Japan’s U-Note wants to make sure you don’t miss out on important events

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U-Note CEO Yuto Koide pitches at Infinity Ventures Summit

Last Friday at the Infinity Ventures Summit LaunchPad event, Tokyo-based startup U-Note pitched a web solution for taking notes at public events.

The company’s CEO, Yuto Koide, explained that they want to transfer event memos online. He says that while many people want to attend local events, they can’t possibly make it to every one – either due to time or money constraints. But U-Note provides user accounts of high profile events on its site, a valuable resource to those who cannot make it in person.

In terms of the technology, the interface looks very much like Storify.com, allowing users to drag and drop rich media elements like Tweets, photos, videos, and more, in addition to text content. As for mobile note-taking, they have an Android app already released, and one for iPhone on the way.

U-Note has nine categories of events on site, such as talks from celebrities, or startup events just like this one [1].

So far the platform is seeing good progress, and May saw 250% growth over the previous month, says Koide. As for monetization, they have editorial ads that they sell for 150,000 yen. They want the user to enjoy the contents, so the editorial ads aspire to be more interesting so that users are more receptive to them.

The content business is a tough one, but U-Note’s tool is certainly useful, capitalizing on Japan’s love of creating ‘matome’ or list posts. And assuming that people use it frequently enough. The U-Note page could prove a useful destination for event coverage.

U-Note publishing interface
U-Note publishing interface

  1. In fact, someone on U-Note actually put together a roundup of the startups competing at the LaunchPad event.  ↩