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ActShare: A mobile photo app based around everyday actions

Rick Martin 2014.01.06

ActShare is an interesting photo sharing app that breaks photos into action-based categories. So where many vertical photo apps focus narrowly on things like eating or traveling, ActShare encourages you to share a wider range of actions, such as drink, buy, listen, read, or make. When browsing content in the app, you can follow all the actions of a certain user, or you can follow more granularly by action. You can also sort by ‘recent’, ‘popular’ or ‘nearby’.

The app was developed by Tokyo based ~~Cougar Inc.~~ Couger Inc. [1], a four person team led by founder and CEO Atsushi Ishii. He explained a little more to me about why they wanted to make this app:

One day I realized that most of the posts on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are related to actions. So ActShare has some common act categories, and the concept is to be an “ActLog”. This means next generation of the Blog. I want to have an app with a simple user interface. I really think anybody can use this app.

This is a nice idea, although it would be great down the road if other forms of content could be shared besides photos. For example, an Amazon link to go with the ‘buy’ action, or even regular hyperlinks to connect followers to something you’ve read. Atsushi noted that this is something they would like to add in the future, and that would certainly be good to see.

There have been apps that have tried to do this sort of thing before. My colleague pointed me towards Impala, an app that uses image recognition technology to categorize images.

I think the app in its current form is a good start, but they might benefit by looking at the input method of some existing diary or logging apps, such as Day One or Notabli. The ability to search external content from within the app, perhaps using DuckDuckGo as Writing Kit does, might be a fun possibility to explore as well.

The app just launched last month, so there’s still lots of time to make improvements based on early feedback. But it’s a promising first step, and it will be interesting to see how the app evolves as it picks up more users.

If you’d like to try it out, you can get it for free over on the App Store.

Couger informs us that a previous version of this article mistakenly correctly spelled the company’s name ‘Couger’ as ‘Cougar’. We have gone back and unfixed our non-mistake. ↩

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Winter not cold enough for you? Let this Japanese company turn your iPhone into an IcePhone!

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.01.05

Some of our readers may recall when we previously featured food sample iPhone cases from Hamee. This is a company that leverages Japan’s expert craftsmanship for creating realistic food samples to produce incredible, one of a kind iPhone cases. Many of these cases are already available to overseas consumers via Hamee’s recently rebranded e-commerce website for global consumers, Hamee Strapya World. One unique case recently added to its lineup is the IcePhone case. It was created in collaboration with ice cream critic, Iceman Fukutome, who claims to eat at least over 1,000 bars of ice cream per year from various convenience stores. The IcePhone comes in two designs: one is a breezy looking blue soda popsicle, and another is a chocolate crunch ice cream. Both cases are available for the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5. Unfortunately these two popsicle cases are not currently available on the international e-commerce site, but it is on sale over on Rakuten for 3,990 yen (or about $38) each if you’d like to order it online. More food related unique phone case can be found over on Hamee, as well as a wide assortment of cute character cases, like Hello Kitty for example.

One unique case recently added to its lineup is the IcePhone case. It was created in collaboration with ice cream critic, Iceman Fukutome, who claims to eat at least over 1,000 bars of ice cream per year from various convenience stores. The IcePhone comes in two designs: one is a breezy looking blue soda popsicle, and another is a chocolate crunch ice cream. Both cases are available for the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5.

Unfortunately these two popsicle cases are not currently available on the international e-commerce site, but it is on sale over on Rakuten for 3,990 yen (or about $38) each if you’d like to order it online.

More food related unique phone case can be found over on Hamee, as well as a wide assortment of cute character cases, like Hello Kitty for example.

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Japanese mobile flea market startup Mercari adds former Mixi CFO to board

Mercari

Takeshi Hirano 2014.01.05

See the original article in Japanese To win in a competitive market, building strong management is necessary for a company. An increasingly competitive market in Japan is the flea market app space. Mercari, one of the leading players in this field, announced this past month that Fumiaki Koizumi, the former CFO of Mixi, would join as a board member. Koiziumi previously worked for Daiwa Securities SMBC and took charge of the IPOs for Mixi and DeNA. After he left Mixi, he has been supporting startups, and his recent addition to the board of directors at Trippiece drew some attention as well. At Mercari, he is currently not in a specific managerial position. But he might assume a title later on. Coinciding with this announcement, Mercari also released some interesting figures. The company says that the total number of items listed on their app has surpassed 1 million since the app went live in July 2013. They say that 10,000 items are added to the app everyday. As this market gets more competitive, what kind of strategy does Mercari have? We spoke to Shintaro Yamada, the CEO of Mercari, and Fumiaki Koizumi about this. The Bridge: First of all, I’d like…

See the original article in Japanese

To win in a competitive market, building strong management is necessary for a company. An increasingly competitive market in Japan is the flea market app space.

Mercari, one of the leading players in this field, announced this past month that Fumiaki Koizumi, the former CFO of Mixi, would join as a board member. Koiziumi previously worked for Daiwa Securities SMBC and took charge of the IPOs for Mixi and DeNA. After he left Mixi, he has been supporting startups, and his recent addition to the board of directors at Trippiece drew some attention as well.

At Mercari, he is currently not in a specific managerial position. But he might assume a title later on. Coinciding with this announcement, Mercari also released some interesting figures. The company says that the total number of items listed on their app has surpassed 1 million since the app went live in July 2013. They say that 10,000 items are added to the app everyday.

As this market gets more competitive, what kind of strategy does Mercari have? We spoke to Shintaro Yamada, the CEO of Mercari, and Fumiaki Koizumi about this.

The Bridge: First of all, I’d like to know how Koizumi-san will get involved in the management of the company.

Yamada: As we expand the business, building strong management is key. The company’s advisor, Atsushi Ishikawa (former vice-president of Unoh Inc., CSO of Wonderplanet Inc.) was the first hire of CyberAgent and understands very well what kind of problems a startup goes through as it expands. He points out these possible problems in advance. I invited Koizumi-san as CFO, but I expect him to be active in the overall business, and in PR, aggressive PR. We had been focusing on development, and couldn’t spare much resources for PR so far.

The Bridge: Koizumi-san recently joined Trippiece as well, right?

Yamada: We encourage double work, and I invested in Smartnews myself. So, we don’t have any problem with that.

The Bridge: What do you think of the flea market app space?

Koizumi: Since resources in our society are limited, I was interested in C2C transactions as a solution. And now that this trend moving forward, I’d like to be a part of it.

The Bridge: What strategy do you have for PR and marketing? Will you put advertisements in magazines and such mass media?

Koizumi: We don’t have a plan to put large resources into advertisement.

The Bridge: Japan’s C2C market won’t grow without significant effort. We previously featured classifieds site Jmty.jp and looked at their challenges. What do you think is the key to succeeding in the C2C market?

Yamada: I was talking about this with my friends who have management experience. What makes Mercari different from others is that we really care about the product. For example, we carefully look at points where users drop out from the purchasing process, and try to improve it.

Koizumi: Our customer support is simple, but we think that a good user experience is very important.

Whenever I speak with Yamada, I’m always impressed with his passion to make a perfect product. Considering that the most of the members of Mercari have been engineers, bringing new perspective to make the product more sophisticated must be important. A user-friendly interface and a solid app is inevitable for consumer service.

The competition among flea market apps will be fierce in 2014. It reminds me of the past competition in the group buying market. Stay tuned to see who can win out in this space.

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To reduce wasted food, this app gives your leftovers to friends

Junya Mori 2014.01.04

See the original article in Japanese The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) [1] is one of the world’s largest conservation NGOs, operating globally in over 100 nations. The local office in Japan, WWF Japan, has recently launched a unique iPhone app called Zan Panda. It lets users share their leftover food with friends or with other people around them. With this app, WWF Japan intends to draw attention to the effects that individual dietary habits have on the environment, and how we should be more eco-friendly. The app was developed in cooperation with Asatsu-dk and Kayac. Check out the video below to get a better idea of the concept. I am not sure how many of us are willing to eat other’s leftovers. But speaking for myself, I would have checked this app quite often if I had it when I was in college or when I started working as a freelancer, times when I was struggling to make ends meet. To give you some perspective, the amount of annual food waste in Japan is allegedly more than twice as the amount of the food aid provided worldwide. Also working on this issue is a non-profit organization called Second…

See the original article in Japanese

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) [1] is one of the world’s largest conservation NGOs, operating globally in over 100 nations. The local office in Japan, WWF Japan, has recently launched a unique iPhone app called Zan Panda. It lets users share their leftover food with friends or with other people around them.

With this app, WWF Japan intends to draw attention to the effects that individual dietary habits have on the environment, and how we should be more eco-friendly. The app was developed in cooperation with Asatsu-dk and Kayac. Check out the video below to get a better idea of the concept.

I am not sure how many of us are willing to eat other’s leftovers. But speaking for myself, I would have checked this app quite often if I had it when I was in college or when I started working as a freelancer, times when I was struggling to make ends meet.

To give you some perspective, the amount of annual food waste in Japan is allegedly more than twice as the amount of the food aid provided worldwide. Also working on this issue is a non-profit organization called Second Harvest Japan which distributes food to those who can’t afford to buy it.

The overall process of food production and consumption requires large amounts of natural resources. So to promote effective use of resources and conservation, reducing food loss and waste is very important. That’s why WWF Japan launched this project. The Zan Panda app doesn’t actually resolve the issue, but hopefully it can raise some awareness.

Earlier this year, an iPad app named WWF together, developed by WWF and AKQA won a 2013 Apple Design Award. Perhaps in the future, we will see more apps like this that bring social messages to users.

Zan Panda is currently available on iOS from the Japanese app store if you’d like to give it a try.

Formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund. ↩

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Chinese tech news site 36kr focuses on the little guys

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.03

Here’s some fun trivia: 36 is the atomic number of Krypton, the home planet of Superman. And making a reference to that factoid in its name, is the Chinese-language tech site 36kr. It was initially launched by ChengCheng Liu (pictured below) and his friends at Peking University in 2012. Currently its editorial department has around fifty staff, and about 30 articles are released everyday. Five or six of those are typically startup-related articles. The site has approximately 20 million page views a month, with readers residing mostly in China or Chinese-speaking regions. And while other Chinese’s tech blogs cover overseas topics or news from big Chinese corporations like Tencent and Sina, 36Kr focuses on Chinese startups. The company has been organizing startup events every two months in many cities in China, the US and Hong Kong. On November 10th, an event in Hangzhou attracted 1400 participants, with about one in three of them being entrepreneurs. This past year the tech blog has covered more than 800 startups in total. In addition to publishing news articles, it has also been developing a startup database. The number of the registered startup projects is 15,000 to date, and it keeps adding about 50…

Here’s some fun trivia: 36 is the atomic number of Krypton, the home planet of Superman. And making a reference to that factoid in its name, is the Chinese-language tech site 36kr.

It was initially launched by ChengCheng Liu (pictured below) and his friends at Peking University in 2012. Currently its editorial department has around fifty staff, and about 30 articles are released everyday. Five or six of those are typically startup-related articles. The site has approximately 20 million page views a month, with readers residing mostly in China or Chinese-speaking regions. And while other Chinese’s tech blogs cover overseas topics or news from big Chinese corporations like Tencent and Sina, 36Kr focuses on Chinese startups.

The company has been organizing startup events every two months in many cities in China, the US and Hong Kong. On November 10th, an event in Hangzhou attracted 1400 participants, with about one in three of them being entrepreneurs.

This past year the tech blog has covered more than 800 startups in total. In addition to publishing news articles, it has also been developing a startup database. The number of the registered startup projects is 15,000 to date, and it keeps adding about 50 projects everyday.

He was a student at Peking University when he launched the site. Even without developing the database, the company has broke even thanks to its news site and events.

But he is taking a bit of a risk by putting resources into database development, with 20 of their 50 staffers tied up in that project. Liu explained:

What we aim to do with this database is not just to provide information on which startup fundraises from which VC. We aim to collect information about which investors are behind the VC, and eventually I hope it develops into a sort of LinkedIn for the startup community. […] By doing this, we will be able to predict the action of investors and entrepreneurs before fundraising occurs.

36kr tracks not only investment, but also which startups investors are interested in. Liu’s aim in developing the database is to build startup culture, rather than to profit from it. He plans to create a one-stop service that offers entrepreneurs access to important information, products, and a network – all the necessary things to launch a startup.

In a way, the concept is similar to Creww Marketplace or e27’s Bundles.

36kr has an entrepreneur knowledge exchange event coming up this week in Shenzhen, and you can learn more about that here.

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Japan’s Wonderport lets you speak though remote virtual characters

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.01.03

In a previous article, we featured a number of mobile apps that come in handy for parents. Here’s one that could be added to this list. It’s called Wonderport. Back in December, Japanese advertising agency Dentsu and two startups, FaithCreates and Starryworks, together announced a prototype for a new kind of communication module. Wonderport is a communication system that lets users control virtual characters displayed on screen, actually speaking through them in real time. By leveraging telecommunication and voice transformation technology, the mouth of the virtual characters moves in sync with the user’s voice. So using Wonderport, parents can ask their children what they want for Christmas disguised as a virtual Santa Claus. You can check out how this works in the video below. Enhancing communication in families is only one possible use case for Wonderport. The companies behind the product envision that it could be used in a number of different ways. For example, such virtual characters could be used to create virtual call centers, or they could be projected on huge displays at conferences or events to communicate with visitors. Wonderport can could also be pretty amazing for kids if it was installed in stuffed animals. The product…

In a previous article, we featured a number of mobile apps that come in handy for parents. Here’s one that could be added to this list. It’s called Wonderport.

Back in December, Japanese advertising agency Dentsu and two startups, FaithCreates and Starryworks, together announced a prototype for a new kind of communication module. Wonderport is a communication system that lets users control virtual characters displayed on screen, actually speaking through them in real time. By leveraging telecommunication and voice transformation technology, the mouth of the virtual characters moves in sync with the user’s voice. So using Wonderport, parents can ask their children what they want for Christmas disguised as a virtual Santa Claus. You can check out how this works in the video below.

Enhancing communication in families is only one possible use case for Wonderport. The companies behind the product envision that it could be used in a number of different ways. For example, such virtual characters could be used to create virtual call centers, or they could be projected on huge displays at conferences or events to communicate with visitors. Wonderport can could also be pretty amazing for kids if it was installed in stuffed animals.

The product came out of an event called Super Hackathon 2013 held back in May in Osaka, Japan.

ActShare: A mobile photo app based around everyday actions

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