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Japanese startup Interstellar Technologies makes successful space rocket launch

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Japanese space startup Intersteller Technologies announced earlier today that it has successfully launched a small rocket in Hokkaido this morning. The company is well known for having been co-founded and invested by Japanese renowned investor/entrepreneur Takafumi Horie a.k.a. Horiemon. Named Momo after a Japanese alias for 100, the rocket literally succeeded to rise to an altitude of more than 100 kilometers (the startup’s twitter says it was 113.4 kilometers). It is 10 meter long and 1 ton with an diameter of 50 centimeters, has been developed by the startup from scratch. Intersteller has just become the first private company in Japan to launch a rocket into the space. The launch was initially planned in April but was postponed due to a minor leak of liquid oxygen fuel and strong winds. This follows their second launch last year which ended in a fiery crash just after the liftoff. The startup is planning to launch another rocket in 2023, hoping to carry small satellites for lower costs.

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Momo F3
Image credit: Interstellar

Japanese space startup Intersteller Technologies announced earlier today that it has successfully launched a small rocket in Hokkaido this morning. The company is well known for having been co-founded and invested by Japanese renowned investor/entrepreneur Takafumi Horie a.k.a. Horiemon.

Named Momo after a Japanese alias for 100, the rocket literally succeeded to rise to an altitude of more than 100 kilometers (the startup’s twitter says it was 113.4 kilometers). It is 10 meter long and 1 ton with an diameter of 50 centimeters, has been developed by the startup from scratch. Intersteller has just become the first private company in Japan to launch a rocket into the space.

The launch was initially planned in April but was postponed due to a minor leak of liquid oxygen fuel and strong winds. This follows their second launch last year which ended in a fiery crash just after the liftoff. The startup is planning to launch another rocket in 2023, hoping to carry small satellites for lower costs.

Takafumi Horie’s restaurant app, Teriyaki, receives major investment

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Teriyaki is a mobile app that curates restaurants selected by foodies. It was launched last November here in Japan by former Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie. As of March 4th, it had surpassed 60,000 downloads with more than 1,100 restaurants listed. Tokyo-based online learning platform developer Hitomedia announced today it has invested an undisclosed sum in the foodie app. For the company, this is its third investment in the internet industry following US-based social commerce startup Fancy (last October) and Japanese online English learning service provider Langrich (last December). Hitomedia’s CEO Masayasu Morita explained the rationale behind the investment: When one of our subsidiaries set up a Facebook page to promoting their publication on Japanese food, it acquired more than a million likes from around the world. So we believe an app like Teriyaki has a great potential to be accepted by a global audience. via Venture Now

teriyaki_featurdimage

Teriyaki is a mobile app that curates restaurants selected by foodies. It was launched last November here in Japan by former Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie. As of March 4th, it had surpassed 60,000 downloads with more than 1,100 restaurants listed.

Tokyo-based online learning platform developer Hitomedia announced today it has invested an undisclosed sum in the foodie app. For the company, this is its third investment in the internet industry following US-based social commerce startup Fancy (last October) and Japanese online English learning service provider Langrich (last December).

Hitomedia’s CEO Masayasu Morita explained the rationale behind the investment:

When one of our subsidiaries set up a Facebook page to promoting their publication on Japanese food, it acquired more than a million likes from around the world. So we believe an app like Teriyaki has a great potential to be accepted by a global audience.

via Venture Now

Former Livedoor CEO launches restaurant recommendation app

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See the original story in Japanese. The Japanese economy appears to be getting better recently. In the startup scene in particular, we’ve seen more than a few acquisitions and fundings. This improved economic situation may have precipitated an interesting new mobile app too. Japanese entrepreneur Takafumi Horie (a.k.a. Horiemon) recently unveiled Teriyaki, an app that provides users with recommendations of the best restaurants in Japan. The app is available for free on both iOS and Android, but users have to pay a monthly subscription of 400 yen (about $4) via an in-app purchase. The app provides recommendations of restaurants and dishes based on curation by celebrity foodies called “Teriyakists”. They include high-profile restaurant guide editors, food-focused TV producers, and even Horiemon himself. At the recent launch party at a restaurant in Shibuya, Horie explained how his team plans to evolve our dining experiences: Even while I was in jail, I was thinking to develop this kind of app. There is still little information available in the app at the moment, but its volume will eventually be ten times larger than now. We’ll be launching an English and Chinese version in the upcoming few months using crowdsourced translation services, and also…

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From the left: Takafumi Horie and Makie Sonoyama (cooking specialist)

See the original story in Japanese.

The Japanese economy appears to be getting better recently. In the startup scene in particular, we’ve seen more than a few acquisitions and fundings. This improved economic situation may have precipitated an interesting new mobile app too. Japanese entrepreneur Takafumi Horie (a.k.a. Horiemon) recently unveiled Teriyaki, an app that provides users with recommendations of the best restaurants in Japan.

The app is available for free on both iOS and Android, but users have to pay a monthly subscription of 400 yen (about $4) via an in-app purchase.

teriyaki_screenshot

The app provides recommendations of restaurants and dishes based on curation by celebrity foodies called “Teriyakists”. They include high-profile restaurant guide editors, food-focused TV producers, and even Horiemon himself.

At the recent launch party at a restaurant in Shibuya, Horie explained how his team plans to evolve our dining experiences:

Even while I was in jail, I was thinking to develop this kind of app. There is still little information available in the app at the moment, but its volume will eventually be ten times larger than now. We’ll be launching an English and Chinese version in the upcoming few months using crowdsourced translation services, and also a version featuring restaurants in east coast US cities. With hopes of global expansion potential, we decided to name the app ‘Teriyaki’ — something familiar to non-Japanese people too.

By the end of this month, the app will cover 700 restaurants profiles across the country. Through a partnership with Pocket Concierge, it will give you opportunities to dine at restaurants introduced on the app, where it is likely difficult to book a reservation.

By next spring, the app is expected to add e-commerce functions, with the ability to order local specialties from any part of the country online, in an effort to monetize the app.

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Teriyakists – foodies curating restaurants for the app

See how paid newsletters are thriving in Japan

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Newsletters are amazingly popular here in Japan. People tend to be less hesitant to pay for content when it’s delivered directly to their inbox. Not just any content though, but typically something that is exclusively published, or written by professionals from a certain field or even celebrities. There are many services around the world that provide backend operations for sending out newsletters, but in Japan there are newsletter content platforms that work more like an information portal. The biggest player in this sector is MaguMagu. The company was founded way back in 1997, and it currently has over 10 million subscribers 1. Many of the newsletters are provided for free, from individuals to small businesses. If you take a look at the newsletters that people pay for, most are business related. One of the most successful business personalities on MaguMagu is Takafumi Horie, the famous founder of Livedoor. Back in November of 2010, the internet tycoon had almost 10,000 subscribers to a weekly newsletter that changed 840 yen monthly. The newsletter was called What I can’t write on my blog. It’s likely that the number of subscribers have jumped even higher after his release from the prison for alleged securities…

ChokuMaga-Kadokawa
ChokuMaga Kadokawa

Newsletters are amazingly popular here in Japan. People tend to be less hesitant to pay for content when it’s delivered directly to their inbox. Not just any content though, but typically something that is exclusively published, or written by professionals from a certain field or even celebrities. There are many services around the world that provide backend operations for sending out newsletters, but in Japan there are newsletter content platforms that work more like an information portal.

The biggest player in this sector is MaguMagu. The company was founded way back in 1997, and it currently has over 10 million subscribers 1. Many of the newsletters are provided for free, from individuals to small businesses. If you take a look at the newsletters that people pay for, most are business related.

One of the most successful business personalities on MaguMagu is Takafumi Horie, the famous founder of Livedoor. Back in November of 2010, the internet tycoon had almost 10,000 subscribers to a weekly newsletter that changed 840 yen monthly. The newsletter was called What I can’t write on my blog. It’s likely that the number of subscribers have jumped even higher after his release from the prison for alleged securities fraud.

A new comer to the premium newsltter platform is the Japanese publisher Kadokawa. Its platform is called Choku Maga (‘Choku’ means ‘directly’ in Japanese). The company is leveraging its relationships with authors and its professional editorial skills to bring their content into forms other than printed books.

Many famous personalities and professionals will join, such as the general director of Gundam, or popular illustrators or comedians. The content can be enjoyed as newsletters, on the web, or even in ePub format.


  1. This is according to the company’s website.

Big in Japan: 10 tech stories most popular with our Japanese readers

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What’s big in the world of Japan technology these days? Well, if our Japanese language site is any indication, the following articles represent what our Japanese readers are most interested in over the last 30 days. Read on to find out more! And if you know of a tech story or a startup that’s big in Japan, be sure to let us know about it. 1. Japan loves Ginger Ginger is an personalized proofreader that checks your grammar and spelling, and it’s official launch in Japan was on April 24th. The service comes in the form of a Windows application or a browser extension, and our post about its launch had over 2,000 tweets and 5,000 likes, making it one of our most read articles ever. Read more in Japanese 2. Hero entrepreneurs, Ieiri and Horie Kazuma Ieiri is a serial entrepreneur known for being the youngest founder to go public on the JASDAQ securities exchange. Takafumi Horie is the former president of Livedoor, now a portal website operated by Line Corp. Horie is now on parole after spending 21 months behind bars having been charged with securities fraud (although he still claims innocence). The two are sort of entrepreneurial…

What’s big in the world of Japan technology these days? Well, if our Japanese language site is any indication, the following articles represent what our Japanese readers are most interested in over the last 30 days. Read on to find out more!

And if you know of a tech story or a startup that’s big in Japan, be sure to let us know about it.

1. Japan loves Ginger

Ginger is an personalized proofreader that checks your grammar and spelling, and it’s official launch in Japan was on April 24th. The service comes in the form of a Windows application or a browser extension, and our post about its launch had over 2,000 tweets and 5,000 likes, making it one of our most read articles ever.

Read more in Japanese

gingerjp

2. Hero entrepreneurs, Ieiri and Horie

Kazuma Ieiri is a serial entrepreneur known for being the youngest founder to go public on the JASDAQ securities exchange. Takafumi Horie is the former president of Livedoor, now a portal website operated by Line Corp. Horie is now on parole after spending 21 months behind bars having been charged with securities fraud (although he still claims innocence). The two are sort of entrepreneurial heroes for the younger generation, and they gave a talk at Ieiri’s book release party where they talked about developing new hardware together.

Read more in Japanese

3. Startups should work from home

This post comes via Charlie Custer who responded to Marissa Mayer’s decision that working from home was not the right path for employees at Yahoo. He asserts that startups should allow people to work from home remotely, noting that hiring pro-active people and quantifying work by actual results rather than just hours will yield many benefits.

Read more in Japanese or see the original post in English.

4. Moneytree

Moneytree is a newly released app that allows users to manage all their financial assets. You just need to register your bank account and it will automatically show balance and spendings for your different credit cards all in a single page. The startup works out of Shibuya’s co-working space, Co-ba, and its founder is Paul Chapman from Australia.

Read more in Japanese, or check out our post on Moneytree in English

moneytreee

5. The travel industry is shifting from search to social

As we see change in consumer behavior, the travel industry is shifting accordingly. What is becoming increasingly important is not ‘where’ but ‘who’ – i.e. who among your friends have traveled to a given destination. As a result, the marketing budget for many travel companies is moving from Google to Facebook. The article cites TravelAdvisor as a good example of a company that does social well.

Read more in Japanese

6. If an engineer’s job is to make 0 into 1, a designer’s job is to make 1 into 100

katayama

Ikumi Katayama is a user interface designer at Cookpad, a major recipe website in Japan. In this interview she talks about the user interface designing process within the company and how it is all about iterating over and over by testing hypotheses and reading numbers.

Read more in Japanese

7. Using social game know-how in education

This post came out of the recent B Dash Camp 2013 event in Fukuoka. Surprisingly, many up-and-coming education startups came from the social games sector, such as Drecom and Quipper. Social gaming companies says that the features and techniques in social games (like operating events or connecting with friends) can be applied to education services as well.

Read more in Japanese or check out the article translated into English.

8. Base apps

E-commerce is getting a lot of hype in Japan recently, and Base is one of the more popular services out there, as it allows users to create their own online shop in a matter of minutes. The startups just launched Base Apps, which is a collection of plug-ins that can be added to shops created with Base. So far the app store includes an original domain, SEO, as well as shipping boxes for your merchandise – all for free. The startup plans to release a few plugins per week, attempting to follow Shopify’s monetization model.

Read more in Japanese or check out the translation in English.

9. Line China

Japanese chat application Line added another accomplishment to its growing list on April 8th, briefly nabbing the top spot in the Chinese App Store in the social network category. Line was released in Chinese back in December, needing less than four months to reach this milestone. At the time of the article, it ranked 7th among all free apps.

Read more in Japanese or see the original post on our English site.

10. Trends in Japan’s online ad space

Another report from the B Dash event in Fukuoka summarized a panel discussing existing problems in the domestic advertising business. Key players from the Japanese online advertising industry talked about the impact of social media on the industry, problems in leveraging personal information in ads, as well as the possibilities of rich media advertisements.

Read more in Japanese, or check out a summarized English report.

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Septeni Holdings CEO Koki Sato speaking on the panel