news

ShareMedical, Fast Doctor join forces to launch physician house-call app for Japan

Masaru Ikeda 2017.05.14

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based medical ISV (independent service vendor) ShareMedical announced on Thursday their partnership with Fast Doctor, a company that provides night time in-home doctors visits, to begin offering a smart house call service in central Tokyo and its adjacent Chiba prefecture. ShareMedical is developing an mobile app geared for patients who wish to use this service, and plans to make it available from August. ShareMedical was founded in September of 2014 by Yoshimasa Mine. Prior to it he was involved in launching Japanese hospital search portal QLife before. The company has released mobile apps such as a messaging tool called MediLine and a medical term-optimized IME (input method editor) called Ikotoba. The MediLine app supports efficient and safe communication among physicians of medical institutions focused on house calls, as electronic medical record systems and portable medical examination machines are spreading owing to the development of various technologies including communication. It is easy to use via a smartphone, so perhaps describing it as the “Medical Version of Line” is most understandable. For regular workers it is most common to take a day off from work to be examined by a doctor at a hospital. When it…

From left: Fast Doctor CEO Ryo Kikuchi, ShareMedical CEO Yoshimasa Mine
Image credit: ShareMedical

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based medical ISV (independent service vendor) ShareMedical announced on Thursday their partnership with Fast Doctor, a company that provides night time in-home doctors visits, to begin offering a smart house call service in central Tokyo and its adjacent Chiba prefecture. ShareMedical is developing an mobile app geared for patients who wish to use this service, and plans to make it available from August.

ShareMedical was founded in September of 2014 by Yoshimasa Mine. Prior to it he was involved in launching Japanese hospital search portal QLife before. The company has released mobile apps such as a messaging tool called MediLine and a medical term-optimized IME (input method editor) called Ikotoba. The MediLine app supports efficient and safe communication among physicians of medical institutions focused on house calls, as electronic medical record systems and portable medical examination machines are spreading owing to the development of various technologies including communication. It is easy to use via a smartphone, so perhaps describing it as the “Medical Version of Line” is most understandable.

For regular workers it is most common to take a day off from work to be examined by a doctor at a hospital. When it is impossible to take time off, people seek medical institutions that offer nighttime treatment or rely on hospitals that have an emergency outpatient clinic; but, it is important to keep in mind the limited number of human resources in medical care when visiting the emergency room for issues that are not urgent. The accounting departments of hospitals are often closed at night, and it is sometimes necessary to pay extra cash in advance with the return to be settled at a later date; and, if there is no medical institution open in your neighborhood, it would be also difficult to secure transportation.

ShareMedical is aiming to begin, in a sense, the “Medical Version of Uber”. Users can register their credit card and health insurance information in advance on the app and request a doctor to visit when necessary. A driver takes the doctor on the house call so if first aid is necessary, the patient can communicate with the doctor until their arrival.

In this partnership, Fast Doctor will provide a network of house call doctors while ShareMedical will be responsible for providing a user experience that attracts prospective patients. According to the law, doctors are permitted to visit areas within a 16-kilometer radius from where the hospital is located; and to start with, ShareMedical’s service area will be a part of the central Tokyo and its adjacent Chiba prefecture centering on the offices of Fast Doctor. In the future, they are planning to increase the medical institutions and related facilities participating in this network, and to expand both ShareMedical and Fast Doctor’s services nationwide.

ShareMedical plans to undertake the reception processes of calculating the payments for medical services, as well as keeping track of medical fees and expenses, in addition to taking the medical clerical work off the hands of doctors. Due to the limitations of the law, it is not possible to put the data or processing related to the reception in the cloud, making it necessary to set up a server containing medical information at the medical institution. In the future, ShareMedical has plans to set up a BPO (business process outsourcing) center with qualified medical coding specialists and make it possible to respond by remote login. In fact, medical institutions and related facilities that participate in the above-mentioned network would not each have to have qualified individuals for medical affairs, so (even if they have medical equipment) they are not medical institutions with installed facilities, thus the birth of the “freelance house call specialists”.

This new business opportunity is convenient for doctors working in public hospitals and trainees that do not necessarily have a large income. In the daytime, they can work their day job at the university hospital or clinic, and at night they can adopt an on-call work style, so their degree of freedom is higher than doctors who work the night shift. A subsequent income is another merit. Because they are limiting the provision of services to only night visits, the risk of competing with the traditional medical institutions and practitioners in the market has also been minimized. This also eliminates the concern of being labeled a “threat” by the medical association and other stakeholders.

The mobile app under development
Image credit: ShareMedical

A glance at companies in the field of smart house call services in the US includes Stat in Philadelphia, Heal in Los Angeles, and Pager in New York. At last month’s World Health Day, Uber announced UberHEALTH which allows users to conduct a diabetes examination and thyroid function test during a house call.

ShareMedical raised funds in December of 2015 from Slogan Coent (amount undisclosed), and in November of 2016 raised 50 million yen (about $440K US) from leading medical and nursing HR matching company Tsme.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

news

Japan’s wearable walkie-talkie Bonx secures $1.8M for North American expansion

Bonx

Masaru Ikeda 2017.05.10

Tokyo-based Bonx, the Japanese startup developing a wearable walkie-talkie device under the same name, unveiled today its fundraising of 200 million yen (about $1.76 million) from Adways (TSE:2489), Keio Innovation Initiative and Japanese hearing aid manufacturer Rion (TSE:6823) as well as several unnamed individual investors. With the latest funding, the company has raised a total of 5 million yen (about $4.4 million) to date. They will use the funds to set up a US subsidiary for North American expansion while exploring technological synergies with the investors participating this time around. Bonx launched a crowdfunding campaign for its first market-ready product back in October of 2015, and subsequently unveiled the second generation called Bonx Grip in December of 2016. The new version sees many improvements in supporting usage environment such as water resistance and wearing comfort. Given that a recent increased coverage of 3G/4G connectivity in ski resorts or snowy landscapes around the globe, CEO Takahiro Miyasaka expects that more foreign outdoor go-ers will start using the Bonx device to communicate with each others during their leisure and sporting activities. Given the recent increased coverage of 3G/4G connectivity in ski resorts or snowy landscapes around the globe, CEO Takahiro Miyasaka expects…

Tokyo-based Bonx, the Japanese startup developing a wearable walkie-talkie device under the same name, unveiled today its fundraising of 200 million yen (about $1.76 million) from Adways (TSE:2489), Keio Innovation Initiative and Japanese hearing aid manufacturer Rion (TSE:6823) as well as several unnamed individual investors.

With the latest funding, the company has raised a total of 5 million yen (about $4.4 million) to date. They will use the funds to set up a US subsidiary for North American expansion while exploring technological synergies with the investors participating this time around.

Bonx launched a crowdfunding campaign for its first market-ready product back in October of 2015, and subsequently unveiled the second generation called Bonx Grip in December of 2016. The new version sees many improvements in supporting usage environment such as water resistance and wearing comfort.

Given that a recent increased coverage of 3G/4G connectivity in ski resorts or snowy landscapes around the globe, CEO Takahiro Miyasaka expects that more foreign outdoor go-ers will start using the Bonx device to communicate with each others during their leisure and sporting activities.

Given the recent increased coverage of 3G/4G connectivity in ski resorts or snowy landscapes around the globe, CEO Takahiro Miyasaka expects that more foreign outdoor go-ers will start using the Bonx device to communicate with each others during their leisure and sporting activities.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Via TechCrunch Japan

news

Japan’s Spectee files patents for news writing bot

Spectee

Masaru Ikeda 2017.05.10

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Spectee, the Japanese startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, revealed on Monday that they have filed for two patents applications for automated creation of straight news stories to the Japan Patent Office (JPO). Upon being granted the patents by JPO, the technologies related to the high precisioning / processing of image recognition and natural language analysis using deep learning, and collection of equivalents to the so-called Five Ws from an average of 4-5 social media posts make it possible to automatically generate straight news stories of about 300 characters. When incidents occur in urban areas and more than 10 posts are likely to be gathered in relation to it they can complete a sufficiently accurate article. See also: Japan’s social news aggregator for press Spectee announces Asian, US expansion In the field of AI-powered news writing, in 2016 the Associated Press started using Automated Insights’ WordSmith to create news articles on sports scores and made headlines. In Japan, Nagoya’s The Mid-Japan Economist, in collaboration with Datasection and Bit A, posted article created by AI; additionally, the Nikkei online edition worked together with the Institute of…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Spectee, the Japanese startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, revealed on Monday that they have filed for two patents applications for automated creation of straight news stories to the Japan Patent Office (JPO).

Upon being granted the patents by JPO, the technologies related to the high precisioning / processing of image recognition and natural language analysis using deep learning, and collection of equivalents to the so-called Five Ws from an average of 4-5 social media posts make it possible to automatically generate straight news stories of about 300 characters. When incidents occur in urban areas and more than 10 posts are likely to be gathered in relation to it they can complete a sufficiently accurate article.

See also:

Japan’s social news aggregator for press Spectee announces Asian, US expansion

In the field of AI-powered news writing, in 2016 the Associated Press started using Automated Insights’ WordSmith to create news articles on sports scores and
made headlines. In Japan, Nagoya’s The Mid-Japan Economist, in collaboration with Datasection and Bit A, posted article created by AI; additionally, the Nikkei online edition worked together with the Institute of Language Understanding and Professor Yutaka Matsuo of the University of Tokyo to begin a Financial Summary service written by news bots. Even among Japanese startups, teams have been emerging to tackle the theme of automatically creating articles using AI.

Spectee was founded in February of 2014 (previously Euclid Lab), and it graduated in October 2015 from the 11th batch of Open Network Lab’s incubation program. In July of 2016, they raised an undisclosed sum of funds in a series A round from Fuji Startup Ventures and a Japanese surveillance camera company, as well as Mizuho Capital. The Spectee platform, which obtains the rights to content collected from social media and provides it as news material to the mass media and companies, has been adopted by about 100 media companies and publishers across Japan.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

news

Tokyo VR Startups holds 2nd batch demo day, announces expansion into Nordic region

Tokyo VR Startups

Masaru Ikeda 2017.04.29

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo VR Startups, the startup incubator focusing on VR (Virtual Reality) that is organized by Japanese mobile game developer Gumi (TSE:3903) of Japan, held last month a Demo Day for its 2nd batch in Tokyo. It became a big event with nine participant teams; four teams from the incubation 2nd batch, four teams from the Korean startup incubator Seoul VR Startups which has special ties with Tokyo VR Startups, and a team from The Venture Reality Fund (The VR Fund) in which Gumi is also invested. In this article, I introduce in particular the four Japanese startup teams. See also: The Bridge’s guide to VR hotspots in Tokyo (2017 new year edition) Cover Tokyo-based Cover, which recently made a pitch regarding a VR game “Ping Pong League” at Tech Lab Paak 7th batch Demo Day, appeared this time with another product under the same name of Cover. It is the VR distribution platform enabling users to remake (“cover”) songs or dances attained with a combination of live distribution and animation. With this platform, users with head-mounted display can perform as getting into animation characters in the virtual space. Speaking of VR games, “Summer Lesson”…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo VR Startups, the startup incubator focusing on VR (Virtual Reality) that is organized by Japanese mobile game developer Gumi (TSE:3903) of Japan, held last month a Demo Day for its 2nd batch in Tokyo. It became a big event with nine participant teams; four teams from the incubation 2nd batch, four teams from the Korean startup incubator Seoul VR Startups which has special ties with Tokyo VR Startups, and a team from The Venture Reality Fund (The VR Fund) in which Gumi is also invested.

In this article, I introduce in particular the four Japanese startup teams.

See also:

The Bridge’s guide to VR hotspots in Tokyo (2017 new year edition)

Cover

Tokyo-based Cover, which recently made a pitch regarding a VR game “Ping Pong League” at Tech Lab Paak 7th batch Demo Day, appeared this time with another product under the same name of Cover. It is the VR distribution platform enabling users to remake (“cover”) songs or dances attained with a combination of live distribution and animation. With this platform, users with head-mounted display can perform as getting into animation characters in the virtual space.

Speaking of VR games, “Summer Lesson” launched by Bandai Namco has been well received in Japan. In China, YY Music is focusing on live streaming services. The Cover team expects its business model in line with the subscriptions system from audiences as with Showroom provided by Japan’s DeNA, so that distributed videos are available to browse on PC or smartphone in addition to head-mounted display.

In the future, the team aims to add various functions, such as editing hair style or costume of animation characters, setting 360-degree video or photos photographed by users as the background image, or sharing captured images in the game streaming or the white boards.

See also:

Gatari

In the days of the pager/beeper, people communicated using numbers, symbols and texts. As devices have evolved from the feature phone to the smartphone, communication methods have changed into a richer style, says Shunichi Takeshita who is CEO of Gatari and the first representative of the VR user society UT-virtual at the University of Tokyo. Gatari strives to create communication methods and devices in the MR (Mixed Reality) era, and aims to realize it in the VR world in advance.

Gatari images that send voice messages in actual spaces will become common by replacing today’s conventional text typing as a communication method in the VR, the AR (Augmented Reality) and the MR era. As a first step during this incubation term, the team completed technology development such as text input by voice recognition, translated output into the conversation partner’s language and keyword auto-extractor in conversation. In the future, the team aims to develop a view-sharing function with a communication partner.

HoloEyes

HoloEyes aims to make an information revolution in the medical field using VR. Its technology will be helpful for the medical world by sharing information of human bodies in 3DVR form. The medical VR database will be constructed through collection of CT scan data and forming 3D human body models, then accumulating these.

If a search on the terms “male, 60s, prostate cancer” is made, 3D images of matched cases will be output. Doctors can utilize them for diagnosis references of similar cases or training upon surgical operations. The team expects a business model providing VR viewers for hospitals and selling collected data after obtaining patients’ consent to medical colleges or pharmaceutical companies.

JollyGood

JollyGood was founded by Kensuke Joji, who had originally worked in the TV broadcaster industry and been involved in producing events such as Wearable Tech Expo held in Tokyo, and last year launched the VR solution named GuruVR Media Pro for the television program production industry. By 2019, simultaneous broadcasting in terrestrial network / Internet by television stations will be commenced in Japan and Joji expects that television will become a device to experience, not just to watch. On the other hand, there was no system to easily introduce VR content into television programs and that triggered him to develop this solution.

The business model of GuruVR Media Pro consists of the initial cost including installation and installation lecture charges and the running cost corresponding to quantities of content as well as downloads of CMS (Content Management System) which is required for VR content distribution. The team explains that VR content can be easily linked up with lands or spaces, and is compatible with local television stations. Viewers can handily try the content provided by television stations they are familiar with, and it will be differentiated by enabling them to have a “pseudo- experience” of various locations where common citizens are forbidden to enter.

In addition, JollyGood has been developing AI (Artificial Intelligence) services to determine automatically what is the image displayed in VR space. This February, the firm agreed to a business tie-up with UK-based Boris FX which develops Mocha, the post-production tool for VR content that prevents VR sickness. Collaborating Boris FX with a network of million VR engineers and the AI services developed by JollyGood, they plan to announce a launch of new services at the world’s biggest convention for visionary technologies, the NAB Show, held in Las Vegas on April 25th.

Incidentally, JollyGood had fundraised one million yen (about $900,000) from Gumi in August of 2016.

At Slush Tokyo 2017 held in Tokyo last month, Gumi announced that it will commence Nordic VR Startups through a joint venture with Nordic Film, while Gumi has currently been providing VR startup incubation through Tokyo VR Startups and Seoul VR Startups.

Denmark-based Nordic Film is running a business focused on movie production, movie theater management and PlayStation distribution in Northern Europe. Nordic VR Startups provides 100,000 euro at most to startups from the Northern European region and encourages prototyping of VR products, as well as providing technical assistance and business support.

Prior to this, Gumi had also announced a cooperation with the Belgium-based VR developer community EUVR this January. Tokyo VR Startups started accepting applications for its incubation program 3rd batch, and the application deadline is May 14th.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

news

Japan’s LabBase, job-matching platform for science students, raises seed round funding

LabBase
POL

Masaru Ikeda 2017.04.28

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup POL, which operates a human resource database consisting of science students called LabBase, announced on Monday that they secured 50 million yen (about $452K US) in a seed round. This round was led by Beenext with participatin from CyberAgent Ventures, Draper Nexus, Beyond Next Ventures, and angel investors also participating. The company’s valuation, investment ratios, and names of the angel investors were not disclosed. POL will strive to strengthen their system development process with the funds received this round. POL was established in September of 2016 by Michiaki Kamo, a second year student of the University of Tokyo’s Natural Sciences II program. Kamo is a serial entrepreneur who was involved in launching the Bivie online diet service which was spearheaded by under the jurisdiction of Singapore-based Reapra Group’s HealthBank. Additionally, former Executive Vice President of Gulliver International (now IDOM) and outside director of FiNC Yukihiro Yoshida is part of the team which currently consists of 10 core members. POL is working on correcting imbalances in supply and demand for science students seeking employment and those looking to employ them. Nearly 80% of graduating students using the typical job hunting sites and attending…

L to R:Beenext Partner Hiro Maeda, POL CEO Michiaki Kamo, POL Senior Managing Director Yukihiro Yoshida, CyberAgent Ventures Takashi Kitao

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup POL, which operates a human resource database consisting of science students called LabBase, announced on Monday that they secured 50 million yen (about $452K US) in a seed round. This round was led by Beenext with participatin from CyberAgent Ventures, Draper Nexus, Beyond Next Ventures, and angel investors also participating. The company’s valuation, investment ratios, and names of the angel investors were not disclosed. POL will strive to strengthen their system development process with the funds received this round.

POL was established in September of 2016 by Michiaki Kamo, a second year student of the University of Tokyo’s Natural Sciences II program. Kamo is a serial entrepreneur who was involved in launching the Bivie online diet service which was spearheaded by under the jurisdiction of Singapore-based Reapra Group’s HealthBank. Additionally, former Executive Vice President of Gulliver International (now IDOM) and outside director of FiNC Yukihiro Yoshida is part of the team which currently consists of 10 core members.

POL is working on correcting imbalances in supply and demand for science students seeking employment and those looking to employ them. Nearly 80% of graduating students using the typical job hunting sites and attending job fairs that make up the employment marketplace are from the humanities, while the remaining 20% hail from the sciences. There are a number of reason science students do not make the rounds.

They secure employment on the recommendation of their department or a professor before beginning the hunt for a job.
They are busy with research so it becomes hard to spare time for job hunting. There are also cases of laboratories banning students who also do internships.
Their knowledge of job hunting practices is low. (The idea that they know people who got jobs based on recommendations, so they’ll somehow manage….etc.)

On the other hand, it is not as if students of science are satisfied with current job hunting conditions. For them, the biggest problem is that even if they refine their expertise and skills, it is not easy to find a work environment that can make use of them. Despite not being satisfied, they must choose to take a job where they can get it, or if they cannot find fitting employment they may remain at university to continue their research, resulting in the postdoctoral researcher problem.

In order to solve such a problem, LabBase provides an environment where students can post profiles to the Accademia such as research portfolios, papers, presentation history at academic societies, contents of experiments, etc. and connect with companies. Pre-registration began for companies in December of last year with about 100 companies total signing up. Following the start of the official service this year, 20 of those companies are using the service for free.

Meanwhile, they have gathered about 550 student users so far, and about 70% are science students from the University of Tokyo and Tohoku University. If you add in users from Hokkaido University, the University of Tsukuba, Kyoto University, and Osaka University, 90% is accounted for. The company does not advertise or engage in marketing, but they do have a network of 50 ambassadors around Japan and thus have been able to accumulate such a number of core users. Ambassadors work free of charge, but in spite of no monetary incentive they are cooperating to help acquire new users and strengthen engagement because they sympathize with POL’s vision of a happy environment for science students seeking employment it is said.

In the same field sometimes labeled “Lab x Tech” or “Lab Tech”, Acaric is a competitor for POL in Japan, however the market share has not yet been wholly dominated. In the US there are lab tech startups like ResearchGate, Figshare, The Center for Open Science, Science Exchange, Instrumentl, and Quartzy, etc. and we can expect to see POL use them to benchmark trends in the future.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

news

Japanese UX design firm Goodpatch raises $3.6M in series C to better serve FinTech businesses

Masaru Ikeda 2017.04.27

See the original story in Japanese. Japanese UX/UI design agency Goodpatch, based out of Tokyo, Berlin and Taiwan, revealed on Wednesday that they have raised 400 million yen (about $3.6M US) from SBI Investment (through SBI FinTech Fund) and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital in a series C round. This is the third round of funding for the company following $1 million (series A round) raised in December of 2013 and $3.5 million (series B round) raised in February of 2016. In addition to receiving the funds from SBI Investment, Goodpatch announced along with the funds raised this round that they are undertaking of a project to improve the UX/UI design of SBI Investment’s SBI Securities. From this month, Goodpatch launched an in house UX/UI design team specialized in the area of FinTech, and they are planning to open a lab to dispatch and share useful design and development knowhow to both the FinTech and design industries in the future. Goodpatch’s UX/UI portfolio in the FinTech world includes Money Forward’s public release in May of 2014, MYDC’s public release in January of 2017, and the public release of Quick’s Shinkly in 2017 (only those that are disclosed). Goodpatch was founded in…

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese UX/UI design agency Goodpatch, based out of Tokyo, Berlin and Taiwan, revealed on Wednesday that they have raised 400 million yen (about $3.6M US) from SBI Investment (through SBI FinTech Fund) and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital in a series C round. This is the third round of funding for the company following $1 million (series A round) raised in December of 2013 and $3.5 million (series B round) raised in February of 2016.

In addition to receiving the funds from SBI Investment, Goodpatch announced along with the funds raised this round that they are undertaking of a project to improve the UX/UI design of SBI Investment’s SBI Securities. From this month, Goodpatch launched an in house UX/UI design team specialized in the area of FinTech, and they are planning to open a lab to dispatch and share useful design and development knowhow to both the FinTech and design industries in the future.

Goodpatch’s UX/UI portfolio in the FinTech world includes Money Forward’s public release in May of 2014, MYDC’s public release in January of 2017, and the public release of Quick’s Shinkly in 2017 (only those that are disclosed).

Goodpatch was founded in August of 2011. Prior to the company, CEO Naofumi Tsuchiya worked as an intern at San Francisco’s digital agency Btrax, and founded Goodpatch after returning home to Japan. The company’s name comes from the incubation space Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco. Their prototyping tool Prott, which was officially launched in October of 2014, has been introduced in major IT companies, startups, design farms, and so on.

See also:

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

news

Cloud for patent lawyers, marketplace for non-refundable hotel reservations win Tokyo’s Open Network Lab demo day

Open Network Lab

Masaru Ikeda 2017.04.19

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Open Network Lab startup incubator held last week a Demo Day for participant startups of its Seed Accelerator Program 14th batch. In this batch, five teams including two foreign teams were chosen from among 76 applicants from Japan and abroad, having received mentoring and support over the last three months. From this batch, Open Network Lab provided mentoring by startups appearing in its past batches. The followings were the judges for the pitch competition of the Demo Day. Kaoru Hayashi (President Executive Officer, Digital Garage / Group CEO) Shonosuke Hata (President, Kakaku.com) Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com) Tomoya Sasaki (Senior Marketing Director, DG Incubation / President, Open Network Lab) Masayuki Sarukawa (Managing Director, DG Incubation) Best Team Award winner: Toreru by Toreru Toreru is a cloud service regarding intellectual property rights. The firm was founded by patent attorney Masafumi Miyazaki, who has dealt with more than 1,000 patent / trademark registration matters. Originally, the mission of patent attorneys is to protect intellectual property rights, as well as to maximize the profit while minimizing the risk for their clients, and yet it has turned out that 95% of working time required for the patent /…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Open Network Lab startup incubator held last week a Demo Day for participant startups of its Seed Accelerator Program 14th batch. In this batch, five teams including two foreign teams were chosen from among 76 applicants from Japan and abroad, having received mentoring and support over the last three months.

From this batch, Open Network Lab provided mentoring by startups appearing in its past batches. The followings were the judges for the pitch competition of the Demo Day.

Kaoru Hayashi (President Executive Officer, Digital Garage / Group CEO)
Shonosuke Hata (President, Kakaku.com)
Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com)
Tomoya Sasaki (Senior Marketing Director, DG Incubation / President, Open Network Lab)
Masayuki Sarukawa (Managing Director, DG Incubation)

Best Team Award winner: Toreru by Toreru

Toreru is a cloud service regarding intellectual property rights. The firm was founded by patent attorney Masafumi Miyazaki, who has dealt with more than 1,000 patent / trademark registration matters. Originally, the mission of patent attorneys is to protect intellectual property rights, as well as to maximize the profit while minimizing the risk for their clients, and yet it has turned out that 95% of working time required for the patent / trademark application process is spent for tasks extraneous to the basic missions, such as document preparation or reporting work to clients.

The patent / trademark registration application process can be divided into four tasks: consideration of the scope of claims, investigation, preparation of application documents and reporting to clients. Among these, Toreru made it possible for a series of work from investigation to reporting to be carried out on the cloud; one can investigate related patents by one-click search and create documents automatically, while enabling information-sharing on the cloud with clients. With this service, the average time required for each matter was reduced to 0.5 hours which is one-tenth of the conventional time, about five hours.

Patent attorneys will be able to spend the idle time for detailed service with their clients or on marketing activities. Within this year, the firm will launch a closed beta version of the service having three functions such as business efficiency improvement, CRM and customer attraction. In addition, it plans to implement foreign patent application support through cooperation with foreign patent attorneys, in addition to auto-investigation / observation of competitor trends by utilizing accumulated data.

Best Team Award / Audience Award winner: Cansell by Cansell

Cansell is marketplace for non-cancelable accommodation reservation rights between guest users. Kyohei Yamashita, who was formerly Product Manager at Dreampass (purchased by Yahoo Japan later), gathered the crew and launched this service as a preview-version in September of 2016. Dreampass is the film-showing service in response to requests from users and is a graduate of Open Network Lab 4th batch.

According to Dohop 2015 Hotel Report, 19% of the online accommodation reservations of hotels are canceled. Many online travel services do not allow cancellation instead of setting cheaper accommodation charges, and Cansell aims to distribute the vacant rooms by transferring name of the holder of accommodation reservations.

In Cansell, exhibitor users can sell accommodation rights only by transferring the confirmation email upon completion of reservation. The security of all exhibited accommodation rights is maintained by pre-marketing examination, and Cansell staffers perform the procedure for transferring accommodation reservations on behalf of users. Since its launch, 130 reservations have been exhibited and the agreement rate exceeded 50% as for expensive cases costing more than 100,000 yen (about $920).

In the future, the firm also aims to deal with cancellation of flights, restaurant reservations, wedding ceremonies or travel plans, in addition to accommodation, while supporting payment methods other than cash, such as service points, virtual currency or right-to-right trading (equivalent exchanges with unnecessary accommodations, for example).

Ninomin by Matsuri Technologies

Under the new Japanese law which will be enacted this June regarding paid accommodation in private homes in Japan, vacation rental business activities will be restricted to less than 180 days per annum for each property. The hosts owning properties for the vacation rental are deprived of business opportunities over a period of half a year, and some of them may be forced to withdraw.

Ninomin, provided by Matsuri Technologies, is a customer attraction service to support renting out of vacation rental properties for various uses such as company-owned house, short-term rental, rental meeting room or room sharing, through cooperation with real estate brokerages. Monitoring market prices in each area and taking into account the operational efficiency of investments, Ninomin proposes the best pricing in line with the use requested by hosts.

As online explanation of important matters related to real estate transactions will be permitted through a revision of another law, Matsuri Technologies expects more and more new players to enter the real estate business. The firm aims to grow capturing demands of these new players or withdrawing vacation rental hosts due to the enactment of the new law.

Café Wifi by Remote Work

The number of remote workers, working at café and so on outside the office, has been steadily increasing and is 50 million just in the US alone. On the other hand, valuable information for remote workers such as whether the Wi-Fi speed is fast, a power source is available or the atmosphere for each spot is not provided so much by conventional portal websites.

Café Wifi determines the score of each café based on unified criteria including auto-measured Wi-Fi speed and on posted information from remote workers all over the world, and shows a list of suitable cafés for remote working in any desired area. In addition, information about late-night operation or meal provision is also available.

The number of registered users has increased tenfold since its launch in December of 2016, and the current WAU (Weekly Active Users) is about 1,000. Information about 3,100 spots in 98 countries including San Francisco and Tokyo has been registered. The team plans to implement a seat reservation function by advance payment via app in the near future. The app is currently available only for iOS but will be soon be offered for Android as well.

Psygig by Psygig

The demand of mobility IoT (Internet of Things) has been increasing with the rising number of autonomous cars, autonomous drones or robotics. Typical mobility products require various sensors and thus some problems for developers may occur; for example, a necessary sensor may be missing, engineering is costly or processing becomes complicated due to the enormous data.

Psygig is a mobility IoT (Internet of THings) diagnostic tool based on the cloud. Mobility developers are allowed to implement this tool easily with the SDK (Software Development Kit). It notifies error information when an abnormality is detected, and also assists the performance evaluation / comparison. This service is provided in two type of SaaS (Service as a service) or on-premise.

In the future, the team will support any type of mobility IoT, and will provide additional functions such as DMP (Data Management Platform), traffic control assistant, P2P (Peer-to-Peer) sharing between mobile IoT devices.

According to Takayoshi Matsuda, Managing Director of Open Network Lab, this incubator program has produced 80 startups until the end of the 14th batch. The funding success rate of the startups to 13th batch are 49.2%.

Coinciding with the end of the Demo Day for 14th batch, it started accepting applications for the 15th batch. Open Network Lab will provide participant startups 10 million yen (about $92,000) at most as their activity funds during the three-month batch period. The participants will be allowed to use Open Network Lab’s three bases (at Daikanyama of Tokyo, Kamakura, and San Francisco) freely for one year, as well as to receive mentoring by startup managers who graduated the past Accelerators Program. The application for the 15th batch will be accepted until noon of May 22nd.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

news
report

Tokyo Office Tour: Xenodata Lab. uses AI to help investors analyze financial reports

Masaru Ikeda 2017.04.12

See the original story in Japanese. This is part of our ‘Tokyo Office Tour’ series (RSS), a modest attempt to better understand how folks in the local startup scene are working every day. We have started to see startups here and there renting houses around Tokyo to use as offices. Instead of rural or suburban areas, this is happening inside of the Yamanote loop train line where rental prices are comparatively high. When asked what they did before moving to their new office, they answer that they used members’ living rooms, or co-working spaces, or even the Renoir coffee shop (yes, the same Renoir where Japanese leading game developer Gumi got its start). It is probably even the case that some of the empty rooms in the houses are being used as living spaces for team members. As long as they apply to divide the areas at the tax office, they should be able to cut costs for the area used as offices, and through the separation of public and private space we could see the birth of a new environment that combines living and working areas. The challenge of how to approach work-life balance would come up, but such…

See the original story in Japanese.

This is part of our ‘Tokyo Office Tour’ series (RSS), a modest attempt to better understand how folks in the local startup scene are working every day.

We have started to see startups here and there renting houses around Tokyo to use as offices. Instead of rural or suburban areas, this is happening inside of the Yamanote loop train line where rental prices are comparatively high. When asked what they did before moving to their new office, they answer that they used members’ living rooms, or co-working spaces, or even the Renoir coffee shop (yes, the same Renoir where Japanese leading game developer Gumi got its start).

It is probably even the case that some of the empty rooms in the houses are being used as living spaces for team members. As long as they apply to divide the areas at the tax office, they should be able to cut costs for the area used as offices, and through the separation of public and private space we could see the birth of a new environment that combines living and working areas. The challenge of how to approach work-life balance would come up, but such a concept is foreign to a single entrepreneur looking to establish their company.

FinTech startup Xenodata Lab. recently rented a house between Ebisu and Hiroo in Tokyo to use as their base of operations. Prior to this, they had worked out of one of their member’s living rooms located in Roppongi, but are now ready to forge the foundations of their business from within their “new castle”.

Ebisu is a popular area for offices, and nearly ten years ago when I was doing business, had I rented offices there I remember the month rent per tsubo (about 3.3 square meters) did not drop below 60,000 yen (around $539 US). Often a 10 month security deposit is necessary for office spaces, making it difficult to use for a business, and of course, you must pay a no interest deposit of a few million yen (tens of thousands of US dollars) to the landlord upon renting. Using the nest egg collected from investors to pay for a deposit is something, as a proprietor, I’d like to see avoided, but in using a residential house as an office the security deposit becomes relatively cheap, significantly lowering the hurdle for finding a space to do business in.

Xeno Flash, developed by Xenodata Lab., specializes in listed stocks in Japan and uses XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) analysis, PDF table analysis, and PDF graph analysis to convert information attached to various financial-related materials into tabular data, which they then apply their own algorithm to in order to extract the most important financial points, and furthermore, through natural language processing, they are able to pull up a background of specific numerical values from an enormous amount of sentence data in the material.

Of the 3,600 listed Japanese stocks, only 500 companies, corresponding to 14% of all stocks, are issuing financial reports which individual investors can refer to when making investment decisions. In other words, since the price fluctuations are so intense, account analysis reports are not issued by most of the small and medium-sized companies invested in by individuals, but if they use Xeno Flash, it would be possible for companies to make them available.

Xenodata Lab. won the Grand Prix of MUFG FinTech Accelorator’s first batch last year. In February of this year, they raised 60 million yen (about $539K US) from the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Teikoku Databank, Kabu.com Securities and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital in a seed round.

Currently, Xenodata Lab. is focusing on sales to online and offline retail brokerage fims as well as financial analysts in investment banking departments of securities, and in the coming months we may expect big announcements from them, such as large collaboration projects with securities firms. Founder and CEO Yojiro Seki confided he would like to expand the range of automated analysis for financial data to include unlisted stocks and foreign listings, and also increase their clients by 50 to 100.

Although the engineering personnel necessary for the immediate system development seems to be satisfied, since the company’s business requires expert knowledge of analysis algorithms and natural language processing, etc., they are always looking for talented people in this field. If you are interested in a business that might be able to create a big impact on the securities industry, try getting in touch with them.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka

XenoHouse situated in a quiet neighborhood

At first glance the signboard appears to be that of a cafe or hair salon.

xenoHouse rooftop panoramic image — View from the rooftop overlooking Ebisu (click to enlarge)

The winning plaque of the MUFG Accelerator is transparent making it difficult to capture in a photograph.

news

AdAsia Holdings raises $12M from Jafco to expand ad and marketing platform into Japan, Korea

Masaru Ikeda 2017.04.11

See the original story in Japanese. AdAsia Holdings, offering video ad network and influencer marketing platform based in Southeast Asia, announced on Wednesday that it had raised $12 million from JAFCO Asia in its series A round. AdAsia Holdings was founded in April 2016 by Kosuke Sogo and Otohiko Koizumi. Prior to the startup, Sogo was successively appointed to CEO of MicroAd’s local subsidiaries in Southeast Asian countries while Kozutsumi was involved in the overseas business development of Japanese ad network startup Nobot (which was purchased by Mediba, an affiliate of KDDI in 2011) and an experienced COO of the Vietnamese local subsidiary of MicroAd. This announcement means that the firm succeeded in large-scale funding within one year after its foundation. AdAsia Holdings has been providing various ad services based on Southeast Asia: AdAsia Digital Platform having programmatic buying (data-driven automated ad inventory buying) and report management function, AdAsia Ad Network binding up local media in Southeast Asia, CastAsia acting as a matching platform for advertisers and influencers, as well as an online media site named Moments undertaking video production or showcasing past products. See also: AdAsia unveils ad network and management tool, enables programmatic buying for Asia Japanese AdTech experts to…

The core members of the AdAsia Holdings team

See the original story in Japanese.

AdAsia Holdings, offering video ad network and influencer marketing platform based in Southeast Asia, announced on Wednesday that it had raised $12 million from JAFCO Asia in its series A round.

AdAsia Holdings was founded in April 2016 by Kosuke Sogo and Otohiko Koizumi. Prior to the startup, Sogo was successively appointed to CEO of MicroAd’s local subsidiaries in Southeast Asian countries while Kozutsumi was involved in the overseas business development of Japanese ad network startup Nobot (which was purchased by Mediba, an affiliate of KDDI in 2011) and an experienced COO of the Vietnamese local subsidiary of MicroAd. This announcement means that the firm succeeded in large-scale funding within one year after its foundation.

AdAsia Holdings’ service menu (Click to enlarge)
Image credit: AdAsia Holdings

AdAsia Holdings has been providing various ad services based on Southeast Asia: AdAsia Digital Platform having programmatic buying (data-driven automated ad inventory buying) and report management function, AdAsia Ad Network binding up local media in Southeast Asia, CastAsia acting as a matching platform for advertisers and influencers, as well as an online media site named Moments undertaking video production or showcasing past products.

See also:

Launched in Singapore and Bangkok, the firm currently has developed its business into seven cities in Southeast Asian countries, namely Jakarta, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Taipei and Phnom Penh, serving major online media or clients in each city. The number of total staffers is 80 and the half of these engaged in system development or creative work at the Bangkok subsidiary. In the future, the firm plans to shift the center of the system development to Vietnam where many highly skilled engineers live.

Sogo explains the reason for fundraising this time:

There was no urgent need for funding, since we achieved a primary surplus in the first year. But considering listing in the future, we have to procure capital from external sources sooner or later. Feeling ready to go upscale with the business, we decided to receive an injection of funds from JAFCO at this time.

AdAsia Holdings’ Bangkok office
Image credit: AdAsia Holdings

With this funding, the firm revealed that it is going to develop its business into East Asia from Southeast Asia. Concretely, the targeted region will probably encompass Japan and Korea. It was a blank area in the Southeast Asian market regarding the business field AdAsia Holdings deal with. As seeking the next market, Sogo noticed that the East Asian market is also undeveloped although appearing at first glance to have players gradually on the increase.

However, it is not difficult to imagine that AdAsia will compete with other video ad network pioneering in this field such as AppVador, Lodeo, Open8 or App-CM. Tokyo-based Withfluence, which recently announced a business tie-up with the leading Thai telecommunication company True, also can be called a competitor in terms of being an influencer marketing platform focusing on Asia. This tendency clearly shows the increase in market awareness and demand.

In the future, AdAsia Holdings plans to introduce a budget optimization or an auto-operation method utilizing AI (artificial intelligence) into entire platforms, and to maximize the ROI (return on investment) performance of planning for advertising publication or buying.

As Sogo mentioning the listing of its stock in the future, the team enhancement is progressing steadily. He implied that some of the big names or aces in the Japanese advertising industry have joined the team, but could not say who at this time due to various reasons. I will try interviewing again as occasion serves.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

news

Japan’s SmartDrive, car telematics startup, nabs $9M series B to ramp up big data analysis

SmartDrive

Takeshi Hirano 2017.04.10

See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s Smart Drive, offering the DriveOps vehicle management platform utilizing big data, announced last week that it has fundraised a total of 1 billion yen (about $9.0 million) in its series B round. The details as to the pay-in date or investors were undisclosed but investor names will be made available in accordance with the announcement of business partnerships. Coincidentally, the firm revealed that it has been developing a drive recorder app for smartphones. This app can detect crucial moments related to dangerous driving or traffic accidents from an enormous amount of video data inside / outside of commercial vehicles, shot using mounted cameras for big data analysis use, and acquire video images for several seconds before and after the incident, to support easy search. The firm is to launch this app around summer, and will enable more accurate real-time video analysis / search service regarding driving. See also: Japan’s SmartDrive unveils vehicle analytics solution, poised for operational testing Japan’s SmartDrive unveils DriveOps to help optimize work efficiency with automobile big data Resulting from big data analysis for 10,000 vehicles It was February of 2014 that I heard the concept of Smart Drive or…

See the original story in Japanese.

Japan’s Smart Drive, offering the DriveOps vehicle management platform utilizing big data, announced last week that it has fundraised a total of 1 billion yen (about $9.0 million) in its series B round. The details as to the pay-in date or investors were undisclosed but investor names will be made available in accordance with the announcement of business partnerships.

Coincidentally, the firm revealed that it has been developing a drive recorder app for smartphones. This app can detect crucial moments related to dangerous driving or traffic accidents from an enormous amount of video data inside / outside of commercial vehicles, shot using mounted cameras for big data analysis use, and acquire video images for several seconds before and after the incident, to support easy search. The firm is to launch this app around summer, and will enable more accurate real-time video analysis / search service regarding driving.

See also:

Resulting from big data analysis for 10,000 vehicles

It was February of 2014 that I heard the concept of Smart Drive or vehicular big data from the current CEO Retsu Kitagawa who had been studying traffic-related big data analysis at his university then. His attractive story made me imagine the future of its service which was under stealth development.

On the other hand, it had been still unclear what kind of effect would be produced from the vehicle data acquired via the OBD-II port (conventionally used for maintenance) and what type of business this technology would lead to. Over three years since then, the firm kept acquiring and analyzing detailed vehicle data, such as stop-and-go, steering angle, speed or distance from 10,000 vehicles and eventually reached conclusive results. For example, it can roughly predict how much fuel efficiency there is for a certain driving style by using these analyzed data.

Noteworthy is the fact that “driving style” can be defined even with rough information.

Smart Drive had been conventionally acquiring vehicle behavior data mainly from the maintenance port. With this method, accurate data can be obtained but there is a risk in terms of security that vehicles could be hacked remotely. Of course, it was not welcomed by vehicle manufacturers. However, as an environment to determine vehicle behavior by Smart Drive was improved, a high-accuracy analysis of driving situation such as whether a vehicle turned or not became available even with data acquired from sensors in smartphones.

Thus, the coverage range of vehicle type for driving analysis expanded significantly. That is, a chance for the firm to expand its business had increased as well. The unusage of the OBD-II port may be one of the biggest factors that the firm succeeded in partnership with multiple companies and in realization of the large-scale funding this time. The service has gradually been introduced into telematic usage-based insurance products under tie-up with Axa General Insurance in Japan or in driving situation management of delivery trucks for major chain convenience stores.

According to Kitagawa, the Smart Drive team takes on the service development with 30 members and plans to enhance this human resource by taking on more engineers specialized in analysis or big data processing while paying close attention to the video image analysis service which is scheduled for launch this summer.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

News

ShareMedical, Fast Doctor join forces to launch physician house-call app for Japan

Japan’s wearable walkie-talkie Bonx secures $1.8M for North American expansion

Japan’s Spectee files patents for news writing bot