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Best of 2013: Nohana finds opportunities printing photos from mobile

Rick Martin 2013.12.24

As the year 2013 winds to a close, I thought I’d take a look back on some of the mobile apps and services that have really stood out. As a new parent, many of my favorite apps this year have been related to managing baby pictures. And here in Japan, Nohana is a must-have for any parent, letting them use pictures taken on their smartphones to create and print small photobooks, which are then delivered by mail. Users can order one free book per month, paying only a 90 yen shipping fee (or about $1). Additional books cost

What’s perhaps most interesting about Nohana to me is how it can bridge the digital divide in families. It provides an option to send a second copy of your photo book to another address, which could be grandparents, or other relatives who might not be very adept with smartphone communication [1].

At the end of this year we saw Nohana roll out a Nengajo (or Japanese New Year’s card) creation app, representing another means of monetizing for the company. And I expect that it’s a far more lucrative stream than the regular Nohana photo service. Each new year card costs 88 yen, with a minimum base fee of 1480 yen and then 525 yen for shipping.

It will be interesting to see if the company publishes other occasion specific apps in the coming year. I’m not sure if the folks at Nohana have any ambition to expand beyond Japan, but a Christmas card service would certainly come in handy in many countries.

In addition to Nohana, 2013 was a year that saw lots of fun photo apps emerge in Japan. This is proving to be an area of expertise for the country, with many startups innovating to compete for the country’s mobile photo market, and opportunities beyond.

For me, I typically use an application called Notabli to share photos with my own parents. ↩

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Highly anticipated Japanese app ‘Class’ proposes school-like social experience

Class
we-b

Junya Mori 2013.12.24

See the original article in Japanese Class, an app that has received much attention here in Japan even before its release, has finally launched. It’s a sort of social networking app where six users who don’t know each other form a virtual class for 15 days where they can interact with each other. Check out the video below for a more visual explanation of the concept. Yukinari Mako, the CEO of we-b, the company that operates the service, explained how he came up with the idea. When you’re busy working for a company, it can be difficult to make new friends. So I came up with the idea of creating new social opportunities for people who have the same problem. At school, we can easily make friends, because students share the same age and meet at the same location for class. My concept is based on the school experience that everyone understands. I decided to provide the same kind of experience on a digital platform. There are many online social services like Line, Path and Facebook. Is Class competing with these services? Mako says that those services are intended to strengthen existing friendships. But Class has a different concept. Mako…

See the original article in Japanese

Class, an app that has received much attention here in Japan even before its release, has finally launched. It’s a sort of social networking app where six users who don’t know each other form a virtual class for 15 days where they can interact with each other. Check out the video below for a more visual explanation of the concept.

Yukinari Mako, the CEO of we-b, the company that operates the service, explained how he came up with the idea.

When you’re busy working for a company, it can be difficult to make new friends. So I came up with the idea of creating new social opportunities for people who have the same problem.

At school, we can easily make friends, because students share the same age and meet at the same location for class. My concept is based on the school experience that everyone understands. I decided to provide the same kind of experience on a digital platform.

There are many online social services like Line, Path and Facebook. Is Class competing with these services? Mako says that those services are intended to strengthen existing friendships. But Class has a different concept. Mako adds:

There is no service that really focuses on building friendships from scratch. I am aiming to make Class into a major SNS.

So what is the app experience like? The user participates in the virtual class for two weeks until ‘graduation day’. In the class, some features are in place to enhance communication. There is a teacher character who encourages users’ interaction, and there are features that encourage users to share photos after lunch and exchange questions with each other.

The service uses Facebook credentials for login, but users remain anonymous in the service. Mako said that being anonymous would let users feel more comfortable about interacting.

The fee for Class will be free for a while. They plan to develop a paid system to charge for new classes later on. Mako expects that the Class experience can lead to real-life events and the company can monetize from there.

Class aims to reach 100,000 users in its first six months and 1 million users by the end of 2014. The app can be downloaded via the website.

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This Japanese vending machine is a virtual girl who sends you text messages

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.12.23

If you have ever visited Japan, you will know that there’s a vending machine on nearly every street. You may recall that we previously wrote about a futuristic vending machine which uses facial recognition technology to recommend suitable drinks to whoever is standing in front of it. And now just recently we found another interesting use of vending machines from a well known company. Georgia, is a popular canned coffee brand produced by Coca-Cola Japan. Canned coffee has always been a popular and affordable beverage among Japanese salary men long before Starbucks arrived on the scene. Even now many of them will opt for vending machine coffee instead of neighborhood stores or cafes. With this specific demographic in mind, Georgia came up with a clever promotion that involves vending machines and mobile phones. Their idea is to turn a relatively boring vending machine into a more neighborly store, doing so in an effort to prompt more purchases. Here’s how it works. You can download an app to your smartphone, and choose one female manager from a list. By reading the QR code posted on your most frequented vending machine, the app registers that machine as your favorite. The female manager…

Georgia, is a popular canned coffee brand produced by Coca-Cola Japan. Canned coffee has always been a popular and affordable beverage among Japanese salary men long before Starbucks arrived on the scene. Even now many of them will opt for vending machine coffee instead of neighborhood stores or cafes. With this specific demographic in mind, Georgia came up with a clever promotion that involves vending machines and mobile phones.

Their idea is to turn a relatively boring vending machine into a more neighborly store, doing so in an effort to prompt more purchases. Here’s how it works.

You can download an app to your smartphone, and choose one female manager from a list. By reading the QR code posted on your most frequented vending machine, the app registers that machine as your favorite.

The female manager will send you friendly texts whenever you’re nearby and you can then communicate back and forth with her.

This experience turns otherwise ordinary vending machines into more of a store-like destination that keeps you coming back. The Georgia app is available on both iOS and Android platforms.

You can check out the promotion video below to see how the app can bring some enjoyment to a working man’s life.

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Riding a media curation trend, Japanese entrepreneur launches interior design photo service

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.23

See the original article in Japanese In North America, photo curation platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Fancy has achieved dramatic growth in the past few years. Here in Japan we have a similar list concept called ‘Matome’, which roughly translates as ‘collecting information’. Blogs that collect and edit threads from 2channel, Japan’s biggest message board, and Naver Matome, a popular curation platform, are attracting lots of traffic. Such curated media are moving into more verticals recently, focusing on specific themes. Increased use of smartphones seems to be driving this trend as well. Another curation-focused media service that just recently launched is Iemo. It’s an online lifestyle site that specializes in interior decoration and housing. Iemo’s CEO, Mari Murata, is a female serial entrepreneur, previously one of the first hires by Japanese internet giant CyberAgent. The service is very simple. The users can create pages using interior design images from its database of 15,000 pictures. Upon the service’s release, there were about 2000 pages are already listed on the site. I expect that there are many users who check the site with their smartphones during their spare time. Iemo was modeled after US-based Houzz, which attracts around 16 million users per…

See the original article in Japanese

In North America, photo curation platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Fancy has achieved dramatic growth in the past few years. Here in Japan we have a similar list concept called ‘Matome’, which roughly translates as ‘collecting information’. Blogs that collect and edit threads from 2channel, Japan’s biggest message board, and Naver Matome, a popular curation platform, are attracting lots of traffic. Such curated media are moving into more verticals recently, focusing on specific themes. Increased use of smartphones seems to be driving this trend as well.

Another curation-focused media service that just recently launched is Iemo. It’s an online lifestyle site that specializes in interior decoration and housing. Iemo’s CEO, Mari Murata, is a female serial entrepreneur, previously one of the first hires by Japanese internet giant CyberAgent.

The service is very simple. The users can create pages using interior design images from its database of 15,000 pictures. Upon the service’s release, there were about 2000 pages are already listed on the site. I expect that there are many users who check the site with their smartphones during their spare time.

Iemo was modeled after US-based Houzz, which attracts around 16 million users per month. Murata said that the images in their database are borrowed from over 20 housing businesses, but users can add their own images as well.

My initial impression of the site was that it was pretty sophisticated, likely due to the founder’s past experiences in startups. Another Japanese competitor in the field, RoomClip reached 100,000 posts last September.

Considering the user shift to smartphones, it might be a good time to launch this kind of photo curation service now. I think we will see more similar media focused on other themes in the near future.

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HALOband: The wrist band that helps you control your smartphone

HALOband

Teppei Wai 2013.12.23

See the original story in Japanese. How much time is needed to launch a function on our smartphone? You will typically need to unlock it with a password or fingerprint, and then tap the screen two or three times. That takes five to 10 seconds at least. But now there’s a wearable device that proposes to cut this time significantly using NFC technology. It is called HALOband, and it was invented by the Shanghai-based startup of the same name. The wrist band is made of silicone and has three NFC chips. Two chips can read patterns of how you touch your smartphone to the band, for example, touch once to chip A, and then twice to chip B. In this way, it provides an alternative to actions like unlocking your phone, instead of the conventional identification methods using a password or fingerprint. You can also set other actions to launch other function, using different patterns. On Kickstarter, the company has already raised $1 million, reaching their first goal, but they’re still trying to raise another $1 million to add new functions. The video below shows you how it works. This would be especially useful for daily joggers and cyclists who…

See the original story in Japanese.

How much time is needed to launch a function on our smartphone? You will typically need to unlock it with a password or fingerprint, and then tap the screen two or three times. That takes five to 10 seconds at least. But now there’s a wearable device that proposes to cut this time significantly using NFC technology. It is called HALOband, and it was invented by the Shanghai-based startup of the same name.

The wrist band is made of silicone and has three NFC chips. Two chips can read patterns of how you touch your smartphone to the band, for example, touch once to chip A, and then twice to chip B. In this way, it provides an alternative to actions like unlocking your phone, instead of the conventional identification methods using a password or fingerprint. You can also set other actions to launch other function, using different patterns.

On Kickstarter, the company has already raised $1 million, reaching their first goal, but they’re still trying to raise another $1 million to add new functions. The video below shows you how it works. This would be especially useful for daily joggers and cyclists who have difficulty controlling a smartphone when on move.

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Google’s newly acquired robotics company wins DARPA Challenge Trials

Masaru Ikeda 2013.12.22

Recently Google acquired Schaft, a Japanese robotics company that grew out of the University of Tokyo. The company won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials this weekend in Miami, an event aimed at encouraging engineers across the world to develop disaster relief robots, in response to the accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. During the competition, robots were tested to measure their motor capabilities in eight different tasks like climbing up-and-down a ladder, removing obstacles and debris, and driving a car. 16 teams competed to advance to the 2014 Finals in an effort to win the $2 million grand prize. The Schaft team took top place, beating out tough competitors like IHMC, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT. The company was launched by humanoid scientists Yuto Nakahishi and Junichi Urata back in 2012. Prior to its acquisition by Google, it was backed by Tokyo-based startup incubator TomyK [1] and Tsuneishi Partners, the investment arm of a leading shipbuilding company in Japan. TomyK is focused on incubating hardware startups, and was launched by Tomihisa Kamada, the inventor of the Japanese feature phone web browser ‘i-mode‘. ↩

suzuki-nakanishi — From the Left: Schaft COO Narito Suzuki, CEO Yuto Nakanishi, and the Schaft robot (from DARPA video)

During the competition, robots were tested to measure their motor capabilities in eight different tasks like climbing up-and-down a ladder, removing obstacles and debris, and driving a car. 16 teams competed to advance to the 2014 Finals in an effort to win the $2 million grand prize. The Schaft team took top place, beating out tough competitors like IHMC, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT.

The company was launched by humanoid scientists Yuto Nakahishi and Junichi Urata back in 2012. Prior to its acquisition by Google, it was backed by Tokyo-based startup incubator TomyK [1] and Tsuneishi Partners, the investment arm of a leading shipbuilding company in Japan.

TomyK is focused on incubating hardware startups, and was launched by Tomihisa Kamada, the inventor of the Japanese feature phone web browser ‘i-mode‘. ↩

Best of 2013: Nohana finds opportunities printing photos from mobile

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Highly anticipated Japanese app ‘Class’ proposes school-like social experience

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HALOband: The wrist band that helps you control your smartphone

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