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Toreta: A new reservation management app for restaurants in Japan

Junya Mori 2013.12.20

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. ↩

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Postach.io: Could this be the perfect blog platform for Japan?

Rick Martin 2013.12.19

There are so many ways for people to start a blog these days. The recent trend of ‘static’ blog services like Scriptogr.am and Ghost are refreshing, because for a personal or casual blog, there really shouldn’t be any reason that you must have your own server running a database [1]. Dropbox lets is publish to the web, and a solution like Calepin (for example) can take advantage of that, serving your blog’s files from there. The idea behind Postach.io is similar. The brainchild of Vancouver-based Input Logic, it uses Evernote to post content to your blog, letting users choose between a number of wonderful design templates as well. The startup is off to a good start, having joined Evernote’s accelerator class having won the company’s Devcup this year. To date, I’m told there are 21,000 people blogging with Postachio so far. The big advantage for a service like this is that it enlists users by finding them on a platform they already use. They already live in Evernote, and can easily publish to Postachio just by adding a note with the tag ‘published’ to a specified Evernote notebook. Big in Japan About 20% of Evernote’s users (and about 30% of…

The idea behind Postach.io is similar. The brainchild of Vancouver-based Input Logic, it uses Evernote to post content to your blog, letting users choose between a number of wonderful design templates as well. The startup is off to a good start, having joined Evernote’s accelerator class having won the company’s Devcup this year. To date, I’m told there are 21,000 people blogging with Postachio so far.

The big advantage for a service like this is that it enlists users by finding them on a platform they already use. They already live in Evernote, and can easily publish to Postachio just by adding a note with the tag ‘published’ to a specified Evernote notebook.

apex — One of Postachio’s many themes, Apex

Big in Japan

About 20% of Evernote’s users (and about 30% of its revenue) come from Japan. Docomo, of course, was an early investor in Evernote [2], and has promoted Evernote Premium to its users. So the ties to Japan are already in place for Postachio to make this sort of overseas jump. So naturally, I was curious to see if the Postachio had any plans to push their blogging service in the country. Co-founder and designer Shawn Adrian explained a little their plans for the next year [3]:

We plan to internationalize, and a Japanese version is in the works. […] We’re going really dig in and improve our themes and the community around them. We’re also launching new social features to help users build their audience, and tools for pro bloggers and companies.

I understand the team has already met some representatives from Docomo Ventures in Silicon Valley, and I expect that whenever a localized version is ready, that it would be very well received here.

The team is also thinking to integrate other platforms too, letting people publish from just about anywhere. For me, I like the possibilities of publishing a Markdown note (Postachio does support Markdown) via Evernote’s publish-over-email function, sending from the mobile Drafts app on iOS.

Evernote's APAC GM Troy Malone users Postachio — Evernote’s APAC GM Troy Malone users Postachio

Static blogs are very trendy these days, but the degree of difficulty for many solutions like Jekyll or Pelican, or even the aforementioned Scriptogram, can be difficult for an average user to wrap their head around. Postachio, for someone who already understands Evernote, is very easy and accessible [4].

I got in touch with some Evernote reps here in Asia just to see how much this Postachio has caught on within the company. While I didn’t get any specific numbers I’m told that APAC general manager Troy Malone is a huge fan, running his own blog on Postachio. Even the Evernote South East Asia blog runs Postachio.

My colleagues here at The Bridge frequently share notes published to the web with Evernote. This interests me, since I myself tend to use Dropbox for that, and I wonder how many other Japanese users also prefer Evernote for web publishing. Perhaps I’m reading too much into a very small difference, but I think this sort of preference could bode well for Postachio.

To learn more about Postachio, check out their video demo below.

Or at least, no reason to pay for a server. ↩
Or more specifically, Docomo Capital. ↩
The other co-founder (and coder) is Gavin Vickery, and the third member is programmer Brandon Brown. ↩
As for my own preference, I’m planning to switch over my personal site to Pelican from Drupal pretty soon. I’d happily use something like Postachio, but because I’m studying Python, I’m going to opt for Pelican. I should also take this opportunity to express how much I really despise WordPress. It started out well, but when the WYSIWYG started randomly injected span and div tags into my code, I decided I had had enough. We still use WordPress on this blog, but for me, it’s not without frequent curse words. ↩

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Lancers CEO Yosuke Akiyoshi on obstacles facing crowdsourcing in Japan

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.19

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 See the original article in Japanese We conducted many interviews about consumer-to-consumer (C2C) businesses at the recent Infinity Ventures Summit. Today we have a conversation from that event that we had with Yosuke Akiyoshi, the CEO of Lancers, a leading startup in Japan’s crowdsourcing space. The Bridge: Here I’ve been interviewing many people from the C2C businesses. One of the hot topics among those people lately is Crowdworks’ recent fund raising. Akiyoshi: Looking back on the five years since we launched our crowdsourcing business, the space has really changed a lot. We target people with basic knowledge of the internet, and among those people, words such as ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘Lancers’ became better known. It took four years for the total number of users (workers who receive orders) to reach 100,000. The number rapidly grew to 200,000 this October, and 220,000 last month. It could surpass 300,000 early next year. But some users still feel they don’t fully understand the system. So, we need to better educate them. In that sense, the 1.1 billion yen (raised by Crowdworks) means a lot in developing the industry. The Bridge: You announced…

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

See the original article in Japanese

We conducted many interviews about consumer-to-consumer (C2C) businesses at the recent Infinity Ventures Summit. Today we have a conversation from that event that we had with Yosuke Akiyoshi, the CEO of Lancers, a leading startup in Japan’s crowdsourcing space.

The Bridge: Here I’ve been interviewing many people from the C2C businesses. One of the hot topics among those people lately is Crowdworks’ recent fund raising.

Akiyoshi: Looking back on the five years since we launched our crowdsourcing business, the space has really changed a lot. We target people with basic knowledge of the internet, and among those people, words such as ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘Lancers’ became better known. It took four years for the total number of users (workers who receive orders) to reach 100,000. The number rapidly grew to 200,000 this October, and 220,000 last month. It could surpass 300,000 early next year. But some users still feel they don’t fully understand the system. So, we need to better educate them. In that sense, the 1.1 billion yen (raised by Crowdworks) means a lot in developing the industry.

The Bridge: You announced today that Lancers will have partnership with GMO Epsilon Inc.

Akiyoshi: GMO Epsilon offers payment services, and lots of work opportunities will arise due to the implementation of the service. Many of such work orders will be placed on Lancers.

The Bridge: The fast-growing aspects of crowdsourcing tend to get a lot of attention. But many services struggle to build a solid culture for C2C and B2C businesses. What kind of issues do you face?

Akiyoshi: Users are increasing, and I don’t see any problem with that. The problem lies on the side of the companies. Currently, there are a core group of companies who are accustomed to the system. But the goal is for any company to use the system. And there are issues that need to be overcome.

The Bridge: I see.

Akiyoshi: First, direction. When a company places an order, it needs to divide the work. But many companies get stuck at this point.

The Bridge: For example, for a web-design work order, work needs to be divided into coding, writing, and programming, with an order made for each. We plan to solve this issue by holding seminars for companies and dividing up the process control of the system. Also, product managers who can understand and handle the process are needed. We aim to implement more training to increase the amount of such product mangers. We need to enlighten companies.

The Bridge: When you enlighten companies, so to speak, which advantages of Lancers do you emphasize?

Akiyoshi: We tell them the overall advantages in speed, cost and resources.

The Bridge: What about users who receive orders? How do you educate them? I heard you often visit local areas.

Akiyoshi: I have already visited about 15 regions. I realized it is important to have face-to-face communication and to solve such issues. … There are few jobs in local regions. Businesses in Tokyo take jobs from the local. There are few useful communities where you can find opportunities, unlike Tokyo.

The Bridge: How long do you think it will take for crowdsourcing to be accepted as a new kind of work style?

Akiyoshi: It depends on how we measure the success, although we have set a metric. Right now, there are about 200 workers who can make a living just from their Lancers work. We’d like to increase that figure to 10,000 by 2017. But it will take much longer to completely change people’s way of working.

The Bridge: It will certainly take a while. So what number or metric do you currently care about the most?

Akiyoshi: Focusing on improving the users’ experiences, we pay attention to the repeat customer rate. Of course we look at the number of the work orders and the member total at the same time.

The Bridge: Thank you for your time.

I got the impression that more workers understand the concept of crowdsourcing these days. But there are still lots of obstacles that get in the way of companies using crowdsourcing. It’s not only about speed and cost, but quality needs to be considered. And it requires more understanding from companies about how to use the system and handle the process control. That knowledge is not open enough, and it becomes an obstacle.

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Wind wonderfully visualized: First Tokyo, now the world

SCORE 1,316

Rick Martin 2013.12.18

A few weeks ago I was lucky to meet with the incredibly clever Cameron Beccario over beers with some friends here in Tokyo [1]. He had just recently created his Tokyo Wind Map, a visualization of publicly available wind data using the very slick D3 Javascript library. Attentive readers of our site might recall that we also used D3 for our own Japan Internet Map. It’s a really great tool. Anyway, since that evening Cameron has – quite literally – moved on to bigger things, and has now published his latest project, simply called “Earth”. The Tokyo wind map was pretty jaw dropping when I first saw it, but this global view takes it to a new level, showing a more insightful view of current [2] weather conditions across the globe. Cameron, who took on these projects merely as a way to learn Javascript, explains: I had seen the US Wind Map and thought it was so amazing that I could follow its example and build a version for Tokyo, learning Javascript in the process. And once the Tokyo map was complete, the next logical step was the entire planet. I hadn’t seen it done before and thought it would…

earth-wind-map-cameron-Beccario — Live version at earth.nullschool.net

Anyway, since that evening Cameron has – quite literally – moved on to bigger things, and has now published his latest project, simply called “Earth”. The Tokyo wind map was pretty jaw dropping when I first saw it, but this global view takes it to a new level, showing a more insightful view of current [2] weather conditions across the globe. Cameron, who took on these projects merely as a way to learn Javascript, explains:

I had seen the US Wind Map and thought it was so amazing that I could follow its example and build a version for Tokyo, learning Javascript in the process. And once the Tokyo map was complete, the next logical step was the entire planet. I hadn’t seen it done before and thought it would be nice to see how the air actually flows around the planet. Clouds tell part of the story, but compare with the amazing images of Jupiter and Saturn. Well, Earth is just like that, if only we can see the wind and oceans.

Creations like Cameron’s are a wonderful example of what can happen when data is made available on the web for public consumption. He adds:

There’s all this data out there hiding in tables, binary files, behind obscure but wide open doors. Like the Tokyo pollutant measurements. But there was no way to visualize it.

Thankfully, he found a way. His interactive world lets explore different areas, zooming in for a closer view if you need, to see how wind behaves all around the globe. If you’d like to explore his code, it’s all openly available over on Github. You can throw some support behind it by liking the project’s Facebook page.

I’m not familiar of many people working with D3 here in Japan, but for anyone who wants to learn more, there is a Japanese intro over on Mike Bostock’s Github page (he developed the project), and there are also some useful tutorials over on dotinstall.com if you’d like to dive deeper.

tokyo-wind-map-cameron-beccario — Cameron’s first effort, a Tokyo Wind Map

David, the author of the recent viral blog post ‘Why Japanese web design is so… different’ was also there, as was Søren Jones, one of the smartest data/scripting geeks I know. I really need to get out more… ↩
Not quite real time, but updated every three hours as the source data updates. ↩

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Pairy, Japan’s social network for couples, raises $1 million

pairy

Junya Mori 2013.12.18

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Timers, the startup behind social network app Pairy, announced today that it has raised $100 million yen (approximately $970,000) from four Japanese investment firms: Incubate Fund, Itochu Technology Ventures, East Ventures, and NTT Docomo Ventures. Pairy helps couples better communicate with each other, with functions like private photo sharing, chatting, and sharing. This is the first funding for the company since its launch one and half years ago. They intend to use the funds to step up their engineering efforts. Our readers may recall that Pairy won the top award at Docomo incubator’s demo day, as well as the FSV Meetup 2013, a pitch event back in September hosted by Fuji Startup Ventures. As a result of these milestones, they surpassed 100,000 users in September, and now has secured this most recent funding. The company’s CEO Toshimasa Takahashi says: Metrics like user activity rate and retention rate are pretty high on our app. We haven’t made massive efforts to promote it, but viral penetration has helped our growth. We expect to keep this up by improving the app to deliver a better user experience. As a sort of closed social network service for…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Timers, the startup behind social network app Pairy, announced today that it has raised $100 million yen (approximately $970,000) from four Japanese investment firms: Incubate Fund, Itochu Technology Ventures, East Ventures, and NTT Docomo Ventures. Pairy helps couples better communicate with each other, with functions like private photo sharing, chatting, and sharing.

div-demoday-pairy — Pairy’s Takahashi (right) won at the recent Docomo demo day event.

This is the first funding for the company since its launch one and half years ago. They intend to use the funds to step up their engineering efforts. Our readers may recall that Pairy won the top award at Docomo incubator’s demo day, as well as the FSV Meetup 2013, a pitch event back in September hosted by Fuji Startup Ventures. As a result of these milestones, they surpassed 100,000 users in September, and now has secured this most recent funding. The company’s CEO Toshimasa Takahashi says:

Metrics like user activity rate and retention rate are pretty high on our app. We haven’t made massive efforts to promote it, but viral penetration has helped our growth. We expect to keep this up by improving the app to deliver a better user experience.

As a sort of closed social network service for couples, Pairy is forced to compete with other similar apps, and even messaging apps in general. Takahashi explained how his team hopes to differentiate from the others.

We can’t differentiate through marketing. Our focus is making the quality of our service extremely high. That will create a strong viral effect and help our user acquisition efforts. Marketing adds values to our product, but I think direct product improvement can really help speed user growth. We will keep differentiating by giving users a better experience.

There are many services out there like this that are intended for couples. But many of them have no difference in their functions. Some services will survive but others will disappear. Takahashi pointed out what he thinks will make the difference.

What’s most important is whether your app can make your users happier when they use it. Our approach may sometimes stray from the rules of usability, but we have been designing it always considering whether our app can make our users happier.

Pairy expects to introduce a multilingual version in English, Chinese, and Korean, as well as a new app for married couples early next year. They’re hoping to acquire a million users by next October in the Japanese market alone.

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The storefront of the future? Tokyo department store digitizes its window display

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.12.18

Many national convenient store chains in Japan have installed digital signage at their storefronts to lure customers inside. The retail industry is typically aggressive, using enormous bright screens to showcase different products, to both encourage more purchases and to communicate their message. Japanese department store Parco has long been the center of the nation’s trendy fashions. And recently it has installed digital signage at its Shibuya storefront. There are six vertical screens that make up its ‘P-Wall’, showcasing the different products available on the Parco website, including 1,000 products by various brands. People can touch different products to see more details, or even check if that product is available in different colors. This P-Wall initiative was completed in collaboration with Tokyo-based TeamLab, and you can get a better idea of how the screens work in the video below. The six adjacent screens replace the traditional shop display windows, letting customers check out a variety of products in one place instead of browsing store after store. Many stores are trying to establish a better connection between their real stores and their online malls, and we’ll have to wait to see if P-Wall proves an effective solution for this problem.

Japanese department store Parco has long been the center of the nation’s trendy fashions. And recently it has installed digital signage at its Shibuya storefront. There are six vertical screens that make up its ‘P-Wall’, showcasing the different products available on the Parco website, including 1,000 products by various brands.

People can touch different products to see more details, or even check if that product is available in different colors. This P-Wall initiative was completed in collaboration with Tokyo-based TeamLab, and you can get a better idea of how the screens work in the video below.

The six adjacent screens replace the traditional shop display windows, letting customers check out a variety of products in one place instead of browsing store after store. Many stores are trying to establish a better connection between their real stores and their online malls, and we’ll have to wait to see if P-Wall proves an effective solution for this problem.

Toreta: A new reservation management app for restaurants in Japan

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