recruiting sites, AirIntern contains rich content like pictures from offices and video interviews with employees (In this way, it seems more like US-based The Muse). You can see an example below, featuring an interview with Kazuo Ikari, the CEO of Whyteboard, a startup that operates a flea market app Listor.

These video clips are created around positive feedback from people like executives, hiring personnel, and public relations staff at a company. The startup plans to stand out from competitors by using rich media content to clearly describe a company’s culture.

To make shooting video interviews efficient, the company plans to enlist available cameramen and writers using a cloud-based system. This is similar to AirBnB which uses available cameramen to shoot accommodation spaces for its website.

Employer Branding

crowdworks — Crowdworks’ hiring page on AirIntern

AirIntern is intended to help companies improve their ’employer branding’ efforts. Employer branding is seen as a key part of a corporate branding, telling potential employers the attractions of your company. Like many established companies, startups can also benefit from such efforts to hire strong talent.

The website focuses on how much user traffic it can drive to your hiring application form. The company will charge you on a monthly basis, for content production and advertising, depending on how many positions you are hiring for. You can add available job descriptions to the website at any time. In many ways, the service is an extension of your hiring page rather than a recruiting site.

The company is also planning to add a user profile feature soon. This will allow users to keep updated on available positions from companies they like. The aim here is to create a pool of job seekers.

Job seekers can stop looking when they are hired, but the website encourages them to keep looking for opportunities even when they are satisfied with their current position. This is sort of similar to LinkedIn.

Humandyne’s CEO Taichi Ebitani says:

We want to give people more employment options. If you are interested in joining emerging businesses or startups, I think you should. By providing more options, we hope that working at startups could be considered mainstream rather than just an escape from working at an established company.

AirIntern aspires to enlist over 100 companies to the platform by next March.

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In conversation with Japan’s Samurai Incubate, Anydoor about early-stage startups (Part 2 of 3)

Takeshi Hirano 2013.11.19

See the original article in Japanese The partnership between investors and entrepreneurs is an interesting one. In the seed money round, investors not only invest funds, but they cooperate with entrepreneurs on many aspects of the business. But what’s actually going during the very early funding round? We spoke with an investor and an entrepreneur to find out more about this. Kentaro Sakaibara is the CEO of Samurai Incubate, a pioneer among independent incubators in Japan. Naoki Yamada is the CEO of Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, a portfolio startup of Samurai Incubate. In the previous article, they talked about how they first met, and how they started working on a translation service. In the following conversation, they continued to discuss the early stages of their cooperation. History of Anydoor * February 2009: Naoki Yamada and Tomohiro Onuma founded Anydoor. * May 2009: Conyac, a crowdsourced translation service, was launched. * March 2010: Yamada met Sakakibara, and became one of the first portfolio startups of Samurai Incubate. * December 2011: Anydoor raises funds from United. * February 2013: Conyac for Business was launched. * October 2013: Anydoor raises funds from three VCs. The Bridge: How was your…

See the original article in Japanese

The partnership between investors and entrepreneurs is an interesting one. In the seed money round, investors not only invest funds, but they cooperate with entrepreneurs on many aspects of the business. But what’s actually going during the very early funding round? We spoke with an investor and an entrepreneur to find out more about this. Kentaro Sakaibara is the CEO of Samurai Incubate, a pioneer among independent incubators in Japan. Naoki Yamada is the CEO of Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, a portfolio startup of Samurai Incubate.

In the previous article, they talked about how they first met, and how they started working on a translation service. In the following conversation, they continued to discuss the early stages of their cooperation.

History of Anydoor
* February 2009: Naoki Yamada and Tomohiro Onuma founded Anydoor.
* May 2009: Conyac, a crowdsourced translation service, was launched.
* March 2010: Yamada met Sakakibara, and became one of the first portfolio startups of Samurai Incubate.
* December 2011: Anydoor raises funds from United.
* February 2013: Conyac for Business was launched.
* October 2013: Anydoor raises funds from three VCs.

The Bridge: How was your cooperation at the beginning?

Yamada: First we decided to make KPIs. Before that, we had been just trying to increase our users. But we decided it’d be better to set another measurement. Me and Sakakibara-san had meetings every week to evaluate the performance of the previous week, and we then decided our plan for the coming week.

Sakakibara: We provided the service for free, temporary.

Yamada: Yes, right. After half a year, we realized we were totally in the red. The more the service was used, the more our loss increased. We had difficulties setting the right price for quite a long time.

Sakakibara: Onuma-san had lots of information about services outside Japan, and we got some ideas from that.

Yamada: Yeah, during a small chat. We enjoyed that kind of small talk, since we concentrated so hard on the work.

Sakakibara: Onuma-san was a sort of healer.

Yamada: The toughest time for me was when I was juggling the business and my other part-time jobs. So Sakakibara-san was really a sort of angel for me.

Sakakibara: Conyac is now widely recognized, but it was quite hard to get the recognition those days. I feel now I should have put more effort in to get the recognition. It was hard to raise funds as well.

Yamada: It had been quite hard until the investment from United (formerly ngigroup) was fixed. In the first year, even the term ‘crowdsourcing’ was not well known. We had to use overseas cases to explain.

Sakakibara: And the market condition was not so good either. Even Nobot was struggling.

The Bridge: Sakakibara-san was the one who proceeded with negotiation with VCs?

Sakakibara: No, I was supporting other aspects like human relations, since Yamada-san was better at creating concrete documents. I had thought VCs don’t like it when investors actively make suggestions, but I heard that is changing. It depends on the person though.

Yamada: For almost a year after we raised funds from United, we had no clear direction and couldn’t used the funds. We’d been providing our service only for consumers.

Sakakibara: It took time to change the target to corporate users. We used to meet almost every month at the time.

Yamada: We should have focused more on data analysis earlier. We should have looked at the data and the users.

Sakakibara: I recently visited Silicon Valley. We visited there a lot together.

Yamada: Yes, we visited many places.

Sakakibara: Our recognition among overseas VCs is improving. Perhaps we could raise funds from them now.

Yamada: We and Kiyo-san (Kiyo Kobayashi, CEO of Nobot, acquired by KDDI) used to visit Silicon Valley together. We visited many VCs, but it was tough when they couldn’t catch what we were saying.

Sakakibara: It was exciting.

Yamada: We struggled together like partners, beyond the business-like relations between VC or incubator and an entrepreneur.

Sakakibara: You joined our visits to Silicon Valley a lot.

Yamada: I kind of felt like I had to…

Sakakibara: Many people used to join the visit, three years ago. But they don’t join anymore.

Yamada: What makes you keep visiting there?

Sakakibara: I’d like to develop services that succeed overseas. To achieve that, it is necessary to make connections with local angel investors, such as Sean Parker.

Yamada: Sean Parker… what a big name.

Sakakibara: But actually, the connections I’ve been building long term help recently. So, I’m going to work harder on that.

Yamada: Now that I think about it, Samurai’s first startups were quite bold, like jumping outside Japan without connections.

Sakakibara: Many startups now first focus on the domestic market, since they think it would be impossible to be successful overseas.

Yamada: The first time we flew together to Silicon Vallley, I had no plan honestly. Sakakibara-san said “We’ll go see VCs there”, so I replied “Okay, let’s go.” Then I was totally knocked down by them. I got negative comments like “Is there a market for such a translation service in English-speaking countries?”

They developed their business step-by-step though trial and error. They continued to talk about how they grew their business. And we’ll cover that in the next article.

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Survey yields surprising insights into smartphone use in Japan

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.11.19

Japanese software development company Just sytems has conducted a survey of 1,100 respondents ages 15 to 69 about about their usage of mobile and social media. The survey used the company’s product Fastask, an online survey and questionnaire platform that works similar to Survey Monkey. The same survey was conducted back in July of 2012, the number of smartphone users exceeded the number of feature phone users by only a little: 48% to 47.7%. Smartphone usage is more common for people in their teens, 20s, and 30s, with a surprising 75% of kids ages 10 to 20 carrying smartphones. People in their 20s owning smartphones about 70%, and 30s at roughly 61%. When asked about which mobile apps that they use most frequently in a given day, the app with the most usage time was Yahoo Japan, at about 24 minutes per day. Both male and females in their teens and 20s used social apps like Line, Facebook, and Twitter about 80 minutes per day. Teen girls use these apps more heavily than other segments, led by Line at 38 minutes, Twitter for 37 minutes, and Facebook for eight minutes per day. Respondents were also asked about the App Store’s…

Japanese software development company Just sytems has conducted a survey of 1,100 respondents ages 15 to 69 about about their usage of mobile and social media. The survey used the company’s product Fastask, an online survey and questionnaire platform that works similar to Survey Monkey.

The same survey was conducted back in July of 2012, the number of smartphone users exceeded the number of feature phone users by only a little: 48% to 47.7%. Smartphone usage is more common for people in their teens, 20s, and 30s, with a surprising 75% of kids ages 10 to 20 carrying smartphones. People in their 20s owning smartphones about 70%, and 30s at roughly 61%.

When asked about which mobile apps that they use most frequently in a given day, the app with the most usage time was Yahoo Japan, at about 24 minutes per day. Both male and females in their teens and 20s used social apps like Line, Facebook, and Twitter about 80 minutes per day. Teen girls use these apps more heavily than other segments, led by Line at 38 minutes, Twitter for 37 minutes, and Facebook for eight minutes per day.

docomo-smartphone — Docomo smartphone launch, 2012

Respondents were also asked about the App Store’s price hike in October. Almost 60% of iPhone users were aware of it, and 54% noted that they are considering cutting back on the purchase of paid apps. On a related topic, the survey also found that almost 53% of iPhone users use some sort of paid app for managing their schedule, in contrast to 41% of Android users.

The fact that this survey was conducted solely online may mean that the results skewed more towards tech-savvy smarphone users. But even so, the survey gives us a decent rough idea of the state of smartphone usage in this country. The entire report can be found over on the Fastask website.

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As Angry Birds x Puzzle & Dragons collab goes live, will Japan warm to Rovio?

Rick Martin 2013.11.18

We previously told you that Japanese gaming giant GungHo Online Entertainment would be working with Rovio’s iconic Angry Birds on a Puzzle & Dragons collaboration. The results of that collaboration just went live in the P&D app today, as a special in game event showcasing a special ‘Piggy Island’ dungeon. As you can see in our video above, the special level includes most of the same Angry Birds characters that many of us know so well. For me, the most interesting part of how this was presented was that the Angry Birds theme music is featured in the collaboration. It was a pleasant surprise [1]. Of course it’s Rovio’s hope that by featuring their feathered friends inside Japan’s most popular mobile game, that they can get a little more exposure to the lucrative Japanese mobile games market. So far it looks to be working, and as I write this Angry Birds is ranked 69th overall in the Japanese iOS app store. It was ranked 432nd the same time yesterday (see picture below)[2]. Typically these collaborations result in a rather temporary spike in this way. But for Rovio, I expect they’ll be quite happy to find another channel through which to…

We previously told you that Japanese gaming giant GungHo Online Entertainment would be working with Rovio’s iconic Angry Birds on a Puzzle & Dragons collaboration. The results of that collaboration just went live in the P&D app today, as a special in game event showcasing a special ‘Piggy Island’ dungeon.

As you can see in our video above, the special level includes most of the same Angry Birds characters that many of us know so well. For me, the most interesting part of how this was presented was that the Angry Birds theme music is featured in the collaboration. It was a pleasant surprise [1].

Of course it’s Rovio’s hope that by featuring their feathered friends inside Japan’s most popular mobile game, that they can get a little more exposure to the lucrative Japanese mobile games market. So far it looks to be working, and as I write this Angry Birds is ranked 69th overall in the Japanese iOS app store. It was ranked 432nd the same time yesterday (see picture below)[2]. Typically these collaborations result in a rather temporary spike in this way. But for Rovio, I expect they’ll be quite happy to find another channel through which to connect with fans in Japan.

The Finnish company appears to have found Japan relatively difficult to crack in comparison to other markets, with so many other strong character brands to go up against. Although when we spoke with Rovio representatives earlier in the year, they emphasized that they wanted to take things slow. Japan is a hard nut to crack, but this is a good step.

angry-birds-puzzle-dragon-collab — Source: App Annie

As with past P&D collaborations (see Batman: Arkham Origins), Clash of Clans), players can collect special themed monsters to power up and evolve. Some of these special monsters have been less than great in the past, but the Angry Birds characters I’ve collected so far (surprisingly) do not suck. ↩
For 9pm Japan time. ↩

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Talking early stage startups: In conversation with Japan’s Samurai Incubate, Anydoor (Part 1 of 3)

Takeshi Hirano 2013.11.18

See the original article in Japanese The partnership between investors and entrepreneurs is an interesting one. In the seed money round, investors not only invest funds, but they cooperate with entrepreneurs on many aspects of the business. But what’s actually going during the very early funding round? We spoke with an investor and an entrepreneur to find out more about this. Kentaro Sakaibara is the CEO of Samurai Incubate, a pioneer among independent incubators in Japan. Naoki Yamada is the CEO of Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, a portfolio startup of Samurai Incubate. Anydoor was found in February, 2009. Yamada came up with the idea having been frequently asked to translate short sentences. He won the seed money at a business contest, and launched the startup with his friend, Tomohiro Onuma. His encounter with Samurai Incubate opened the way for them to start their business. Anydoor raised funds from United (previously known as ngi group) in December 2011, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital in October 2013. Almost broke Yamada: It was in 2010 at Tully’s Coffee in Shinjuku when we met for the first time, right? Sakakibara: Most of the first meetings with startups in…

See the original article in Japanese

The partnership between investors and entrepreneurs is an interesting one. In the seed money round, investors not only invest funds, but they cooperate with entrepreneurs on many aspects of the business. But what’s actually going during the very early funding round? We spoke with an investor and an entrepreneur to find out more about this. Kentaro Sakaibara is the CEO of Samurai Incubate, a pioneer among independent incubators in Japan. Naoki Yamada is the CEO of Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, a portfolio startup of Samurai Incubate.

Anydoor was found in February, 2009. Yamada came up with the idea having been frequently asked to translate short sentences. He won the seed money at a business contest, and launched the startup with his friend, Tomohiro Onuma. His encounter with Samurai Incubate opened the way for them to start their business.

Anydoor raised funds from United (previously known as ngi group) in December 2011, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital in October 2013.

Almost broke

Yamada: It was in 2010 at Tully’s Coffee in Shinjuku when we met for the first time, right?

Sakakibara: Most of the first meetings with startups in the early days at Samurai were at fast food restaurants. I remember, you had only 5000 yen left in your bank account, right?

Yamada: Actually, I had more. I think, a bit more than 10,000 yen.

Sakakibara: In the corporate account, not personal one.

Yamada: We met at a TechCrunch Japan on the previous Friday. The one organized by Hirano-san [1]. After the event I got an e-mail from Sakakibara-san, introducing Samurai Incubate. It seemed dubious and I deleted it right away.

Sakakibara: Wha!? I’ve been saying I want to make something like “Honyaku Konnnyaku” [2], then someone told me about the event. And you were the only person I contacted after the event.

Yamada: Really!?

Sakakibara: Yes. Only you.

Yamada: But you seemed indifferent to our product when I talked about it. And I said I have little money left in my bank account. Then you told me all of a sudden “I’m gonna invest you.”

Sakakibara: Yeah? Was it like that?

Yamada: So, I answered I that I needed time to think. I returned to my office, and asked Onuma if he knew Samurai Incubate. And he said “No." I asked our first investor about Samurai Incubate. It turned out that person knew Taiga-san (Taiga Matsuyama, East Ventures) and Sakakibara-san. That way, I was convinced I could trust you, and I decided to accept the offer.

Sakakibara: I didn’t know that story.

Yamada: At the time, my bank balance was only 5000 yen. And the money was transferred on the following Monday. I was so relieved!

Sakakibara: Sounds like we are a consumer money lender…

Yamada: Haha.

Sakakibara: But it was good that you had a corporate account. Some freelance app-developers don’t have one. Sometimes, I accidentally transfer money to them, and ask them to transfer it back.

Yamada: I had part-time jobs back then.

Sakakibara: You worked at a carpet shop, right?

Yamada: Actually, I rented a space at a carpet shop. I sometimes helped them sell Persian carpets. And I worked at a cafe during the day, and at a transportation company at nights. I worked on Conyac in my spare time. I was working like that in the first year. I had decided not to use the money I had raised from Skylight Consulting for salary.

Anyway, I had only 100,000 yen in my bank account at the time when I left my previous workplace. I was quite broke.

The Bridge: What was your first impression on Yamada-san?

Sakakibara: Brown-dyed hair…

Yamada: Ha ha.

Sakakibara: I mean, he looked similar to some people around me. Harada-san (Daisaku Harada, CEO of Zawatt) at Zawatt and I dye our hair brown as well. I also felt Yamada-san was very humble. Before I met him, I thought he might be a bit arrogant, but actually he just seemed pretty broke.

Yamada: Haha. Looking broke is not really good. I expected to meet someone way older than me, so it was surprise that you looked very casual and open-minded. You wore a suit with a tie.

Sakakibara: But with brown-dyed hair.

Yamada: Before I met you, I had visited quite a lot of VCs, about 25. But I was rejected by all of them. Now that I think about it, there were some little known VCs. Then, you, an active and cheerful investor showed up. I was pretty suspicious. Things like “Samurai” sounded quite dubious. But the more I talked with you, the more I realized your personality was very nice. Then I decided to accept the offer.

Sakakibara: I rarely make the move first. But had been just thinking how to collaborate to develop a Honyaku Konnyaku.

Yamada: I searched for Samurai on the internet, but couldn’t find any results but a Wikipedia page.

Sakakibara: We had already made many investments at that time though. Kobayashi-san, (Kiyo Kobayashi, CEO of Nobot, subsequently acquired by KDDI) was the third case. And the first company we invested was Synclogue.

Yamada: We were close to the end of the fiscal term, the end of March. We thought we couldn’t get through the term. We were really on the edge.

The legendary Samurai House

Sakakibara: These things happened quite recently, but I sometimes feel like it was long time ago. You joined Samurai House at the time [3].

Yamada: Samurai Hause was already open then?

Sakakibara: Yes, we had already opened it.

Yamada: When we got investment in March, we were still using the carpet shop as an office. So we visited Samurai House. Then I thought there’s something wrong with the place. (laughs) I seriously tried to judge which was better — the carpet shop or this messy room at Samurai House.

Sakakibara: Really!?

Yamada: I thought Samurai House was not really very good, but at the same time I thought since you were always there it would be easy to have meetings and I wouldn’t get disturbed by customers like in the carpet shop.

Sakakibara: It was in Kotakemukaihara. Those days were exciting.

Yamada: I was on the upper floor in the house, and we would meet each other two or three times a week. I was a kind of like a leader in this Japanese-style room.

Sakakibara: We had lunch together sometimes. To Ekoda, it was only five minutes to get to Samurai House. When I missed talking to someone, I visited your room.

Yamada: I thought you visited my room when you were really tired.

Sakakibara: We had about 20 residents at our peak. And around five of them actually lived there. Some rooms were not even equipped with an air conditioner.

Yamada: The toughest thing was to bear was the snoring by Haruki-san (Seiha Haruki, the CEO of Joy).

Sakakibara: I know. He snored extremely loud.

Yamada: It was so loud that I couldn’t focus on my work. I could hear his snoring over my headphones.

The Bridge: What are they all doing now?

Sakakibara: Some joined other startups, and some rebuilt their companies. All of them still work in the startups field.

Yamada: We stayed there until SSI (Samurai Startup Island) was founded. Oh yeah, and the earthquake. After the earthquake, I discussed with Onuma and decided to relocate our office to Kanda. Because it might be impossible to return the office in Samurai House when natural disasters occur. So we moved two years ago. Now when I think of that, I can’t believe I lived in Samurai House.

The two went on to discuss how they started growing the translation service “Conyac”. We’ll cover that in the next article.

They met at an event called TokyoCamp organized by the author. ↩
Honyaku Connyaku is an imaginary gadget for translation, which appears in a Japanese anime series Doraemon. ↩
Samurai House was an incubation office by Samurai Incubate, a house in Kotakemukaihara. ↩

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Tokyo Office Tour: Trippiece wants you to travel differently

Masaru Ikeda 2013.11.17

Trippiece is a Tokyo-based startup that allows you to create your travel plan and then gather friends who might be likely to take the same trip. Our readers may recall the company recently fundraised $200 million yen ($2 million) from Silicon Valley-based investment firm Draper Nexus. This followed previous seed investments from Japanese internet marketing agency Opt and incubation company Movida Japan back in 2012. We heard that they recently relocated, so we visited them at their new office in Shibuya. We spoke to founder and CEO Ian Ishida and CFO Fumiaki Koizumi [1] about how they will enhance their business using these latest funds. Ishida unveiled that the company will launch its first overseas office in Singapore next February, intensifying their global marketing efforts: We currently talking to a person in Singapore, and we’ll be launching an office there early next year, naming her as its head. The new office will be located in the heart of the Asian region, which will encourage more Asian people to travel to Japan using our service. In contrast to other travel services like Meetrip or Voyagin [2], our service advises you to visit a destination you’ve never visited, instead of presenting local…

Trippiece is a Tokyo-based startup that allows you to create your travel plan and then gather friends who might be likely to take the same trip. Our readers may recall the company recently fundraised $200 million yen ($2 million) from Silicon Valley-based investment firm Draper Nexus. This followed previous seed investments from Japanese internet marketing agency Opt and incubation company Movida Japan back in 2012.

We heard that they recently relocated, so we visited them at their new office in Shibuya. We spoke to founder and CEO Ian Ishida and CFO Fumiaki Koizumi [1] about how they will enhance their business using these latest funds.

Ishida unveiled that the company will launch its first overseas office in Singapore next February, intensifying their global marketing efforts:

We currently talking to a person in Singapore, and we’ll be launching an office there early next year, naming her as its head. The new office will be located in the heart of the Asian region, which will encourage more Asian people to travel to Japan using our service. In contrast to other travel services like Meetrip or Voyagin [2], our service advises you to visit a destination you’ve never visited, instead of presenting local experiences at that destination. So in that way, we’re not competing with them.

Trippiece’s key concept is to ask locals about local business and destinations. That’s why they intend to hire local people for the new office rather than just dispatch Japanese personnel.

To help users get easy access to the service’s travel resources on mobile, the company introduced an iOS app back in August. An Android version will follow by the end of this year. The app has a feature to notify users when their favorite travel plans get a comment from other users, and it helps increases user retention.

Trippiece has also partnered with established Japanese travel agencies such as JTB and HIS to work on collaborative projects. It also recently won the Chief Secretary of Japan Tourism Agency award. According to Ishida, these results help them get their name out there and win the confidence of consumers.

As for future global expansions, they will launch an English version in February, with an interface enriched with pictures and videos to help foreign people better understand travel experiences in Japan. The Japanese government and tourism agencies are holding many showcase events around the world, such as the Japan Anime Expo, where the Trippiece will introduce their services to those who love Japanese culture and are likely to travel here.

Including Ishida and Koizumi, the company is a seven-person team in total, comprised of engineers, designers, and a certified travel service supervisor.

trippiece-10 — Plastic model airplanes in the meeting room.

trippiece-9 — CEO Ian Ishida admires Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe because of their same first names.

trippiece-6 — The commemorative shield of the Chief Secretary of Japan Tourism Agency’s award.

Fumiaki Koizumi previously worked as CFO at Japanese social network service Mixi. ↩
Meetrip was acquired by Japanese social game developer Donuts earlier this month. Voyagin is also establishing an office in Singapore. ↩

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New app helps Japanese women looking to get pregnant

SCORE 2,097

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.11.16

In addition to photo sharing and decoration apps, a genre of apps popular among women here in Japan is the utility category. Specifically, many of these are apps that provide a convenient way for women to track their menstrual cycles. Apps like Luna Luna and Lalu are particularly popular with Japanese users. Luna Luna began as a dedicated feature phone service, and it had more than 4.5 million users as of April 2013. Lalu is a product by Ateam, a company located in Nagoya, Aichi prefecture. This app had over one million users as of Feburary of 2013. Ateam recently released a new community app for the same target demographic. It’s called Urara. This particular community is aimed at women who want to get pregnant or those in fertility treatment. The app was born out of a growing need seen among the existing users of Lalu. Although the app’s main users are women, partners or spouses can register to use the app. Users can find answers to their questions thanks to contributions from other community members. This is especially useful since many such users may not feel comfortable discussing this sort of topic openly with friends. Within the app, users…

In addition to photo sharing and decoration apps, a genre of apps popular among women here in Japan is the utility category. Specifically, many of these are apps that provide a convenient way for women to track their menstrual cycles. Apps like Luna Luna and Lalu are particularly popular with Japanese users. Luna Luna began as a dedicated feature phone service, and it had more than 4.5 million users as of April 2013. Lalu is a product by Ateam, a company located in Nagoya, Aichi prefecture. This app had over one million users as of Feburary of 2013.

Ateam recently released a new community app for the same target demographic. It’s called Urara. This particular community is aimed at women who want to get pregnant or those in fertility treatment. The app was born out of a growing need seen among the existing users of Lalu. Although the app’s main users are women, partners or spouses can register to use the app.

Users can find answers to their questions thanks to contributions from other community members. This is especially useful since many such users may not feel comfortable discussing this sort of topic openly with friends. Within the app, users can also turn to professional counselors to receive monthly advice. Other content, such as recipes that may help with fertility, are available in the app.

According to data from the Japanese Ministry of Health, the amount of financial aid provided for fertility treatment has grown by six times when compared to seven years ago. This is, of course, part of the reason behind the country’s aging population, and Urara aspires to provide a solution for this very urgent problem.

Urara is available for download over on Google Play and will cost a monthly fee of 350 yen. (or about $3.50)

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