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Japan’s Qiita, Q&A site for programmers, acquired by gaming giant Ateam for $13M

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese social gaming giant Ateam (TSE:3662) announced today that it has acquired the entire stake in Tokyo-based Increments, the Japanese startup offering the Qiita knowledge-sharing platform for programmers, for 1.45 billion yen (about $13 million US). Qiita was launched back in September of 2011 by Hiroshige Umino, who had worked for Google and Japanese internet company Hatena as a programming intern while attending Kyoto University. The team graduated from Tokyo-based seed accelerator Open Network Lab‘s 4th batch, over the 2011-12 period. The platform has served more than half the population of all programmers in Japan. In addition to the Qiita open community platform, the company launched Qiita:Team back in 2013, designed for a company’s in-house use upon knowledge-sharing among their programming employees. According to the consolidated statement as of December 2016, the company posted revenue of 89.95 million yen (about $793,000), with a final deficit of 80.22 million yen (about $708,000). Ateam said in a statement: Qiita is very active in the sector where we cannot easily expand into on our own. By gaining the entire stake in Increments, we think we can accelerate our business expansion effort through leveraging of their assets and…

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese social gaming giant Ateam (TSE:3662) announced today that it has acquired the entire stake in Tokyo-based Increments, the Japanese startup offering the Qiita knowledge-sharing platform for programmers, for 1.45 billion yen (about $13 million US).

Qiita was launched back in September of 2011 by Hiroshige Umino, who had worked for Google and Japanese internet company Hatena as a programming intern while attending Kyoto University. The team graduated from Tokyo-based seed accelerator Open Network Lab‘s 4th batch, over the 2011-12 period. The platform has served more than half the population of all programmers in Japan. In addition to the Qiita open community platform, the company launched Qiita:Team back in 2013, designed for a company’s in-house use upon knowledge-sharing among their programming employees. According to the consolidated statement as of December 2016, the company posted revenue of 89.95 million yen (about $793,000), with a final deficit of 80.22 million yen (about $708,000).

Ateam said in a statement:

Qiita is very active in the sector where we cannot easily expand into on our own. By gaining the entire stake in Increments, we think we can accelerate our business expansion effort through leveraging of their assets and experience. We are certain this acquisition will contribute to our growth over the mid- to long-term perceptive in addition to improving our corporate value.

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Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Kobito for Mac lets you share bits of code with Japanese programming community [Video]

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In the past we have featured Japanese code/knowledge sharing service Qiita. With over 20,000 domestic users (and over 220,000 monthly unique visitors [1]) the platform is an important hub for Japanese programmers. While many people that I speak to often refer to it as a sort of Japanese Github, sharing on Qiita is more akin to sharing a Gist on Github. As with Gists, any code you share can have nice syntax highlighting, and that’s really handy. Notes shared on Qiita are written in Markdown format, and the startup has also produced a handy Markdown editor for Mac OSX called Kobito that integrates with its service. So you can compose notes or explanations of code snippets you want to share, and post directly to Qiita for the app. The split screen Markdown preview is somewhat reminiscent of Mou or MultiMarkdown Composer. When you publish you also have the option to share to Twitter, or publish your note as a Gist as well. This latter option is especially handy since there is likely a huge overlap between Qiita and Github users. Qiita just published a new 1.7 release of Kobito today if you’d like to give it a try. Or check…

kobito
Kobito app for Mac

In the past we have featured Japanese code/knowledge sharing service Qiita. With over 20,000 domestic users (and over 220,000 monthly unique visitors [1]) the platform is an important hub for Japanese programmers.

While many people that I speak to often refer to it as a sort of Japanese Github, sharing on Qiita is more akin to sharing a Gist on Github. As with Gists, any code you share can have nice syntax highlighting, and that’s really handy.

Notes shared on Qiita are written in Markdown format, and the startup has also produced a handy Markdown editor for Mac OSX called Kobito that integrates with its service. So you can compose notes or explanations of code snippets you want to share, and post directly to Qiita for the app. The split screen Markdown preview is somewhat reminiscent of Mou or MultiMarkdown Composer.

When you publish you also have the option to share to Twitter, or publish your note as a Gist as well. This latter option is especially handy since there is likely a huge overlap between Qiita and Github users.

Qiita just published a new 1.7 release of Kobito today if you’d like to give it a try. Or check out our video demo below for more details.


  1. These numbers are from back in May of this year.  ↩

Japanese knowledge sharing site Qiita could reach as many as half the nation’s programmers

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See the original story in Japanese. Qiita is a knowledge sharing platform for programmers, a place where they can exchange information and code snippets in order to learn from each other. It has been growing well too, as Increments Inc (the company behind Qiita) announced yesterday that the platform has reached the 20,000 user milestone, boasting about 220,000 monthly unique visitors too. Coinciding with this announcement, the startup also launched brand new service called ‘Qiita Team’, which allows users to share knowledge among a closed group. Qiita was initially launched back in September of 2011, as part of the fourth batch of Open Network Lab incubation program. Of course on a global level, Github is the social coding community with almost 3 million engineers — but there is no overwhelming favorite in Japan [1]. Qiita is quite niche but is dominating this space for now. Interestingly, according to the startup’s designer and co-founder Tomoya Konishi, recent surveys indicate that there are about 400,000 programmers working in the Japanese IT industry [2]. Given that Qiita’s total monthly unique visitors is 220,000, that roughly accounts for 50% of the entire population of Japanese programmers. In addition to Qiita Team, the company has…

register-user-graph-en

See the original story in Japanese.

Qiita is a knowledge sharing platform for programmers, a place where they can exchange information and code snippets in order to learn from each other. It has been growing well too, as Increments Inc (the company behind Qiita) announced yesterday that the platform has reached the 20,000 user milestone, boasting about 220,000 monthly unique visitors too.

Coinciding with this announcement, the startup also launched brand new service called ‘Qiita Team’, which allows users to share knowledge among a closed group.

Qiita was initially launched back in September of 2011, as part of the fourth batch of Open Network Lab incubation program. Of course on a global level, Github is the social coding community with almost 3 million engineers — but there is no overwhelming favorite in Japan [1]. Qiita is quite niche but is dominating this space for now.

Interestingly, according to the startup’s designer and co-founder Tomoya Konishi, recent surveys indicate that there are about 400,000 programmers working in the Japanese IT industry [2]. Given that Qiita’s total monthly unique visitors is 220,000, that roughly accounts for 50% of the entire population of Japanese programmers.

In addition to Qiita Team, the company has also launched a job/talent matching site called ‘Qiita Carrer’. But how does the company intend to monetize all these services? Konishi explains:

Qitta Career is a gateway for our partner recruiting companies which might be a suitable fit for our users as they advance their careers. We’re currently exploring other business models too by adding some features.

If Qiita can reach half of the country’s programmers, the startup likely has a promising future.

qiita


  1. Although Github itself is certainly a favorite here too.  ↩

  2. The figure comes from a white paper on IT human resources in Japan by Japan’s IT Promotion Agency.  ↩