Slush Asia 
Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese.
took place on May 13th and 14th at the Makuhari Messe exhibition halls in Chiba. Among 60 nominees fiercely competing during the 2-day event, Taiwan-based SkyREC — which is developing an analytics platform for real stores — won this year’s startup pitch competition. Taiwanese startups won for two consecutive years following Slush Asia 2015 last year.
Top award winner: SkyREC (Taiwan)
Supplemental awards: Premium support worth 1 million yen from Google, 55,000 miles point from Japan Airlines, legal services worth $15,000 from the law firm Orrick and 1 million yen in cash from Autodesk
SkyREC is a Google Analytics for real stores, allows users to understand how many times and also how long wherein the store customers have been gathing at the most. It will demonstrate a great capability in finding customer flow lines, hot-selling items as well as unpopular items with 12 different core analytics solutions.
At a certain store in Taiwan, it could improve in-store customer traffic 10% and monthly revenue 18% after three months since implementing the SkyREC solution. Since its launch in December of 2015, the solution has been adopted by 400 stores, planning to be deployed into 64,000 stores under 30 brands. This startup was born out of the 11th batch of Taiwan’s AppWorks accelerator.
Recruit Strategic Partners award winner: Giroptic (France)
Supplemental awards: 500,000 yen in cash and one-year free rent until September 2016 of TECH LAB PAAK co-working space in Shibuya, Tokyo
Giroptic has developed a camera device which enables capture of 360-degree motion pictures with three micro cameras and three microphones but without any software. In addition to Nokia’s Ozo exhibited in the Slush Asia venue at this time, images captured by three cameras are stitched into one 360-degree video stream in real time with an onboard chip. It can be livestreamed via Wi-Fi too.
Typical use cases include projecting images using a virtual reality-enabled head-mounted display (HMD) or browsing on desktop but users can swipe it directly or horizontally towards where they want to look at. It can be also attached to a light bulb socket and work as a 360-degree CCTV camera which enables image transmissions via Wi-Fi in real time. The team has received about 4,000 pre-orders at a Kickstarter campaign in France. Giroptic has 48 employees in France and San Francisco, and is currently funded at $6.1 million.
PR Times award winner: Meleap (Japan)
Supplemental awards: One-year complimentary use of press release distribution from PR Times
Meleap has developed a sports game environment called Hado, leveraging a combination of several technologies such as spatial perception, smartphone-based HMD and motion sensors. It virtually reproduces decorated rooms and townscapes for up to 10 users upon enjoying games or exercises. They will start with a B2B (business-to-business) model serving leisure and recreational service providers.
See also:
The following two finalists could receive no award but were attracting much attention from an audience and judges:
Vectr (Taiwan)
Vectr is a one-stop graphic design platform that has been integrated with markup editor, prototyping tool and other several functions. With a professional account paying $25 monthly fee, users can use create documents making the most of templates, icons, fonts, stock photos, logs and illustration patterns provided on the platform. It also has editors and libraries for animated content, audios and videos as well.
Users can also sell their templates, icons, fonts, stock photos, logos and illustration patterns to other users through a marketplace. The company will take 30% of the price as a commission when the purchase is made.
MoBagel (Taiwan)
By collecting usage of IoT (Internet of Things) or “connected” home appliances, MoBagel provides consumer electronics manufacturers with business intelligence through a dashboard screen. It will help manufacturers understand usage or customer behaviors of their products. With this solution, manufacturers can grab statistics about how frequently their products are being used or demographics of their user base. Through the analysis, manufacturers can gain user insights that will definitely be useful for future product developments such as considering a suitable lifetime of batteries installed in their products.
Having partnered with Softbank, Philips, Panasonic and other consumer electronics companies, the company also secured $1 million in a seed round from 500 Startups, CyberAgent Ventures, SingTel’s Innov8 incubation initiative and Club Clover.
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
Shintaro Eguchi
