Masaru Ikeda
Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program.
The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program.
Viibar (The Best Team Award winner)
Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills.
The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos.
Locarise (The Special Award winner)
Locarise is an analytics solution for retail stores. By placing small sensors inside and around your store, the system can collect metrics such as how many people passed in front of the store and how many customers you have served.
The system’s web-based dashboard shows you these metrics, as well as other things like visit duration, and retention rate. For a business owner monitoring many store locations, you can easily stay up to date on real-time target rates for KPIs at many stores in a single interface.
Shakring
Regardless of location, culture, or language, this mobile app lets you to ask or tell other users what you’re looking at. By scanning barcodes, it also helps you find details about what you have in your hand.
When the app’s creator, Hyongchol, Kim visited a drug store here in Japan, he saw a young Indian confused about cold medicine he should buy. Since he couldn’t read Japanese characters, he hesitated to buy the medicine despite the fact that Kim told him which one it was. This experience motivated Kim to create the app, which he is preparing for iOS and Android platforms.
Style With
Style With is an e-commerce site for men, helping them coordinate their outfits. Users’ preferences are classified according to the ’taste graph’ concept, and you will receive about five different outfit proposals of outfits every month that you might like. The platform can monetize by letting a user buy any item from the outfits proposed. It targets male users may not be very bold in their fashion but want to purchase clothes that will turn some heads.
Ednity
Ednity is a vertical social network for school classes. By putting teachers, students, and their parents in a sort of loop, it will help them build a collaborative education environment. The platform gives you a dashboard to manage notifications from school and your homework, and also provides a virtual white board for hand-drawn content that can be shared between teachers and their children.
Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the upcoming batch of its incubation program starting next January. The application deadline is November 8th. The incubator’s parent company, Digital Garage, will also launch a co-working space in San Francisco pretty soon, where their incubated startups will be able to establish a base.
To commemorate the launch of the facility, the company plans to host Global Pitch 2013 on November 4th, and New Context Conference 2013 in San Francisco on November 5th and 6th. That’s just before digital agency Btrax’s SF Japan Night event at Pivotal Labs on November 7th.
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Rick Martin
