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How do you create a strong management team? Japanese internet execs discuss.

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See the original story in Japanese. Below is a condensed, translated version. For startups in their launching phase, sometimes the founders may have interpersonal issues, and the team may fall apart as a result. In order to find some insight from some of Japan’s more successful companies, we recently heard from the executives of three Japanese internet giants, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at their management systems. The panel, which took place at last week’s Infinity Ventures Summit, included: Yoshikazu Tanaka, CEO at GREE Kotaro Yamagishi, executive vice president at GREE Yusuke Hidaka, vice president at CyberAgent Tetesuhito Soyama, managing director at CyberAgent Yasuhiro Hagino, managing director at Mixi Yuichi Kawasaki, executive officer at Mixi Moderator: Etsuko Okajima, CEO at Pronova Most executives at GREE have been working together for a long time. Yoshikazu Tanaka, the company’s CEO explains: GREE’s Tanaka: At some companies, growth heavily relies on the founder’s effort. I previously worked at Rakuten where I saw how Hiroshi Mikitani managed the company, I sometimes wanted to work in a way that followed his management style. From my perspective, mobility of personnel is not essential as long as the company keeps growing. But for a startup founder, if…

japanese executives

See the original story in Japanese. Below is a condensed, translated version.

For startups in their launching phase, sometimes the founders may have interpersonal issues, and the team may fall apart as a result. In order to find some insight from some of Japan’s more successful companies, we recently heard from the executives of three Japanese internet giants, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at their management systems. The panel, which took place at last week’s Infinity Ventures Summit, included:

  • Yoshikazu Tanaka, CEO at GREE
  • Kotaro Yamagishi, executive vice president at GREE
  • Yusuke Hidaka, vice president at CyberAgent
  • Tetesuhito Soyama, managing director at CyberAgent
  • Yasuhiro Hagino, managing director at Mixi
  • Yuichi Kawasaki, executive officer at Mixi
  • Moderator: Etsuko Okajima, CEO at Pronova

Most executives at GREE have been working together for a long time. Yoshikazu Tanaka, the company’s CEO explains:

GREE’s Tanaka: At some companies, growth heavily relies on the founder’s effort. I previously worked at Rakuten where I saw how Hiroshi Mikitani managed the company, I sometimes wanted to work in a way that followed his management style. From my perspective, mobility of personnel is not essential as long as the company keeps growing. But for a startup founder, if you still keep a large stake in your company, your management board does not work anymore – because all the other board members do is just follow your judgment.

To avoid this particular issue, GREE is working on adding external people to its board of directors.

GREE’s Yamagishi: Our business has been rapidly expanding in the last few years, we actually have many issues to address in our management process. Recently we invited someone new to our board of directors, and asked him to provide some general business advice. He’s 65 years old but has been working in the global manufacturing business.

CEO Tanaka described the external director as a sort of mirror, since he can restrain himself based on things that person points out. When asked by the moderator about a possible change of board members, Tanaka responded he would add more people as the company becomes larger.

In a contrast with GREE, CyberAgent takes a different approach to deliver a improved and efficient management. The system is called CA8, and changes the board members every two years. This was deployed to eliminate employees’ anxiety that they might have no chance to join the board of directors in the future.

CyberAgent’s Hidaka: Our CEO Fujita has alone decided everything about the CA8 system. He said we would create the rules of personnel management and employee welfare from the scratch. If a rule works appropriately, we’ll keep using it in the company. To be honest, the system has some negative effects, but the positive aspects surpass the negative one.

A person from the audience asked if the company has any intention to invite a non-employee to become an executive at a future subsidiary. In response, Hidaka explained:

CyberAgent’s Hidaka: For an entrepreneur running a startup, if you can understand our corporate culture, we can acquire your startup and invite you to our team, which will work well. We haven’t yet done this because we haven’t found such a high-potential talent or startup. We are used to growing a business with our own employees rather than acquiring new business from outside the company. This trend will continue.

Perhaps by this he means that the company requires no drastic changes as long as its business keeps growing.

Mixi’s Ogino: Unlike the other two companies, our growth is in a crucial stage right now. In this situation, some of our employees started to stand in the way of their most competitive colleagues. That is unfortunate. In the beginning of 2010, my previous company was acquired and I joined the team. At that time our people were always following what their boss said, and they had no interest in competing with other internet companies or aiming for the top in the global markets.

In the crucial moments for management or executives, unless you change your mind significantly, your people are likely to see that you are not seriously determined to make things happen. But I learned the entire company may change if a small number of people change their mind.

Mixi acquired Naked Technology back in 2011, and Kamado in 2012. Those startups’ co-founders Yusuke Asakura and Yuichi Kawasaki joined Mixi, and now its board is filled with experienced entrepreneurs.

After announcing new CEO last week, Japan’s Mixi invests in two startups

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In the wake of announcing a new CEO last week, Japanese social network company Mixi (TYO:2121) continued a busy month by announced investments in two startups today. At its financial results briefing, incoming CEO Yusuke Asakura talked about future changes planned for Mixi, including aggressive investments in promising companies. The two investment disclosed today are CloudStudy and Reventive. CloudStudy will receive 72 million yen (over $700,000), which will account for 20% of its total funding to date. The figure for Reventive was not disclosed but it is somewhere in the tens of millions. The startup has other investors including Sunbridge Global Ventures and some angel investors, adding up to 70 million yen in total. StudyPlus is a social learning management platform that was released back in March of 2012. It hit the 100,000 user milestone after almost a year later in April of 2013 . Users can study languages or prepare for university entrance exams by recording their study hours and content, sharing progress with friends if they choose. The platform can be used anonymously, making it easy to connect with other users. The startup’s CEO Takashi Hirose shared some interesting figures about their growth to date. So far they…

StudyPlus-logo Close-logo

In the wake of announcing a new CEO last week, Japanese social network company Mixi (TYO:2121) continued a busy month by announced investments in two startups today. At its financial results briefing, incoming CEO Yusuke Asakura talked about future changes planned for Mixi, including aggressive investments in promising companies.

The two investment disclosed today are CloudStudy and Reventive. CloudStudy will receive 72 million yen (over $700,000), which will account for 20% of its total funding to date. The figure for Reventive was not disclosed but it is somewhere in the tens of millions. The startup has other investors including Sunbridge Global Ventures and some angel investors, adding up to 70 million yen in total.

StudyPlus is a social learning management platform that was released back in March of 2012. It hit the 100,000 user milestone after almost a year later in April of 2013 . Users can study languages or prepare for university entrance exams by recording their study hours and content, sharing progress with friends if they choose. The platform can be used anonymously, making it easy to connect with other users.

The startup’s CEO Takashi Hirose shared some interesting figures about their growth to date. So far they have 23 million monthly page views, with about 9,500 of their 12,000 active users recording learning activities every day with the app. That means 80% of all the users who log into the service enter a record, typically 3.5 times a day on average. StudyPlus is available both on the web, as well as via iOS and Android apps.

As for Reventive, its main offering is an app called Close, which is available on both iOS and Android. Close is sort of a Path equivalent, limiting the number of friends you can have to nine people. The app aspires to be the most secure place to connect and communicate with the most important people in your lives. There is a big update planned for June, so stay tuned to see what they have in store. Close is a graduate of KDDI Mugen Labo.

Written with contributions from Masaru Ikeda

Japan’s Mixi to appoint new CEO, co-founder Kenji Kasahara to step down

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Japanese social network giant Mixi (TYO:2121) announced today that its co-founder Kenji Kasahara would step down from the CEO position. Yusuke Asakura will take over in his place effective June 25th when the company’s next shareholder meeting is scheduled. Asakura started his career at McKinsey & Co, founding his startup Naked Technology in August of 2010 [1]. That company was subsequently acquired by Mixi. In the announcement, Mr. Kasahara expressed some parting thoughts: Mr. Asakura has two different backgrounds — working at a big consulting firm and running his own startup, and that experience will help guide him to make good decisions in a logical manner, with passion. He is still just 30 years old but has the great entrepreneurial drive needed to lead our business. 16 years has been passed since the launch of Find Job (a talent/job matching site by Mixi), and nine years has been passed since the launch of the Mixi social network platform. I’ll be stepping down as chairman, but our new CEO will evolve the entire company to bring more new services to the community. Last August Mixi set up an internal ‘innovation team’ to intensify service development efforts. So far their products include app…

mixi_logoJapanese social network giant Mixi (TYO:2121) announced today that its co-founder Kenji Kasahara would step down from the CEO position. Yusuke Asakura will take over in his place effective June 25th when the company’s next shareholder meeting is scheduled.

From the left: the current CEO Kenji Kasahara and upcoming CEO Yusuke Asakura
Current CEO Kenji Kasahara (left) and incoming CEO Yusuke Asakura (right)

Asakura started his career at McKinsey & Co, founding his startup Naked Technology in August of 2010 [1]. That company was subsequently acquired by Mixi. In the announcement, Mr. Kasahara expressed some parting thoughts:

Mr. Asakura has two different backgrounds — working at a big consulting firm and running his own startup, and that experience will help guide him to make good decisions in a logical manner, with passion. He is still just 30 years old but has the great entrepreneurial drive needed to lead our business.

16 years has been passed since the launch of Find Job (a talent/job matching site by Mixi), and nine years has been passed since the launch of the Mixi social network platform. I’ll be stepping down as chairman, but our new CEO will evolve the entire company to bring more new services to the community.

Last August Mixi set up an internal ‘innovation team’ to intensify service development efforts. So far their products include app testing service DeployGate and photo printing app Nohana. These are not derivatives from the social network, and they represent entirely new revenue streams for the company.

Mixi has also been aggressively acquiring high-profile startups and entrepreneurs, and this is a trend that can be seen across the entire Japanese tech scene, with Yahoo Japan being especially active.

Press briefing at Mixi Headquarters (May 15th, Tokyo)
Press briefing at Mixi Headquarters (May 15th, Tokyo)

  1. We’ve recently written about another Naked Technology alum Miku Hirano, who is trying to conquer the Southeast Asia region with a unique photo sharing app.  ↩

Mixi’s Nohana to donate photo books to local kindergarten schools

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Back in February we wrote about a new service from Mixi’s (TYO:2121) innovation team called Nohana. Using the Nohana smartphone app, users can create a photo book using snapshots taken with their mobile, and then received that printed book via mail. Users in Japan can receive one free picture book per month (not including a 90 yen shipping fee), but for each one after that they need to pay 500 yen (or about $5). According to the folks over at Venture Now, Nohana currently has 30,000 users, with over 8,000 photo books published since the February launch. And it was just announced a few days ago that Nohana would be donating pre-paid Nohana credit to selected nurseries and kindergartens. The specific establishments will be selected by lottery, and Nohana will donate 1 percent of its published book total to these facilities. So in other words, based on their 8,000 total books published thus far, eight facilities will receive prepaid cards for 5,000 yen Nohana credit, good enough to buy 10 photo books (or 80 in total). These child care establishments have expressed a need to share photos with parents, to give them a better indication of the child care environment…

nohana_photobook

Back in February we wrote about a new service from Mixi’s (TYO:2121) innovation team called Nohana. Using the Nohana smartphone app, users can create a photo book using snapshots taken with their mobile, and then received that printed book via mail. Users in Japan can receive one free picture book per month (not including a 90 yen shipping fee), but for each one after that they need to pay 500 yen (or about $5).

According to the folks over at Venture Now, Nohana currently has 30,000 users, with over 8,000 photo books published since the February launch. And it was just announced a few days ago that Nohana would be donating pre-paid Nohana credit to selected nurseries and kindergartens.

The specific establishments will be selected by lottery, and Nohana will donate 1 percent of its published book total to these facilities. So in other words, based on their 8,000 total books published thus far, eight facilities will receive prepaid cards for 5,000 yen Nohana credit, good enough to buy 10 photo books (or 80 in total).

These child care establishments have expressed a need to share photos with parents, to give them a better indication of the child care environment and activities. And from Nohana’s perspective, this is a good way to introduce more parents to their photo printing service.

Personally, I’ve already printed a couple of books with Nohana. And so far the service has been great. If you do try out the service for yourself, do make sure that the photos you select for printing are nice and sharp, because paper is far less forgiving than your smartphone screen.

[Via Venture Now]

UI Scope teams up with DeployGate to create a one-stop app testing solution

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    See the original story in Japanese. We frequently hear words like ‘usability’ or ’user experience”, but still very few developers have conducted user tests for their apps. So says Daisuke Hiraishi, the CEO of InnoBeta Inc., the up-and-coming startup behind the crowdsourced app testing service UIScope. Innnobeta announced today that it would be partnering with DeployGate, a smartphone app test platform run by Japanese social network operator Mixi. As we mentioned in our previous feature interview, DeployGate has acquired users from over 93 countries and been used for testing more than 4,000 apps worldwide. With this integration with DeployGate, Innobeta provides a one-stop service to be known by the name of ‘DeployGate Scope.’ It allows developers to provide crowdsourced usability testing not only for live apps but also for prototypes still under development. UI Scope was launched last October, and its team consists of three full-time workers, a freelance designer, and an engineer (who is attending grad school). The CEO Hiraishi used the bulletin board service WishScope to invite potential co-workers, including his CTO Takakiyo Aritaka. They’ve had been running a design-oriented app service, but faced many issues in the process of user testing. That experience made them…

 

dgscope_logo
DeployGate + UI Scope = Dgscope

 


See the original story in Japanese.

We frequently hear words like ‘usability’ or ’user experience”, but still very few developers have conducted user tests for their apps.

So says Daisuke Hiraishi, the CEO of InnoBeta Inc., the up-and-coming startup behind the crowdsourced app testing service UIScope. Innnobeta announced today that it would be partnering with DeployGate, a smartphone app test platform run by Japanese social network operator Mixi. As we mentioned in our previous feature interview, DeployGate has acquired users from over 93 countries and been used for testing more than 4,000 apps worldwide.

With this integration with DeployGate, Innobeta provides a one-stop service to be known by the name of ‘DeployGate Scope.’ It allows developers to provide crowdsourced usability testing not only for live apps but also for prototypes still under development.

UI Scope was launched last October, and its team consists of three full-time workers, a freelance designer, and an engineer (who is attending grad school). The CEO Hiraishi used the bulletin board service WishScope to invite potential co-workers, including his CTO Takakiyo Aritaka. They’ve had been running a design-oriented app service, but faced many issues in the process of user testing. That experience made them realize that many app developers were likely facing the same problem. And this led to them to eventually launch the crowdsourced usability testing service, making use of a pool of testers to provide feedback to developers and designers.

Similar services exist, but there’s no testing service specifically focused on testing for smartphone apps. The majority of the startup’s clients are big Japanese companies such as Recruit or NEC Biglobe, but users from startups also on the rise.

Since launch last October, the service was used for 200 projects by 40 companies. 70% of developers have the service to get feedback on upgrades for their apps, and the rest are for testing initial releases.

In terms of specifying the layer of testers you want to ask, you may choose them according to age, gender. You can also select testers by other criteria, such as people who have tried out a specific service, or even someone who has recently traveled to a certain place. On average, every case takes about one week and with 10 testers. According to global measurement company Nielsen Jakob Nielsen, a test conducted with 10 five people is enough to find and identify 80% of all problems [1].

deploygate_image
Mixi’s DeployGate

The testing process is an interesting one. Participating testers will receive a webcam for free from UI Scope. Testers are requested to record their testing task, speaking their impressions as they proceed step-by-step. By collecting those recorded videos, you can understand how testers thought and felt, why they pressed a certain button, or why they abandoned a screen on the app. These videos will then be passed on to clients. Pricing is 3,000 yen for testing, and clients will pay 15,000 yen on average, typically asking for around 5 testers. Analysis reports are also available as an additional option.

Strict requirements for testers

More than 4,000 people have signed up for the service to be testers. The startup is devising ways to get more applicants, although they have a very strict filtering process for those who want to be qualified testers. Potential testers receive two to three dummy tests a week, and only are few of them who yield good results and display a certain literacy level will finally qualify. After that they can can receive 500 yen compensation every time they finish a testing task. When compensation reaches 2,000 yen, it will be transferred to your bank account.

Housewives were invited to be testers through the startup’s ‘invite your friend’ campaign, and many students have signed up through an introduction from the startup’s partner companies. UI Scope has also partnered with Mamion, a chain operating PC training courses for the elderly, thus succeeding in acquiring some older testers as well. This broad variety of testers helps the startup to receive many testing orders from a wide range of companies.

For future problems they want to solve, Mr. Hiraishi further explains:

We need to some time to educate developers on the necessity of the usability testing. That’s why we’re organizing events like the “Smartphone Design Conference”. For usability testing, it usually requires 10 to 15 minutes for a testing case. Conducting the case with 10 testers, that means 100 minutes at least. We want to improve the service so that it allows users to see each [step] of the testing task. We look into providing more specifications about our testers, so that our clients will be able to conduct more targeted tests.

For now, most testings are conducted at home, but the startup is planning to develop an environment where people can do tests outside their home (useful for testing GPS-enabled apps, for example) and real-time testing (for testing social network apps). For developers who would like to try out the service, UI Scope is giving a 50% discount until the end of this month.

The company previously raised 5 million yen (about $53,800) from Movida Japan, and has acquired 120 developers and 2500 testers during the last six months. The video below will give you a better idea of how the service works.


  1. Thanks to @david_z on Twitter for the error report! Much appreciated.  ↩

Japanese startup acquisitions: An interactive timeline

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As I mentioned in a recent article about Yahoo Japan’s acquisition of Dreampass, the startup eco-system is gradually taking shape here in Japan. Incubators play a big role in the eco-system and off the top of my head I can think of maybe ten incubators. Many provide a Y-combinator model three month program with five to ten startups in each class. Most acquisitions have happened in the past year or two, so it is still far too soon to predict the fate of such startups. However, we have witnessed some encouraging exits in the last couple of years, so we thought we’d present an overview. Note that it’s not comprehensive, but it is a good general overview. Check out our interactive timeline of acquisitions above (feel free to share with the embed code below), or read on for more details below! Cirius Technologies (August 2010) ¶ Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) acquired geo-location enabled mobile advertisement technology company Cirius Technologies for an undisclosed sum. At the time of, it was rumored to be an acqui-hire for Yahoo so that it could obtain patents for the ad-technology in hopes of optimize its local mobile advertisement products. Atlantis (January 2011) ¶ Gaming giant GREE…

As I mentioned in a recent article about Yahoo Japan’s acquisition of Dreampass, the startup eco-system is gradually taking shape here in Japan. Incubators play a big role in the eco-system and off the top of my head I can think of maybe ten incubators. Many provide a Y-combinator model three month program with five to ten startups in each class. Most acquisitions have happened in the past year or two, so it is still far too soon to predict the fate of such startups. However, we have witnessed some encouraging exits in the last couple of years, so we thought we’d present an overview. Note that it’s not comprehensive, but it is a good general overview. Check out our interactive timeline of acquisitions above (feel free to share with the embed code below), or read on for more details below!

Cirius Technologies (August 2010)

Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) acquired geo-location enabled mobile advertisement technology company Cirius Technologies for an undisclosed sum. At the time of, it was rumored to be an acqui-hire for Yahoo so that it could obtain patents for the ad-technology in hopes of optimize its local mobile advertisement products.

Atlantis (January 2011)

Gaming giant GREE picked up ad-exchange platform Atlantis with an eye to winning an advantage over its competitors. Just a month after the acquisition, Gree began it’s own independent ad program. The acquisition price was rumored to be somewhere around two billion yen.

Nobot (July 2011)

Tokyo-based smartphone ad optimization and exchange platform Nobot was acquired by KDDI’s advertising unit Mediba for 1.5 billion yen (about $19.2 million). With this acquisition, KDDI became one of the largest local ad platforms, pitting it directly against Google’s AdMob.

Naked Technology (September 2011)

Mixi, one of the biggest and oldest social networks in Japan, acquired Naked Technology, a smartphone development company known for its talented engineers in hopes of enhancing its smartphone app development. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Conit (November 2011)

A few months later Mixi also picked up Conit, a startup that was founded in 2008 and focused on smartphone app development. It operated an in-app purchase platform for iOS and Android called Samurai Purchase.

Mars Ltd. (November 2011)

Gree acquired Tokyo-base startup Mars Ltd, a company known for its signature pet game ‘Megu.’

Pikkle (April 2012)

Online game and smartphone development studio KLab acquired social games Pikkle company for 175 million yen. This was an acqui-hire for the development team, also bringing in CEO David Collier, the current CTO at KLab America.

Decopic (September 2012)

Community Factory, the company behind this successful photo sharing app for girls, was acquired by Yahoo Japan for an estimated one billion yen. The six year-old startup (at the time) was the very first startup to be funded by a Mixi venture fund. Owning 40% of the total stocks, Mixi for the first time recorded a sizable chunk of income amounting to about 310.2 million yen(about $3,246,000).

Social Lunch (December 2012)

Social game company Donuts acquired lunch partner matching app Social Lunch for an undisclosed sum. Having operated for just a year and four months at the time of buyout, the app had 60,000 users. Social Lunch was a graduate of the KDDI Innovation Fund and the three members of the team joined Donuts to continue the operation of Social Lunch.

Kamado (December 2012)

Kamado was another Mixi acquisition. The company’s well-known CEO Yuichi Kawasaki was the former vice president of Japanese bookmarking site Hatena. Kamado runs a few web services including a social item exchanging website Livlis and a fashion photo curation site called Clipie.

Enter Crews (January 2013)

Mobile entertainment platform Mobcast went public in June of 2012 with over 2.7 million users (as of October 2012). It acquired online game development company Enter Crews (with 300,000 users in Japan) for roughly 600 million yen. Enter Crews was founded in September of 2009 and has opened offices in Korea and Indonesia as well. It’s a logical move by Mobcast who is eager to accelerate its expansion to other parts of Asia.

Dreampass (March 2013)

The most recent acquisition was made by Yahoo Japan for on-demand cinema service Dreampass, for an undisclosed amount. You can read more about the deal here.

This is not a complete list of startup exit stories from Japan, but you can get an idea that the money is moving around mobile ads and social gaming. Although the competition for talent (especially developers) is not as intense as Silicon Valley, social gaming companies are facing a talent acquisition war. I’m sure that these examples will only encourage and motivate creative young Japanese with their minds set on changing the world.


Feel free to share our graphic using the embed code below:

Japan’s DeployGate aspires to be a standard tool for Android development

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Japanese social network Mixi (TYO:2121) doesn’t often do business beyond its home market, so I was pretty intrigued recently to get a preview of a relatively new project from its innovation team that is making an effort to go after global users. DeployGate initially launched last year, promising an easier way to distribute test versions of Android applications as part of the development process, all without an SDK. That service is getting an update today, one which expands its focus past just developers, placing more emphasis on the users. With this shift, it moves in on the territory of Test Flight, although its focus is still heavily on the development process. DeployGate initially came about as a result of the Mixi in-house developers scratching their own itch. As the were developing Mixi Android clients they often ran into problems, finding they had a need for easier deployment of apps to test users. DeployGate is the solution they came up with, eventually becoming a product that The Mixi innovation team would ship as a product, spun off from the Mixi development team. The process looks simple enough from a developer’s point of view. Your app is uploaded, and then you can…

L to R: Kenta Imai, Yuki Fujisaki, Kyosuke Inoue
L to R: Kenta Imai, Yuki Fujisaki, Kyosuke Inoue

Japanese social network Mixi (TYO:2121) doesn’t often do business beyond its home market, so I was pretty intrigued recently to get a preview of a relatively new project from its innovation team that is making an effort to go after global users. DeployGate initially launched last year, promising an easier way to distribute test versions of Android applications as part of the development process, all without an SDK. That service is getting an update today, one which expands its focus past just developers, placing more emphasis on the users. With this shift, it moves in on the territory of Test Flight, although its focus is still heavily on the development process.

DeployGate initially came about as a result of the Mixi in-house developers scratching their own itch. As the were developing Mixi Android clients they often ran into problems, finding they had a need for easier deployment of apps to test users. DeployGate is the solution they came up with, eventually becoming a product that The Mixi innovation team would ship as a product, spun off from the Mixi development team.

01_distribution_page_en

The process looks simple enough from a developer’s point of view. Your app is uploaded, and then you can create a unique deployment page (or distribution panel) for that iteration which can then be circulated to whomever you wish, typically via email. It can be password protected too if you like. The amount of users you can reach depends on your payment plan. After deployment over-the-air, a developer can then monitor error and crash reports from the web dashboard (pictured below), push updates, debug remotely, or even cancel privileges remotely if they choose.

The ability to deploy different app versions to different groups means that the newer version of DeployGate makes AB testing a little easier than before.

The new version of DeployGate has a number of new features, most notably a new pricing plan that makes it more accessible to more people. The pricing plans are listed below. As you can see, the new version follows a freemium model, although paid plans are reasonably priced.

Free Lite Pro Biz
Number of apps 4 10 50 100
Number of developers/collaborators 2 5 25 100
Version histories 5 15 100 1000
Devices 20 100 3,000 30,000
Monthly fee (yen) [1] 0 525 3,650 9,975

With this new version, the hope is that developers and marketers will use the free plan and want to do more, eventually upgrading to paid plans. So far the team has mainly used Google Adwords for marketing, so this should give the product an extra push now that more people can try it out. But the advantages for any individual developers are obvious.

The team has high hopes for DeployGate too, saying they want to become the de facto solution for developing Android applications. That’s a lofty goal, but it looks like they have some prominent clients already. So far, notable companies who use DeployGate are Baidu (Japan), Kayac, Zaim [2], and Tokyo Otaku Mode. I’m told that currently the service has enough paid customers to sustain their current ecosystem, and that’s certainly promising.

So far they have users in 90 countries, with 3,400 apps distributed in total. And surprisingly their customers appear to be more global that than I’d have expected from anything associated with Mixi, with 76% of usage in English, and 24% in Japanese.

It will be interesting to see if this service from the innovation team can break free of the stagnation that has been hampering Mixi as a whole in recent years. But with DeployGate, along with the recently launched Nohana camera app, it’s certainly great to see them try.

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  1. In dollars, that’s $8, $45, amd $120.  ↩

  2. Zaim is a made-in-Japan personal finance application which I really like a lot. In the coming weeks I hope to feature it in more detail.  ↩

Mixi tries again: New photo printing service ‘Nohana’ targets parents in Japan

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Japanese social network Mixi (TYO:2121) just launched a new photo service named Nohana (meaning ‘wild flowers’ in Japanese) targeting parents with small children. This move makes a lot of sense considering that the early users of the social network, which launched way back in 2000, are now a little older and likely to have children of their own. The app is surprisingly simple and is completely separate from Mixi proper. After signing up, you can invite your family members by entering their phone numbers. Once this is done, you can upload or take photos with the iOS app [1] and then every month users (in Japan) can receive a free (90 yen shipping fee not included) printed photo book. The first book of each month is always free, however each additional book costs 525 yen and there is free shipping for orders above 1,050 yen (about $11). Nohana is Mixi’s answer to our modern habit of frequent photo-taking, but never having enough time to organize and print them. With this solution, families can share their photos with grandparents or other relatives who may live far away. Mixi’s official total monthly active users was 14 million as of September 2012, with…

nohana_photobook

Japanese social network Mixi (TYO:2121) just launched a new photo service named Nohana (meaning ‘wild flowers’ in Japanese) targeting parents with small children. This move makes a lot of sense considering that the early users of the social network, which launched way back in 2000, are now a little older and likely to have children of their own.

The app is surprisingly simple and is completely separate from Mixi proper. After signing up, you can invite your family members by entering their phone numbers. Once this is done, you can upload or take photos with the iOS app [1] and then every month users (in Japan) can receive a free (90 yen shipping fee not included) printed photo book. The first book of each month is always free, however each additional book costs 525 yen and there is free shipping for orders above 1,050 yen (about $11).

Nohana

Nohana is Mixi’s answer to our modern habit of frequent photo-taking, but never having enough time to organize and print them. With this solution, families can share their photos with grandparents or other relatives who may live far away.

Mixi’s official total monthly active users was 14 million as of September 2012, with about 8.6 million of those on smartphones (see interactive chart below). And the most active users on the social network are people in the 20 to 24 demographic accounting for almost 30% of the total users. That’s followed by users ages 25 to 29 at 20%, and 30 to 35 at 14%. Ostensibly many users from these segments should benefit greatly from a service like Nohana.

Mixi currently runs two major business: its social network, plus the online job posting site, Find Job. The company recently shut down its short-lived subscription fashion commerce, Petite Jete, which was targeting young female users. Under what was likely the correct assumption that young female struggled to find casual work fashion, the company did succeed in gaining over a million users. However, the business was not as big as they expected.

In Japan, the photo book market is getting pretty crowded with competitors from Fujifilm and startups like Tolot. Lets stay tuned to see if this new venture, Nohana, will go as they hope — or suffer the same sad fate as Petite Jete.

Download image version of chart


  1. An Android version is coming later this spring  ↩