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Business web services to be showcased at Tokyo event on July 19th

Rick Martin Rick Martin
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We recently received word about an upcoming event in Tokyo this month highlighting many business web services. This ‘BizWeb’ event will take place at Microsoft Japan headquarters on July 19th, running from 10am to 8pm. We’re told that the objective will be to promote more awareness of web services, and encourage more SMEs to make use of them. There will be 15 companies with booths set up on the site, each one showcasing their services and what they have to offer SMEs. About 200 visitors are expected to attend in total. There will be speakers there as well, including George Goda, who will talk about how web services are used outside of Japan, and Microsoft and Prezi will be there to talk about their services too. Consumer internet services tend to get most of the attention in the media, so we’re happy to give this BizWeb event a quick shout out here, in case some of our readers want to go check it out. The event is being organized by Libv K.K, led by Hiroki Kudo. If you’d like to find out more, there is more information available on the DoorKeeper event page.

We recently received word about an upcoming event in Tokyo this month highlighting many business web services. This ‘BizWeb’ event will take place at Microsoft Japan headquarters on July 19th, running from 10am to 8pm.

We’re told that the objective will be to promote more awareness of web services, and encourage more SMEs to make use of them. There will be 15 companies with booths set up on the site, each one showcasing their services and what they have to offer SMEs. About 200 visitors are expected to attend in total.

There will be speakers there as well, including George Goda, who will talk about how web services are used outside of Japan, and Microsoft and Prezi will be there to talk about their services too.

Consumer internet services tend to get most of the attention in the media, so we’re happy to give this BizWeb event a quick shout out here, in case some of our readers want to go check it out.

The event is being organized by Libv K.K, led by Hiroki Kudo. If you’d like to find out more, there is more information available on the DoorKeeper event page.

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Tokyo-based invoicing solution MakeLeaps is now used by 10,000 business

Rick Martin Rick Martin
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Tokyo-based invoicing system MakeLeaps has announced (PDF) today that the company has reached its previously stated goal of 10,000 business users. The service was initially launched back in 2009, and last year it acquired competing invoicing service Noroshi, a significant step for the company. At the time, the CEO of MakeLeaps’ parent company Webnet IT corporation, Jason Winder, hoped that the acquisition would bring them to 10,000 businesses by August 2013. Now they have reached that benchmark with time to spare. Companies in Japan have not been as quick to jump on the cloud computing band wagon as in the US market. But they’re coming around, says Winder, largely thanks to cloud success stories like Salesforce which is used by many prominent Japanese companies. He adds: Our biggest challenge is really just letting people know that these solutions now exist, and they’re low cost, and easily available. Our biggest competitor is not a competing software package, it’s still very much Microsoft Excel, since that’s what most Japanese companies are using to create/send their documents. Back in April MakeLeaps also added Evernote integration (PDF) so that users can sync their quotes and invoices into an Evernote notebook. About 20% of Evernote’s…

make-leaps

Tokyo-based invoicing system MakeLeaps has announced (PDF) today that the company has reached its previously stated goal of 10,000 business users.

The service was initially launched back in 2009, and last year it acquired competing invoicing service Noroshi, a significant step for the company. At the time, the CEO of MakeLeaps’ parent company Webnet IT corporation, Jason Winder, hoped that the acquisition would bring them to 10,000 businesses by August 2013. Now they have reached that benchmark with time to spare.

Companies in Japan have not been as quick to jump on the cloud computing band wagon as in the US market. But they’re coming around, says Winder, largely thanks to cloud success stories like Salesforce which is used by many prominent Japanese companies. He adds:

Our biggest challenge is really just letting people know that these solutions now exist, and they’re low cost, and easily available. Our biggest competitor is not a competing software package, it’s still very much Microsoft Excel, since that’s what most Japanese companies are using to create/send their documents.

Back in April MakeLeaps also added Evernote integration (PDF) so that users can sync their quotes and invoices into an Evernote notebook. About 20% of Evernote’s users come from Japan, so this is a pretty wise addition.

MakeLeaps has been growing an average of 18% each month this year (see chart below), and is now focused on reaching 25,000 companies by July of 2014.

chart_makeleaps

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Japan’s Chatwork brings its business chat tool to Europe

Junya Mori Junya Mori
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See the original story in Japanese. Chatwork Inc., a Japanese startup that operates a cloud-based chat tool for business, has announced that it would start expanding service operations to the European region from Luxembourg. This follows its international expansion to North America last year, and the Asian region this past spring. The Chatwork app was launched back in March of 2011, providing a business chat environment for corporate users, with features like group chat, task management, file management, and video conferencing. Luxembourg is known for having a very low tax rate, and has succeeded in inviting a number of multinational companies to set up shop there. It’s surrounded by Germany, France, and Belgium, and most local citizens can speak English, Luxembourgish, German, and French. Chatwork has decided to start its European operations here because of these geographical and linguistic advantages. The company was in attendance at ICT Spring 2013, an annual tech startup conference in the country taking place this week. The startup recently unveiled that it has acquired more than 200,000 users as of this month. In terms of the ratio of paid to unpaid users, Chatwork has performed even better than services like Dropbox or Evernote, which are…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Chatwork Inc., a Japanese startup that operates a cloud-based chat tool for business, has announced that it would start expanding service operations to the European region from Luxembourg. This follows its international expansion to North America last year, and the Asian region this past spring.

The Chatwork app was launched back in March of 2011, providing a business chat environment for corporate users, with features like group chat, task management, file management, and video conferencing.

Luxembourg is known for having a very low tax rate, and has succeeded in inviting a number of multinational companies to set up shop there. It’s surrounded by Germany, France, and Belgium, and most local citizens can speak English, Luxembourgish, German, and French. Chatwork has decided to start its European operations here because of these geographical and linguistic advantages. The company was in attendance at ICT Spring 2013, an annual tech startup conference in the country taking place this week.

The startup recently unveiled that it has acquired more than 200,000 users as of this month. In terms of the ratio of paid to unpaid users, Chatwork has performed even better than services like Dropbox or Evernote, which are said to be around 4 to 4.5%. More than 50,000 users visit the service every day, and more than 100 million messages have been exchanged using the platform.

The startup unveiled a screen-sharing feature called ChatWork back in May. And from here, it will be interesting to see how much traction it can build in the country where Skype started its journey.

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Japanese accounting solution provider, A-SaaS, raises $6.6 million

Masaru Ikeda Masaru Ikeda
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Accounting SaaS Japan, or A-SaaS for short, is a Tokyo-based startup providing solutions to Japanese accounting firms. The startup announced that today it has raised 625 million yen (approximately $6.6 million) from SalesForce.com, GREE Ventures, and Mobile Internet Capital [1]. Computer systems used at Japanese accounting firms have been mostly dominated by a few vendors for a long time [2]. In partnership with SalesForce.com, the startup plans to optimize their solutions so they can be operated on SaaS environment Force.com, with plans to jointly intensify sales and marketing efforts with the SaaS company. There are about 32,500 accounting firms in Japan, and almost 80% of their systems are dominated by Japan’s top 3 accounting system providers. The startup expects to replace 5,000 of them with their SaaS solutions by the end of 2017, which accounts for 15.4% of all accounting firms in the country. A-Saas was launched back in 2009 by Toshinao Morisaki. He previously worked with accounting solution vendor JDL, and served as the president of its subsidiary Ibex Airlines. Gree Ventures is, of course, the investment arm of Japan’s social gaming giant Gree. Mobile Internet Capital is a VC firm launched by ex-Intel Japan Chairman Ikuo Nishioka. ↩ Japan’s three leading vendors…

a-saas_salesforce_greeventures_mic

Accounting SaaS Japan, or A-SaaS for short, is a Tokyo-based startup providing solutions to Japanese accounting firms. The startup announced that today it has raised 625 million yen (approximately $6.6 million) from SalesForce.com, GREE Ventures, and Mobile Internet Capital [1].

Computer systems used at Japanese accounting firms have been mostly dominated by a few vendors for a long time [2]. In partnership with SalesForce.com, the startup plans to optimize their solutions so they can be operated on SaaS environment Force.com, with plans to jointly intensify sales and marketing efforts with the SaaS company.

There are about 32,500 accounting firms in Japan, and almost 80% of their systems are dominated by Japan’s top 3 accounting system providers. The startup expects to replace 5,000 of them with their SaaS solutions by the end of 2017, which accounts for 15.4% of all accounting firms in the country.

A-Saas was launched back in 2009 by Toshinao Morisaki. He previously worked with accounting solution vendor JDL, and served as the president of its subsidiary Ibex Airlines.

  1. Gree Ventures is, of course, the investment arm of Japan’s social gaming giant Gree. Mobile Internet Capital is a VC firm launched by ex-Intel Japan Chairman Ikuo Nishioka. ↩
  2. Japan’s three leading vendors for accounting firm solutions are TKC, JDL, and MJS. ↩

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