But yesterday the company kicked its ‘repertoire of cute’ up a notch by release a new mobile game called Emotipon. In short, the title is sort of like GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons, only it’s far simpler, and far more cute.
Like P&D this is an orb-matching game, but here you just need to trace out lines of matching orbs with your finger. It’s almost painfully easy. And by matching more orbs, you can launch a more powerful attack against your enemy. As you progress, you collect ‘helper’ characters that you can take into battle with you, each with special abilities that you can use (just like P&D).
I expect Quan must be targeting younger kids with Emotipon, because I think few adults would choose something like this over P&D. But surprisingly it’s launching in English as well as Japanese, so there may be opportunity for it to pick up fans outside Japan, especially in markets around Asia where cute Japanese apps do best.
If you’d like to check out Emotipon, you can get it for free over on the App Store (via Gamebiz)
This is part of our cute Japanese apps series (RSS), examining a trend of ‘kawaii’ success stories emerging from Japan’s mobile space.
The revival of “Made in Japan” products. That is the mission of online fashion commerce startup Factelier. Having launched back in October of 2012, it eliminates the middle-man in fashion distribution by working directly with manufacturing factories. The resulting products can be purchased at one third the price of department stores. At the time of launch, Factelier leveraged Japanese crowdfunding service Campfire, hoping to raise just 300,000 yen (or about $3,000). But eventually it brought in over 1,100,000 yen (about $11,400) from over 70 supporters. The company’s very first partner was a factory in Kumamoto prefecture called Hitoyoshi, which works with over 74 worldwide brands. Factelier is seeing an ever-increasing demand from its customers and continues to add new products every month. The most recent product was a polo shirt selling for 7,350 yen (or about $74). It has an estimated market price of about 13,000 yen (an estimate based on the initial costs, equal to about $130). These shirts are manufactured in collaboration with a factory called Seiko, well-known for its state of the art sewing technology. In recent years, the rate of clothing products made in Japan has dropped by a whopping 45% compared to 1990. There are…
The revival of “Made in Japan” products. That is the mission of online fashion commerce startup Factelier. Having launched back in October of 2012, it eliminates the middle-man in fashion distribution by working directly with manufacturing factories. The resulting products can be purchased at one third the price of department stores.
At the time of launch, Factelier leveraged Japanese crowdfunding service Campfire, hoping to raise just 300,000 yen (or about $3,000). But eventually it brought in over 1,100,000 yen (about $11,400) from over 70 supporters. The company’s very first partner was a factory in Kumamoto prefecture called Hitoyoshi, which works with over 74 worldwide brands.
Factelier is seeing an ever-increasing demand from its customers and continues to add new products every month. The most recent product was a polo shirt selling for 7,350 yen (or about $74). It has an estimated market price of about 13,000 yen (an estimate based on the initial costs, equal to about $130). These shirts are manufactured in collaboration with a factory called Seiko, well-known for its state of the art sewing technology.
In recent years, the rate of clothing products made in Japan has dropped by a whopping 45% compared to 1990. There are many reasons behind this decline, but the emergence of a low-budget fashion market and the strong yen have definitely had an impact. As a result, the industry is seeing layoffs of highly skilled workers, and many factories are even closing. But by connecting factories directly with consumers at an appropriate price, many of them will be able to secure sales and revenue they would otherwise miss.
The company behind Factelier is Lifestyle Accent, and its founder Toshio Yamada was born into a family business that sold women’s clothes. He grew up with “made in Japan” quality clothes and studied abroad in France. He has experience in working at a luxury brand (Gucci in Paris) and has also worked in the online fashion commerce field. Yamada tells us:
70% of our customers are in their 30s and 40s. People find that our original products, produced in collaboration with [quality] factories, are great for gifts as well. All of our customers have one thing in common: they are looking for high quality products and care less about the brand name. We are doing very well right now and seeing a steady increase in demand.
Factelier supports international shipping using EMS. But currently its website is only available in Japanese.
See the original story in Japanese. Base is an e-commerce platform provider startup from Tokyo. It was born out of Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by serial entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. In contrast with their competitor Stores.jp, the Base team has been pretty quiet recently. But they have released a new iOS app today, which allows merchants to build and manage their online shops entirely on mobile. In addition, the company has added a new feature called ‘Base Curation,’ which has an interface resembling an online shopping mall, curating featured shops. It displays users’ shops which have been selected by the company’s management, and if you would to like them to feature your shop in the menu, you can make a request via the dashboard. I asked the startup’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka if the curation menu is a special business strategy for Base — but he said that this wasn’t quite the intention, explaining: Unlike other mall platforms (which have many tenant merchants), our service does not provide a way to find a specific shop on the platform. We want to see how we can encourage merchants to set up their online shop on our platform. When you launch…
Base is an e-commerce platform provider startup from Tokyo. It was born out of Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by serial entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. In contrast with their competitor Stores.jp, the Base team has been pretty quiet recently. But they have released a new iOS app today, which allows merchants to build and manage their online shops entirely on mobile.
In addition, the company has added a new feature called ‘Base Curation,’ which has an interface resembling an online shopping mall, curating featured shops. It displays users’ shops which have been selected by the company’s management, and if you would to like them to feature your shop in the menu, you can make a request via the dashboard.
I asked the startup’s CEO Yuta Tsuruoka if the curation menu is a special business strategy for Base — but he said that this wasn’t quite the intention, explaining:
Unlike other mall platforms (which have many tenant merchants), our service does not provide a way to find a specific shop on the platform. We want to see how we can encourage merchants to set up their online shop on our platform. When you launch an app, it shows you a number of online shops where you can quickly jump in to purchase something you want, but you can also [just as] easily establish your own shop from the menu.
Placing pictures of products, changing design, inventory management, etc. – all these tasks can be completed with the smartphone app because we really want to give more people opportunities to build up their own “economic block”.
Base is not trying to be a big e-commerce portal, but a rather platform where people can easily repeat transactions, buying and selling items by leveraging their social connections, and accelerating long-tail businesses.
According to Mr. Tsuruoka, almost 60% of their purchasing traffic comes from mobile devices.
Co-founder Kazuma Ieiri using the app
Of course, all these updates are very likely a direct result of Ieiri’s own philosophies. I asked him how they plan to compete against various competitors, including major e-commerce platforms, shopping cart ASPs, and other similar services. He answered me directly, not hiding his intentions of taking the fight to his competitors:
They are elephants or capybaras [1], but we are mere ants, in contrast. For ants, even if you join forces with capybaras, there’s no way you can defeat elephants. Therefore, you must dig up the ground so that you might trip up the elephants. Understand?
The Base team is expecting to see 500,000 downloads of their iOS app by the end of this month. Let’s stay tuned to see how they do!
The capybara is the largest rodent in the world according to Wikipedia. Editor’s note: Ieiri’s metaphor is a little strange, but it seems capybaras might be a less obscure animal among Japanese people because it is cute, and has been featured in some TV commercials. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Fuji Startup Ventures [1], Gumi Ventures [2], and B Dash Ventures have jointly announced (PDF) that they have teamed up to establish a new mobile gaming studio called A-lim. It has not been disclosed how much stake each party will hold in the company. This newly formed company also released its first mobile iOS game today, titled Brave Frontier. It’s available for free over on the App Store if you’d like to try it out. The company’s CEO Eiji Takahashi tells us that they are preparing to release an Android version and an international edition as well. More games will be coming later on. We had an opportunity to hear from Hironao Kunimitsu, the company’s executive director and the CEO at Gumi. He claimed that they company will try to produce games based on top-class IP in partnership with Fuji TV. It will be interesting to see what this new company has in store for mobile gamers! The investment arm of Tokyo’s private TV station Fuji TV. ↩ The investment arm of Japanese gaming giant Gumi. ↩
This newly formed company also released its first mobile iOS game today, titled Brave Frontier. It’s available for free over on the App Store if you’d like to try it out. The company’s CEO Eiji Takahashi tells us that they are preparing to release an Android version and an international edition as well. More games will be coming later on.
We had an opportunity to hear from Hironao Kunimitsu, the company’s executive director and the CEO at Gumi. He claimed that they company will try to produce games based on top-class IP in partnership with Fuji TV.
It will be interesting to see what this new company has in store for mobile gamers!
The investment arm of Tokyo’s private TV station Fuji TV. ↩
The investment arm of Japanese gaming giant Gumi. ↩
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
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.
In Japan, only 20% of taxi rides are booked in advance. And many taxi companies are releasing their own mobile apps to simplify the process of calling up a cab, and hopefully filling up more of their empty cabs at the same time. Nihon Kotsu is one such company, with its mobile app Zenkoku Taxi Haisha (roughly translated as National Taxi Dispatch). The app was first released back in December of 2011 and within a year it had over 500,000 downloads. The sales resulting from the app have exceeded 500 million yen, with over 40 prefectures and 76 taxi groups making use of it. And now the company has announced the release of a Taxi Ojisan Fare Calculation app in collaboration with a startup called Fuller. Fuller is known for its Android phone management app ‘Boku Sumaho’ (meaning ‘I’m smartphone’ in Japanese). The app lets you run your mobile phone more efficiently by uninstalling apps that are not used, or killing unnecessary tasks. What’s unique about the app is that a small ojisan character (‘ojisan’ refers to an older man) in the app can be nurtured as you better manage the usage of your Android phones. In the taxi fare…
In Japan, only 20% of taxi rides are booked in advance. And many taxi companies are releasing their own mobile apps to simplify the process of calling up a cab, and hopefully filling up more of their empty cabs at the same time. Nihon Kotsu is one such company, with its mobile app Zenkoku Taxi Haisha (roughly translated as National Taxi Dispatch).
The app was first released back in December of 2011 and within a year it had over 500,000 downloads. The sales resulting from the app have exceeded 500 million yen, with over 40 prefectures and 76 taxi groups making use of it. And now the company has announced the release of a Taxi Ojisan Fare Calculation app in collaboration with a startup called Fuller.
Fuller is known for its Android phone management app ‘Boku Sumaho’ (meaning ‘I’m smartphone’ in Japanese). The app lets you run your mobile phone more efficiently by uninstalling apps that are not used, or killing unnecessary tasks. What’s unique about the app is that a small ojisan character (‘ojisan’ refers to an older man) in the app can be nurtured as you better manage the usage of your Android phones.
In the taxi fare calculation app, this same ojisan character lends a helping hand as well. By entering the starting point and destination from keywords or a map, the app calculates the estimate taxi fare. It uses the engine of the National Taxi Dispatch app, allowing you to call for a cab right after you do the math.
CNet Japan points out that the founders of Nihon Kotsu and Fuller met at an Evernote Hackathon in Tokyo held back in January. The CEO of Nihon Kotsu, Ichiro Kawanabe, explains:
At many companies, the decision makers are middle aged men. The common problem we have is to expand our reach to women and the younger generation. Getting support from a young startup sounded like a good idea. Our collaboration will trigger more projects like this […] which are lacking in the Japanese business society.
Back at the Japan New Economy Summit, we Uber CEO Travis Kalanik talk about the problems he encountered when trying to bring his car service to Japan:
In Tokyo they fix the prices on private car services at 5540 yen. There are something like 90 different zones with different minimum fares, different rules. We are in cities all over the world and we haven’t seen anything like this. The government has essentially said that only rich people are able to get car service. […] These laws are set up to protect the taxis and your city is worse off because of it. In order for us to connect you to a car service through an app, we have to become a licensed travel guide. We have to hire certified travel guides. I don’t know why. They’re just trying to make it hard.
So while it’s certainly good to see taxi companies like Nihon Kotsu experimenting with new technologies, we hope that regulators leave some space for up-and-coming services like Uber to innovate as well.
Rick Martin
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Takeshi Hirano
