Japanese recipe sharing site Cookpad announced today that it has acquired two companies doing similar business: US-based Allthecooks and Spain-based Mis Recetas. Cookpad has no intention to integrate its services with these two, but plans to share knowledge about providing better user experiences and explore possible business synergies.
Mis Recetas is a user-generated content platform for sharing recipes. It has 400 million users with about 6 million monthly visitors across Mexico, Argentina, Spain and other countries. Their iOS app is ranked tops in food and drink iOS category in 17 Spanish-speaking countries. It also provides an Android version.
Allthecooks is a US-based recipe site that launched back in December of 2012, and their smartphone app has over 1 million users and is ranked number one in the recipe app category on Google Play.
According to Japanese tech news sites CNet Japan and IT Media, Cookpad reportedly took over the Spanish company for 1.12 billion yen ($10.7 million), and the US company for a price ranging from $5 million to $10 million.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Sassor, the startup best known for creating its Energy Literacy Platform (ELP), announced today it has raised an undisclosed sum from Japanese semiconductor company Innotech. For those who are unfamiliar with their product, check out their promotional video below. The startup is a graduate from the first batch of Tokyo’s Open Network Lab incubator back in 2010, raising seed funding from another incubator, Samurai Incubate, that same year. Subsequently they joined China-based hardware accelerator HAXLR8R (pronounced ‘hackccelerator’) as well. The company first started its business by providing power consumption management solutions for households. But eventually, they got an offer from soup franchise Soup Stock Tokyo, which led them to develop a service for restaurants and retailers called ELP for Biz. This corporate version lets you manage power consumption for all your appliances, helping you optimize the energy expenditure in your business operations. Sasser co-founder Takayuki Miyauchi explains: In addition to providing these products, we’ve also been requested to advise corporate staffers how they can improve power consumption. But we don’t have enough people to consult with them face-to-face. So we’re planning to develop a system to automate the consultation process. Their corporate service…
The Sassor team: Co-founder/CEO Shuichi Ishibashi in the middle, co-founder Takayuki Miyauchi is second from the left.
Tokyo-based Sassor, the startup best known for creating its Energy Literacy Platform (ELP), announced today it has raised an undisclosed sum from Japanese semiconductor company Innotech. For those who are unfamiliar with their product, check out their promotional video below.
The startup is a graduate from the first batch of Tokyo’s Open Network Lab incubator back in 2010, raising seed funding from another incubator, Samurai Incubate, that same year. Subsequently they joined China-based hardware accelerator HAXLR8R (pronounced ‘hackccelerator’) as well.
The company first started its business by providing power consumption management solutions for households. But eventually, they got an offer from soup franchise Soup Stock Tokyo, which led them to develop a service for restaurants and retailers called ELP for Biz. This corporate version lets you manage power consumption for all your appliances, helping you optimize the energy expenditure in your business operations. Sasser co-founder Takayuki Miyauchi explains:
In addition to providing these products, we’ve also been requested to advise corporate staffers how they can improve power consumption. But we don’t have enough people to consult with them face-to-face. So we’re planning to develop a system to automate the consultation process.
Their corporate service has been adopted at about 50 retail stores. They’ve also been receiving inquiries about their products from home appliance makers in Japan and the rest of the world.
Innotech, the investor in this round, says their investment is not about the short-term, but rather is about potential business synergies that may happen in the future. It is said that Sassor has learned about logistics and warehouse management from Innotech.
Beyond the Internet of Things, Sassor is now looking beyond clean-tech to become more than a hardware-focused startup.
We expect to keep serving our customers by making the most of our experience in hardware development. We hope to change people’s quality of life through a combination of hardware and software rather than just providing technology-oriented products.
The company has been specializing in visualizing power consumption. But Miyauchi hopes to diversify their business to sectors like the health care industry.
We want to be a company that can create everything from software to hardware, with the ability to design a more whole service.
They are currently hiring new people to serve better more clients across many business sectors.
See the original story in Japanese. Our readers may recall our report from Line’s annual showcase event back in August where the company announced that it was planning to launch a flea market platform. The service went online today, and is available on Android as a trial version. It’s called Line Mall. The new app is fully integrated with the Line messaging app, and Line users can login without any additional sign-up process. But your credentials for the market platform are independent from the messaging platform, and your history of selling and buying items will be never shared with your friends on the messaging platform without your prior approval. On Line Mall, categories of products range from fashion, baby goods, interior items, consumer electronics, toys, hobby items, foods, and beauty products. To sell your own items on the platform, no preliminary review or subscription fee is required. However, to keep users safe from suspicious items, Line’s staffers review your item before listing it on the platform. When receiving a payment, the messaging company stands between the seller and buyer, in order to prevent possible unfair trades. You can also earn rewards points when you buy things from other users on…
Our readers may recall our report from Line’s annual showcase event back in August where the company announced that it was planning to launch a flea market platform. The service went online today, and is available on Android as a trial version. It’s called Line Mall.
The new app is fully integrated with the Line messaging app, and Line users can login without any additional sign-up process. But your credentials for the market platform are independent from the messaging platform, and your history of selling and buying items will be never shared with your friends on the messaging platform without your prior approval.
On Line Mall, categories of products range from fashion, baby goods, interior items, consumer electronics, toys, hobby items, foods, and beauty products. To sell your own items on the platform, no preliminary review or subscription fee is required. However, to keep users safe from suspicious items, Line’s staffers review your item before listing it on the platform. When receiving a payment, the messaging company stands between the seller and buyer, in order to prevent possible unfair trades. You can also earn rewards points when you buy things from other users on the platform.
The company plans to improve the app based on feedback from users, and will release the official version of the app next Spring. It’s expected that the iOS version will also be available soon.
Japan is often known for its unusual products, and we have written a little about them in the past. One app that is pretty ridiculous, but also very sneaky and smart at the same time, is Yahoo’s ‘Kiss-Shiyo!’ Android app. Its name when translated means “let’s kiss.” Think of a girl that you find attractive, for example. You’re not dating her and you probably won’t in the future, but you still find her attractive. You wonder what she would look like when she’s trying to kiss someone. That’s when the Kiss-Shiyo app comes in handy. The app will produce a picture showing you how she’d look when she’s about to kiss someone — all without revealing your ulterior motive. The brilliance of the app lies in how it produces this picture. Kiss-Shiyo is camouflaged to look like a fortune telling app. It displays a candle displayed on the screen, and if you ask her to blow it out and make a wish, the app takes her photo. That’s it. It’s super simple. If the girl has some sense of humor, you will not only get a cute photo of her, but hopefully also a good laugh. Kiss-Shiyo is a creation…
Japan is often known for its unusual products, and we have written a little about them in the past. One app that is pretty ridiculous, but also very sneaky and smart at the same time, is Yahoo’s ‘Kiss-Shiyo!’ Android app. Its name when translated means “let’s kiss.”
Think of a girl that you find attractive, for example. You’re not dating her and you probably won’t in the future, but you still find her attractive. You wonder what she would look like when she’s trying to kiss someone. That’s when the Kiss-Shiyo app comes in handy.
The app will produce a picture showing you how she’d look when she’s about to kiss someone — all without revealing your ulterior motive. The brilliance of the app lies in how it produces this picture. Kiss-Shiyo is camouflaged to look like a fortune telling app. It displays a candle displayed on the screen, and if you ask her to blow it out and make a wish, the app takes her photo. That’s it. It’s super simple.
If the girl has some sense of humor, you will not only get a cute photo of her, but hopefully also a good laugh.
Kiss-Shiyo is a creation that came out of Yahoo Japan’s Lab, an experimental initiave from the internet giant. On its website, the Lab showcases different projects, including Yubichizu and FashionNavi. Yubichizu is an intuitive web app for tablets that lets users draw on a map to find the distance to nearby stores for example. FashionNavi, meanwhile, is an color-focused image search designed specifically for fashion.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup U-note announced on Thursday that it has received investments from Venture United and Anri. Details were not disclosed, but the amount is thought to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Prior to this funding, the startup raised 11 million yen (approximately $130,000 [1]) from Party Factory, Voyage Ventures, and Movida Japan about a year ago. U-note is an collaborative event summary platform, providing text overviews of presentations, lectures or events. Typical topics could be notable business success stories, secrets for better sales, or useful tips for your work. Their users are mainly business people in their 20s and 30s. When the service was launched in July of 2012, they envisioned the it as a real-time note sharing service rather than an event summarization platform. But according to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Yuto Koide, his team made a change to their service during the last year. The result has been an acceleration in growth. Now they’re positioning U-note as an intelligence hub for business people, and their adjustment has resulted in constant monthly growth of over 140% in pageviews and unique users. Koide tells us a little more about their…
From the left: Anri Samata (general partner, The Anri fund), Yuto Koide (CEO, U-note), and Satoshi Maruyama (chief venture capitalist, Venture United)
Tokyo-based startup U-note announced on Thursday that it has received investments from Venture United and Anri. Details were not disclosed, but the amount is thought to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Prior to this funding, the startup raised 11 million yen (approximately $130,000 [1]) from Party Factory, Voyage Ventures, and Movida Japan about a year ago.
U-note is an collaborative event summary platform, providing text overviews of presentations, lectures or events. Typical topics could be notable business success stories, secrets for better sales, or useful tips for your work. Their users are mainly business people in their 20s and 30s.
When the service was launched in July of 2012, they envisioned the it as a real-time note sharing service rather than an event summarization platform. But according to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Yuto Koide, his team made a change to their service during the last year. The result has been an acceleration in growth. Now they’re positioning U-note as an intelligence hub for business people, and their adjustment has resulted in constant monthly growth of over 140% in pageviews and unique users.
Koide tells us a little more about their change in strategy:
We changed direction about half a year ago. Until then, we had been focusing on providing reports about speaking events, since we thought that kind of content had great value. Subsequently we found that many business people were looking for such useful tips. So we decided to make the platform serve that need.
We’ve recently seen a rise in media sites curating vertical content, such as Iemo (interior-focused) and Mery (girls interest). U-note is yet another that can be added to that list. Koide hopes to keep running it more as a web service instead of a media site. He explained:
We’d aiming to be somewhat like Cookpad, but for business. Cookpad helps housewives figure out what they’ll cook for a dinner. Similarly we are hoping to help business people with their business decisions. Currently our team creates the content, but we expect to get our users involved in creating content too. We hope our site will have more consumer-generated content.
The platform is publishing almost 20 to 30 articles a day, with the goal of increasing it to 100 articles a day within three months. These articles will be more focused on topics that offer value at all times (so-called ‘evergreen’ content) rather than news tips that lose freshness right away. Their current monetization streams are banner ads and branded content (advertorial articles). But they’re seeking other revenue streams as well.
The company aspires to accumulate 100,000 articles by the end of 2015. Using the funds raised this time, they plan to hire more engineers, enrich their content, and develop a mobile app.
We had a chance to speak with Venture United’s chief venture capitalist Satoshi Maruyama and Anri’s general partner Anri Samata about U-Note. Here’s a little of what they had to say:
Maruyama: When I met with them for the first time, they were still running as a note sharing service. But when I met again last summer, they’d already pivoted. I thought the idea – creating a platform for sharing business intelligence – was interesting.
Samata: It was almost a half year ago when I met with Koide for the first time. The more I meet and talk with him, the more I feel that he is strong-minded. He is a workaholic. … Rather than giving his product a good valuation, I thought his attitude at this age will definitely bring a market-disrupting product sooner or later. That’s why I invested in the company.
Maruyama: Through trial and error, Koide has grown up as an entrepreneur. Seeing how fast he has developed, I think he still has much room to grow further.
Koide: Maruyama told me he’s willing to work with us to develop better products. He was the only person who offered to do that. Samata believed in me rather than my product. That’s why I decided to ask them to invest.
Maruyama: This type of service will usually take a while to find success. But I think his team can keep ahead of the curve. From an investor’s perspective, I’ll try to help him make the most of his potential.
Using the currency conversion rate at that time. ↩
See the original article in Japanese Hitoshi Nakamura, the CEO of Toreta Inc., has released a new app for the food service industry called Toreta. Nakamura is best known as the founder FrogApps, which operates Japanese food photos sharing app, Mill. Our readers may recall that we previously spoke with Nakamura about his decision of stepping down as the CEO of FrogApps. And now, his new endeavor has been revealed [1]. Toreta is an iPad app that lets restaurants easily manage their customers’ reservations. It’s somewhat unique in that it targets restaurants as its users, and not customers. Reservation data is managed on the cloud, with features such as voice-recoding, hand-written notes, and the ability to send confirmation messages via SMS. You can get an the idea of how the service works in the introduction video above. The biggest advantage to using the app is that restaurants can shorten the time required to take and manage reservations. Nakamura further explains: Mill was a service for end users, but Toreta was designed and developed as a B2B service. As I have been in the restaurant busness, I have seen a lot of inefficiency and issues. With these issues in mind, the…
Hitoshi Nakamura, the CEO of Toreta Inc., has released a new app for the food service industry called Toreta. Nakamura is best known as the founder FrogApps, which operates Japanese food photos sharing app, Mill. Our readers may recall that we previously spoke with Nakamura about his decision of stepping down as the CEO of FrogApps. And now, his new endeavor has been revealed [1].
Toreta is an iPad app that lets restaurants easily manage their customers’ reservations. It’s somewhat unique in that it targets restaurants as its users, and not customers. Reservation data is managed on the cloud, with features such as voice-recoding, hand-written notes, and the ability to send confirmation messages via SMS. You can get an the idea of how the service works in the introduction video above.
The biggest advantage to using the app is that restaurants can shorten the time required to take and manage reservations. Nakamura further explains:
Mill was a service for end users, but Toreta was designed and developed as a B2B service. As I have been in the restaurant busness, I have seen a lot of inefficiency and issues. With these issues in mind, the solution I decided to work on is Toreta. A reservation book is one of the most important tools for restaurants when managing critical information. Mishandling the reservations could damage customers’ satisfaction. So Toreta aims to avoid that sort of situations.
Nakamura points out that human errors are inevitable when keeping track in a paper book. And existing solutions for reservation management are not ideal. The initial fee to start using Toreta is free, and users are charged 9,000 yen per month. The first month is free as part of a free trial.
He is also the owner of Butagumi, a restaurant located in Tokyo’s Nishi-Asabu area. ↩
Masaru Ikeda
Junya Mori
Yukari Mitsuhashi
