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Tokyo Game Show: The Mobile Players

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If 2012 was the year that mobile exhibitors overtook consoles at the Tokyo Game Show, 2013 was the year consoles rebounded, with Sony and Microsoft dominating the show. But there was still a strong mobile presence this year, perhaps the biggest exhibitor being GREE, once again shelling out for a large floor space. We spoke to their SVP of social games Eiji Araki, who explained why they feel the need to go big every year. But the standout newcomer this year at TGS was GungHo Online Entertainment, the developer of perhaps the world’s most successful game, Puzzle & Dragons, spotlighting their new 3DS version. They also previewed their upcoming title, Divine Gate, which is set for a September 30 release on Android. There were some notable absences from the mobile space however. GREE rival DeNA, as always, chose to skip the event. Colopl had a pretty large booth last year, but they took a pass on showing up this year. Casual game makers Line Corporation and BeeWorks, the creator of the wildly popular (and cute) Nameco franchise, were also no shows. We turned our eyes to the little guys in mobile this year, skipping over consoles entirely [1]. In the…

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If 2012 was the year that mobile exhibitors overtook consoles at the Tokyo Game Show, 2013 was the year consoles rebounded, with Sony and Microsoft dominating the show.

But there was still a strong mobile presence this year, perhaps the biggest exhibitor being GREE, once again shelling out for a large floor space. We spoke to their SVP of social games Eiji Araki, who explained why they feel the need to go big every year. But the standout newcomer this year at TGS was GungHo Online Entertainment, the developer of perhaps the world’s most successful game, Puzzle & Dragons, spotlighting their new 3DS version. They also previewed their upcoming title, Divine Gate, which is set for a September 30 release on Android.

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There were some notable absences from the mobile space however. GREE rival DeNA, as always, chose to skip the event. Colopl had a pretty large booth last year, but they took a pass on showing up this year.

Casual game makers Line Corporation and BeeWorks, the creator of the wildly popular (and cute) Nameco franchise, were also no shows.

We turned our eyes to the little guys in mobile this year, skipping over consoles entirely [1]. In the indie gaming area it was great to see companies like Okinawa-based SummerTime Studio, who has had a hit with their Ancient Surfer mobile game. We had a short discussion with their president, Hirotsu Takeyasu, which you can check out below.

Set up right next to them was Tokyo-based Link Kit, the maker of Samurai Defender, a game that we reviewed (and loved) earlier this year. Team Martini was also showing off Pechan, a really fun game for iPad where you have to push a juicer around the screen to crush fruit.

The game show also had an area dedicated to romance simulation games, featuring Eitarosoft, Voltage, and the oddly named ZZYZX. We did a short interview with Voltage (see video below), a prolific game publisher with over 50 titles to date. They plan to release one app every month, including some games that men can enjoy as well. This is one of those genres that is unique to Japan, but I imagine we will see more of these kind of titles creep into the global market (as we saw with card battle games), on an experimental basis if nothing else.

They came from beyond

Of course, the game show wasn’t just about Japanese game producers peddling their wares. There were also an abundance of foreign game makers parachuting into the country to show off titles here. As we mentioned yesterday, the one that most impressed us was Israel’s Nordau Creative with its Kazooloo augmented reality dragon fighting title.

But there was also an abundance of exhibitors from the Asia region, representing Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Tawian, Thailand, and Vietnam.

We also were quite impressed by the efforts of Russian developer and publisher Game Insight, who just recently launched a localized version of their Tribez game here in Japan for iOS. They win our unofficial award for the most enthusiastic game demo, corralling me and my colleague into a room and not letting us go until we had seen five of their games. They should get a raise.

And finally, making my naughty list this year is Square Enix, who once again had their “no photos” policy in effect at their booth, demonstrating that they still do not comprehend the concept of a “show”.

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The Nordau Creative team, featuring Kazooloo AR game at Tokyo Game Show

  1. There no shortage of coverage over on sites like Tktk and Tktk, so you can check that out there.  ↩

Israel’s Nordau Creative unleashes virtual dragons upon Tokyo Game Show

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While we were primarily focused on Japanese mobile game makers in our visit to the Tokyo Game Show, there were lots of foreign developers and publishers who brought great games to show off. The one that stood out the most for me was from Israeli studio Nordau Creative. They were turning lots of heads with their Kazooloo augmented reality dragon fighting game. This mobile title makes use of a large board that you place on the floor, which when viewed through the camera on your phone or tablet, appears as a sort of inter-dimensional vortex that spawns angry dragons for you to fight. Admittedly, these AR games can be somewhat gimmicky sometimes. But watching visitors dance around Kazooloo game boards shooting at floor dragons makes me think that this one has more potential than most. To try the game out for yourself, you’ll first need to get the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play and then purchase one of the available boards from the company website, which will then be shipped to you. They range in price from $14.99 for a mini-board, to $49.99 for larger sizes. If you’d like a visual demo of how the game…

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The Nordau Creative team, featuring Kazooloo AR game at Tokyo Game Show

While we were primarily focused on Japanese mobile game makers in our visit to the Tokyo Game Show, there were lots of foreign developers and publishers who brought great games to show off.

The one that stood out the most for me was from Israeli studio Nordau Creative. They were turning lots of heads with their Kazooloo augmented reality dragon fighting game. This mobile title makes use of a large board that you place on the floor, which when viewed through the camera on your phone or tablet, appears as a sort of inter-dimensional vortex that spawns angry dragons for you to fight.

Admittedly, these AR games can be somewhat gimmicky sometimes. But watching visitors dance around Kazooloo game boards shooting at floor dragons makes me think that this one has more potential than most.

To try the game out for yourself, you’ll first need to get the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play and then purchase one of the available boards from the company website, which will then be shipped to you. They range in price from $14.99 for a mini-board, to $49.99 for larger sizes.

If you’d like a visual demo of how the game works, you can check out their promo video for the game below.

After a rough year, GREE still goes big at Tokyo Game Show

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Back in 2011 the Tokyo Game Show was GREE’s coming out party, with the company planting a very big footprint in the gaming world – quite literally too, occupying about 10% of the entire floorspace. That exhibition was interpreted by some to be more political than practical, a show of power from a company poised to take over the world via smartphones. Skip to 2013 and we find that GREE, while still a mobile powerhouse, has had to scale things back. GREE’s offices in China and the UK have been shut down, and in the US and Canada the platform division has been shrunk, with staff being integrated back to Japan. Sony and Microsoft are the biggest exhibitors this year, spotlighting new consoles, and for mobile, the new kid on the block is GungHo Online Entertainment, showcasing Puzzle & Dragons in a coming out party reminiscent of GREE two years back. Tokyo Game Show is a very important opportunity for us to interact with our players. Nevertheless, GREE was still out in full force at the Tokyo Game Show this year, with the same humongous booth that they’ve had for the past three years. I wondered, after what was a…

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Back in 2011 the Tokyo Game Show was GREE’s coming out party, with the company planting a very big footprint in the gaming world – quite literally too, occupying about 10% of the entire floorspace. That exhibition was interpreted by some to be more political than practical, a show of power from a company poised to take over the world via smartphones.

Skip to 2013 and we find that GREE, while still a mobile powerhouse, has had to scale things back. GREE’s offices in China and the UK have been shut down, and in the US and Canada the platform division has been shrunk, with staff being integrated back to Japan. Sony and Microsoft are the biggest exhibitors this year, spotlighting new consoles, and for mobile, the new kid on the block is GungHo Online Entertainment, showcasing Puzzle & Dragons in a coming out party reminiscent of GREE two years back.

Tokyo Game Show is a very important opportunity for us to interact with our players.

Nevertheless, GREE was still out in full force at the Tokyo Game Show this year, with the same humongous booth that they’ve had for the past three years. I wondered, after what was a rough year for GREE, why it was necessary for GREE to have such a huge display. I suppose once you make a booth of that magnitude, you may as well keep using it. It’s hardly something you can sell on eBay or Craigslist, is it? But I spoke to GREE senior vice president of social gaming, Eiji Araki, about this, asking why the company still comes to TGS in full force:

The Tokyo Game Show is a very important opportunity for us to interact with our players. In the mobile internet industry it is very difficult to interact with real players to see how they play our games, to see how they are enjoying the games. There are lots of staff here, game producers standing besides the titles they created.

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GREE’s Eiji Araki

This last point took me by surprise, as I had thought that perhaps the staff at the booth were just temporary part-timers. Like most companies at TGS, GREE had its share of models manning their floor space, but it’s encouraging to see that their game producers are on site to speak and interact with consumers.

Araki points out that the focus of their booth is primarily on existing titles rather than new ones. But one fresh change for the GREE booth this year was a dedicated section for Pokelabo, the Japan-based studio which GREE acquired back in October of 2012 for 13.8 billion yen.

Almost a year after that acquisition, Araki tells me that the Pokelabo studio still operates separately for the most part, but that there is a mixed team where Pokelabo and GREE work on collaborative titles. But letting Pokelabo do what they do best is somewhat indicative of GREE’s new focus going forward, distilling their business to do what they collectively do best. Araki explains:

That’s why we downsized some studios, and these studios are still doing really well, focusing on what they are good at. So we are creating lots of new games in US studio for US market, and in the Japan studio for Japan market. At this moment, we are not creating games from Japan for abroad, or from US to Japan, It would be better for our studios to focus on what they are good at, focus on the markets they know.

This applies to San Francisco-based Funzio as well, the other big GREE purchase in 2012, as Araki notes that their US studio is not only stable but actually growing. The Funzio-developed title Knights & Dragons has been doing pretty well of late in the US market, which has been ranking well on the iOS top grossing charts in the US thanks to continued in-game events. Crime City is another Funzio title that has fared well in many markets.

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However, Araki admits that they will stop cut back on developing card battle games for the US market however, as that genre is “not huge,” and already pretty saturated. Of course, the card battle genre is still a massive market in Japan, and GREE will continue to develop such titles at home [1].

GREE’s refocus in the coming year will be largely about increasing their hit-ratio, says Araki in true gamer lingo. The company has yet to produce the big runaway hit recently that we might have expected from them.

And now, with more competition at home and abroad, GREE still has a significant challenge ahead if it wants to win the attention of the world’s mobile gamers.


  1. A little more on this point. GREE’s NFL Elite card battle game (which I’ve been a big fan of, as I wrote in my review here) is now doing well, now that the 2013 NFL season has kicked off. Since it was rebranded from NFL Shuffle back on September 3rd, the game has been ranked in or near the top ten for the iOS US market. The other sports card battle game, MLB Full Deck, has not been as fortunate, Araki noting that we have “almost stopped” it.  ↩

Japan’s Uzabase introduces business news curation app

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See the original story in Japanese. The advent of social media and smart devices has allowed us to receive continuous updates from content producers at any time, no matter where we are. So these days people really need practical solutions to help them filter what to receive and read. We’ve seen several outstanding Japanese startups working on such information solutions, including Smart News, Vingow, and Gunosy. It’s an economic journal for the smartphone era On Friday another player jumped into this space. Tokyo’s Uzabase, the startup behind corporate profile database Speeda, unveiled an iOS app that curates financial and business news updates. It’s called News Picks. News Picks aggregates business and financial updates from 30 news entities in Japan and around the world, delivering them to subscribers with in-depth analysis by the startup’s team of economists and high profile entrepreneurs. The app is available for iOS, and its desktop version will be also introduced by the end of this year. If you think this is just a RSS news aggregator, you’re partly right. But the biggest draw of this service is that it is developed and managed by a team with a solid background in finance. The startup was founded…

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See the original story in Japanese.

The advent of social media and smart devices has allowed us to receive continuous updates from content producers at any time, no matter where we are. So these days people really need practical solutions to help them filter what to receive and read. We’ve seen several outstanding Japanese startups working on such information solutions, including Smart News, Vingow, and Gunosy.

It’s an economic journal for the smartphone era

On Friday another player jumped into this space. Tokyo’s Uzabase, the startup behind corporate profile database Speeda, unveiled an iOS app that curates financial and business news updates. It’s called News Picks.

News Picks aggregates business and financial updates from 30 news entities in Japan and around the world, delivering them to subscribers with in-depth analysis by the startup’s team of economists and high profile entrepreneurs. The app is available for iOS, and its desktop version will be also introduced by the end of this year. If you think this is just a RSS news aggregator, you’re partly right. But the biggest draw of this service is that it is developed and managed by a team with a solid background in finance.

The startup was founded back in 2008. The company’s first app, Speeda, was invented by its founding members who previously worked with investment banks. It collects news updates and business analysis from think tanks, and provides them to finance businesses. In terms of differentiation from big players like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, the service requires users to have no special terminal nor master specific commands or functions.

The company is rapidly expanding its focus on Asia, and has overseas offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Curation by economic experts might be the key

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One key service provided by the startup is a strong expertise in business trends, with valuable news updates curated by financial experts.

When you launch the app, you’re required to log in to the service with your social media accounts. But I found it somewhat discouraging that it asked me to create a user account/password for the service in addition to the social media login. Subsequently, you choose persons or business categories that interest you. This process is similar to that of the Vingow app as well.

You can browse updates in the timeline curated by other users you follow, or check out the news crawling robots. You can add notes on updates, which then allows other users know why you liked it. Like conventional RSS reader apps, you can jump to the original website from any given update.

From my perspective, there’s still room to improve in terms of choosing updates to suit my preference. It’s difficult to choose which high profile user I should follow. For example, if I follow Japanese dotcom tycoon Takafumi Horie, I don’t know what kind of curated updates I will get through his timeline.

Here on this site, we also bring you updates from startup scenes around the world, including business updates. From a media person’s perspective, I’m looking forward to seeing how this kind of solutions changes how consumers’ get news updates.

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newspicks newspicks

Forget food photos. Japan’s ‘Instapaper for Interiors’ raises $1M

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Tunnel is the startup behind RoomClip, a photo sharing service that lets you show off your room. The company announced today that it has raised 100 million yen ($1 million) from Femto Growth Capital. Coinciding with this funding, the investment firm’s general partner Tetsuya Isozaki will join the board of the startup. Tunnel was founded back in November of 2011. Previously it received seed investment of 10 million yen ($100,0000) from Samurai Incubate and Cyber Agent Ventures back in 2011. According to the startup’s CEO Masahiko Takashige, the service’s main userbase are females in their 20s and 30s. He observed many people sharing interior photos on Mixi and other social networking services even before launching the startup back in May of 2012. To date the RoomClip mobile app has seen 130,000 downloads and over 100,000 photos posted. I asked Takashige about what motivates users sharing those photos. For some users, they may not be so proud to show the inside of their home to others. So sharing such photos of your room can be a good excuse to clean up a little. Other users say it can be sort of addictive. In terms…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Tunnel is the startup behind RoomClip, a photo sharing service that lets you show off your room. The company announced today that it has raised 100 million yen ($1 million) from Femto Growth Capital. Coinciding with this funding, the investment firm’s general partner Tetsuya Isozaki will join the board of the startup.

Tunnel was founded back in November of 2011. Previously it received seed investment of 10 million yen ($100,0000) from Samurai Incubate and Cyber Agent Ventures back in 2011.

According to the startup’s CEO Masahiko Takashige, the service’s main userbase are females in their 20s and 30s. He observed many people sharing interior photos on Mixi and other social networking services even before launching the startup back in May of 2012. To date the RoomClip mobile app has seen 130,000 downloads and over 100,000 photos posted. I asked Takashige about what motivates users sharing those photos.

For some users, they may not be so proud to show the inside of their home to others. So sharing such photos of your room can be a good excuse to clean up a little. Other users say it can be sort of addictive.

In terms of user behaviors, 90% of users are viewing other user’s photos, and refer to interiors posted by the service’s most frequent users. This tendency leads to some monetization potential with e-commerce opportunities.

For typical interior fanatics, they hope to discover and buy items they really want. We see many furniture and specialty stores in town. But you select items and place them in your room very much according to your own preference. Our service lets you share this experience online.

The startup expects to add product details and links to e-commerce sites in the app, and examine how these efforts can help drive user traffic for monetization.

The company aims to eventually reach 2.5 downloads for its mobile app and acquire 2 million users.

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Japanese publisher lets readers tweet out their favorite manga page

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Japanese publisher Kodansha is making aggressive moves toward digital recently. Our readers may recall we wrote about their partnership with Line’s novel service back in June. Another initiative from Kodansha is its mobile app ‘D Morning’ provided in cooperation with internet portal Excite Japan. There is a weekly comic book entitled ‘Morning’ that has been in print since 1982. Since then, the comic book has attracted so many manga fans of all ages, especially men. D Morning is the digital version of this comic, and works as a subscription-based app. The application was released back in May and provides about 500 pages from popular comics such as Shimakosaku and Uchu-Kyodai. Users of D Morning can enjoy the latest issues of comics every Thursday at 12am, faster than anybody else. The two companies just updated the app, with a unique feature that lets users share their favorite page from a selected comic to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Readers can tweet out their favorite quotes or pictures that they find especially moving. This feature is exclusive to iOS users for now, but the Android app will see an update sometime in October. D Morning can be downloaded for free,…

D-Morning

Japanese publisher Kodansha is making aggressive moves toward digital recently. Our readers may recall we wrote about their partnership with Line’s novel service back in June.

Another initiative from Kodansha is its mobile app ‘D Morning’ provided in cooperation with internet portal Excite Japan. There is a weekly comic book entitled ‘Morning’ that has been in print since 1982. Since then, the comic book has attracted so many manga fans of all ages, especially men. D Morning is the digital version of this comic, and works as a subscription-based app.

The application was released back in May and provides about 500 pages from popular comics such as Shimakosaku and Uchu-Kyodai. Users of D Morning can enjoy the latest issues of comics every Thursday at 12am, faster than anybody else.

The two companies just updated the app, with a unique feature that lets users share their favorite page from a selected comic to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Readers can tweet out their favorite quotes or pictures that they find especially moving. This feature is exclusive to iOS users for now, but the Android app will see an update sometime in October.

D Morning can be downloaded for free, on both iOS and Android. The first download comes as a free issue, but subsequent downloads will cost 500 yen (about $5) per month. The back catalogue, going back to the time of registration, is available as well.

D-morning-share

Talking with Japanese indie developer SummerTime Studios at Tokyo Game Show [Video]

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Earlier this month we stumbled across Ancient Surfer a gem of a Japanese indie developer, SummerTime Studio based out of Okinawa. So I suppose I should not have been surprised to see them turn up in the indie section of the Tokyo Game Show 2013, which kicked off today. Ancient Surfer currently tops the iOS sports category in 11 countries But I was surprised. Very pleasantly so, in fact. We rarely get a chance to mention any companies based out of Okinawa. And to see Ancient Surfer doing so well right now is especially good to see. We spoke with the company’s president, Hirotsu Takeyasu, who told us that Ancient Surfer has surpassed 500,000 downloads globally. As we look at the app rankings right now, we can see that it tops the iOS sports category in 11 countries, mostly around Asia. SummerTime Studio was founded back in 2011, and to date has made eight apps of their own, as well as many more for clients. They will be exhibiting in the quiet indie corner of the Tokyo Game Show for the next few days, so be sure not to miss them. If you haven’t tried Ancient Surfer yet, check out…

Earlier this month we stumbled across Ancient Surfer a gem of a Japanese indie developer, SummerTime Studio based out of Okinawa. So I suppose I should not have been surprised to see them turn up in the indie section of the Tokyo Game Show 2013, which kicked off today.

Ancient Surfer currently tops the iOS sports category in 11 countries

But I was surprised. Very pleasantly so, in fact. We rarely get a chance to mention any companies based out of Okinawa. And to see Ancient Surfer doing so well right now is especially good to see.

We spoke with the company’s president, Hirotsu Takeyasu, who told us that Ancient Surfer has surpassed 500,000 downloads globally. As we look at the app rankings right now, we can see that it tops the iOS sports category in 11 countries, mostly around Asia.

SummerTime Studio was founded back in 2011, and to date has made eight apps of their own, as well as many more for clients. They will be exhibiting in the quiet indie corner of the Tokyo Game Show for the next few days, so be sure not to miss them.

If you haven’t tried Ancient Surfer yet, check out our demo video below. Or pick it up for free over on the App Store or from Google Play.

Big thanks to my colleague Yukari Mistuhashi, who conducted a number of fun interviews today, including the one above.

With over 1M downloads, Japan’s Barcode Footballer features a brilliant gimmick

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I don’t play too many sports games on mobile, but recently I thought it might be time to finally give Japan’s Barcode Footballer a look. It’s available on both iOS and Android, and has been around since late last year. It’s a soccer team management game, where you collect different players and formations in an effort to build the best possible team. But the most clever thing about this game is the way that it uses the bar codes from ordinary products as a means of creating unique players (more than 3 trillion can be made) with their own special look and skills. In some cases, as you can see in my short video demo below, the name of your new player is often based on the product you chose. The first thing I scanned was a pack of Macadamia chocolates, and the player’s name ended up being Macadamia! I realize that the technology behind this is far from rocket science, but it still left me with a pretty big grin on my face. The game, developed by Cybird, is still only available in Japan, but it has been fairly popular here, ranking well in the the sports category as…

bar_code_footballer

I don’t play too many sports games on mobile, but recently I thought it might be time to finally give Japan’s Barcode Footballer a look. It’s available on both iOS and Android, and has been around since late last year. It’s a soccer team management game, where you collect different players and formations in an effort to build the best possible team.

But the most clever thing about this game is the way that it uses the bar codes from ordinary products as a means of creating unique players (more than 3 trillion can be made) with their own special look and skills. In some cases, as you can see in my short video demo below, the name of your new player is often based on the product you chose. The first thing I scanned was a pack of Macadamia chocolates, and the player’s name ended up being Macadamia! I realize that the technology behind this is far from rocket science, but it still left me with a pretty big grin on my face.

The game, developed by Cybird, is still only available in Japan, but it has been fairly popular here, ranking well in the the sports category as you might expect. Just last week the title surpassed 100 million downloads, which is pretty good for a game in this genre.

The use of bar codes here is a really clever way to execute a sort of gacha, and I’d love to see this kind of thing pop up in more games. Of course, there are lots of games that implemented barcodes in the past, but apparently not too many for smartphones yet.

Mixi Marketing launches a new mobile monetization platform

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Mixi Marketing recently announced the release of a new mobile monetization platform called Coudec. The platform displays advertisements, including coupons, to targeted consumers at the most effective times. At the time of launch, popular mobile apps such as CocoPPa (whose progress we have closely covered) and Mixi’s own mobile app (with a total of over 30 million downloads) have deployed Coudec. Coudec uses a pay-for-performance model, allowing advertisers to display their ads at the most engaging moment when users are in certain apps. Mobile app developers can use Coudec on top of the advertising networks already in use, since Coudec only displays ads at a selected time, giving developers an extra source of income. Mixi went through big organizational changes back in May when the former CEO stepped down, leaving Yusuke Asakura to steer the company. Mixi Marketing was founded back in July in order to handle advertisements and promotional business for the giant social network, as well as other social marketing campaigns. The company hopes Coudec can become the largest smartphone app monetization platform by encouraging more apps to participate in the future.

Coudec-mixi

Mixi Marketing recently announced the release of a new mobile monetization platform called Coudec. The platform displays advertisements, including coupons, to targeted consumers at the most effective times. At the time of launch, popular mobile apps such as CocoPPa (whose progress we have closely covered) and Mixi’s own mobile app (with a total of over 30 million downloads) have deployed Coudec.

Coudec uses a pay-for-performance model, allowing advertisers to display their ads at the most engaging moment when users are in certain apps. Mobile app developers can use Coudec on top of the advertising networks already in use, since Coudec only displays ads at a selected time, giving developers an extra source of income.

Mixi went through big organizational changes back in May when the former CEO stepped down, leaving Yusuke Asakura to steer the company. Mixi Marketing was founded back in July in order to handle advertisements and promotional business for the giant social network, as well as other social marketing campaigns.

The company hopes Coudec can become the largest smartphone app monetization platform by encouraging more apps to participate in the future.

Brand Pit wins Startup Sauna Tokyo, moves on to compete in Finland

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Startup Sauna, a startup accelerator from Finland, held a pitch event here on Tokyo last night. There were a number of familiar faces from the local startup community, including Conyac, Lang–8, Terra Motors, and Locarise. But in the end it was Brand Pit that snatched first prize, with an impressive pitch from Chu Tsz Tat. They now qualify to move on to participate in Slush 2013 in Finland this November. Brand Pit offers brands the ability to see who their fans are. Not to be confused with Brad Pitt (obviously), Brand Pit makes use of image recognition technology to identify brands in pictures shared on social media. What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that it offers brands the ability to see who their fans are, both in terms of demography and geography, and it also lets them see information about their competitors’ fans. The company points out that its solution is one that can bridge even language barriers, because it depends on data obtained from images, as opposed to data obtained from text. I tried to Google ‘Brand Pit’ to find their website. As you might expect, it’s hard. But if you’re lucky, you’ll come across Brand-Pit.com, where you…

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Brand Pit pitches at Startup Sauna Tokyo

Startup Sauna, a startup accelerator from Finland, held a pitch event here on Tokyo last night. There were a number of familiar faces from the local startup community, including Conyac, Lang–8, Terra Motors, and Locarise. But in the end it was Brand Pit that snatched first prize, with an impressive pitch from Chu Tsz Tat. They now qualify to move on to participate in Slush 2013 in Finland this November.

Brand Pit offers brands the ability to see who their fans are.

Not to be confused with Brad Pitt (obviously), Brand Pit makes use of image recognition technology to identify brands in pictures shared on social media.

What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that it offers brands the ability to see who their fans are, both in terms of demography and geography, and it also lets them see information about their competitors’ fans.

The company points out that its solution is one that can bridge even language barriers, because it depends on data obtained from images, as opposed to data obtained from text.

I tried to Google ‘Brand Pit’ to find their website. As you might expect, it’s hard. But if you’re lucky, you’ll come across Brand-Pit.com, where you can read more details about the company. But no matter what the name is, this looks like a pretty clever technology, and it will be interesting to see how they fare in Finland.

Other standout startups

Capy
Masa Morishita of Capy

In addition to the aforementioned companies, there were many other notable startups participating as well. We saw Capy kick off the pitch session with Masa Morishita explaining his text-free, mobile friendly Captcha solution that readers may recall from our previous feature.

There was also social home design startup Suvaco, founded by former investment banker Takemasa Kuroki and his partner Hisashi Nakata.

Perhaps the brightest idea of the evening was NetLED, a cloud-controlled LED light solution that promises better lighting control and optimization that could bring savings of up to 80% or 90% on what we have today. It was pitched by Sherwin Faden.

There was also Pigmal, a hardware solution that itself looks to be nothing more that a few big buttons, but when integrated with smart devices they could be a game controller, or even something as simple as a buzzer at a company’s reception desk. Based out of the Samurai Incubate accelerator, they have already crowdsourced funds on CerevoDash for their first production run.

The last startup to present on the night was Mystar Japan, with its health advice service Up Health. Pitched by Satoshi Taniguchi, this solution proposes to analyze your Tweets and send you the appropriate advice to help you stay healthy.

Overall it was a really fun event, and it’s great to see organizations like Startup Sauna make an effort to come all this way to learn about Japan’s startup community. It certainly doesn’t hurt as well that Finnair got behind the initiative as a sponsor, and we thought we’d throw them a shout out for their support too.

Sébastien Béal, co-founder and CEO of Locarise
Sébastien Béal, co-founder and CEO of Locarise
Terra Motors
Terra Motors
Satoshi Taniguchi, Mystar Japan
Satoshi Taniguchi, Mystar Japan
Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio and Taizo Son of Movida Japan/Gung Ho congratulate Brand Pit
Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio and Taizo Son of Movida Japan/Gung Ho congratulate Brand Pit