What’s the first thing you do when you grab your mobile phone? Slide to unlock the homescreen. Here in Asia, there is an app and an reward advertisement platform that capitalizes on this action. It’s called Latte Screen. The app was first released in Korea where it was downloaded over 2 million times in the first three months after its release. And now AppDisco Japan, the company behind the app, has announced that it will be expanding service to a total of 13 countries, including Australia, Spain, France, and Germany.
According to the company, Latte Screen ‘hijacks’ (so to speak) [1] a user’s lock screen with advertisements. Users are shown the most recent advertisements (updated once every hour) and can receive points everytime they unlock their lock screen. These points can be exchanged for gift cards or even can be exchanged for cash. The company also plans to add coupons for stores and restaurants, as well as goods from Korean cosmetic brands or relating to pop stars.
AppDisco released its first app in Japan, Ad Latte, back in December of 2011. The app gives out points to its users for watching commercials, answering questions, and participating in campaigns. The two Latte apps are integrated, allowing users to collect points from both apps.
The app will be available to U.S. users starting this summer. Latte Screen can be downloaded over on Google Play.
In their announcement, the company used the word ‘hijacks’, perhaps for creative effect. Obviously this has a negative connotation in English, but in Japanese it reads ok.↩
Japanese web conglomerate Septeni Holdings (JASDAQ:4293) has established a new subsidiary that will focus on building a manga content e-publication platform. The group gets most of its revenue from online advertising and social gaming apps. But with this platform, it is looking to diversify its business beyond intellectual property. The new subsidiary, Comicsmart, will establish a website, as well as discover and train new cartoonists for its comic e-publication platform. The company also announced a program to supporting aspiring cartoonists, called Route M, giving them complimentary painting materials, production facilities, grants, and distribution channels for their works. On a related note, Japanese gaming company Spicy Soft recently announced that it has handed over Manga Get (a manga-focused, user-generated content site) to Septeni. The site has more than 900,000 amateur cartoonists and more than 40,000 cartoons. Some of our readers may remember that Gyao and GREE recently established an investment fund for the anime business. Since the beginning of this year, anime-related startps such as MugenUp or Anipipo have been attracting much attention among Japanese consumers and investors.
Japanese web conglomerate Septeni Holdings (JASDAQ:4293) has established a new subsidiary that will focus on building a manga content e-publication platform. The group gets most of its revenue from online advertising and social gaming apps. But with this platform, it is looking to diversify its business beyond intellectual property.
The new subsidiary, Comicsmart, will establish a website, as well as discover and train new cartoonists for its comic e-publication platform. The company also announced a program to supporting aspiring cartoonists, called Route M, giving them complimentary painting materials, production facilities, grants, and distribution channels for their works.
On a related note, Japanese gaming company Spicy Soft recently announced that it has handed over Manga Get (a manga-focused, user-generated content site) to Septeni. The site has more than 900,000 amateur cartoonists and more than 40,000 cartoons.
Some of our readers may remember that Gyao and GREE recently established an investment fund for the anime business. Since the beginning of this year, anime-related startps such as MugenUp or Anipipo have been attracting much attention among Japanese consumers and investors.
Production IG Tour, photo by Danny Choo, CC license
See the original story in Japanese. Nulab is a startup based in Japan’s western city of Fukuoka, which has developed web-based collaborative tools for use with remote workers. You may be familiar with their diagram sharing tool Cacoo or their task tracking and management tool Backlog. In terms of business management style, Nulab does things a little differently than typical startups. Their method is incrementally progressive, similar to what typical SMEs do. They don’t show off so much, but their services are pretty great, and Cacoo in particular has a wide following around the world. We recently had a chance to hear from the startup’s CEO, Masanori Hashimoto, who told us a little more about their progress to date. Developing Backlog The startup’s primary revenue early on came from developing mobile and web apps for its clients. That’s how Backlog was invented. Hashimoto: We launched back in 2004 and started our business doing software development for clients. So we were working on web productions for our clients in Fukuoka, system developments for securities companies, or even consulting work. In such processes, we had no system for tracking bugs and managing fixes. So we developed our own. That was the beginning…
From the left, Nulab’s co-founders and board members: Shinsuke Tabata (managing director), Toshitaka Agata (managing director), and Masanori Hashimoto (CEO)
Nulab is a startup based in Japan’s western city of Fukuoka, which has developed web-based collaborative tools for use with remote workers. You may be familiar with their diagram sharing tool Cacoo or their task tracking and management tool Backlog.
In terms of business management style, Nulab does things a little differently than typical startups. Their method is incrementally progressive, similar to what typical SMEs do. They don’t show off so much, but their services are pretty great, and Cacoo in particular has a wide following around the world. We recently had a chance to hear from the startup’s CEO, Masanori Hashimoto, who told us a little more about their progress to date.
Developing Backlog
The startup’s primary revenue early on came from developing mobile and web apps for its clients. That’s how Backlog was invented.
Hashimoto: We launched back in 2004 and started our business doing software development for clients. So we were working on web productions for our clients in Fukuoka, system developments for securities companies, or even consulting work. In such processes, we had no system for tracking bugs and managing fixes. So we developed our own. That was the beginning of the Backlog app.
Using some open source code and libraries, we could finally introduce the commercial version of the tool after a couple of testing versions. That was in 2006, and at that time the tool was available for free. We didn’t care about charging to our users. (laugh) After that we picked up a lots of new users without any intentional promotion activities.
Subsequently, they released a premium version that was priced at around 8,000 yen (about $80) a month, but that didn’t quite work out. They needed to find another way to make it work.
Hashimoto: We had been developing the app from an engineer’s perspective. We hoped the tool could help software engineers design system architecture or interfaces for their work. But then we changed things and made some improvements for designers or website producers, and the premium version started showing good numbers.
As a result, the tool became widely recognized as a task management tool, not only in the Fukuoka tech community but all across the country.
The emergence of Cacoo
Following up on the Backlog app, the startup introduced Cacoo back in 2010, enabling users to collaborate on diagrams with other remote users, and even chat within the app. Cacoo would go on to become a smash hit.
Cacoo is now integrated with AdFlow, a banner ad production assisting tool.
Hashimoto: We released the Cacoo app back in 2010. During development work, we previously used wikis for sharing technical information among our developers. But we wanted to edit a diagram or an image in the Wiki easily. And that’s why we started developing the diagram editing and sharing tool.
But for them, it was a very long road to releasing both Cacoo and Backlog. By taking time away from their primary work to develop the Cacoo app, they needed two years to develop the app and get it published.
Shifting focus
Each of the three board members plays a different role. Hashimoto was in charge of managing the client software development, but since these two web services started showing good numbers, he decided to shutdown that department.
Hashimoto: Our director Tabata takes care of the Backlog app, and Agata takes care of the Cacoo app. Since these services are growing now, we shutdown my department. It used to be the primary revenue stream for the company but I think it there is less potential in the future.
We have expected to execute this pivot earlier, but it was impossible to do it so rapidly. We spent three years to shifting our resources from development work to intensifying these new web services.
The startup has also introduced an SDK, which allows third-party developers to work on system integration with the Cacoo app.
I asked Hashimoto if he’s interested in trying for an IPO. He explained:
If your company is listed on a stock exchange, it’s no longer a private company, and should serve people almost like public works. If you expect to make your business into something like that, it’s worth trying to IPO. […] Our next goal is to make this a world-class company.
With the lofty aspiration of further global expansion, Nulab launched a subsidiary in Singapore back in March of 2012. It will be interesting to see if they can use that outpost to find further opportunities around Asia and beyond.
Readers may recall that a few months back we mentioned a really strange, but really fun game from Japan called Alpaca Evolution. The game can be described as kimo kawaii or “disgustingly cute”, and millions of downloads later Japanese mobile users have really taken to it. In case you thought that sort of hit was a one time thing, another equally weird mobile game is number one in Japan’s App Store today. It’s called Raising Titan. Update: This app appears to have been removed from the App Store. I’ll keep you posted if I learn why. When you start the game you’re given a little newborn character to care for, with options to feed or bathe it when needed. After a while, you level up to become a new, stranger looking giant, and it continues in this way until you become something quite monstrous. There’s also a mini game that looks very much inspired by Alpaca Evolution, where your giant has to eat up as many tiny humans as possible within the given time. The title is was the top free iOS app in Japan for a while today, and is also doing well in Taiwan and Hong Kong. If…
Readers may recall that a few months back we mentioned a really strange, but really fun game from Japan called Alpaca Evolution. The game can be described as kimo kawaii or “disgustingly cute”, and millions of downloads later Japanese mobile users have really taken to it.
In case you thought that sort of hit was a one time thing, another equally weird mobile game is number one in Japan’s App Store today. It’s called Raising Titan.
Update: This app appears to have been removed from the App Store. I’ll keep you posted if I learn why.
When you start the game you’re given a little newborn character to care for, with options to feed or bathe it when needed. After a while, you level up to become a new, stranger looking giant, and it continues in this way until you become something quite monstrous. There’s also a mini game that looks very much inspired by Alpaca Evolution, where your giant has to eat up as many tiny humans as possible within the given time.
The title is was the top free iOS app in Japan for a while today, and is also doing well in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
If you’d like to get a closer look at the wacky gameplay, check out our video demo below.
Photo via. TowerRecords Japan’s Radiko.jp is a website and mobile app (iOS and Android) that provides simultaneous broadcasts of radio programs over the internet. The service has maintained strong growth since its launch back in 2011 and has over 13 million monthly unique users as of April 2013. Over 68 commercial radio stations have joined the platform. Now Radiko has just announced that it will broadcast interviews of the top five winners of the AKB48 Election, a popular nationwide event that decides the center stage positions for the all-girl idol group. The event (sadly) might even exceed the country’s national election in terms of national interest. This 5th election is planned to take place tomorrow at Nissan Stadium in Yokohama. A total of 100 minutes interviews will be broadcasted beginning the night of June 8th and will be repeated the next day. There are over 246 members fighting for limited positions, and the participating members promote themselves on their blogs and on social media such as Twitter and Google+. The candidates speeches can be viewed on the official AKB48 YouTube channel. Fans can vote by purchasing CDs which (ingeniously) function as votes. This mega pop-culture event will surely attaract a…
Japan’s Radiko.jp is a website and mobile app (iOS and Android) that provides simultaneous broadcasts of radio programs over the internet. The service has maintained strong growth since its launch back in 2011 and has over 13 million monthly unique users as of April 2013. Over 68 commercial radio stations have joined the platform.
Now Radiko has just announced that it will broadcast interviews of the top five winners of the AKB48 Election, a popular nationwide event that decides the center stage positions for the all-girl idol group. The event (sadly) might even exceed the country’s national election in terms of national interest.
This 5th election is planned to take place tomorrow at Nissan Stadium in Yokohama. A total of 100 minutes interviews will be broadcasted beginning the night of June 8th and will be repeated the next day.
There are over 246 members fighting for limited positions, and the participating members promote themselves on their blogs and on social media such as Twitter and Google+. The candidates speeches can be viewed on the official AKB48 YouTube channel. Fans can vote by purchasing CDs which (ingeniously) function as votes.
This mega pop-culture event will surely attaract a wider range of fans for Radiko. Radio as a form of media is not exactly cutting-edge and has been going downhill in most places. But this old media form saw a revival in Japan when the Tohoku earthquake hit Japan in March of 2011. With so many things washed away after the tsunami, many people only had radio left as a way to connect to the rest of the world.
Japanese game publisher GungHo Entertainment and Finish publisher Supercell have just announced a joint collaboration that will result in the mutual sharing of content in each others games. To be clear, these are two giant games teaming up here; two of the biggest money makers in the mobile gaming space, working together to likely make even more money! What this means exactly is that we’ll see some Clash of Clans themed dungeons and monsters showing up in GungHo’s hit game Puzzle and Dragons. And likewise, we will see Clash of Clans and Hay Day display cross promotions for Puzzle and Dragons, in both the iOS and Android versions. Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen commented in the announcement: We are very honored to work with GungHo and learn from the masters of free-to-play gaming. The more time we spend with GungHo, the more we realize how remarkably similar our two companies are. We are deeply committed to helping each other expand into new markets and equally committed to having an incredible amount of fun working together. GungHo has done collaborations like this previously for its Japanese version, but this is the first time (that I’m aware of) that they have made such…
Japanese game publisher GungHo Entertainment and Finish publisher Supercell have just announced a joint collaboration that will result in the mutual sharing of content in each others games. To be clear, these are two giant games teaming up here; two of the biggest money makers in the mobile gaming space, working together to likely make even more money!
What this means exactly is that we’ll see some Clash of Clans themed dungeons and monsters showing up in GungHo’s hit game Puzzle and Dragons. And likewise, we will see Clash of Clans and Hay Day display cross promotions for Puzzle and Dragons, in both the iOS and Android versions.
Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen commented in the announcement:
We are very honored to work with GungHo and learn from the masters of free-to-play gaming. The more time we spend with GungHo, the more we realize how remarkably similar our two companies are. We are deeply committed to helping each other expand into new markets and equally committed to having an incredible amount of fun working together.
GungHo has done collaborations like this previously for its Japanese version, but this is the first time (that I’m aware of) that they have made such an effort for the English version of its game.
Serkan Toto has a great overview of how Japanese gaming companies use this collaboration strategy here, if you’d like to learn more.
For anyone who has yet to try out Puzzle and Dragons check out our demo video of basic gameplay strategy here.
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Masaru Ikeda
Japanese web conglomerate 
Takeshi Hirano
Rick Martin
