We’ve had another fun week here at SD, doing our best to bring you interesting tech stories going down in Japan. But in case you missed any of it, here’s a wrap up below. Readers on mobile might want to check them out over on Readlists or in ePub format.
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Photo via toto.co.jp It can sometimes be difficult to find absolute silence in a library if a noisy student or two decide to be chatty. But that’s not really needed at Japan’s Seikei University thanks to the building’s ingeniously designed isolation spheres (pictured above). Referred to as ‘planets’ these modernly designed elevated rooms can be used for meetings or for group work. Such a futuristic environment certainly looks like an inspiring place for young minds to develop! But why bother to go to such lengths to create these isolation rooms? The sole purpose was to create a new type of library where speaking was not prohibited. In a traditional library, students come in to find books that they’re looking for, and then they proceed to read or work quietly. Seikei University wanted to reinvent their library into a space where students have discussions and exchange opinions about their books. The library was co-designed by Shigeru Ban, a graduate of the university and design/construction company Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei. Ban is perhaps best known for his gorgeously designed for Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, pictured below: The library was built back in 2006 to mark the 100th anniversary of Seikei University. Although the…
It can sometimes be difficult to find absolute silence in a library if a noisy student or two decide to be chatty. But that’s not really needed at Japan’s Seikei University thanks to the building’s ingeniously designed isolation spheres (pictured above). Referred to as ‘planets’ these modernly designed elevated rooms can be used for meetings or for group work. Such a futuristic environment certainly looks like an inspiring place for young minds to develop!
But why bother to go to such lengths to create these isolation rooms? The sole purpose was to create a new type of library where speaking was not prohibited. In a traditional library, students come in to find books that they’re looking for, and then they proceed to read or work quietly. Seikei University wanted to reinvent their library into a space where students have discussions and exchange opinions about their books.
The library was co-designed by Shigeru Ban, a graduate of the university and design/construction company Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei. Ban is perhaps best known for his gorgeously designed for Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, pictured below:
The library was built back in 2006 to mark the 100th anniversary of Seikei University. Although the modern building has been around for more than six years, it recently received a lot of attention when someone featured it on Naver Matome, a heavily used Japanese curation site [1].
People who reside in vicinity of the university are allowed to use the library, but I’m not sure if it is open visitors who live beyond those areas. Perhaps if some sci-fi movie director decides to shoot a film there, then maybe you can enjoy a more thorough view of this modern library in Tokyo!
Japanese mobile carrier NTT Docomo (NYSE:DCM) has announced a new ‘Twitter local yellow pages’ mobile site in cooperation with Twitter Japan and local radio stations. The new mobile site, accessible at tw-yp.jp, will include recommended Twitter accounts, sorted into the categories of food, shopping, sight seeing spots, local reports, celebrities, and sports teams. Drilling down into each category, the listed recommended accounts can be further browsed according to Japan’s prefectures and cities. The intent here is very much in the same spirit of Twitter’s suggested users function. It aims to provide assistance to first time and beginner Twitter users who might not immediately know where they can find relevant information after signing up. In theory, this will help Japanese Twitter users stay better connected with important Twitter broadcasters in their local areas, a service which should prove valuable in the event of local emergencies when critical information might be disseminated through those channels. While the service is intended to be a mobile site, it is also accessible by PC. Docomo and Twitter Japan have working together as partners since May of 2011.
Japanese mobile carrier NTT Docomo (NYSE:DCM) has announced a new ‘Twitter local yellow pages’ mobile site in cooperation with Twitter Japan and local radio stations.
The new mobile site, accessible at tw-yp.jp, will include recommended Twitter accounts, sorted into the categories of food, shopping, sight seeing spots, local reports, celebrities, and sports teams. Drilling down into each category, the listed recommended accounts can be further browsed according to Japan’s prefectures and cities.
The intent here is very much in the same spirit of Twitter’s suggested users function. It aims to provide assistance to first time and beginner Twitter users who might not immediately know where they can find relevant information after signing up.
In theory, this will help Japanese Twitter users stay better connected with important Twitter broadcasters in their local areas, a service which should prove valuable in the event of local emergencies when critical information might be disseminated through those channels. While the service is intended to be a mobile site, it is also accessible by PC.
Docomo and Twitter Japan have working together as partners since May of 2011.
Read our Japanese report on this event Our partner tech site beSuccess will hold the second edition of its beLAUNCH event in Seoul this May, one of the largest tech startup conferences in the Asia region. In association with Tokyo-based Skyland Ventures and Seoul-based startup VCNC, the media company had a local satellite event in Tokyo on Wednesday, where one finalist was chosen from six participating Japanese startups to pitch at the main event in Korea. Let’s rundown through the lineup and take a closer look to who’s going to Gangnam, Seoul this May. The participating judges for the pitching session were (in alphabetical order): Hyungseok Dino Ha, CEO, Memebox (Seoul) James Jung, CEO, beSuccess (Seoul) Jimmy Jihoon Rim, CEO, Kcube Ventures (Seoul) Kiyo Kobayashi, CEO, Nobot Inc., (Tokyo) Ryuichi Nishida, editor-in-chief, TechCrunch Japan (Tokyo) Tetsuro Oshita, managing director, Cyber Agent Ventures (Tokyo) Yasuhiko Yurimoto, president and CEO, Global Brain (Tokyo) Yoshiro Taneda, senior director of digital media, Fuji TV (Tokyo) Designclue (the 3rd prize winner) ¶ Prize: Wins a complimentary booth to exhibiting at the Seoul event When you order logo design in Japan, it will usually not be very cheap due to high labor costs in the country. It can also be very hard for most Japanese people to order design work from…
Our partner tech site beSuccess will hold the second edition of its beLAUNCH event in Seoul this May, one of the largest tech startup conferences in the Asia region. In association with Tokyo-based Skyland Ventures and Seoul-based startup VCNC, the media company had a local satellite event in Tokyo on Wednesday, where one finalist was chosen from six participating Japanese startups to pitch at the main event in Korea.
Let’s rundown through the lineup and take a closer look to who’s going to Gangnam, Seoul this May. The participating judges for the pitching session were (in alphabetical order):
Wins a complimentary booth to exhibiting at the Seoul event
When you order logo design in Japan, it will usually not be very cheap due to high labor costs in the country. It can also be very hard for most Japanese people to order design work from overseas because of the language barrier.
Designclue is a logo-focused crowdsourcing site which allows users to easily place orders from independent foreign designers. Readers may recall that we we featured them on this site last week. The website has multilingual interfaces to easily facilitate your orders. Users can receive many design proposals at affordable rates from registered designers in emerging markets.
Not long ago, the startup announced that it had fundraised 14.7 million yen (about $150,000) from two Japanese seed investors, Incubate Fund and East Ventures.
Comobaco allows you and your friends to create a pool of shared items both on the web and in real life. With this service, you can easily share things you own (such as books, DVDs, and game titles) with your office colleagues, your roommates, or any similar sort of group.
To use the service, someone at your location has to become the manager of a box, which will then be used to hold the exchanged items. If you put in things you don’t want to use any more, others will have a chance to take them without having to buy. The service’s founder hopes to change the concept of buying things for yourself only into buying things for the sake of the many people around you as well.
Job share is a community-based talent seeking site that helps companies find new employees who might enjoy working together. When you post a job opportunity on the service, your posting will be shared via social media through colleagues at your company. If someone sees it and would like to work at your company, you can then hire them if they’re a good fit. The startup aims to help companies create a workplace with a positive atmosphere by enlisting the help of existing employees in finding their new colleagues.
From the left: Conyac’s CEO Naoki Yamada (the 1st prize winner), Global Brain’s Yasuhiko Yurimoto (award presenter), and beSuccess’ James Jung (award presenter)
Prizes:
A complimentary booth for exhibiting at the Seoul event
Round-trip air tickets for two, Tokyo/Seoul
A chance to pitch at the main competition
Conyac is a crowdsourced translation service that gives users an interesting way to communicate with someone in a foreign language for affordable rates. When we spoke to them in a recent interview, they introduced the launch of a high-end service for business use, and told us about their first overseas expansion to San Francisco.
A complimentary booth for exhibiting at the Seoul event
Round-trip air tickets for two, Tokyo/Seoul
Finding the right book to buy at bookstore can often take a long time. One recent survey says that 39% of all bookstore purchases take more than an hour. Similarly when you buy a book on Amazon.com, you’ll rely on book reviews posted by other users — but some of them are not reliable or just not good enough to help you decide.
Booklap is a service that wants to help you find a book you will love to read. It has two ways of doing this. The first is based on your interests which are pulled from ‘social graphs’ such as your Facebook profile. The other way by presenting quotes from books that have impressed other users.
The startup is planning to introduce a smartphone app which will allow a user to easily post quotes by just shooting a picture. What differentiates this from Amazon.com is that book reviews are being posted with the real names of those who have written the review.
Their revenue model is expected to come from affiliate fees from online bookstores like Amazon.com, driving users to buy books on their site. Booklap raised 3 million yen (about $32,000) from Incubate Fund last July.
UI Scope allows software and hardware developers to crowdsource product testing tasks. A registered tester (called a ‘panel’ in the service) receives a camera from the startup so that it can record the testing process. When a developer (called ‘a client’) chooses someone from all registered testers and asks them to test the product, that person will take about 20 minutes to test it and report back with a video of the testing process. The developer pays 3,000 yen (about $32) for this testing, and the tester receives 500 yen. The testing results are reported online in the form of video, screenshots, and behavioral reports in text.
UI Scope was launched last August with the aim of creating a huge database of product testing by gathering such test results and case studies. It has raised 5 million yen (about $53,800) from Movida Japan, and has acquired 120 developers and 2500 testers during the last six months.
Three Korean startups also attended the meet-up, pitching their remarkable services to the Japanese crowd. Let’s have a look at what’s hot in this neighboring tech community.
BeNative aims to help students have a more organic language learning experience by providing them with content that imitates real-life situations with native speakers. By presenting video clips of a specific occasion in English or other languages, the service allows users to learn more natural ways to speak new languages. According to Alan Moonsoon Kim, the CEO of parent company Smatoos, they are currently providing English version and Chinese versions of the language learning site, as well as running news sites in English, Korean and Japanese. For more information, check out this feature over on Technode for more details.
Profeel.me is your digital business card, incorporating your social network accounts. It can be exchanged through text, messaging services, and social networks. Following the model of a real/physical business card, Korean-startup Venster has created an online business card that can be used as a virtual ID or calling card. The startup’s CEO HoSuk Jeong presented. beSuccess has further information if you’d like to learn more.
Profeel.me CEO HoSuk Jeong pitches to a Japanese crowd
Memebox is the Korean version of Birchbox, a subscription-based e-commerce service that periodically delivers a box of cosmetics to users. The startup’s CEO Hyungseok Dino Ha explains they have partnered with 185 brands worldwide, and have delivered 52,900 boxes to their customers since launching in February of 2012. Subscribers can sign up for the service using three different subscription options: one, two, or six months. So far there are over 5,000 total subscribers.
There are 31 people on the team with an expected revenue of $1.3 million in Q2 of 2013. The startup is from the first batch of graduates coming out of Seoul-based SparkLab’s incubation program.
The beLAUNCH 2013 main event is scheduled to take place at COEX, an exhibition center in Korea’s capital on May 1st and 2nd. If you’d like to join. please feel free to sign up.
From the left: Kcube Venture’s Jimmy Rim and VCNC’s Keisuke Kajitani with a collection of autographs.
TV Tokyo is planning a new reality TV show where contestants will have to create a home life with items they purchase only from Amazon Japan. The show, to be titled Kaiteki! Amazon Seikatsu!, will be aired on March 4th at 1AM in the morning. Contestants stay in a one-room apartment, buying goods from Amazon Japan such as food, goods to help them pass the time, or even furniture. The goal will be to create a home that people would want to visit. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is already doing respectably well in the Japanese market, as its sales for 2012 grew 19% over the previous year to 7.8 billion yen (or about $84 million). That’s good enough to make the country Amazon’s second largest foreign market, just behind Germany. The company is also set to release its Kindle Fire HD 8.9 in Japan on March 12, priced at 24,800 yen for the 16GB model ($268), and 29,800 yen ($322) for the 32 GB model. TV Tokyo via Asiajin, Marketzine.jp
TV Tokyo is planning a new reality TV show where contestants will have to create a home life with items they purchase only from Amazon Japan.
The show, to be titled Kaiteki! Amazon Seikatsu!, will be aired on March 4th at 1AM in the morning. Contestants stay in a one-room apartment, buying goods from Amazon Japan such as food, goods to help them pass the time, or even furniture. The goal will be to create a home that people would want to visit.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is already doing respectably well in the Japanese market, as its sales for 2012 grew 19% over the previous year to 7.8 billion yen (or about $84 million). That’s good enough to make the country Amazon’s second largest foreign market, just behind Germany.
The company is also set to release its Kindle Fire HD 8.9 in Japan on March 12, priced at 24,800 yen for the 16GB model ($268), and 29,800 yen ($322) for the 32 GB model.
Japan has more than its fair share of strange mobile apps and games, and we hope to show you a few of them every now and then on this site – just because they’re fun. One such application is called Everyday ear-picking, which has just reached the 1 million downloads milestone. The game has you cleaning some stranger’s ear, as he provides feedback (in Japanese) as to how your doing. If you’re lucky, you might fish out some really big blobs of ear muck, which you can then add to your collection book. In the latest update to the game, the developers have added even bigger pieces of ear-muck for you to fish out [1]. Check out the video below for a closer look at how it works. While it’s pretty amazing that an ear-picking/cleaning mobile game even exists at all, it’s perhaps even more amazing that a million people have downloaded it. Initially released back last fall, the iOS version has been a steady top 50 ‘entertainment’ app for about three months now, while the Android version peaked last November when it was a top 5 game on Google Play in Japan for about three weeks. But overall, it’s a…
Japan has more than its fair share of strange mobile apps and games, and we hope to show you a few of them every now and then on this site – just because they’re fun. One such application is called Everyday ear-picking, which has just reached the 1 million downloads milestone.
The game has you cleaning some stranger’s ear, as he provides feedback (in Japanese) as to how your doing. If you’re lucky, you might fish out some really big blobs of ear muck, which you can then add to your collection book. In the latest update to the game, the developers have added even bigger pieces of ear-muck for you to fish out [1]. Check out the video below for a closer look at how it works.
While it’s pretty amazing that an ear-picking/cleaning mobile game even exists at all, it’s perhaps even more amazing that a million people have downloaded it. Initially released back last fall, the iOS version has been a steady top 50 ‘entertainment’ app for about three months now, while the Android version peaked last November when it was a top 5 game on Google Play in Japan for about three weeks.
But overall, it’s a good example of how a fun, unique idea with a dash of humor can hit a sweet spot with casual gamers in Japan, even with ridiculously simple artwork and gameplay. (via Gamer.ne.jp)
Did I just write that sentence? I think it’s time to call it a day! ↩
Rick Martin
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Masaru Ikeda
Finding the right book to buy at bookstore can often take a long time. One recent survey says that 39% of all bookstore purchases take more than an hour. Similarly when you buy a book on Amazon.com, you’ll rely on book reviews posted by other users — but some of them are not reliable or just not good enough to help you decide.
