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WordPress cloud service provider Sova raises $3M, launches freemium hosting plan

Masaru Ikeda 2014.06.18

See the original story in Japanese. Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore. Why so confident? Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors: Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20. Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region…

See the original story in Japanese.

Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore.

Why so confident?

Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors:

Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20.

Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region because we’ve seen no competitors focused on such a niche space.

Adding multilingual options

Many of their users come from Japan and the Southeast Asian regions. To address a latency issue for them, the company’s cloud facilities are located in Singapore and Osaka, Japan. Using the funds raised this time, they plan to set up another facility in Palo Alto to prepare for their expansion to the US market and also add user support offices in Palo Alto and Indonesia to the existing locations in Singapore and Osaka. Fujimoto explained:

Since WordPress accounts for over 20% of all websites in the world, everyone knows how it’s sure to monetize. We’re still as young as six months old, but we’ve been receiving many takeover offers from companies like telcos in Asia and Silicon Valley-based companies expecting expansions to the Asian markets. But we have no intention to accept their offers for now.

Sova is also in talk with a undisclosed Japanese hosting company to provide a white label service for their customers. So you’ll be able to see a WordPress cloud hosting service branded with a major Japanese company pretty soon. The service is currently available in English and Japanese, but plan to add Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Spanish to its language options next month.

Launching freemium hosting plan

Earlier this week, the company started accepting applications for their freemium hosting plan called Sova WP Free. Now that they’ve got the funds and a measurable number of paying users, so they thought it’s good to launch the premium plan to gain their awareness amongst potential customers. Fujimoto added:

It’s a freemium service but has a feature to boost the capacity of your environment to withstand up to 1 million daily page views. We’re developing our own ad network platform, which will enables blog owners using our service to monetize their content. It’s also available for mobile browsing. Typical WordPress templates are limited in its variety of design, but we will provide many templates using responsive designs and give users more choices.

We understand that they are trying to secure a series A funding worth an amount ranging from $10 to $15 million by the end of October.

I was curious about how Fujimoto have been working prior to this business. He told me that he started his own business while he was attending Kyoto University. Subsequently he launched an IT business and sold it over to a big Japanese IT company back in 2009. He’s busy flying back and forth between Singapore and Palo Alto for setting up their first office in the US.

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Japanese social marketing company Allied Architects sets up shop in Singapore

Masaru Ikeda 2014.04.23

Tokyo-based Allied Architects(TSE:6081) announced yesterday it has set up a subsidiary in Singapore. It’s called Allied Asia Pacific, and it will administrate operations around the company’s marketing services in the region, including the ‘Monipla for Facebook’ marketing platform in Vietnam and Taiwan. Our readers may recall that the company recently partnered with Silicon Valley-based growth hacking startup AppSocially. So I expect this expansion is intended to assist such partner services in reaching out to local businesses in the region. via Venture Now

Tokyo-based Allied Architects(TSE:6081) announced yesterday it has set up a subsidiary in Singapore. It’s called Allied Asia Pacific, and it will administrate operations around the company’s marketing services in the region, including the ‘Monipla for Facebook’ marketing platform in Vietnam and Taiwan.

Our readers may recall that the company recently partnered with Silicon Valley-based growth hacking startup AppSocially. So I expect this expansion is intended to assist such partner services in reaching out to local businesses in the region.

via Venture Now

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Pirate3D to bring its Buccaneer 3D Printer to Japan

Rick Martin 2014.01.30

We have written about a number of fun Japan-based 3D printing projects. In a country like this one known for creative product design, 3D fabrication already off to a promising start. But in order for this space to thrive on a large scale, printers need to be accessible and affordable. We’ve previously written about a number of shared workspaces, including CUBE and FabCafe, which are helping in this regard. We’re also pleased to see more printers going on sale here in Japan, including the Buccaneer 3D printer, whose parent company, Singapore-based Pirate3D, has just signed a distribution deal for Japan with Keienu Trading Company. Its printers are set to go on sale in the country in late May or early June. It’s a little surprising to me to see that Pirate3D really didn’t waste any time moving in on the Japan market, seeing as how they are still just in the pre-order phase elsewhere. So I asked the company’s management engineer Evgeny Lazarenko why Japan represented such an important market for them. He explained: Japan is arguably the most developed consumer market in Asia in terms of purchasing power. […] The nation is quick to experiment with new products, and…

We have written about a number of fun Japan-based 3D printing projects. In a country like this one known for creative product design, 3D fabrication already off to a promising start. But in order for this space to thrive on a large scale, printers need to be accessible and affordable. We’ve previously written about a number of shared workspaces, including CUBE and FabCafe, which are helping in this regard.

We’re also pleased to see more printers going on sale here in Japan, including the Buccaneer 3D printer, whose parent company, Singapore-based Pirate3D, has just signed a distribution deal for Japan with Keienu Trading Company. Its printers are set to go on sale in the country in late May or early June.

It’s a little surprising to me to see that Pirate3D really didn’t waste any time moving in on the Japan market, seeing as how they are still just in the pre-order phase elsewhere. So I asked the company’s management engineer Evgeny Lazarenko why Japan represented such an important market for them. He explained:

Japan is arguably the most developed consumer market in Asia in terms of purchasing power. […] The nation is quick to experiment with new products, and 3D printing is all about experimentation. The ‘monozukuri’ philosophy is deeply ingrained into Japanese mentality. This nationwide maker spirit is exactly what Pirate3D is looking for. We believe that 3D printing market in Japan is going to explode very soon, and cultural element will be one of the major contributing factors to this.

He adds that because Japan cares about inspired product design, that the Buccaneer 3D printer will “resonate with tastes” in Japan.

For those not familiar with Pirate3D and its Buccaneer 3D printer, we should point out that the product is still pretty young, having launched a very successful Kickstarter campaign last summer that raised $1.4 million. The product itself focuses on ease-of-use, sporting a minimalist design without any buttons, just a light indicator. It can print continuously for over 200 hours, and can even function as a server through wireless connection with PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

While the they hesitate to make any sales projections, Evgeny says maybe they can move hundreds of units per month by September. A representative from their Japanese distributor, Keienu Trading, says that they have seen “explosive growth” in Japanese demand for 3D printers in the past year, and so far their distribution partners have all shown a “significant and promising” reaction to the Buccaneer 3D printer and its potential.

Check out the video above for an overview of the Buccaneer 3D. Pirate3D was backed by Red Dot Ventures and incubated by the Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES).

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Explosive potential: Nitrous puts pre-configured development environments in the cloud

Rick Martin 2014.01.09

As someone who has been trying to learn programming over the past few years, one of the biggest issues that I continue to run into is getting my local development environment to function properly. For a beginner, an amazing amount of stamina is required to power through the inevitable command line errors that often come up when you’re getting started [1]. But while interviewing a well-known designer/developer recently, he suggested that I check out Nitrous.IO, a cloud-based development environment platform that he assured me would make the process much easier [2]. And sure enough, it did. After signing up, you can create a development environment, or ‘box’, for one of four languages/frameworks: Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, NodeJS, or Go — all with little more than a button click. From there you’re presented with the familiar green-on-black terminal interface, all ready to go from the comfort of your web browser, letting you focus on writing code rather than fumbling with environment configurations. I got in touch with Nitrous co-founder A.J. Solimine to find out more about how their product came about. While I find it a helpful tool for my own beginner-level learning, Nitrous was built to make software configuration easier not just…

As someone who has been trying to learn programming over the past few years, one of the biggest issues that I continue to run into is getting my local development environment to function properly. For a beginner, an amazing amount of stamina is required to power through the inevitable command line errors that often come up when you’re getting started [1]. But while interviewing a well-known designer/developer recently, he suggested that I check out Nitrous.IO, a cloud-based development environment platform that he assured me would make the process much easier [2].

And sure enough, it did.

After signing up, you can create a development environment, or ‘box’, for one of four languages/frameworks: Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, NodeJS, or Go — all with little more than a button click. From there you’re presented with the familiar green-on-black terminal interface, all ready to go from the comfort of your web browser, letting you focus on writing code rather than fumbling with environment configurations.

I got in touch with Nitrous co-founder A.J. Solimine to find out more about how their product came about. While I find it a helpful tool for my own beginner-level learning, Nitrous was built to make software configuration easier not just for novices, but for everyone.

A.J. explains:

We’ve set out to make development easier and more enjoyable by eliminating the complexities that come with setting up and configuring software. On Nitrous.IO, you just write code, you don’t really need to know about Linux, and Ruby, and Rails, or Postgres configuration flags.

A.J. and his team began working on Nitrous (initially named Action.io) back in the summer of 2013 from a small shop in Singapore. The other cofounders are Peter Kim and Arun Thampi, who both studied at the National University of Singapore. While working on web and mobile apps, Arun and A.J. ran into difficulties keeping their development environments up to date for their many projects. They looked into Quora’s published explanation of their EC2 development, in an effort to see if a cloud solution might be the answer.

They found there were many configuration tools out there, but most with a steep learning curve and none built specifically for development [3]. The alternative that they devised (see a screenshot of the browser interface below) is one that has attracted a lot of attention and admiration from the development community, and from investors as well.

Nitrous raised $1 million in seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and other investors back in late 2012, and I’m told that since they launched their public beta in June 2013 they’ve averaged a stunning 500 new registered users per day. And in December they announced a beta ‘Nitrous for Business’ program, targeting larger teams that need a way to simplify their development and collaboration.

nitrous-jekyll — A Nitrous ruby box in the browser

The business model is very smart as well, in my view, with a number of upgrade plans (announced just yesterday) that give you access to more CPU share and virtual memory, as well as things like premium support, no automatic shutdowns (free boxes are shutdown after a period of inactivity), and direct SSH access.

But even free users can earn additional resources through Nitrous’s referral plan [4]. A.J. tells me that this strategy has served them very well so far:

The referral strategy has been a strong catalyst for growth for us – we don’t spend any money on marketing or advertisements, so all of our growth thus far has been due to our users sharing Nitrous.IO with their friends.

With an office now in the US as well as Singapore, it will be interesting to see how Nitrous progresses over the next year or so. They have made some astounding strides in a very, very short amount of time, so I think there’s really a lot of potential here. Nitrous is hiring too, for anyone out there who would like to get involved.

Expect big things.

Nitrous's US team after a go-kart outing — Nitrous’s US team after a go-kart outing

I’m sure that many experienced programmers might assert that powering through such errors is an essential part of your learning, and understanding the development environment is important. And I think that’s very true. But with more and more people learning programming on their own these days, as opposed to in a classroom, a tool like this makes the learning process a little more accessible in my view. ↩
I’m referring to Sacha Greif, and my conversation with him is upcoming in a future article. He has written an informative post about running Meteor apps using Nitrous here. ↩
They also found some big companies centralized infrastructure in place for remote development, but that was usually the exception and not the norm. ↩
I’m going to shamelessly drop my own Nitrous referral link right here. ↩

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Japanese startup Fello raises $1M to help game developers improve user retention

Takeshi Hirano 2013.09.12

See the original story in Japanese. Singapore-based Unicon, the Japanese startup behind user retention improvement platform Fello, announced today that it has raised 100 million yen (approximately $1 million) from Jafco and other Japanese investors. With these funds, the startup will intensify engineering and marketing efforts and is planning to set up an office in Japan. The platform provides testing and analysis features for typical mobile gaming app functions such as push notification or messaging via an SDK. According to the startup’s CEO Ryuichi Tanaka, more than 100 app developers have signed up for the service since its launch back in August. Over 100 app developers have signed up for Fello since its launch in August In the Japanese gaming industry, many publishers are shifting their development efforts from browser-based apps to native apps. Fello’s growth indicates there’s a high need for this kind of platforms in terms of helping developers improve their apps. Why are they off to such a good start? Tanaka says that it’s likely because the service is free. For developers, if you have published a number of apps, a plan that charges by volume would be a heavy burden. Users can gain a 7-day user…

See the original story in Japanese.

Singapore-based Unicon, the Japanese startup behind user retention improvement platform Fello, announced today that it has raised 100 million yen (approximately $1 million) from Jafco and other Japanese investors. With these funds, the startup will intensify engineering and marketing efforts and is planning to set up an office in Japan.

The platform provides testing and analysis features for typical mobile gaming app functions such as push notification or messaging via an SDK. According to the startup’s CEO Ryuichi Tanaka, more than 100 app developers have signed up for the service since its launch back in August.

Over 100 app developers have signed up for Fello since its launch in August

In the Japanese gaming industry, many publishers are shifting their development efforts from browser-based apps to native apps. Fello’s growth indicates there’s a high need for this kind of platforms in terms of helping developers improve their apps.

Why are they off to such a good start? Tanaka says that it’s likely because the service is free. For developers, if you have published a number of apps, a plan that charges by volume would be a heavy burden. Users can gain a 7-day user retention rate of up to 60% on average by adding a messaging function using the platform’s SDK. That rate is three times higher than the average without such a function.

So how will the startup monetize this platform? I presumed it would adopt a freemium business model — but I was wrong. Tanaka tells me that they will launch an ad network in the beginning of September, but he could not go into more details.

The startup is targeting casual game developers, and that may be why they are based in Singapore, likely hoping fill the need for this kind of solutions for the entire Asian region. They have already started talks with major game developers that may potentially participate in the ad network. We will update you with more details when they become available.

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Feeding Asia’s growing games appetite: Gumi Asia CEO on expansion beyond Japan

Masaru Ikeda 2013.04.17

It was almost one year ago when Japanese social game developer Gumi established a presence in Singapore. That subsidiary, called Gumi Asia, was set up last April, with David Ng appointed as the CEO. Ng has previously worked with low-end router vendor Linksys and gaming giant Electronic Arts [1]. During a recent visit to Singapore, I had an opportunity to speak with Ng, who explained more about what the company has in store in the future, as well as some advice to businesses aspiring to expand in the Asia regions. Q: Can you tell us a little about your Singapore team? David: We have 75 people at our Singapore office alone. Every team in the office has 20 to 25 people, [each] with a single mission for developing a specific game title. That’s how our operations in Singapore can currently develop three game titles at the same time. In addition to Singapore, we have development teams in Taipei and Jakarta, and I’m administrating all 110 people working at the three different locations. I speak with each of the offices via teleconference once a week at least, and I actually visit the locations once a month at least. Q: Gumi is…

It was almost one year ago when Japanese social game developer Gumi established a presence in Singapore. That subsidiary, called Gumi Asia, was set up last April, with David Ng appointed as the CEO. Ng has previously worked with low-end router vendor Linksys and gaming giant Electronic Arts [1]. During a recent visit to Singapore, I had an opportunity to speak with Ng, who explained more about what the company has in store in the future, as well as some advice to businesses aspiring to expand in the Asia regions.

Q: Can you tell us a little about your Singapore team?

David: We have 75 people at our Singapore office alone. Every team in the office has 20 to 25 people, [each] with a single mission for developing a specific game title. That’s how our operations in Singapore can currently develop three game titles at the same time.

In addition to Singapore, we have development teams in Taipei and Jakarta, and I’m administrating all 110 people working at the three different locations. I speak with each of the offices via teleconference once a week at least, and I actually visit the locations once a month at least.

Q: Gumi is currently focusing on the Asian market. Why not North America nor Europe?

David: We’re in the emerging market where the population of our potential users are rapidly increasing. In other parts of the world, to be honest, few people know about us. Our brand is becoming well-known in Asia, and that’s why we’re running our business right here now. I heard that some gaming titles cost six dollars to acquire a user, and that’s the number we definitely can’t accept. This is another reason why we’re focusing on Asia.

gumi_halloween — CEO David Ng and his colleagues at Gumi Asia’s Halloween Party
(from Gumi Asia’s Facebook page)

Q. Your business is not only about sales but also developing products all over Asia. What is the benefit of this development strategy?

David: Game developers are doing business differently than typical tech startups. Startups are pursuing the development of market-disrupting products or services to acquire users. But we as game developers need keep introducing new titles to attract people. Through this kind of sustained efforts, we’ll have a smash hit product some day in the future.

In order to develop as many titles as possible with a limited amount of the funds, we reduce the development cost for every development task. In Taiwan, a talent can be hired for almost a half the salary as in Singapore. In Indonesia, we can hire a designer with very high skills for only $500 a month. By mixing up skills from our employees at different locations, we can develop more high-quality game titles than our competitors. With the cost of developing a game at a typical Japanese game development company, we can develop three titles.

Q. At the end of last year, Konami also set up in Singapore. Is the regional market attracting many more gaming companies?

David: When they set up an office in Singapore, their president came to my office, and I enjoyed chatting with him. Gumi is still a very small and young company, but many executives from companies new to Singapore contact me for advice. The Singaporean government is offering great support for innovative businesses. For example, the PIC (Productivity and Innovation Credit) offers 400% tax deductions and 60% cash payout for the deployment of working facilities. It’s easier to ask someone for translation to Mandarin or English here. Also our country is well known for having the world’s lowest income tax system, which is 17% at most. We also got financial support from the government for covering the cost of setting up our local office. For Japanese startups aspiring to expand in the Asia region, I believe Singapore is the smart choice.

However, Japanese companies should not expect results in the short-term. No results can be made in the first three to six months. It may require at least three to five years to achieve something. Furthermore, they shouldn’t deploy a Japanese management style to local employees. This might cause negative results no matter where the region.

Q. You achieved a lot in your past business life, at Linksys and EA, and I expect you’re doing ok financially. Why did you choose to join startup where the future is less certain?

David:
I did a joint venture with Linksys CEO in 1998 after the Thailand economic crisis and built Linksys business in Asia. Linksys was sold to Cisco for $500 million in 2003, hence I was successful as an entrepreneur from early days. (This paragraph contained a mistake of fact. It’s been corrected.)

But when I met with Mr. Kunimitsu (Gumi Group’s CEO) and listened to his dreams and ideas, and where he’s heading, I wanted to get involved and work with him. This is not about making money. Unlike my previous business experiences, Gumi is a startup requiring us to create everything from scratch. I thought this must be very challenging and interesting.

Q. What projects are you currently working on?

David: In the smartphone game industry, there will be a shift to native apps from web-based apps this year. For us, developing native apps based on our Japan-made apps is also one of our missions at the Singapore office. For upcoming gaming titles for smartphones, we’ll be developing all of them as native apps. Puzzle Trooper is a notable one, released on April 16th (available on Google Play, trailer below). We will also introduce another slot app by the end of this year which was mainly designed at our Indonesian office. So please stay tuned for that and more upcoming products.

As I talked with David Ng, I felt that he was not just the president of a Japanese subsidiary, but also that he has the perspective of an investor rather than that of an entrepreneur. And he’s ambitious enough to share a dream with the startup’s founder, and expects to make Gumi a top global company.

Linksys was subsequently acquired by Cisco Systems and Belkin. ↩

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Namco Bandai hopes to increase global presence with new subsidiaries in Vancouver and Singapore

Rick Martin 2013.04.11

Japanese game developer and publisher Namco Bandai (TYO:7832) has announced that it will be establishing subsidiaries in Vancouver and Singapore, with the intention of improving its presence in global markets [1]. The Vancouver office, to be called ‘Namco Bandai Studios Vancouver,’ will develop online social games for North American and European markets. It is set to begin operations in June, and will be located within the Center for Digital Media, a post graduate school supported by local universities. The British Columbia provincial government said it its announcement that it provided ‘significant assistance’ to Namco Bandai, including tax credits. Vancouver is quickly becoming an international hub in the gaming space with over 85 studios there so far. As for Singapore, the new Namco Bandai Studios Singapore will also start operations in June, and it will be located at Mediapolis at One North district. Namco Bandai says that this office will be instrumental as the company has many development partners in the region, many of which have also set up shop in Singapore. For both subsidiaries, the company plans to bring in locally hired staff, with help and support from its Tokyo headquarters. Namco Bandai’s announcement is here (PDF). I’m aware that…

Japanese game developer and publisher Namco Bandai (TYO:7832) has announced that it will be establishing subsidiaries in Vancouver and Singapore, with the intention of improving its presence in global markets [1].

The Vancouver office, to be called ‘Namco Bandai Studios Vancouver,’ will develop online social games for North American and European markets. It is set to begin operations in June, and will be located within the Center for Digital Media, a post graduate school supported by local universities.

The British Columbia provincial government said it its announcement that it provided ‘significant assistance’ to Namco Bandai, including tax credits. Vancouver is quickly becoming an international hub in the gaming space with over 85 studios there so far.

As for Singapore, the new Namco Bandai Studios Singapore will also start operations in June, and it will be located at Mediapolis at One North district. Namco Bandai says that this office will be instrumental as the company has many development partners in the region, many of which have also set up shop in Singapore.

For both subsidiaries, the company plans to bring in locally hired staff, with help and support from its Tokyo headquarters.

Namco Bandai’s announcement is here (PDF). I’m aware that the company writes its name in all caps, but in the interests of readability and common sense, I’ll refrain from doing that in this article. ↩

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