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Startup partners with TV station to give Japanese seniors work after retirement

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.11.01

Some of our readers may recall when we previously shared an interesting report from Japanese crowdsourcing website Crowdworks. The report indicated that seniors in Japan are turning to crowdsourced platforms for work. This shift will only accelerate as the country’s population grows older. The findings in that report pushed the crowdsourcing platform to make its next move, launching a crowdsourcing business in collaboration with a major TV station TV Tokyo, targeting seniors specifically [1].

Since the older segment of the population are typically dependent on television as a means of obtaining information, this partnership between the young startup and an established TV station makes perfect sense.

The two companies will make efforts to encourage more seniors engage in crowdsourced work, and they plan to launch skill certifications to enhance the movement. The official launch of the platform is set for November 4th, when TV Tokyo will broadcast a show titled Work After Retirement.

Crowdworks was first launched back in April of 2012, and has over 16,000 companies using its crowdsourced workforce to date.

This initiative aims for 100,000 registered users by end of September next year, as well as one billion yen worth of work for this particular segment.

In this case, people over the age of 50. ↩

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Now with over 1M downloads, Japanese news app Gunosy launches ad network

gunosy

Takeshi Hirano 2013.11.01

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Gunosy, the startup behind the news curation app of the same name, announced today it will launch a performance-based ad service next week, which it will call Gunosy Ads. The new service allows advertisers to distribute ads to clusters of users according to their interests. The company has also just revealed that their app surpassed 1 million downloads last month. The Gunosy Ads service started distributing ads on a test basis last month, and the diagrams below were measured in the period. The CTR (click through rate) and CVR (conversion rate) figures are surprisingly high. CVR is mostly just above 10% on average, and you typically won’t see such a high number on other ad networks. By going ahead with the launch, it shows that Gunosy sees potential in this new advertising stream. In addition, Shinji Kimura, a pioneer in the Japanese ad-tech sector, has joined their team. He founded ad-tech startup Adlantis back in 2007, subsequently selling it off to Gree for 1.6 billion yen (approximately $16 million) back in 2011. We had a chance to hear more from Kimura about the company’s future strategy, and we hope to share that very…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Gunosy, the startup behind the news curation app of the same name, announced today it will launch a performance-based ad service next week, which it will call Gunosy Ads. The new service allows advertisers to distribute ads to clusters of users according to their interests.

The company has also just revealed that their app surpassed 1 million downloads last month.

The Gunosy Ads service started distributing ads on a test basis last month, and the diagrams below were measured in the period. The CTR (click through rate) and CVR (conversion rate) figures are surprisingly high. CVR is mostly just above 10% on average, and you typically won’t see such a high number on other ad networks. By going ahead with the launch, it shows that Gunosy sees potential in this new advertising stream.

In addition, Shinji Kimura, a pioneer in the Japanese ad-tech sector, has joined their team. He founded ad-tech startup Adlantis back in 2007, subsequently selling it off to Gree for 1.6 billion yen (approximately $16 million) back in 2011.

We had a chance to hear more from Kimura about the company’s future strategy, and we hope to share that very soon. So stay tuned!

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Punishment Punch Girl: Japan’s latest ‘weird’ game is surprisingly good

Punishment Punch Girl

SCORE 1,484

Rick Martin 2013.10.31

One of Japan’s hottest new mobile games over the past couple of weeks has been Punishment Punch Girl, a (strange) new fighter game from e-Dragon Power and Craft & Meister. I understand that well-known game designer Noritaka Funamizu (C&M), of Street Fighter II and Monster Hunter fame, worked on this title. The premise of the game, as noted already by a few Western publications, is an unusual one. The hero is a high school girl who is tasked with beating up perverts (often very strangely dressed ones) who lurk on the train. Looking beyond the unusual concept, Punch Girl is a really fun game. I’ve been playing it over the past few days, but I confess, it’s not something I really want to play when anyone is looking! In addition to the overall style of Punch Girl, the fun part of the gameplay is mastering the technique of, well, kicking ass. You have to keep your enemy airborne long enough to inflict the required amount of hits, and to do that you’ll need variety of directional attacks. Building a repertoire of attacks (they can be added in exchange for your collected experience points) really hooks you into the game. You…

One of Japan’s hottest new mobile games over the past couple of weeks has been Punishment Punch Girl, a (strange) new fighter game from e-Dragon Power and Craft & Meister. I understand that well-known game designer Noritaka Funamizu (C&M), of Street Fighter II and Monster Hunter fame, worked on this title.

The premise of the game, as noted already by a few Western publications, is an unusual one. The hero is a high school girl who is tasked with beating up perverts (often very strangely dressed ones) who lurk on the train. Looking beyond the unusual concept, Punch Girl is a really fun game. I’ve been playing it over the past few days, but I confess, it’s not something I really want to play when anyone is looking!

In addition to the overall style of Punch Girl, the fun part of the gameplay is mastering the technique of, well, kicking ass. You have to keep your enemy airborne long enough to inflict the required amount of hits, and to do that you’ll need variety of directional attacks. Building a repertoire of attacks (they can be added in exchange for your collected experience points) really hooks you into the game. You can check out our video demo above to see how this works.

Putting cute girl characters in the role of a fighter always seems to prove popular in various media (see Lollipop Chainsaw, Machine Girl [1]), not surprisingly among male audiences. So far it is doing pretty good here in Japan, becoming the second ranked iOS app overall back on October 29, having initially launched back on October 16. Currently it is ranked 22nd overall, although it was still in the top ten just earlier today.

On one hand, I hope the game gets published in English as well because I think it could really do well with Western audiences. But at the same time, I think the sense of humor behind the game might just be passed off as Japan being weird, rather than Japan being creative and funny.

Overall I think it is a pretty interesting game. It’s very enjoyable, and hard to put down once you get going. If you’d like to give it a try, you can get it as a free download over on the Japanese App Store.

Or maybe it’s just chainsaws? What if Evil Dead 2 was remade with a school girl? Hmmm… ↩

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Japan’s Zozotown unveils new app, but some fashion retailers want to ban it from stores

SCORE 1,219

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.31

Start Today, the company behind Japanese fashion commerce site Zozotown, recently announced that it is receiving applications for a new sort of Showrooming feature for offline fashion retailers. It is called Wear and it launches today. The service uses a mobile app (for iOS and Android) that lets consumers scan a barcode of a clothes item at a participating offline retailer, and then purchase it online on Zozotown or other sites. When you buy online, a sales commission will then be paid from Zozotown to the retailer. This is called ‘showrooming’, and is becoming more common consumer behavior not only in Japan but also in the US and China. According to Nikkei, some retailers are receptive to Zozotown’s efforts — but others are not. Lumine, a fashion mall chain in Tokyo, has asked their tenent stores to prohibit photo-shooting in stores by consumers, a firm stance against the showrooming wave. In contrast, Japanese department store Parco has partnered with the e-commerce company and agreed to receive a commission when the store succeeds in driving traffic to Zozotown. We are told that about 200 fashion brands will participate in the program. We’ve seen major e-commerce players exploring new opportunities in this…

The service uses a mobile app (for iOS and Android) that lets consumers scan a barcode of a clothes item at a participating offline retailer, and then purchase it online on Zozotown or other sites. When you buy online, a sales commission will then be paid from Zozotown to the retailer. This is called ‘showrooming’, and is becoming more common consumer behavior not only in Japan but also in the US and China.

According to Nikkei, some retailers are receptive to Zozotown’s efforts — but others are not. Lumine, a fashion mall chain in Tokyo, has asked their tenent stores to prohibit photo-shooting in stores by consumers, a firm stance against the showrooming wave. In contrast, Japanese department store Parco has partnered with the e-commerce company and agreed to receive a commission when the store succeeds in driving traffic to Zozotown. We are told that about 200 fashion brands will participate in the program.

We’ve seen major e-commerce players exploring new opportunities in this space. Amazon Japan is intensifying fashion sales by leveraging its same-day delivery advantage. Meanwhile Rakuten launched an e-commerce store in partnership with popular fashion retailer Beams back in May. Japan’s leading fashion retailer Magaseek partnered with NTT Docomo and to try to cultivate a revenue stream using the latter’s mobile subscriber userbase.

In addition to this latest initiative, Start Today has been busy as well, acquiring e-commerce platform developer Stores.jp back in July, and partnering with fashion coordination site iQON last year.

It will be interesting to see how the company will evolve the fashion retail scene in Japan. Our Bridge team is now working on a report on the O2O market in Japan and around the world. We expect to share some of our insights here soon, so please stay tuned.

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Japanese marketing campaign puts idol group HKT48 in ‘selfie’ videos

HKT48
Lotte

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.10.31

Japan’s AKB48 is the biggest pop idol group in terms of CD sales. So it’s only natural for companies and brands to try leverage that marketing power in their promotions. Google Plus did so once before, as did game developer Nijibox with the band’s Indonesian sister group JKT48. And now sweets manufacturer Lotte, famous for its signature Ghana chocolate, is getting in on the action as well. The company has a new promotion called Lotte x HKT48 Jidori 48. ‘Jidori’ means ‘selfie’ in Japanese, and HKT48 stands for Hakata48, another branch of the huge idol group. On a special site dedicated to this new campaign, you can find videos of the group’s 39 members, where each one poses as if they are feeding you chocolate. Users can cast their vote for their favorite video, and the most popular idol will win a TV commercial all by herself. In that commercial she will call out a name of one lucky user who will be chosen by lottery. The campaign has proven quite popular already, and in the first three days after launch there were around 2.7 million votes. Whether we like it or not, ‘selfies’ are an important part of self-expression…

And now sweets manufacturer Lotte, famous for its signature Ghana chocolate, is getting in on the action as well. The company has a new promotion called Lotte x HKT48 Jidori 48. ‘Jidori’ means ‘selfie’ in Japanese, and HKT48 stands for Hakata48, another branch of the huge idol group.

On a special site dedicated to this new campaign, you can find videos of the group’s 39 members, where each one poses as if they are feeding you chocolate. Users can cast their vote for their favorite video, and the most popular idol will win a TV commercial all by herself. In that commercial she will call out a name of one lucky user who will be chosen by lottery. The campaign has proven quite popular already, and in the first three days after launch there were around 2.7 million votes.

Whether we like it or not, ‘selfies’ are an important part of self-expression for many young people in Japan. These videos by HKT48 are all selfies, with idols using lots of different ideas to make their own video stand out from the rest.

To learn more about this unique campaign, check out the TV commercial below.

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Japanese restaurant finder service Retty sees over 1M monthly visitors

Takeshi Hirano 2013.10.30

See the original story in Japanese Retty, a Tokyo-based startup providing social restaurant recommendations, announced that it has surpassed 1 million monthly unique visitors this month (see chart below). It’s growing by 200,000 visitors every month, and the month of October was almost double what it was back in August. The company’s CEO Kazuya Takeda attributes this growth spurt to a recently added feature that lets users easily to find their favorite restaurants. 65% of Retty visitors come from smartphones, and it has over 600,000 review postings for 160,000 restaurants. He adds: Some foodies are using our app to just explore restaurants in their spare time. In addition to the community function, we plan to make the app more helpful for you to find restaurants you will like. Takeda also revealed that his team will move to a monetization phase early next year. For restaurants owners, you will be able to get in touch with users who like your restaurant as well. The company has the eventual goal of reaching over 15 million monthly unique visitors in two years.

See the original story in Japanese

Retty, a Tokyo-based startup providing social restaurant recommendations, announced that it has surpassed 1 million monthly unique visitors this month (see chart below). It’s growing by 200,000 visitors every month, and the month of October was almost double what it was back in August.

The company’s CEO Kazuya Takeda attributes this growth spurt to a recently added feature that lets users easily to find their favorite restaurants. 65% of Retty visitors come from smartphones, and it has over 600,000 review postings for 160,000 restaurants. He adds:

Some foodies are using our app to just explore restaurants in their spare time. In addition to the community function, we plan to make the app more helpful for you to find restaurants you will like.

Takeda also revealed that his team will move to a monetization phase early next year. For restaurants owners, you will be able to get in touch with users who like your restaurant as well.

The company has the eventual goal of reaching over 15 million monthly unique visitors in two years.

Startup partners with TV station to give Japanese seniors work after retirement

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