A couple of weeks ago Japanese mobile news startup Gunosy launched an English version of their app for the UK. Now today the company has announced that it has released its iOS app in the US as well, with an Android version to follow at the end of the month. The company says that it is targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide. And while I’m usually encouraged to see Japanese companies venturing abroad, there are three reasons I can think of why this app – in its current form – will fail spectacularly. No ‘readability’ view – I’ve written about why I think so before. Gunosy does not provide news articles in a stripped-down, Readability-style view. Most Western news apps, in contrast, do. Check out the view of the same article below, first on Gunosy, then on Pocket. Which would you prefer to read on mobile? Late mover advantage squandered – As a startup, if you enter a market late as Gunosy is now doing, you benefit from seeing what competitors have done, and you have a chance to do it better. Gunosy, for some reason, seems to think it has a chance against the…
A couple of weeks ago Japanese mobile news startup Gunosy launched an English version of their app for the UK. Now today the company has announced that it has released its iOS app in the US as well, with an Android version to follow at the end of the month.
The company says that it is targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide. And while I’m usually encouraged to see Japanese companies venturing abroad, there are three reasons I can think of why this app – in its current form – will fail spectacularly.
No ‘readability’ view – I’ve written about why I think so before. Gunosy does not provide news articles in a stripped-down, Readability-style view. Most Western news apps, in contrast, do. Check out the view of the same article below, first on Gunosy, then on Pocket. Which would you prefer to read on mobile?
Late mover advantage squandered – As a startup, if you enter a market late as Gunosy is now doing, you benefit from seeing what competitors have done, and you have a chance to do it better. Gunosy, for some reason, seems to think it has a chance against the competition without bothering to do anything. In my view, their app does not in any way compare with even the 2012 version of Flipboard (for example), let alone the current one.
Doesn’t serve the user first – Just for kicks, I tried to send an article from Gunosy to Pocket. It worked, but the link that Gunosy lets users share not actually the article link, but a Gunosy link of this format: https://gunosy.today/r/gEqFt. At first I thought it might be just a link shortener, but it’s not, as you can see below. It’s pure Gunosy promotion with a download link and the top, and below too if you scroll down. Warning, this mess may induce flashbacks to the Hootsuite toolbar.
So where is Gunosy’s proposed value add? I confess, I have no idea. Perhaps KDDI knows? I can think of 12 million reasons why they should know!
Gunosy’s push notifications/reminders at different times during the day might be touted as a differentiator, but it’s not really a big selling point.
I think if the company hopes to do well beyond Japan, they’ll need to make some serious user-focused iterations on this app first.
This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this: Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile. While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1]. But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the…
Scared?
This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this:
Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile.
While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1].
But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the side of caution by showing the original webpage content in their app, as is, without any effort to ensure that it’s readable on mobile [2]. They have purposefully chosen to not disrupt or challenge current content models.
Let’s look at a few examples from some of Japan’s leading news apps. Here’s Gunosy:
Gunosy does what most Japanese news apps do. They serve up the original web page when the title is clicked, whether its very readable or not. Other Japanese apps that do this are Presso, Romly, Vingow, Mynd, and Kamelio[3]. These news apps are primarily aggregators or curation tools. I wouldn’t go so far as to call any of them ‘news readers’, because technically, you’re just being directed to a traditional reading experience on the source site.
SmartNews’s approach is an interesting one, maybe the only one that is even a little daring. They are one of the few companies to present a readability mode, boasting offline caching as a feature for Japanese users who might be beyond internet signal on the subway. When you tap to read an article on SmartNews, you are flashed an option to read in ‘SmartMode’. This is SmartNews’s more readable view, but it’s presented as something the user must choose to view deliberately. What’s more, when you press back, the app sneakily presents the original source page (see this below). This is a clever way of giving both the publisher and the user what they want, and I’m sure it took them a while to figure out this compromise.
Line News is also mildly daring, showing longer excerpts relating to one story, collected from various sources. Tapping on any of those sources brings you to the original source, however (see lower left), including ads and undesirable cruft (lower right).
Overall I think it is pretty clear that the relationship that exists between content publishers and news apps that tiptoe around their requirements/expectations is not good for innovation in the content space. Publishers cling to old monetization models instead of searching for new ones, and Japanese readers are denied the kind of beautified reading experience that the rest of the world enjoys [4].
Mobile-friendly news sites are far more common in Japan than in other countries, so if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that. the original page view on mobile is typically not so bad. ↩
Kamelio does some interesting things with timelines which I think are admirable, but they still opt to show the original source in this way. ↩
Unless they use something like Pocket, of course, which many do. ↩
Last week I mentioned that Japanese internet company Hatena would be launching a mobile news app based around its Hatena Bookmarks service. Yesterday that app, dubbed Presso, was made available on the App Store, so I decided to take it for a spin. For those not familiar with Hatena Bookmarks, or ‘Hatebu’, the service began way back in 2005, offering the same sort of social bookmarking as Delicious (2003) but for the Japanese market. As I mentioned last week, the company has built a useful ‘hot entry’ portal based on most frequently bookmarked media from users, and this new mobile app brings that same valuable content on to mobile. What’s useful about Presso is that the available news categories are rather robust and customizable. So for example, if I’m interested in news about ‘mobile apps’, ‘business’, and ‘cameras and photography’, I can simply select those to create a very personalized news service for myself. There are more diverse topics included as well, such as ‘Government/Economics’, ‘Manga/Anima’ [1], ‘Lifehacks’, ‘Travel’, and ‘Blogs/Journals’ (see below). You can even add your own tags on your own, which is perhaps the most useful function. As I expected, Hatena’s new app puts more focus on…
Last week I mentioned that Japanese internet company Hatena would be launching a mobile news app based around its Hatena Bookmarks service. Yesterday that app, dubbed Presso, was made available on the App Store, so I decided to take it for a spin.
For those not familiar with Hatena Bookmarks, or ‘Hatebu’, the service began way back in 2005, offering the same sort of social bookmarking as Delicious (2003) but for the Japanese market. As I mentioned last week, the company has built a useful ‘hot entry’ portal based on most frequently bookmarked media from users, and this new mobile app brings that same valuable content on to mobile.
What’s useful about Presso is that the available news categories are rather robust and customizable. So for example, if I’m interested in news about ‘mobile apps’, ‘business’, and ‘cameras and photography’, I can simply select those to create a very personalized news service for myself. There are more diverse topics included as well, such as ‘Government/Economics’, ‘Manga/Anima’ [1], ‘Lifehacks’, ‘Travel’, and ‘Blogs/Journals’ (see below). You can even add your own tags on your own, which is perhaps the most useful function.
As I expected, Hatena’s new app puts more focus on photos as most modern news applications do. And I while I really like the way you can swipe right or left to go to the next news category, Presso occasionally feels slow when loading those categories. I had hoped that Presso would apply its the same minimalist reformatting on article pages that we find in apps like Instapaper and Pocket, but it doesn’t – which I think is a mistake. Similarly, I think they’ve wasted an opportunity in the video category by not pulling in videos for consumption within Presso.
One interesting feature is the optional four push notification times (8am, 12pm, 6pm, and 11pm, as you can see above), which are ostensibly intended to coincide with the times that Japanese users read news most. But overall I think Presso doesn’t bring anything to the news app space that we haven’t seen before. However, because you can bookmark articles to Hatena Bookmarks as you read them, that will feed much needed activity back into its bookmarks service, perhaps winning back many Hatena users that the company may have lost as smartphone popularity has grown.
So in this sense, I think Hatena has built this app more with its own interests in mind instead of those of its users. This might have been an exciting app two or three years ago, but in the age of startup news challengers like Gunosy and SmartNews here in Japan, I think local consumers expect a little more.
Despite the downslide of the leading social bookmarking service Delicious, online bookmarking has enjoyed something of a resurgence recently through the very geeky Pinboard. That is essentially a clone of what Delicious was when it was good, now serving a rather niche market by charging an initial one-time sign-up fee of $10, and optional caching service for $25 per year.
It would be interesting to see Hatena explore that kind of business model, but I have a feeling they never will. Nevertheless, for hardcore Hatebu fans out there, Presso is a welcome present.
Perhaps a good resource for Japanese learners interested in manga. ↩
See the original Japanese version of this article here The competition among news technology startups is heating up. Yesterday, we brought you the first part of our interview with Shinji Kimura, who just joined a leading news technology startup, Gunosy. In this second part, he talks about the company’s competitors, as well as his own goals as an entrepreneur. The Bridge: There are several competitors in this field. How will you stand apart from them all? Kimura: Gunosy made it possible for users to get useful information without having to search for it for it on the internet. News was the first step. But the next step could be other content like books, music, or great images. E-commerce is now more personalized as well. We could help bring content from any field to users. The Bridge: You are expanding beyond news? Kimura: We have a chance to access to all kinds of content. We could develop an efficient matching system that spans the world, by building a great team with the necessary expertise. If we can do this, we could see a form of consumption nobody has ever imagined before. Connecting dots, as Steve Jobs said, will be realized in…
The competition among news technology startups is heating up. Yesterday, we brought you the first part of our interview with Shinji Kimura, who just joined a leading news technology startup, Gunosy. In this second part, he talks about the company’s competitors, as well as his own goals as an entrepreneur.
The Bridge: There are several competitors in this field. How will you stand apart from them all?
Kimura: Gunosy made it possible for users to get useful information without having to search for it for it on the internet. News was the first step. But the next step could be other content like books, music, or great images. E-commerce is now more personalized as well. We could help bring content from any field to users.
The Bridge: You are expanding beyond news?
Kimura: We have a chance to access to all kinds of content. We could develop an efficient matching system that spans the world, by building a great team with the necessary expertise. If we can do this, we could see a form of consumption nobody has ever imagined before. Connecting dots, as Steve Jobs said, will be realized in the field of recommendation technology. Ultimately this sort of thing has potential to make people happier.
The Bridge: Amazon recommends users items based on what they previously bought. And Gunosy recommends based on users’ interests, right?
Kimura: People often misunderstand this, but we don’t recommend articles based on what users’ friends have shared. We don’t do that. What we want to do is to try to copy the users’ mind based on interests. That’s why sometimes articles the user has already read the previous day are recommended.
The Bridge: Gunosy is growing rapidly. But I have the impression that there is still room to add entertainment value. Is there any possibility for such an entertainment feature in the future? Perhaps implementing a real-time function?
Kimura: Basically user interests are not updated real-time, so that’d be a difficult feature to implement. I hear that a lot of users use a variety of services, each for a different purpose. So naturally it’d be more convenient if they could be integrated into just one service.
The morning edition and the evening edition of newspapers is a good representation of readers’ daily activities. [Giving consideration to time], it could be interesting to provide recipes from Cookpad before lunch time. I think that this kind of feature can add an entertainment value to the service.
The Bridge: To what extent are you planning to scale up this business?
Kimura: We have to carefully look at the actions of competitors and major companies, and try to take action at the right time. There will be a lot of things young members in their 20s cannot imagine. I have business experiences both in startups and big companies. So I think my role here in Gunosy is to help young members think beyond their existing frames of view.
The Bridge: The executive team will be built based on your network as well?
Kimura: I am talking to some people who have startup experiences. Possibly some people who are well known in the startup field will join our team. […] Considering that existing competitors are already big, we need to pump human and capital resources at this stage. I had difficulty doing that in my past starup experience, so this time I will take advantage of my experiences and execute rather boldly. Japan needs big technology companies like Google and Facebook, a place where young talents can work. Our generation needs to establish a 1 trillion-yen company which can be passed to the next generation.
See the original Japanese version of this article. The competition news technology startups is heating up in Japan. Each company is adjusting its business strategy in an attempt to differentiate from competitors. Two startups are leading this competition: Smartnews and Gunosy. The latter recently surpassed 1 million downloads and launched an ad network as well. Gunosy recently added a very notable new member to its team in Shinji Kimura, who previously founded an ad-tech startup (Adlantis) and also has experience as an investor. We spoke with him to learn more about Gunosy, particularly about their recently launched ad service, and about his own goals as an entrepreneur. The Bridge: You are back on the frontlines! Kimura: It is getting busier here everyday. The experience I had before in Adlantis, expanding the business and the team, helps me a lot now. As soon as I started using Gunosy, I realized that this is something different from other recommendation technology. I was referred to Mr. Fukushima, the CEO of Gunosy, and met him at a restaurant. The Bridge: The performance of Gunosy Ads (recently launched) turned out to be surprisingly high, right? It is a way better than I expected. CTR and…
The competition news technology startups is heating up in Japan. Each company is adjusting its business strategy in an attempt to differentiate from competitors. Two startups are leading this competition: Smartnews and Gunosy. The latter recently surpassed 1 million downloads and launched an ad network as well. Gunosy recently added a very notable new member to its team in Shinji Kimura, who previously founded an ad-tech startup (Adlantis) and also has experience as an investor. We spoke with him to learn more about Gunosy, particularly about their recently launched ad service, and about his own goals as an entrepreneur.
The Bridge: You are back on the frontlines!
Kimura: It is getting busier here everyday. The experience I had before in Adlantis, expanding the business and the team, helps me a lot now. As soon as I started using Gunosy, I realized that this is something different from other recommendation technology. I was referred to Mr. Fukushima, the CEO of Gunosy, and met him at a restaurant.
The Bridge: The performance of Gunosy Ads (recently launched) turned out to be surprisingly high, right?
It is a way better than I expected. CTR and CVR figures are both around 10 times more than average ad networks. Facebook might reach a similar figure in the future. I will keep improving the ad technology.
The Bridge: What is the vision of Gunosy Ads you have in mind?
Kimura: A lot of users get annoyed by ads on smartphones. I want Gunosy Ads to be a solution to this issue. Ads should be part of the content. So, we need to identify how users find content. The question is, how do they find contents they want when everything like music, books and information are digitized? We need to provide technology to help users find contents efficiently.
The Bridge: You worked on advertising technology at Adlantis. How is it different at Gunosy?
Kimura: Gunosy stands right between advertisers and media. We analyze user information and provide that to advertisers. DSP and SSP have room for improvement. Current advertising systems made it possible for advertisers to put ads more efficiently at lower prices. But media has not succeeded in getting enough data on clusters of users, and that keeps them from upping their advertising rate.
The high performance of Gunosy Ads proves that as long as media can grab solid data about users based on SSP and DSP, they don’t need to sell ads at unreasonably low prices. Since we have technology to understand user interests, it could be possible in the future to utilize it and help other websites display optimized ads.
While Adlantis provided optimized ad serving as a third party, Gunosy realized optimal ad serving by changing the scheme and reconstructing information.
The Bridge: It’s not possible without communication with users, is it?
This scheme is possible only when there is solid trust between us and our users. Our users have to be convinced that we are working for them. If we just put random ads, users will not trust us. We have to make sure that our ad program serves our users as a sort of concierge and provide useful information for users’ daily lives.
The Bridge: So how do you describe Gunosy?
Kimura: Gunosy is a response to the changing times. When internet devices were only PCs, the internet was available only at home or in the office. But now, people can connect to the internet with smartphones anytime anywhere. When the places we could use the internet was limited, we connected to the internet with specific purposes. We used search engines to reach information. But when the internet became accessible anytime, we started using the internet without purpose.
The Bridge: I see.
Kimura: Then social network sites expanded. But they are not efficient. Users get redundant information. Users were looking for something that matches their interests. A kind of unknown information was needed.
Social network users seem to spend endless amounts of time looking at their timelines, but actually they are looking for something that interests them. People want a more efficient search engine. That’s Gunosy.
Gunosy is different from a news aggregator. It’s a system that connects users and information when users don’t have any particular purpose.
I understand that the concept of Gunosy is closer to Yahoo than Google. However, on portal sites organized as a directory, users still have trouble finding what they want. So, the question is how to provide a timeline of information optimized for each user. We need to calculate, optimize and control data in order to do that.
The Bridge: The optimization of Yahoo sounds like a key idea for the future.
Kimura: I think Yahoo Japan is going to execute it. They have not yet done it possibly because of other business issues, but Yahoo USA has already implemented a timeline system. The volume of user data is the key to making a solid recommendation system. Things like a social graph makes a difference as well.
Kimura also talked about their competitors, as well as his own goals as an entrepreneur. We’ll cover that in the next article!
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Gocro, the startup behind news curation app SmartNews, announced today it has raised 420 million yen (approximately $4.2 million) from Globis Capital Partners. Smartnews is a mobile app that curates trending news stories based on Twitter data, analyzed with its own original technology. To date the startup has partnered with 43 news services and 25 companies for content syndication, and is exploring more partnerships in many business sectors. With this funding, the company plans to hire engineers and data scientists, and will increase its headcount from six to 40 over the next year. In this news app space here in Japan, we’ve seen more than a few competitors including Vingow and Gunosy. It is an interesting sector to watch, especially now that Line has thrown its hat in the ring as well with its own news app.
Tokyo-based Gocro, the startup behind news curation app SmartNews, announced today it has raised 420 million yen (approximately $4.2 million) from Globis Capital Partners.
Smartnews is a mobile app that curates trending news stories based on Twitter data, analyzed with its own original technology. To date the startup has partnered with 43 news services and 25 companies for content syndication, and is exploring more partnerships in many business sectors.
With this funding, the company plans to hire engineers and data scientists, and will increase its headcount from six to 40 over the next year.
In this news app space here in Japan, we’ve seen more than a few competitors including Vingow and Gunosy. It is an interesting sector to watch, especially now that Line has thrown its hat in the ring as well with its own news app.
news apps 
Rick Martin
Takeshi Hirano
Junya Mori
