We have previously discussed Tokyo-based startup MakeLeaps, which offers an online quotes and invoicing solution for freelancers and businesses in Japan. Today the company announced a third service to its repertoire of offerings, rolling out the capability to create delivery slips from its system as well. This is the most requested feature that they receive from their customers, they say.
These slips are important notifications used very heavily in Japan to confirm the delivery of purchased electronic goods and services. If you’ve never had to manage delivery slips (like me!), the significance of this offering was not immediately obvious.
But I had a chance to browse some of the feedback from their customers, and it looks like this feature can significantly save them time and manual effort in their day-to-day workflow.
Bringing management of quotes, invoices, and delivery slips together under its platform, MakeLeaps is centralizing document management for freelancers and businesses. According to its announcement, the company had been providing this delivery slip feature to a group of beta testers, obtaining feedback from those users so they could refine and improve it before today’s official launch.
Back in June MakeLeaps announced that it had surpassed 10,000 business users. They’re aiming to grow that to 25,000 companies by July of 2014.
These days, it seems like crowdsourcing is becoming an integral part of many existing online services. Major examples here in Japan would be websites like CrowdWorks and Lancers, where clients can find freelance workers. But many other companies want a piece of this seven billion yen market [1]. One such Japanese company is iSitter, a service similar to US-based Urbansitter. It launched just a few days ago, providing a crowdsourcing site that helps busy moms find qualified babysitters. The site requires babysitters to identify themselves using their Facebook credentials, which helps ensure safety for mothers and children. The company takes this precaution a step further, doing check ups on newly registered babysitters as well (checking things like their driver’s license, health-insurance, etc). Their five star review system provides objective evaluations of registered care-takers. Although iSitter is a much needed service, it might be headed down a rocky road in Japan. In this country there is not really any babysitting culture, perhaps since Japan is generally a safe place where parents can leave young children at home by themselves. But according to iSitter, the babysitting market is a 20.5 billion yen market in Japan. And it will be interesting to see…
These days, it seems like crowdsourcing is becoming an integral part of many existing online services. Major examples here in Japan would be websites like CrowdWorks and Lancers, where clients can find freelance workers. But many other companies want a piece of this seven billion yen market [1].
One such Japanese company is iSitter, a service similar to US-based Urbansitter. It launched just a few days ago, providing a crowdsourcing site that helps busy moms find qualified babysitters. The site requires babysitters to identify themselves using their Facebook credentials, which helps ensure safety for mothers and children. The company takes this precaution a step further, doing check ups on newly registered babysitters as well (checking things like their driver’s license, health-insurance, etc). Their five star review system provides objective evaluations of registered care-takers.
Although iSitter is a much needed service, it might be headed down a rocky road in Japan. In this country there is not really any babysitting culture, perhaps since Japan is generally a safe place where parents can leave young children at home by themselves.
But according to iSitter, the babysitting market is a 20.5 billion yen market in Japan. And it will be interesting to see whether or not they can succeed in grabbing some of that.
Besides the hourly wage paid to babysitters, iSitter is free to use. The company’s goal is to acquire 3,000 parents and 200 babysitters within a year. In the future it is expected to implement a paid model, with a monthly fee of a few hundred yen.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Yuno Group today launched a crowdfunding site focused on live musical performances. It enables music fans in Japan to collaboratively invite their favorite artists from overseas. The new site is called Alive (alive.mu). The number of live performance events hosting musicians from the overseas has been gradually decreasing. For those in the event business, there is always the risk of poor sales or way too many vacant seats, and that may scare organizers away from inviting niche artists. But this new crowdfunding platform receives ticket orders prior to organizing an event, and the artist will be invited when the number of advanced orders reaches a preset target. In this way, the platform reduces the chance of an unsuccessful event. It is a similar business model to on-demand theater service Dreampass which was acquired by Yahoo Japan back in March. As of today, the platform has five crowdfunding projects available: Blue Hawaii – An electronic music duo from Montreal, Canada. The band’s latest album Untogether features acoustic folk and electronic sounds. San Cisco – An Australian four-piece indie pop band formed in 2009. Awkward, a single from their first album San Cisco, has…
Tokyo-based startup Yuno Group today launched a crowdfunding site focused on live musical performances. It enables music fans in Japan to collaboratively invite their favorite artists from overseas. The new site is called Alive (alive.mu).
The number of live performance events hosting musicians from the overseas has been gradually decreasing. For those in the event business, there is always the risk of poor sales or way too many vacant seats, and that may scare organizers away from inviting niche artists. But this new crowdfunding platform receives ticket orders prior to organizing an event, and the artist will be invited when the number of advanced orders reaches a preset target. In this way, the platform reduces the chance of an unsuccessful event. It is a similar business model to on-demand theater service Dreampass which was acquired by Yahoo Japan back in March.
As of today, the platform has five crowdfunding projects available:
Blue Hawaii – An electronic music duo from Montreal, Canada. The band’s latest album Untogether features acoustic folk and electronic sounds.
San Cisco – An Australian four-piece indie pop band formed in 2009. Awkward, a single from their first album San Cisco, has over 5 million views on YouTube.
Crocodiles – An indie pop band from San Diego. Their sound has typically been likened to The Jesus and Mary Chain and Stone Roses because of their psychedelic pop style. They have performed all across Europe.
XXYYXX – A 17-year-old electronic musician and producer from Orlando, Florida. His style has been likened to James Blake and Burial because of his experimental lo-fi music.
Nouvelle Vague – A French pop cover band known for punk rock, post-punk, new wave, and their use of ’60s bossa nova-style arrangements.
The Alive team was founded by British neuroscientist Sam Mokhtary and Japanese UI designer Yutaka Fujiki. They are based at PAX Coworking, a space here in Tokyo. It seems their team is comprised of many people from music startup Nana.
In this space, we’ve already seen some websites providing showbiz-focused crowdfunding projects, such as UK-based Songkick and Brazil’s WeDemand (previously known as Queremos). The former raised $10 million from Sequoia Capital last year, which is a good indication of the potential in this sector.
There are so many note-taking tools available these days, especially for Mac and iOS. Many people use Evernote to sync notes across devices, while others might use lighter solutions like TaskPaper. But one Tokyo-based developer recently launched an interesting alternative which emphasizes more granular control over which notes go to which devices. It’s called Snipe. Snipe is available for both Mac and iOS, and was developed by AppFusion, which I’m told has a presence in both Japan and Singapore. When creating a note – which could include text, images, links, and some meta data – you’re presented with options for which device you would like to send/save to. Snipe’s tagline promises that you’ll never have to email notes to yourself again. And I think that for many people, it will solve that issue. As for the app’s business model, it relies on a paid add-on to support additional devices. Myself, I tend to prefer a plain text, Dropbox solution like nvALT/Notesy or TaskPaper, because I know my notes are then future proof no matter what happens to the apps that house them. Similarly Evernote, as established as it is, is probably a relatively safe bet too. Here in Japan there…
There are so many note-taking tools available these days, especially for Mac and iOS. Many people use Evernote to sync notes across devices, while others might use lighter solutions like TaskPaper. But one Tokyo-based developer recently launched an interesting alternative which emphasizes more granular control over which notes go to which devices. It’s called Snipe.
Snipe is available for both Mac and iOS, and was developed by AppFusion, which I’m told has a presence in both Japan and Singapore. When creating a note – which could include text, images, links, and some meta data – you’re presented with options for which device you would like to send/save to. Snipe’s tagline promises that you’ll never have to email notes to yourself again. And I think that for many people, it will solve that issue. As for the app’s business model, it relies on a paid add-on to support additional devices.
Myself, I tend to prefer a plain text, Dropbox solution like nvALT/Notesy or TaskPaper, because I know my notes are then future proof no matter what happens to the apps that house them. Similarly Evernote, as established as it is, is probably a relatively safe bet too. Here in Japan there is also Sleipnir which proposes an interesting solution to this problem with its Sleipnir Linker app. That service is particularly smart when it comes to handling things like addresses or phone numbers when passed to a mobile device.
I asked Snipe’s creator Ben Dunn about how Snipe differentiates from something like Evernote, and he explained:
Evernote has evolved into an incredibly powerful feature set and I personally continue to be a paying Evernote user for storing documents and notes that I want to keep forever. But I think its too heavy for short-life notes (the type we used to scribble on a post it note and carry around with us) and doesn’t allow sending a note to a specific device which is Snipe’s key feature. That said, for a light user of Evernote, Snipe could definitely be a good alternative.
I think he’s right on this last point. For many users who just want a frictionless go-between to transition information from device to device, Snipe can be very handy. I don’t think it’s going to solve any problems for power users though, because those people have likely already found solutions among the many that exist. But I do think that Snipe can step in to help many new users, because this is a problem that everyone runs into at some time or another – and the app’s proposed solution is very, very clear [1].
I was also curious to hear Ben’s impressions on being an entrepreneur here in Tokyo. He says that there are certainly many things that can make Tokyo tough, but there are lots of reasons to be excited as well:
Ben Dunn
It’s expensive, more limited in hiring options (if you require English speakers) and harder to network. But that ignores some of the very real benefits of being able to work in a very large consumer market which is largely ignored (through language) by most new products developed in the West or even conversely to export ideas/product categories from Japan to the rest of the world.
While we’re not yet at that point with Snipe, there are other opportunities that I am looking at that will be very focused on this idea of localizing English focused products and tapping into the Japanese market.
Snipe is a very young product, with lots of room to grow and improve. It’s not the solution that I’ll be using to transfer information across devices (I’m already a little set in my ways), but I’m sure there are many people out there for whom it will work quite well. If you’d like to try it out, you can get it for free for both iOS and Mac.
Update: Ben tells me that the Snipe iPad app is now available over on the App Store, so be sure to check that out as well! ¶
Update: I had previously hoped that for iOS Snipe might support Drafts integration, and Ben tells me that now it does! You can install the Drafts action here.¶
Snipe will likely need to adjust their app title in the App Store, currently listed as ‘Snipe It’. While the name is fine, for users searching for terms like ‘notes’ or ‘sync’, they will not easily come across Snipe. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Yokohama-based Gamba, the startup behind the business reporting tool of the same name, announced today that it has raised $20 million yen (approximately $200,00) from Skyland Ventures, a Japanese investment company focused on seed-stage startups. Some of our readers may recall when we reported back in July that their tool would be integrated with a number of code- and task-tracking tools: GitHub, BitBucket, Pivotal Tracker and Google Tasks. The company was launched last December by Masahiro Morita who previously worked with e-commerce giant Rakuten as a business development producer. As of July, it has acquired more than 1,000 corporate accounts in Japan across a wide range of companies. For sales representatives or engineers, the app provides an easy way to share your updates with colleagues or management, at the beginning and the end of business hours. For management who have difficulties finding time to speak with employees face-to-face, it provides information on the progression of tasks as well as information about what are employees are working on. Among social tools available for enterprises, we’ve recently seen big developments like corporate messaging tool Yammer’s, acquired last year by Microsoft, and Australian business tool startup Atlassian,…
Yokohama-based Gamba, the startup behind the business reporting tool of the same name, announced today that it has raised $20 million yen (approximately $200,00) from Skyland Ventures, a Japanese investment company focused on seed-stage startups. Some of our readers may recall when we reported back in July that their tool would be integrated with a number of code- and task-tracking tools: GitHub, BitBucket, Pivotal Tracker and Google Tasks.
The company was launched last December by Masahiro Morita who previously worked with e-commerce giant Rakuten as a business development producer. As of July, it has acquired more than 1,000 corporate accounts in Japan across a wide range of companies. For sales representatives or engineers, the app provides an easy way to share your updates with colleagues or management, at the beginning and the end of business hours. For management who have difficulties finding time to speak with employees face-to-face, it provides information on the progression of tasks as well as information about what are employees are working on.
For Skyland Ventures, this is the largest of its investments to date. The company’s portfolio also includes Wonder Graphics, a company specializing in video explainers; Hachimenroppi, which does food distribution for restaurants; and Creofuga, a vertical social network for musical composers.
Ptmind is the Tokyo-based startup behind access analytics tool Miapex. The company recently announced that it will expand to serve global customers, and set up an office in Silicon Valley by the end of this year. The tool allows users to analyze visitor access to websites, as well as better understand their experience on your website, regardless of whether you are on desktop or mobile. In this space, there are already more than a few competitors including Google Analytics, Clicky, clicktale, Crazyegg, and Heatmaps. To differentiate from these services, the company aims to give more visual, more intimate access to real-time analytics by providing traffic heatmaps and compatibility tests for multiple mobile browsers, and click-through heatmap reports. The company was originally launched back in 2007 by graduates from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It has been trying to acquire users in the Chinese market but was forced to shut down after its investor folded due to the global financial crisis. In 2010, the team revived as PtThink China and founded a Japanese subsidiary in Tokyo as Ptmind. Ptmind has been generating its main revenue stream in Japan over the last few years. In addition to the recent announcement of its…
Ptmind is the Tokyo-based startup behind access analytics tool Miapex. The company recently announced that it will expand to serve global customers, and set up an office in Silicon Valley by the end of this year.
The tool allows users to analyze visitor access to websites, as well as better understand their experience on your website, regardless of whether you are on desktop or mobile. In this space, there are already more than a few competitors including Google Analytics, Clicky, clicktale, Crazyegg, and Heatmaps. To differentiate from these services, the company aims to give more visual, more intimate access to real-time analytics by providing traffic heatmaps and compatibility tests for multiple mobile browsers, and click-through heatmap reports.
The company was originally launched back in 2007 by graduates from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It has been trying to acquire users in the Chinese market but was forced to shut down after its investor folded due to the global financial crisis. In 2010, the team revived as PtThink China and founded a Japanese subsidiary in Tokyo as Ptmind.
Ptmind has been generating its main revenue stream in Japan over the last few years. In addition to the recent announcement of its partnership with Softbank BB, Softbank’s internet service provider, the company released an English edition of its tool and plans to set up a Silicon Valley office.
Rick Martin
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Masaru Ikeda
