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! ↩
Many of our readers are likely familiar with Shopkick, a popular smartphone app that rewards customers as they enter a store. Well, Japan has very similar service called Smapo, which provides a smooth combination of in-store hardware and a free smartphone app for both iPhone and Android. I recently had spoke with Yo Shibata, the CEO of Spotlight Inc. (the company behind Smapo) to find out more about this service. With Smapo, all that a user has to do is to download the free app, and turn it on when walking into a participating merchant — exactly like Shopkick. Every time the app is turned on, users receive about 30 yen (about 30 cents) in points which can later be exchanged for gift certificates to be used at participating stores. What differentiates Smapo from its US counterpart is that it uses a sort of inaudible audio signal to detect users walking in, via the required in-store hardware which is about the size of a matchbox. There are so many small shops in Tokyo, and many brands decide to set up within crowded departments where in many cases, there is no proper store entrance. Smapo’s technology is valid as long as…
Many of our readers are likely familiar with Shopkick, a popular smartphone app that rewards customers as they enter a store. Well, Japan has very similar service called Smapo, which provides a smooth combination of in-store hardware and a free smartphone app for both iPhone and Android.
I recently had spoke with Yo Shibata, the CEO of Spotlight Inc. (the company behind Smapo) to find out more about this service.
With Smapo, all that a user has to do is to download the free app, and turn it on when walking into a participating merchant — exactly like Shopkick. Every time the app is turned on, users receive about 30 yen (about 30 cents) in points which can later be exchanged for gift certificates to be used at participating stores.
What differentiates Smapo from its US counterpart is that it uses a sort of inaudible audio signal to detect users walking in, via the required in-store hardware which is about the size of a matchbox. There are so many small shops in Tokyo, and many brands decide to set up within crowded departments where in many cases, there is no proper store entrance. Smapo’s technology is valid as long as the user is in the store space (the inaudible audio signal does not go beyond the store’s walls) so wherever they are, the system works.
Finding new faces
Many notable merchants have already joined Smapo including mega electronics franchise Bic Camera, department stores Daimaru and Marui, as well as popular fashion retailer United Arrows. All of these merchants wanted a new way to attract consumers. Because many people do their product research in advance on computer and on smartphones these days, there is less of a need to actually visit the stores than before. Newspapers are one common place where merchants advertise, but the number of newspaper subscibers have dropped to half of what they used to be 15 years ago.
The user demographic for Smapo is half male and half female. And in an effort to satisfy the younger female generation, Smapo recently launched 58 more merchants targeting young women, including The Body Shop, and Amo’s Style (a lingerie brand). Early adopter male users are still fans of the app too. At Bic Camera, which can be a heaven for tech savvy geeks, Smapo can bring over 10,000 people to a store monthly.
But how effective is Smapo in actually attracting new consumers? Shibata-san cited Marui as an example. Their problem was that people perceived their brand as one specifically for young people, and they wanted to make an effort to bring in customers who shopped there in their youth, but may be a little older now. By bringing users to a specific part of the store such as the men’s shoe section or the women’s bags floor, they managed to land many new customers.
When they run a TV commercial, of all the customers who arrive at Marui, only 10% are new. With Smapo, that number rose to an impressive 40%. And of those 40%, about half the people ended up buying something.
Besides the chat application war that’s famously going down in Japan, O2O is another sector that’s going to generate some heat this year. NTT Docomo have adopted the exact same model as Shopkick and Smapo for their newly launched Shoplat. The system works in the same manner, but it seems that their speciality is restaurants and bars for now.
Ever since their launch in September of 2011, Smapo has seen no significant competitor, which also meant that they were essentially wholly responsible for developing the market. With the largest mobile carrier in Japan now in the game, we expect that this space is going to get far more competitive in the coming months. It is not very often we see such a young startup butting heads against an internet giant in Japan. Stay tuned, because this is going to get interesting.
Five Japanese animation studios and two Japanese advertising agencies announced yesterday that they will jointly found a web-based content distribution platform called Daisuki (literally meaning, ‘I love it so much.’). They plan to launch the service in April. The participating studios are Aniplex, Sunrise, Toei Animation, TMS Entertainment and Nihon Ad Systems, and two ad giants involved are Dentsu and Asatsu DK. These seven companies aspire to make it easier for people overseas to watch Japanese animation titles regardless of time and location, and to explore possibilities to monetize Japan-made content while preventing the spread of video piracy online. They will also sell merchandise such as character toys on the website as well. The animation titles expected to be included are Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Mobile Suit Gundam, One Piece, Lupin The Third, and The Prince of Tennis. Some popular new titles will be available on the platform also, broadcast at the same time that they appear on Japanese terrestrial TV networks. On a related note, Japanese video portal Gyao and social gaming giant GREE also announced this week that they would be teaming up to establish an investment fund to cultivate the animation production business.
Five Japanese animation studios and two Japanese advertising agencies announced yesterday that they will jointly found a web-based content distribution platform called Daisuki (literally meaning, ‘I love it so much.’). They plan to launch the service in April. The participating studios are Aniplex, Sunrise, Toei Animation, TMS Entertainment and Nihon Ad Systems, and two ad giants involved are Dentsu and Asatsu DK.
These seven companies aspire to make it easier for people overseas to watch Japanese animation titles regardless of time and location, and to explore possibilities to monetize Japan-made content while preventing the spread of video piracy online. They will also sell merchandise such as character toys on the website as well.
On a related note, Japanese video portal Gyao and social gaming giant GREE also announced this week that they would be teaming up to establish an investment fund to cultivate the animation production business.
Rick Martin
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.
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Five Japanese animation studios and two Japanese advertising agencies 
