Earlier this month we stumbled across Ancient Surfer a gem of a Japanese indie developer, SummerTime Studio based out of Okinawa. So I suppose I should not have been surprised to see them turn up in the indie section of the Tokyo Game Show 2013, which kicked off today.
Ancient Surfer currently tops the iOS sports category in 11 countries
But I was surprised. Very pleasantly so, in fact. We rarely get a chance to mention any companies based out of Okinawa. And to see Ancient Surfer doing so well right now is especially good to see.
We spoke with the company’s president, Hirotsu Takeyasu, who told us that Ancient Surfer has surpassed 500,000 downloads globally. As we look at the app rankings right now, we can see that it tops the iOS sports category in 11 countries, mostly around Asia.
SummerTime Studio was founded back in 2011, and to date has made eight apps of their own, as well as many more for clients. They will be exhibiting in the quiet indie corner of the Tokyo Game Show for the next few days, so be sure not to miss them.
If you haven’t tried Ancient Surfer yet, check out our demo video below. Or pick it up for free over on the App Store or from Google Play.
Big thanks to my colleague Yukari Mistuhashi, who conducted a number of fun interviews today, including the one above.
Today was the opening day of the Tokyo Game Show 2013. At this year’s event we wanted to focus on mobile developers in particular. And given the popularity of love simulation games here in Japan, we were not surprised to find a section dedicated to developers of this genre. Readers might recall that back in May we wrote about one of these games, called ‘Office Secrets’. And the company behind the app, Voltage, was in attendance today, with a very interesting booth. Voltage has produced over 50 apps in total, all love simulations. Here visitors could play the popular mobile game, but also take photos with real ‘ikemen’ (Japanese for ‘good-looking’) on a faux wedding ceremony backdrop (pictured above). It took the fantasy of the game made into a reality for fans. Voltage provides over 50 apps in total, which is a pretty impressive total — even more impressive when you consider that they are all of the love simulation variety. According to reps Mayuko Sugihara and Emiri Okawa, of their many mobile applications, the most popular app is ‘Chikai no kiss wa totsuzenni’ (roughly translated as ‘The Sudden Kiss for a Promise’). With this app, female users can play…
TGS2013 was mostly filled with booth babes, but Voltage had booth boys!
Today was the opening day of the Tokyo Game Show 2013. At this year’s event we wanted to focus on mobile developers in particular. And given the popularity of love simulation games here in Japan, we were not surprised to find a section dedicated to developers of this genre. Readers might recall that back in May we wrote about one of these games, called ‘Office Secrets’. And the company behind the app, Voltage, was in attendance today, with a very interesting booth.
Voltage has produced over 50 apps in total, all love simulations.
Here visitors could play the popular mobile game, but also take photos with real ‘ikemen’ (Japanese for ‘good-looking’) on a faux wedding ceremony backdrop (pictured above). It took the fantasy of the game made into a reality for fans.
Voltage provides over 50 apps in total, which is a pretty impressive total — even more impressive when you consider that they are all of the love simulation variety. According to reps Mayuko Sugihara and Emiri Okawa, of their many mobile applications, the most popular app is ‘Chikai no kiss wa totsuzenni’ (roughly translated as ‘The Sudden Kiss for a Promise’). With this app, female users can play a role as the main character who is in a fake marriage with a handsome guy.
Chikai no kiss wa totsuzenni is used by a wide-range of women from age 19 to 44, but the most active users are women in their 30s. Many are returning users due to the fact that the romance progresses and gets more interesting as the story moves forward.
Voltage plans to release at least one app per month, with plans to develop similar games that men can enjoy as well.
Check out our interview with Emiri Okawa from Voltage in the video below.
I don’t play too many sports games on mobile, but recently I thought it might be time to finally give Japan’s Barcode Footballer a look. It’s available on both iOS and Android, and has been around since late last year. It’s a soccer team management game, where you collect different players and formations in an effort to build the best possible team. But the most clever thing about this game is the way that it uses the bar codes from ordinary products as a means of creating unique players (more than 3 trillion can be made) with their own special look and skills. In some cases, as you can see in my short video demo below, the name of your new player is often based on the product you chose. The first thing I scanned was a pack of Macadamia chocolates, and the player’s name ended up being Macadamia! I realize that the technology behind this is far from rocket science, but it still left me with a pretty big grin on my face. The game, developed by Cybird, is still only available in Japan, but it has been fairly popular here, ranking well in the the sports category as…
I don’t play too many sports games on mobile, but recently I thought it might be time to finally give Japan’s Barcode Footballer a look. It’s available on both iOS and Android, and has been around since late last year. It’s a soccer team management game, where you collect different players and formations in an effort to build the best possible team.
But the most clever thing about this game is the way that it uses the bar codes from ordinary products as a means of creating unique players (more than 3 trillion can be made) with their own special look and skills. In some cases, as you can see in my short video demo below, the name of your new player is often based on the product you chose. The first thing I scanned was a pack of Macadamia chocolates, and the player’s name ended up being Macadamia! I realize that the technology behind this is far from rocket science, but it still left me with a pretty big grin on my face.
The game, developed by Cybird, is still only available in Japan, but it has been fairly popular here, ranking well in the the sports category as you might expect. Just last week the title surpassed 100 million downloads, which is pretty good for a game in this genre.
The use of bar codes here is a really clever way to execute a sort of gacha, and I’d love to see this kind of thing pop up in more games. Of course, there are lots of games that implemented barcodes in the past, but apparently not too many for smartphones yet.
Mixi Marketing recently announced the release of a new mobile monetization platform called Coudec. The platform displays advertisements, including coupons, to targeted consumers at the most effective times. At the time of launch, popular mobile apps such as CocoPPa (whose progress we have closely covered) and Mixi’s own mobile app (with a total of over 30 million downloads) have deployed Coudec. Coudec uses a pay-for-performance model, allowing advertisers to display their ads at the most engaging moment when users are in certain apps. Mobile app developers can use Coudec on top of the advertising networks already in use, since Coudec only displays ads at a selected time, giving developers an extra source of income. Mixi went through big organizational changes back in May when the former CEO stepped down, leaving Yusuke Asakura to steer the company. Mixi Marketing was founded back in July in order to handle advertisements and promotional business for the giant social network, as well as other social marketing campaigns. The company hopes Coudec can become the largest smartphone app monetization platform by encouraging more apps to participate in the future.
Mixi Marketing recently announced the release of a new mobile monetization platform called Coudec. The platform displays advertisements, including coupons, to targeted consumers at the most effective times. At the time of launch, popular mobile apps such as CocoPPa (whose progress we have closely covered) and Mixi’s own mobile app (with a total of over 30 million downloads) have deployed Coudec.
Coudec uses a pay-for-performance model, allowing advertisers to display their ads at the most engaging moment when users are in certain apps. Mobile app developers can use Coudec on top of the advertising networks already in use, since Coudec only displays ads at a selected time, giving developers an extra source of income.
Mixi went through big organizational changes back in May when the former CEO stepped down, leaving Yusuke Asakura to steer the company. Mixi Marketing was founded back in July in order to handle advertisements and promotional business for the giant social network, as well as other social marketing campaigns.
The company hopes Coudec can become the largest smartphone app monetization platform by encouraging more apps to participate in the future.
Startup Sauna, a startup accelerator from Finland, held a pitch event here on Tokyo last night. There were a number of familiar faces from the local startup community, including Conyac, Lang–8, Terra Motors, and Locarise. But in the end it was Brand Pit that snatched first prize, with an impressive pitch from Chu Tsz Tat. They now qualify to move on to participate in Slush 2013 in Finland this November. Brand Pit offers brands the ability to see who their fans are. Not to be confused with Brad Pitt (obviously), Brand Pit makes use of image recognition technology to identify brands in pictures shared on social media. What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that it offers brands the ability to see who their fans are, both in terms of demography and geography, and it also lets them see information about their competitors’ fans. The company points out that its solution is one that can bridge even language barriers, because it depends on data obtained from images, as opposed to data obtained from text. I tried to Google ‘Brand Pit’ to find their website. As you might expect, it’s hard. But if you’re lucky, you’ll come across Brand-Pit.com, where you…
Brand Pit pitches at Startup Sauna Tokyo
Startup Sauna, a startup accelerator from Finland, held a pitch event here on Tokyo last night. There were a number of familiar faces from the local startup community, including Conyac, Lang–8, Terra Motors, and Locarise. But in the end it was Brand Pit that snatched first prize, with an impressive pitch from Chu Tsz Tat. They now qualify to move on to participate in Slush 2013 in Finland this November.
Brand Pit offers brands the ability to see who their fans are.
Not to be confused with Brad Pitt (obviously), Brand Pit makes use of image recognition technology to identify brands in pictures shared on social media.
What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that it offers brands the ability to see who their fans are, both in terms of demography and geography, and it also lets them see information about their competitors’ fans.
The company points out that its solution is one that can bridge even language barriers, because it depends on data obtained from images, as opposed to data obtained from text.
I tried to Google ‘Brand Pit’ to find their website. As you might expect, it’s hard. But if you’re lucky, you’ll come across Brand-Pit.com, where you can read more details about the company. But no matter what the name is, this looks like a pretty clever technology, and it will be interesting to see how they fare in Finland.
Other standout startups
Masa Morishita of Capy
In addition to the aforementioned companies, there were many other notable startups participating as well. We saw Capy kick off the pitch session with Masa Morishita explaining his text-free, mobile friendly Captcha solution that readers may recall from our previous feature.
There was also social home design startup Suvaco, founded by former investment banker Takemasa Kuroki and his partner Hisashi Nakata.
Perhaps the brightest idea of the evening was NetLED, a cloud-controlled LED light solution that promises better lighting control and optimization that could bring savings of up to 80% or 90% on what we have today. It was pitched by Sherwin Faden.
There was also Pigmal, a hardware solution that itself looks to be nothing more that a few big buttons, but when integrated with smart devices they could be a game controller, or even something as simple as a buzzer at a company’s reception desk. Based out of the Samurai Incubate accelerator, they have already crowdsourced funds on CerevoDash for their first production run.
The last startup to present on the night was Mystar Japan, with its health advice service Up Health. Pitched by Satoshi Taniguchi, this solution proposes to analyze your Tweets and send you the appropriate advice to help you stay healthy.
Overall it was a really fun event, and it’s great to see organizations like Startup Sauna make an effort to come all this way to learn about Japan’s startup community. It certainly doesn’t hurt as well that Finnair got behind the initiative as a sponsor, and we thought we’d throw them a shout out for their support too.
Sébastien Béal, co-founder and CEO of LocariseTerra MotorsSatoshi Taniguchi, Mystar JapanPeter Vesterbacka of Rovio and Taizo Son of Movida Japan/Gung Ho congratulate Brand Pit
Tokyo-based media startup Cinemacraft has announced today that it has closed a $1.5 million round of funding from NTT Docomo Ventures, Turner Broadcasting’s Media Camp, and 500 Startups. We have previously featured Cinemacraft’s primary offering Videogram, a clever thumbnailed display that gives users visual previews of the various parts of a video. Check out the Runner Runner trailer below for an example of how it works. It feels good to reach market validation but work is not over yet. We’re just getting started The new funds will be used to expand the team, adding three new engineers to the core team in Tokyo, which will continue to be Cinemacraft’s engineering center. Founder Sandeep Casi tells us that they are currently hiring developers (iOS, Android, HTML5, Java/JSP) and if anyone would like to apply they can do so here. Including Casi, the team is still a lean six people in total, with two additions in Los Angeles for business development and operations. Readers may recall back in June when we mentioned that the startup had been admitted into Turner Broadcasting’s Media Camp. Founder Sandeep Casi notes how important that experience was for him: [It] was awesome. We had traction from Hollywood…
Tokyo-based media startup Cinemacraft has announced today that it has closed a $1.5 million round of funding from NTT Docomo Ventures, Turner Broadcasting’s Media Camp, and 500 Startups.
We have previously featured Cinemacraft’s primary offering Videogram, a clever thumbnailed display that gives users visual previews of the various parts of a video. Check out the Runner Runner trailer below for an example of how it works.
It feels good to reach market validation but work is not over yet. We’re just getting started
The new funds will be used to expand the team, adding three new engineers to the core team in Tokyo, which will continue to be Cinemacraft’s engineering center. Founder Sandeep Casi tells us that they are currently hiring developers (iOS, Android, HTML5, Java/JSP) and if anyone would like to apply they can do so here. Including Casi, the team is still a lean six people in total, with two additions in Los Angeles for business development and operations.
Readers may recall back in June when we mentioned that the startup had been admitted into Turner Broadcasting’s Media Camp. Founder Sandeep Casi notes how important that experience was for him:
[It] was awesome. We had traction from Hollywood going into Media Camp. We had a product that was market ready and what the Media Camp did was amplify our execution. Now it is about scaling. Getting the right hires in place is the next major priority. It feels good to reach market validation but work is not over yet. We’re just getting started.
So what lies ahead for Cinemacraft? Casi adds that they are already deploying their product in the US with some large entities like Fox, Turner, and Capitol Records. They will also be working with NTT group here in Japan.
This new round brings the startups total amount of funds raised to $2 million.
Rick Martin
Yukari Mitsuhashi
