Santa Company, an anime production team led by Japanese filmmaker Kenji Itoso, recently met its funding goal of $50,000 goal on Kickstarter. This fundraising effort comes after the team attempted to raise money on Japanese crowdfunding site Anipipo earlier this year, falling short of its target.
Itoso has produced animations, films and music videos, and his works have been featured at many international film festivals and won prominent awards from them. With this new project, he hopes to complete a 30 minute anime and present it for children and families in affected areas of the 2011 earthquake. The video below gives a more detailed introduction.
Here are a few other Japanese projects that have leverage Kickstarter to raise funds.
October 2012 – ‘Kick-Heart’ raised $201,164. Directed by Masaaki Yuasa of Product I.G.
June 2013 – ‘Are you enjoying the time of EVE?’ raised $215,433. Directed by Yasuhiro Yoshiura of Studio Rikka and Directions. This project aimed to produce an English-subtitled version of the anime. It raised more than 10 times than its target goal of $18,000.
August 2013 – ‘Little Witch Academia’ raised $625,518. Directed by Yo Yoshinari of Trigger. This project reached its target goal of $150,000 in just five or six hours after launching its project on Kickstarter.
Summing up the three projects above, and this most recent Santa Company project, Kickstarter has helped Japanese filmmakers raise over $110 million in total. We’ll see more Japanese anime projects raising money on Kickstarter, but I still wonder if it’s impossible for them to do so on Japanese crowdfunding sites.
Santa Company is looking for partners to work with them on collaborative businesses. If you are interested, we can encourage you to contact them.
We have previously featured Japan-based developer Kayac, the team behind the Dominos Japan Hatsune Miku augmented reality app among many other fun digital productions. Kayac was founded back in 2005, and has been known for its distinctive creative digital works ever since [1]. Kayac participates in April Fool’s day pranks just like other tech companies in Japan and around the world. But it also holds an interesting end-of-year sale, or ‘Nenmatsu-Sale’. During this sale, many of Kayac’s mobile apps and web services go on sale. It’s not just a discount on apps, but they are selling entire web services to anyone willing to acquire them. This year’s sale began on December 27th, with a total of 12 services are waiting to be acquired. One of the most expensive things up for sale is Kayac’s Q&A based music community service called ‘Ongakusuri’. It is available on iOS, Android, and on the web. Users on the site post their music-related questions, and other users can suggest music using Youtube videos. An example would be ‘Suggest songs that helps me with my long distance relationship’. Ongakusuri comes with a price tag of 15 million yen (or about $142,620). Other services on sale include…
We have previously featured Japan-based developer Kayac, the team behind the Dominos Japan Hatsune Miku augmented reality app among many other fun digital productions. Kayac was founded back in 2005, and has been known for its distinctive creative digital works ever since [1].
Kayac participates in April Fool’s day pranks just like other tech companies in Japan and around the world. But it also holds an interesting end-of-year sale, or ‘Nenmatsu-Sale’. During this sale, many of Kayac’s mobile apps and web services go on sale. It’s not just a discount on apps, but they are selling entire web services to anyone willing to acquire them. This year’s sale began on December 27th, with a total of 12 services are waiting to be acquired.
One of the most expensive things up for sale is Kayac’s Q&A based music community service called ‘Ongakusuri’. It is available on iOS, Android, and on the web. Users on the site post their music-related questions, and other users can suggest music using Youtube videos. An example would be ‘Suggest songs that helps me with my long distance relationship’. Ongakusuri comes with a price tag of 15 million yen (or about $142,620).
Other services on sale include Jsdo.it, a community for front-end engineers using HTML5, JavaScript, or CSS. This community, along with a social network for Flash creators called ‘Wonderfl’, can be purchased for 75 million yen. Fonta, a collaborative community where users upload their hand-written letters to create new fonts, is on sale for 300,000 yen.
Kayac also has nine smartphone apps up for sale for a more affordable price:
Music Party: an app that generates a playlist from playists on friend’s iPhones (1.5 million yen)
Lunch Chokin: lets you record and track your lunch spending (300,000 yen)
Calclock: a game where users try to complete a mathematical formula using the four digits on a clock (100,000 yen)
There are other unique but creepy (or ‘kimoi’ in Japanese) mobile apps such as Oshibori-Ningen and Kameleon Man on sale for 9,800 yen (or about $93). There is also a special offer where you can buy five Kimoi apps for 39,000 yen [2].
If you’re still looking to do some holiday shopping, Kayac’s list of products might be an interesting option.
Happy Holidays!
The company celebrated its 15th anniversary this past August with a neat website. ↩
For this last price, the numbers 3 and 9 read ‘san-kyu’ in Japanese, which sounds like ‘thank you’. ↩
Japan’s Nikkei reported today that Silicon Valley-based investment company WiL (World Innovation Lab) has formed a new fund focused on startups in Japan and the Valley, raising $300 million from a number of Japanese companies: All Nippon Airways, NTT Group, Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings, Hakuhodo DY Group, Daiwa Securities, JVC Kenwood, Benesse Holdings, and Innovation Network Corporation of Japan [1]. Their potential investees are startups developing new products and services in fields like consumer electronics, e-commerce, or motor vehicles, making the most of smartphone and big data technologies. They expect the size of each investment to be in the range from $5 million to $50 million, with about six to eight investments being made per year. The Nikkei says that $300 million is a figure that equate to 30% of all startup investments in Japan in FY 2012. The investment fund was founded by Japanese venture capitalist Gen Isayama, who previously worked at the investment firm DCM, where he invested in Renren, a social network service in Mainland China. According to his recent Facebook posting, this new effort was made possible by working with co-founding members Shiichi Saijo and Masataka Matsumoto [2]. Innovation Network Corporation of Japan is the country’s state-run…
Image credit: Big Stock Photo
Japan’s Nikkei reported today that Silicon Valley-based investment company WiL (World Innovation Lab) has formed a new fund focused on startups in Japan and the Valley, raising $300 million from a number of Japanese companies: All Nippon Airways, NTT Group, Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings, Hakuhodo DY Group, Daiwa Securities, JVC Kenwood, Benesse Holdings, and Innovation Network Corporation of Japan [1].
Their potential investees are startups developing new products and services in fields like consumer electronics, e-commerce, or motor vehicles, making the most of smartphone and big data technologies. They expect the size of each investment to be in the range from $5 million to $50 million, with about six to eight investments being made per year. The Nikkei says that $300 million is a figure that equate to 30% of all startup investments in Japan in FY 2012.
The investment fund was founded by Japanese venture capitalist Gen Isayama, who previously worked at the investment firm DCM, where he invested in Renren, a social network service in Mainland China. According to his recent Facebook posting, this new effort was made possible by working with co-founding members Shiichi Saijo and Masataka Matsumoto [2].
Shinichi Saijo was previously the CEOs of CyberAgent Ventures and CyberAgent America. He was appointed director at Japanese payment startup Coiney earlier this year, and has been helping Japanese startups expand their businesses. Masataka Matsumoto co-founded a web service company called P.I.M. in late 1990 and sold it off to Yahoo Japan back in 2000. He has held several executive posts at the portal company for almost ten years, but quit in 2012. ↩
Dudu Noy is the CMO at Ginger Software. Ginger’s Grammar Checker and Sentence Rephraser are available as desktop software, browser add-ons and Android mobile keyboard. Readers of our Japanese site may recall that we featured the company’s Japan launch back in April. I predict that 2014 will be remembered as the year that CaaS, or “Cognition-as-a-Service” platforms came of age. Cognition is historically a complex biological trait including skills such as decision making, problem solving, learning, reasoning, working memory and not least language, skills that today the computer sciences are chipping away at from various angles. With each major evolutionary step in computing we have seen over the last 30 years, from mainframes to PCs, the internet, cloud and SaaS, and now ubiquitous smart mobile, the new realm has not so much replaced but augmented what was there before. In the same way the promise of CaaS is to allow apps and services to function more intelligently and intuitively, allowing you to converse with them, ask questions, give commands and complete tasks more efficiently and conveniently. Apple’s Siri is one of the most famous cognition-based services in general use today. And now Google’s recent innovations to its search product for…
Dudu Noy is the CMO at Ginger Software. Ginger’s Grammar Checker and Sentence Rephraser are available as desktop software, browser add-ons and Android mobile keyboard. Readers of our Japanese site may recall that we featured the company’s Japan launch back in April.
Ginger CMO Dudu Noy
I predict that 2014 will be remembered as the year that CaaS, or “Cognition-as-a-Service” platforms came of age. Cognition is historically a complex biological trait including skills such as decision making, problem solving, learning, reasoning, working memory and not least language, skills that today the computer sciences are chipping away at from various angles.
With each major evolutionary step in computing we have seen over the last 30 years, from mainframes to PCs, the internet, cloud and SaaS, and now ubiquitous smart mobile, the new realm has not so much replaced but augmented what was there before.
In the same way the promise of CaaS is to allow apps and services to function more intelligently and intuitively, allowing you to converse with them, ask questions, give commands and complete tasks more efficiently and conveniently.
Apple’s Siri is one of the most famous cognition-based services in general use today. And now Google’s recent innovations to its search product for mobile, incorporating more contextual conversation for queries, pits it against Siri in the cognition-augmented search arena. In both cases, the technology itself is in the cloud, even though the device is in the user’s hand. Their main functions only work when there is an internet connection [1].
The reason is that the two necessary tricks to make sense of a user’s speech input – speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) – require cloud-based servers performing intensive processing of proprietary algorithms that is beyond the capabilities of handheld technology.
When it comes to NLP it is the sheer diversity of languages that makes it such a challenge. Old school NLP solutions were based on rigid rules that map inputs to a big list of known inputs. But the list can never be long enough, and the hard rules can never cover all the edge cases. So the experience of talking to a supposedly “smart assistant” always left the user frustrated.
You need more powerful, agile technologies that can figure out that in a sentence such as: “Yuko wants to eat an apple.”
Yuko is something that can have wants, and can eat things, and that apples are things that can be eaten. The technology needs to be able to do this for the vast majority of sentences the app is likely to encounter. This is incredibly hard, but here at Ginger and a few other places, we are doing it.
It is not just Apple and Google who are eyeing this space. IBM is now also a player with Watson, recently announcing that the same supercomputer-strength software that conquered the quiz show “Jeopardy!”, will be available to app developers through an API and software toolkit. This will allow cognitive apps that leverage cognition to be hosted in the cloud on Watson. This would obviously be a great thing for IBM’s cloud hosting service as well.
This “platform model” in tech business is nothing new of course. In recent years IBM did this with its Websphere application server technology, which went from an internal project to a software community of thousands of developers. Salesforce.com did this with its Force cloud-app development platform, as did Amazon with Amazon Web Services.
But what is different with CaaS platforms is that cognitive powers will be baked in to the operating system, and all the apps that are developed on that platform. That will bring intelligence to a mass public in a wide variety of as yet unimagined contexts.
At Ginger we have not opened up our technology as a platform via an API yet, but we are providing the benefits of its cognitive powers to a mass user base globally. Our technology uses statistical algorithms in conjunction with natural language processing, referencing a vast database of trillions of English sentences that have been scoured from the web. This allows us to work out what the users of our applications are trying to communicate, be it in Microsoft Office apps, Gmail, Facebook or wherever, and correct their mistakes and suggest improvements to their expressions.
One thing is for sure – this is a really interesting space to work, and it will be fun to see where computer based cognition will go in 2014.
As an exception, Siri can be used to control some local apps. ↩
See the original article in Japanese, posted earlier this year I recently had a chance to visit Bangkok, and the following is a conversation with many locals who have unique insights into the Thai startup scene [1]. Oranuch Lerdsuwankij (Mimee) from ThumbsUp Mimee is the cofounder of ThumbsUp, a partner media for The Bridge with whom we often exchange articles. ThumbsUp was founded in 2011 by a team of five, and currently there are seven members who run the Thai and English editions. While Mimee works as a consultant at another company, she operates ThumbsUp, organizes startup events, and hosts an IT-focused TV program call Thailand Can Do. Thailand has three telecommunications carriers: AIS, DTAC and TRUE. And all of them have startup programs. But the problem is that there is little difference among these three programs, and consequently the same startups tend to occupy the programs. So Mimee thinks it is necessary to expand the startup community, and she focuses on helping startups in Thailand expand overseas. Vincent Sethiwan & Permsiri Tiyavutiroj from Launchpad Tokyo-based Animation Crowd Funding platform, Anipipo was launched in 2013. The board members, Vincent Sethiwan and Permsiri Tiyavutiroj (Sam) are in Thailand most of time,…
I recently had a chance to visit Bangkok, and the following is a conversation with many locals who have unique insights into the Thai startup scene [1].
Oranuch Lerdsuwankij (Mimee) from ThumbsUp
Mimee is the cofounder of ThumbsUp, a partner media for The Bridge with whom we often exchange articles. ThumbsUp was founded in 2011 by a team of five, and currently there are seven members who run the Thai and English editions. While Mimee works as a consultant at another company, she operates ThumbsUp, organizes startup events, and hosts an IT-focused TV program call Thailand Can Do.
Thailand has three telecommunications carriers: AIS, DTAC and TRUE. And all of them have startup programs. But the problem is that there is little difference among these three programs, and consequently the same startups tend to occupy the programs. So Mimee thinks it is necessary to expand the startup community, and she focuses on helping startups in Thailand expand overseas.
Vincent Sethiwan & Permsiri Tiyavutiroj from Launchpad
Launchpad entrance
Tokyo-based Animation Crowd Funding platform, Anipipo was launched in 2013. The board members, Vincent Sethiwan and Permsiri Tiyavutiroj (Sam) are in Thailand most of time, founding a co-working space called Launchpad in November of 2012. The space is about a 10-minute walk from Chong Nonsi station, only two stations away from the downtown Bangkok. While many co-working spaces often use a room in a small building, Launchpad has its space on the first floor Sethiwan Tower, a fairly large building. I was quite surprised to see such a great location, and Sethiwan tells me that it’s a property owned by his family, as we might have guessed from the name!
Permsiri Tiyavutiroj (left) and Vincent Sethiwan (right)
Vincent previously participated in Alpha Lab, an accelerator program in Pittsburg. After he came back to Thailand, he got to know Sam while he was working at a Japanese consulting firm. They explained:
Although the three telecom carriers have startup programs, the startups participating in those programs are the same. What Thailand’s startups scene needs is not a pitch contest. Thai startups don’t really know how to do business. Then we got the idea of starting an incubation program. We’d like to offer hands-on training, and we will first accept only around three startups. […] We have a two-hour time difference between Tokyo and Bangkok though, and it would be great if we can do networking or share our pitches over Skype or something.
Amarit Charoenphan from Hubba
Another co-working space, Hubba is a renovated house with a garden located in the east of Bangkok, at Thong Lo, an area where many Japanese and western people live. The co-founder and director of Hubba, Amarit Charoenphan (pictured below, left), said he wanted to create a comfortable and relaxing atmosphere. Hubba is operated though organized events and paid membership. In the past, it was the organizer of Echelon Ignite, a localized vesion of the Singapore-based Echelon tech conference.
Hubba even has a shower, so for long events like the 54-hour Startup Weekend Bangkok, participants can refresh themselves. There are many Japanese restaurants and pubs around this area, a taste of home for any Japan’s startups who would like an office in Thailand.
Hubba’s backyard
Jon Russell of The Next Web & Paul Srivorakul from Ardent Capital
Jon Russel on the right, Photo by Elisha Ong
The last time I met Jon Russell was at Echelon, a tech conference held in Singapore. He often reports on Asia-based startups from his base in Bangkok. He referred us to Paul Srivorakul as a key person in the city. Paul is the founder of Ardent Capital and he co-invested in Asian tech media site e27. He founded NewMedia Edge, Admax Network, Ensogo Group and sold each business to STW Group, Kimil Media and LivingSocial respectively.
Most entrepreneurs in Thailand have little knowledge of management. So Paul sends those who have management experience in major companies to be startup board members and let entrepreneurs learn from them. He focuses on Southeast Asia’s fast-growing market, and has shown interest in meeting Japanese startups who are willing to do business in Southeast Asia.
At Khaosan Road
Even though I spent just a weekend there, I met so many key people in Bangkok and learned a lot from them. My overall impression is that Thailand’s startup scene is just beginning. Startups like Oakbee, Wangnai or Builk are often mentioned as success stories. But success for Thai startups, according to Vincent Sethiwan, is to fundraise in Singapore and expand overseas. The mindset is very far from that of Silicon Valley’s startups and might be closer to the outlook of Japanese startups.
I found that many people have a good impression of Japanese people and products. While there are 18.3 million Facebook users in Thailand, Line has already attracts 12.3 million [2]. There are some great examples of implementing Japanese apps such as the case where Thailand’s police started using LINE for sharing investigation information with members.
For Japanese startups looking to do business in Asian countries, I hope they can consider Thailand as a possible choice.
This article was first published back in February, and has been slightly modified to create this English version. ↩
The Facebook data is according to research data by Cereja Technology, released on Januarty 8th, 2013. Line’s numbers are based on an infographic from Line’s blog, released on Januarty 18th, 2013. ↩
BearTail, the startup behind the cloud-based household accounting solution Dr. Wallet, announced today that it has raised $100 million yen (approximately $955,000) from three Japanese investment firms: Incubate Fund, Nissay Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital. The service lets you keep track of your personal finances by simply scanning your receipts. It was officially launched back in August, and is now available for the Android and iOS platforms, as well on the desktop. To differentiate from similar services, the app does not use OCR (optical character recognition), but instead depends on human-powered data entry to ensuring accuracy. It also automatically sorts and classifies your purchases. With this human-powered processing, the startup could reach data entry accuracy of up to 99.98%, likely enough to ease any user concerns over erroneous inputs. Using the funds raised this time, they hope to develop a function that lets you know the best products to buy from partnering supermarkets or groceries, based on your purchase history. This feature resembles another budget app, Zaim, which started providing back in July. Also operating in this space is Toppan Printing, with its Shufoo service, allowing households to check the latest supermarket discounts online. BearTail was chosen for the fifth…
The service lets you keep track of your personal finances by simply scanning your receipts. It was officially launched back in August, and is now available for the Android and iOS platforms, as well on the desktop. To differentiate from similar services, the app does not use OCR (optical character recognition), but instead depends on human-powered data entry to ensuring accuracy. It also automatically sorts and classifies your purchases. With this human-powered processing, the startup could reach data entry accuracy of up to 99.98%, likely enough to ease any user concerns over erroneous inputs.
Using the funds raised this time, they hope to develop a function that lets you know the best products to buy from partnering supermarkets or groceries, based on your purchase history. This feature resembles another budget app, Zaim, which started providing back in July. Also operating in this space is Toppan Printing, with its Shufoo service, allowing households to check the latest supermarket discounts online.
BearTail was chosen for the fifth batch of KDDI’s incubation program, and will be featured at the program’s demo day event, along with four other startups, on January 24th.
Teppei Wai
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Masaru Ikeda
The Bridge
Mimee is the cofounder of ThumbsUp, a partner media for The Bridge with whom we often exchange articles. ThumbsUp was founded in 2011 by a team of five, and currently there are seven members who run the Thai and English editions. While Mimee works as a consultant at another company, she operates ThumbsUp, organizes startup events, and hosts an IT-focused TV program call 
