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Japanese homescreen decoration app hits 12M downloads, partners with Sanrio

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Based on our previously published Japanese article CocoPPa is a popular homescreen decoration app from Japan that also has some handy social functions. It is operated by United Co. Ltd., and yesterday that company announced that the app has broken though the 12 million downloads milestone. That’s an impressive feat considering that the app just launched about a year ago in July of 2012. What’s remarkable about CocoPPa is that about 83% of its downloads have been from overseas, making it a remarkable success story among Japanese companies that have often have difficulties looking abroad. It was just a little over a month ago that the app surpassed the 10 million downloads mark, and it’s release on Google Play back in late May, picking up the slack for slowing iOS downloads, as you can see in the chart above. CocoPPa also recently became available on the Amazon Android app store as well as the Opera Mobile Store just a few days ago. On a related note, it was announced earlier this month that CocoPPa would be seeking third-party content providers for partnerships and collaborations. And now Sanrio has decided to participate, bringing well-known IP like Hello Kitty, My Melody, and…

Based on our previously published Japanese article

CocoPPa is a popular homescreen decoration app from Japan that also has some handy social functions. It is operated by United Co. Ltd., and yesterday that company announced that the app has broken though the 12 million downloads milestone. That’s an impressive feat considering that the app just launched about a year ago in July of 2012.

What’s remarkable about CocoPPa is that about 83% of its downloads have been from overseas, making it a remarkable success story among Japanese companies that have often have difficulties looking abroad.

It was just a little over a month ago that the app surpassed the 10 million downloads mark, and it’s release on Google Play back in late May, picking up the slack for slowing iOS downloads, as you can see in the chart above. CocoPPa also recently became available on the Amazon Android app store as well as the Opera Mobile Store just a few days ago.

On a related note, it was announced earlier this month that CocoPPa would be seeking third-party content providers for partnerships and collaborations. And now Sanrio has decided to participate, bringing well-known IP like Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Little Twin Stars to feature in the app.

CocoPPa has previously partnered with Tokyo Otaku Mode on anime-themed homescreen decorations, and it also launched a Kanahei collaboration to mark its first anniversary back on July 19th.

In Japan, beers are born out of general elections

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After the emergence of the popular girl idol group AKB48, ‘Sosenkyo’, or ‘general elections’ became a common tactic for brands and companies to obtain user feedback in the form of votes. Companies have always sought feedback from customers in more traditional ways such as postcards or surveys, but now these interactions are online. One company that has excelled in leveraging online tools is beverage company Sapporo Beer. Sapporo Beer chose Facebook for its social marketing initiatives, with campaigns called ‘Hokkaido Likers’ and ‘Hyakunin Beer Lab’ (‘Hyakunin’ meaning ‘100 people’ in Japanese.) The idea was to not just to sell beer directly, but to create trends surrounding its products. Hokkaido Likers began back in April of last year, and on the Facebook page local writers and photographers are encouraged to post photos or information specific to Hokkaido. Everything is posted in Japanese, as well as in English and Chinese. The total number of likes now exceeds 800,000, which is a significant following. The Hyakunin Beer Lab launched last September. That initiative aimed to create a new line of beer based on user feedback. Every Friday night, users can join a live meeting to discuss the new beer product in Facebook comments….

100-beer-lab-

After the emergence of the popular girl idol group AKB48, ‘Sosenkyo’, or ‘general elections’ became a common tactic for brands and companies to obtain user feedback in the form of votes. Companies have always sought feedback from customers in more traditional ways such as postcards or surveys, but now these interactions are online. One company that has excelled in leveraging online tools is beverage company Sapporo Beer.

Sapporo Beer chose Facebook for its social marketing initiatives, with campaigns called ‘Hokkaido Likers’ and ‘Hyakunin Beer Lab’ (‘Hyakunin’ meaning ‘100 people’ in Japanese.) The idea was to not just to sell beer directly, but to create trends surrounding its products.

Hokkaido Likers began back in April of last year, and on the Facebook page local writers and photographers are encouraged to post photos or information specific to Hokkaido. Everything is posted in Japanese, as well as in English and Chinese. The total number of likes now exceeds 800,000, which is a significant following.

The Hyakunin Beer Lab launched last September. That initiative aimed to create a new line of beer based on user feedback. Every Friday night, users can join a live meeting to discuss the new beer product in Facebook comments. Sapporo Beer also held offline meetups and invited the more active users within its Facebook group to get involved. There were over 100,000 users participating in the campaign, and many elections were held to decide on the type of the beer, the name, and its label. After many Friday night meetings, the company found that people want to relax and drink beer, not with friends, but alone. After all the responses, the resulting beer was a little expensive — but it sold out a fews days after it hit the market.

Similarly other brands have held these kinds of elections. Haagen-Dazs Japan launched a new website to ask consumers which limited flavor of ice cream they want to taste see on sale again. There are over 24 limited flavors to vote for, and users can do so by signing in with their Facebook, Twitter, or Mixi account. For those who voted for the top flavor, 1,000 ice cream cups would be delivered. There have been over 160,000 votes in the month after the start of the campaign, and so far the number one flavor is Custard Pudding, followed by Chocolate Macademia and Caramel Walnuts follow.

Haagen-Dazs-campaign

Japanese consumers frequently see companies like Sapporo Beer appearing in traditional media like TV commercials or in magazines. But less people are watching TV these days, and they can skip commercials with the push of a button when they recorded videos. Most of the younger generation are online, and brands now have to scramble to adapt to that shift.

Capy offers text-free, mobile-friendly captchas

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See the original story in Japanese. Most of our readers are likely familiar with ‘Captchas’, the short online security tests that are easy for humans to pass but difficult for spam bots. People use captchas more than 280 million times a day. But because they can contain very hard-to-recognize characters, it is said that more than 10% of users give up on the attempt to pass this step. To address this problem, Kyoto native and entrepreneur Mitsuo Okada launched a startup in the US last year. He has been developing a spam filter technology for smartphones and tablet devices called Capy. We recently spoke to him about his plans for the service. Capy doesn’t use twisted characters like Captcha validation, but instead presents them as image-based puzzles. As a user, in order to to complete validation you simply drag and drop a piece to complete the puzzle, making you feel like you’re enjoying a sort of mini game. For smartphone users this is especially handy since you don’t need to enter any characters but instead simply move a puzzle piece with one stroke. There are many tools out there that allow malicious users to attack conventional Captcha security, but puzzle-based…

capy_featured

See the original story in Japanese.

Most of our readers are likely familiar with ‘Captchas’, the short online security tests that are easy for humans to pass but difficult for spam bots. People use captchas more than 280 million times a day. But because they can contain very hard-to-recognize characters, it is said that more than 10% of users give up on the attempt to pass this step.

To address this problem, Kyoto native and entrepreneur Mitsuo Okada launched a startup in the US last year. He has been developing a spam filter technology for smartphones and tablet devices called Capy. We recently spoke to him about his plans for the service.

Capy doesn’t use twisted characters like Captcha validation, but instead presents them as image-based puzzles. As a user, in order to to complete validation you simply drag and drop a piece to complete the puzzle, making you feel like you’re enjoying a sort of mini game. For smartphone users this is especially handy since you don’t need to enter any characters but instead simply move a puzzle piece with one stroke. There are many tools out there that allow malicious users to attack conventional Captcha security, but puzzle-based Captcha technology like Capy is a different animal.

Since Capy is an image-based Captcha technology, web developers can easily customize puzzles using their own images. It can take as little as 30 minutes to implement it on your website, since the technology is compatible with various development environments like PHP, Ruby, and Python. The program is being provided in private bata, and it’s available upon request by submitting a form. According to Dr. Okada, the startup is already in talks with major portal sites and telecom operators.

Capy launches in the US for the world to see

Okada came up with the original concept back in 2010 when he was study digital watermarking technology at graduate school in Kyoto University. During this research, he had the idea of creating a more enjoyable Captcha process, and that subsequently became Capy.

A typical smartphone does not have a big screen and therefore has little space to advertise.

His product was first introduced last November, but he has been exhibiting at many academic conferences and events before that. His startup was chosen as one of the top 50 companies at this year’s TiE50, an annual Silicon Valley event.

The company also won nine notable awards including the top prize at the Entrepreneur and Innovation track at MIT Sloan School.

Since Okada graduated from a university in the US, it was natural for him to launch the business there. And because US-based services receive many spam attacks from around the world, people there are typically very conscious about user authentication security and spam countermeasures. Of course, there are many competitors in this space, including reCaptcha (which was acquired by Google), Solvemedia, Nucaptcha, and Are you a human. In contrast with other solution providers who focusing only on their strict security, Capy aims to develop a stress-free and user-friendly program that also works as it should.

As for monetization, the service adopts a freemium model. The free version uses third party ads for images in the Captcha puzzle. But paying users can choose any images they want. If Capy could replace all of the world’s Captchas, it would generate an annual revenue worth more than $150 million.

For website developers, you can vary the security strength by increasing or decreasing the amount of puzzle pieces used. Okada explains:

Captcha and ads work well together. A typical smartphone does not have a big screen and therefore has little space to advertise. But with our technology, you can place an ad in the middle of your user validation screen. It might be even more effective than pay-per-view ads.

We also asked him if he had any advice for Japanese startups looking to expand globally.

In terms of both fundraising and exploring partnerships, registering a company in Delaware works for us. In Japan, some people say it’s just cost-consuming but is good for convincing our potential partners or investors that we mean business. People in the US are typically unfamiliar with the Japanese legal systems, so perhaps California- or Delaware-registered companies can take advantage of funding proposals.

Capy-demo

For Japanese companies looking to grow globally, sometimes you need to abandon your preconceived notions. When you market a service in the US, you should consider that much of what you have learned in Japan will never work in that market. When Japanese entrepreneurs set up their base in the Bay Area, many of them typically rely on Japanese people living there. But Okada says, since very few Japanese entrepreneurs are active in the area, if you only rely on them, your business will never get beyond that tiny network. So you must get in touch with people who are influential in the area, regardless of their race or nationality.

According to Okada, their current version is just phase one. They’re aiming to keep developing an interface that is more optimized for evolving devices. He adds:

Passwords are still an old-fashioned technology. It still uses a keyboard even though our devices have been changed. In terms of authenticating a user, we want to propose more intuitive approaches. Capy is one of them. In this space, many developers have been pursuing security, but no one care about usability. Even if our approach results in a decrease its security, the technology with better usability will make users feel more comfortable in completing user validations. And this will contribute to raising people’s overall awareness of security.

The startup is hiring English-speaking programmers and designers, and also inviting websites which want to use the Capy service for their validation walls. If you are interested, feel free to sign up for it here.

Kakao Japan enhances its Item Store with prominent local content partner

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See the original story in Japanese. Kakao Japan, the Japan subsidiary of Korean messaging app KakaoTalk, announced today that it has partnered with Japanese karaoke and mobile content provider Xing (pronounced ek-sing) to provide stickers and themes in the app’s Item Store. The distribution partnership will start on August 1st. In the Item Store, Kakao Talk users are allowed to download free and paid stickers or smartphone themes, which include animated to talking stickers of webtoons, celebrity icons, and animation characters. Xing launched a ring-tone marketplace called ‘Pokemero Joysound’ back in 1999. Since then, the company has been providing a variety of mobile content to feature phones and smartphones. For Kakao Japan, the partnership is intended to enhance its Item Store with the Japanese provider’s content. KakaoTalk has acquired more than 100 million users worldwide, and its gaming platform KakaoGame has been showing good numbers both in revenue and user growth. In addition, the messaging company has also released a number of more vertical apps such as KakaoStory and KakaoPoll. It will be interesting to see if the company can acquire more users and become more of an app distributor as Line is doing.

kakaotalk-itemstore

See the original story in Japanese.

Kakao Japan, the Japan subsidiary of Korean messaging app KakaoTalk, announced today that it has partnered with Japanese karaoke and mobile content provider Xing (pronounced ek-sing) to provide stickers and themes in the app’s Item Store. The distribution partnership will start on August 1st.

In the Item Store, Kakao Talk users are allowed to download free and paid stickers or smartphone themes, which include animated to talking stickers of webtoons, celebrity icons, and animation characters.

Xing launched a ring-tone marketplace called ‘Pokemero Joysound’ back in 1999. Since then, the company has been providing a variety of mobile content to feature phones and smartphones. For Kakao Japan, the partnership is intended to enhance its Item Store with the Japanese provider’s content.

kakao talk
Kakao Japan office

KakaoTalk has acquired more than 100 million users worldwide, and its gaming platform KakaoGame has been showing good numbers both in revenue and user growth. In addition, the messaging company has also released a number of more vertical apps such as KakaoStory and KakaoPoll.

It will be interesting to see if the company can acquire more users and become more of an app distributor as Line is doing.

Say Hi to beautiful location-based experiences

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I like content presented on maps. And I’ve been a big fan of Hitotoki, developed by Craig Mod and the folks at Tokyo-based AQ, since a few years back. It was a great collection of geo-tagged stories, wrapped in the kind of beautiful design that great stories deserve. But looking back now, I think that this location-based content concept was a little ahead of its time. I asked AQ’s Chris Palmieri about the state of Hitotoki a few months back, and I was pretty excited when he told me that it would be relaunching. After a bit of a wait, the new service is now online and is known simply as Hi, living on the web at SayHi.co [1]. Like Hitotoki, it asks you to ‘sketch’ a moment from where you are, comprised of a photo and some text. The process is optimized for smartphones, geotagging your moment as you add it. Chris notes that Hitotoki and Hi began with the same goal of a 500-word moment, but points out that “how each [one] makes that happen couldn’t be more different.” I had a chance to take an early look at Hi, testing it out over the past few months….

sayhi-screenshot
A moment from Nick K on SayHi.co

I like content presented on maps. And I’ve been a big fan of Hitotoki, developed by Craig Mod and the folks at Tokyo-based AQ, since a few years back. It was a great collection of geo-tagged stories, wrapped in the kind of beautiful design that great stories deserve. But looking back now, I think that this location-based content concept was a little ahead of its time.

I asked AQ’s Chris Palmieri about the state of Hitotoki a few months back, and I was pretty excited when he told me that it would be relaunching. After a bit of a wait, the new service is now online and is known simply as Hi, living on the web at SayHi.co [1]. Like Hitotoki, it asks you to ‘sketch’ a moment from where you are, comprised of a photo and some text. The process is optimized for smartphones, geotagging your moment as you add it. Chris notes that Hitotoki and Hi began with the same goal of a 500-word moment, but points out that “how each [one] makes that happen couldn’t be more different.”

I had a chance to take an early look at Hi, testing it out over the past few months. So far my contributions are few and far between – both in terms of time and distance – but there’s a reason for that. While Hi doesn’t ask you to be overly meticulous in composing your moments, for me, the incredible design of the site implicitly demands a certain level of reflection before publishing. It makes me want take a weekend train out of Tokyo, and not come back until I have snapped the perfect selfie with a buddist zen master, and a compose a clever photo caption – preferably in haiku form – to go along with it.

[We] made the sketching tool as enjoyable to use as possible, because we want people to use it over and over and over again.

But interestingly, the publishing flow imposes some reflection by design. After uploading a moment, other Hi users may (or may not) ask you to expand on that moment. This ’Tell me more" request is both a reward for a good contribution, and peer encouragement to take it further [2]. It’s like the applause that encourages a speaker to keep talking with confidence when he’s on stage.

It turns out that the time gap between your initial sketch and your follow up elaboration is conducive to a better published piece. Chris explains that the first step is called a ‘sketch’ for a reason:

We named the initial act of creating with Hi “sketching”, but made the sketching tool as enjoyable to use as possible, because we want people to use it over and over and over again.

But the subsequent steps in the process lets you digest, process, and maybe come up with something you didn’t think of while you were in your moment. By breaking up the process in this way, it doesn’t feel like a process at all. More like a brief instant message session, or a FourSquare check-in that others might actually care about.

Craig Mod explains that the high-quality feedback loops that exist within Hi (the ‘tell me more’ and ‘thanks’ functions) have been effective so far:

It sounds a bit complex but in practice it’s proven to be quite a fluid little interaction model and has already produced over 80,000 words of content — the order of many of those words quite excellent! — in a little over 10 days.

say-hi-mobile-view

I tend to notice more remarkable things when I travel, and so I find I use Hi more while on the road. But because I like Hi, I find that it’s also prompting me to look for remarkable things in my own neighborhood, seeing it in a slightly different light.

But at the same time, my own privacy concerns keep me from adding moments that are too close to home – so that greatly limits my use, although I expect that may not be as big of a concern for most people. Despite that concern, I really love it a lot and will continue to use it.

It’s clear that Craig and Chris and company love Hi a lot too. As far as websites go, this one is pretty immaculately groomed, and they really believe in the content format. And even though this is a labor of love, there are also hopes that it can be a business as well. Craig says:

This needs to be, at some point, sustainable. For now we’re testing hypothesis around engagement; if the core creative ideas don’t work then it’s pointless to consider the business side of things.

Craig has himeself written a great introduction to Hi over on Medium if you’d like to dive deeper into what it’s all about. Or if you’d like to sign up for it yourself, I have some invitations here (thanks Craig!) if any of our readers would like to sign up.

Personally I really hope that Hi does well, in much the same way that I’m rooting for time-machine app Yesterscape, which archives moments of today for tomorrow. I’m still dreaming of a web service that will do a better job of archiving our stories and culture, letting us scrub through a rich timeline of any given location. I think there’s a huge need for services of this kind, and I really hope we can see more spring up in the future.


  1. The old Hitotoki still exists as Hitotoki classic if you ever want to browse those moments.  ↩

  2. If you don’t want to develop it further, that’s cool too. Just click ‘that’s all I’ve got’.  ↩

Sports game platform Mobcast hits 3.5 million users, eyes markets beyond Japan

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Tokyo-based gaming company Mobcast announced yesterday that its sports-focused gaming platform now has more than 3.5 million users, adding about 380,000 new members every three months. The company expanded its service to Korea back in February, intensifying its localization efforts by acquiring Korean gaming company Entercrews. Mobcast’s Korean gaming platform surpassed 600,000 users, and 300,000 of those have tried MobaSoccer, a soccer title where both Japanese and Korean users can simultaneously play a Japan vs Korea match. In addition to Japan and Korea, the company has expressed interest in expanding to South East Asian markets, and it has already established a local presence in Indonesia. The company has been seeing good results in user acquisition, thanks to marketing efforts in partnership with sports TV shows and notable football clubs. The company parnered with FC Barcelona and shows off high-profile football players in its online soccer gaming app, including stars like Thierry Henry and Lionel Messi. In a previous interview with the company’s CSO (chief strategic officer) Takashi Sato, he unveiled that the company is aiming to reach at least 30 million users in Japan, and one million users in Korea in this year. To learn more about the service, check…

20130422-100818

Tokyo-based gaming company Mobcast announced yesterday that its sports-focused gaming platform now has more than 3.5 million users, adding about 380,000 new members every three months.

The company expanded its service to Korea back in February, intensifying its localization efforts by acquiring Korean gaming company Entercrews. Mobcast’s Korean gaming platform surpassed 600,000 users, and 300,000 of those have tried MobaSoccer, a soccer title where both Japanese and Korean users can simultaneously play a Japan vs Korea match. In addition to Japan and Korea, the company has expressed interest in expanding to South East Asian markets, and it has already established a local presence in Indonesia.

mobcast-girls
Mobcast Girls cheer and promote the game platform in Japanese media.
(Image: Mobcast website)

The company has been seeing good results in user acquisition, thanks to marketing efforts in partnership with sports TV shows and notable football clubs. The company parnered with FC Barcelona and shows off high-profile football players in its online soccer gaming app, including stars like Thierry Henry and Lionel Messi.

In a previous interview with the company’s CSO (chief strategic officer) Takashi Sato, he unveiled that the company is aiming to reach at least 30 million users in Japan, and one million users in Korea in this year. To learn more about the service, check out a couple of its commercials which we have included below.

Japanese TV commercial:

 

Korean TV Commercial:

 

LINE continues to be the perfect app distributor, as its photo app hits 40M downloads

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Line Corporation has announced today that that its photo decoration and effects app Line Camera has surpassed the 40 million downloads mark. That’s a pretty significant accomplishment, although one wonders how many of those 40 million have stuck with the app given the abundance of alternatives available in Line’s home market of Japan [1]. I was curious to look at the pace of Line Camera’s growth, given that I hadn’t checked in on the app in over a year (see chart below). After its initial launch in April of 2012, the app picked up 5 million downloads in its first month, and went on to snag 20 million just after New Years. With 40 million announced today, it’s likely that Line Camera’s growth will continue to be completely dependent on how fast the Line chat platform – which is how it is distributed – can grow. Still, there are lots of photo apps that didn’t have such an effective distribution platform as Line, most notably services like Papelook (said to have been downloaded by half of Japan’s young girls who own iPhones), or FX Camera, which had 25 million users as of this past March. For more information on the…

line-camera-40-million-campaign

Line Corporation has announced today that that its photo decoration and effects app Line Camera has surpassed the 40 million downloads mark. That’s a pretty significant accomplishment, although one wonders how many of those 40 million have stuck with the app given the abundance of alternatives available in Line’s home market of Japan [1].

I was curious to look at the pace of Line Camera’s growth, given that I hadn’t checked in on the app in over a year (see chart below). After its initial launch in April of 2012, the app picked up 5 million downloads in its first month, and went on to snag 20 million just after New Years. With 40 million announced today, it’s likely that Line Camera’s growth will continue to be completely dependent on how fast the Line chat platform – which is how it is distributed – can grow.

Still, there are lots of photo apps that didn’t have such an effective distribution platform as Line, most notably services like Papelook (said to have been downloaded by half of Japan’s young girls who own iPhones), or FX Camera, which had 25 million users as of this past March.

For more information on the growth of Line and its vast repertoire of apps, including Line Play, please check out our interactive Line Timeline which chronicles its growth from its launch back in 2011 up until the present day.

line-camera


  1. I was one of the early downloaders, and I’m no longer using it. Although admittedly, it probably would have been weird for me to keep doing so.  ↩

Japanese social network Sumally launches membership for brands, helps them establish online stores

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See the original story in Japanese. Sumally is a Japanese social network that connects what you love with the people you love. For those not familiar with the service, it allows you to tag items other users have posted with either ‘have’ or ‘want’. If you follow users who tag items similar to those you tag, you can connect with such like-minded people. In this way you can discover things that you might never have seen, but you may be very interested in. The startup recently started issuing corporate accounts, providing them with its e-commerce related features for free. To date the service has acquired more than 150,000 users. For corporate users, the new membership allows you to use all features for free, including: Placing your banner image on the top of their page. Uploading your items without tagging ‘want’ or ‘have’. Providing a dashboard to register your items on the platform. Registering item profiles and images in an Excel file format. In addition to these features, you will be allowed to apply to building up your own e-shop on the platform. Your shop can be set up upon approval from Sumally. When a user buys your product on the…

sumally-for-business

See the original story in Japanese.

Sumally is a Japanese social network that connects what you love with the people you love. For those not familiar with the service, it allows you to tag items other users have posted with either ‘have’ or ‘want’. If you follow users who tag items similar to those you tag, you can connect with such like-minded people. In this way you can discover things that you might never have seen, but you may be very interested in.

The startup recently started issuing corporate accounts, providing them with its e-commerce related features for free. To date the service has acquired more than 150,000 users. For corporate users, the new membership allows you to use all features for free, including:

  • Placing your banner image on the top of their page.
  • Uploading your items without tagging ‘want’ or ‘have’.
  • Providing a dashboard to register your items on the platform.
  • Registering item profiles and images in an Excel file format.

In addition to these features, you will be allowed to apply to building up your own e-shop on the platform. Your shop can be set up upon approval from Sumally. When a user buys your product on the platform, you will need to pay a 5% commission in addition to the payment processing fee.

Since late January when the startup launched full e-commerce operations, it has partnered with more than a few brands and encouraged them to establish official stores on the platform. The introduction of the corporate membership is expected to help on this front.

In a past interview with Wired.jp, the company’s CEO Kensuke Yamamoto said that he was aiming to create a platform that blended social with commerce. Sumally’s recent move makes me feel that it’s definitely heading in that direction.

Japan’s Stores.jp partners with major e-commerce portals to help merchants find traffic

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See the original story in Japanese. Recently we’ve seen fierce competition among two Japanese e-commerce platform builders, Stores.jp and Base. Now it seems both are moving past simple merchants acquisition, looking beyond to see what value they can add to their respective services. Bracket, the startup behind Stores.jp, yesterday unveiled a new feature that will help merchants promote their e-store on the platform, using partner e-commerce portals such as EC Navi, Kakaku.com, and Value Commerce. For merchants, if you use this promotion feature you will be asked to pay a 10% commission for a purchase made via this affiliated traffic. For merchants, products will be featured in search results on partnering portal sites, such as MSN Japan which is pictured below. The startup is exploring partnerships with many other e-commerce portal sites based on a revenue share model. The advent of these simple e-commerce platforms allows merchants to put up an online store far more easily than with conventional ASP-based shopping cart services. It has spurred an abundance of merchants to start e-businesses, but subsequently they have no way to attract new customers. The startup is trying to solve this problem, recently partnering with fashion giant Zozotown, which could be…

1075068_10152055661528696_482832807_n

See the original story in Japanese.

Recently we’ve seen fierce competition among two Japanese e-commerce platform builders, Stores.jp and Base. Now it seems both are moving past simple merchants acquisition, looking beyond to see what value they can add to their respective services.

Bracket, the startup behind Stores.jp, yesterday unveiled a new feature that will help merchants promote their e-store on the platform, using partner e-commerce portals such as EC Navi, Kakaku.com, and Value Commerce. For merchants, if you use this promotion feature you will be asked to pay a 10% commission for a purchase made via this affiliated traffic.

For merchants, products will be featured in search results on partnering portal sites, such as MSN Japan which is pictured below. The startup is exploring partnerships with many other e-commerce portal sites based on a revenue share model.

myfave_screenshot

The advent of these simple e-commerce platforms allows merchants to put up an online store far more easily than with conventional ASP-based shopping cart services. It has spurred an abundance of merchants to start e-businesses, but subsequently they have no way to attract new customers. The startup is trying to solve this problem, recently partnering with fashion giant Zozotown, which could be new partner site for them in the future, in terms of helping merchants drive traffic.

Bracket’s CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto explains how they plan to evolve their e-commerce platform.

As well as keeping the image of a simple-to-launch platform, we plan to give merchants many solutions to acquire customers. We have partnered with Zozotown, but we will not change into to a fashion commerce site — we will keep going beyond what we have been doing.

Some of our readers may be familiar with the startup’s competitor Base. Base recently launched an iOS app and an interface that curates featured shops. In contrast with Base, which has not yet partnered with other sites, Stores.jp unveiled a partnership with GMO Makeshop, an e-commerce platform from GMO, one of Japan’s leading internet companies. This could be an indication that the startup might be exploring a partnership-based business.

We’ll try to keep you updated about how these two companies’ business strategies compare in the future.

Japanese restaurant review site sees its premium membership soar

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It was almost three years ago that Japanese food review portal Tabelog went premium. That was back in September of 2010, and since then it has made some progress in gathering paid users. Kakaku.com, the company behind Tabelog, has just announced that the number of premium members now exceeds 250,000, as of July 28th. The total number of monthly users is over 46 million, and page views are over one billion, as of June 2013. With a monthly fee of 315 yen (or about $3.20), premium members can enjoy additional features such as: Sorting or filtering by preferences Coupons with discounts of 20% to 100% A GPS-enabled feature that finds you nearby restaurants Ranking sorted by age and gender An ad-free version of the mobile app Tabelog launched way back in March of 2005, taking about five years to release its premium version – which at the time they did not handle very well. The change was very sudden and the site forced constraints in usage of exisiting features. It was so bad at one point that the almost all of over 440 app reviews submitted were one star ratings. The biggest complaint from the users was the restriction in…

Tabelog-premium-members

It was almost three years ago that Japanese food review portal Tabelog went premium. That was back in September of 2010, and since then it has made some progress in gathering paid users. Kakaku.com, the company behind Tabelog, has just announced that the number of premium members now exceeds 250,000, as of July 28th. The total number of monthly users is over 46 million, and page views are over one billion, as of June 2013. With a monthly fee of 315 yen (or about $3.20), premium members can enjoy additional features such as:

  • Sorting or filtering by preferences
  • Coupons with discounts of 20% to 100%
  • A GPS-enabled feature that finds you nearby restaurants
  • Ranking sorted by age and gender
  • An ad-free version of the mobile app

Tabelog launched way back in March of 2005, taking about five years to release its premium version – which at the time they did not handle very well. The change was very sudden and the site forced constraints in usage of exisiting features. It was so bad at one point that the almost all of over 440 app reviews submitted were one star ratings. The biggest complaint from the users was the restriction in using sorting features.

tabelog
Tabelog

But looking at the gradual increase in the number of premium members, people seem to have finally accepted it now, and they continue to use the site. Honestly, there aren’t many good enough alternatives out there.

But the lessons to be learned here are very simple. Don’t make a sudden change without taking the time to educate users and adjust their expectations. Premium accounts should offer additional services, and not cripple something that was already available. Although Japanese people are relatively used to micropayments on mobile, when it comes to smartphone apps where free or one-time purchases are more common, they are more unwilling to pay monthly fees.

Tabelog has found other ways to monetize the site too. In addition to premium memberships, the company also operates an equivalent of OpenTable called Cena that allows users to easily make restaurant reservations. It’s likely that they take a cut when reservations are made, just like they do for when a reservation phone call is made through Tabelog restaurant page.

Despite incidents in the past, Tabelog is considered one of the most successful services in Japan, and it will be interesting to see their future attempts in boosting the number of premium members.