In China, duck necks are a popular food. And if you’re looking to find some, you might try the nearest Hahajing restaurant, a chain with over 1600 outlets in China. It’s main menu is duck meat, and even if you can’t visit the restaurant in person, the company prides itself on very fast delivery time, with food usually being delivered within 30 minutes.
Hahajing opened just four years ago, but its annual sales amount to 700 million yuan (or about $120 million).
As a comparison, Japan’s highest-grossing pizza chain, Pizza-La, has 535 outlets, and the company took 20 years to achieve 57 billion yen ($560 million) in the total annual sales, and that’s including the sales from its restaurant business. When you compare these two, it’s easy to see why speed of Hanhanjing growth is so impressive.
Hahajing restaurant (photo hd55.cn)
We should clarify that you aren’t likely to see many people eating duck necks when you visit China. The company says that their main demographic/target is (for lack of a better word) geeks, or those who prefer to stay at home or in their room during the weekend.
If you’d like to learn more about Hahajing, you can check out their website and order page for more details. Or if you think you might be a frequent customer, you can also check out their iOS and Android apps for duck necks on the go should you ever need them.
WWDC just not the same with ducks necks, packaged in foreground. (from Weibo user @xbxbxbb)
See the original article in Japanese Tokyo-based startup 7-bites has launched a new service called A2mato, a C2C flea market app focused on goods relating to Japanese subculture. It’s a smartphone marketplace where individuals can buy and sell things like self-published works, cosplay costumes, gaming, manga, and pop idol goods. When the startup raised funds last June, the CEO told us about this plan, and now it has finally gone online. This ‘otaku’ market includes other things like dating simulations and other online games, vocaloid voice synthesizing, cosplay, figures, novels, electronic comic books, and even railway models. According to a study by Yano Research Institute, this otaku market is getting more customers in Japan beyond its core fan group. In 2011, the market size was valued at 892 billion yen ($8.5 billion). The CEO of Bushiroad, Takaaki Kidani, mentioned that the market for card gaming alone is almost 100 billion yen ($9.5 billion), big enough to get the attention of many businesses. Recently I had a chance to interview with 7bites CEO Shota Sawada about why he thinks there’s potential in this market. He explained there are two main reasons why he started A2mato: One reason is that there is…
Tokyo-based startup 7-bites has launched a new service called A2mato, a C2C flea market app focused on goods relating to Japanese subculture. It’s a smartphone marketplace where individuals can buy and sell things like self-published works, cosplay costumes, gaming, manga, and pop idol goods. When the startup raised funds last June, the CEO told us about this plan, and now it has finally gone online.
This ‘otaku’ market includes other things like dating simulations and other online games, vocaloid voice synthesizing, cosplay, figures, novels, electronic comic books, and even railway models.
According to a study by Yano Research Institute, this otaku market is getting more customers in Japan beyond its core fan group. In 2011, the market size was valued at 892 billion yen ($8.5 billion). The CEO of Bushiroad, Takaaki Kidani, mentioned that the market for card gaming alone is almost 100 billion yen ($9.5 billion), big enough to get the attention of many businesses.
Recently I had a chance to interview with 7bites CEO Shota Sawada about why he thinks there’s potential in this market.
He explained there are two main reasons why he started A2mato:
One reason is that there is a market. The other reason is that I wanted to support creators.
At Comiket (a large comic convention) visitors cannot get enough information on the groups that are participating, and they turn to other media like Twitter or websites to get information. Because information is not easily accessible, comic fans pay attention only to major groups or circles. So it is difficult to find new talented creators. With A2mato I’d like to make information on new talents more easily accessible and support long-tailed creators.
While mobile C2C marketplace and flea market apps attracts many consumers today, there was no flea market app focused only on subculture. So Sawada thought there would be potential to grow.
Today many of online marketplaces for self-published works charge users high service charges. For example, when a creator sells their work on websites like DLsite or Melonbooks, the company charges the creator 30 percent of the price as a service charge. But on A2mato, it’s only 5.25%.
On A2mato, users can follow hashtags for each genre and see that content on their timeline. There is also a feature called ‘remart’, similar to Twitter’s retweet, and users can save their favorite items as well.
The UI was developed based on Sawada’s assumption that the many users with interest an in subculture might be Twitter users too.
Just like other flea market apps, users can list their items on A2mato from their smartphone app. Payments can be made using credit cards, money transfer at convenience stores and banks, or with A2mato points.
Unlike most flea market apps, A2mato has a web version of its marketplace as well. This is because the company expected that linked web content will be important to bring traffic/users from Twitter.
A2mato is targeting a half million users and 500 million yen ($4.8 million) in monthly transactions. If you’d like to try out the app, it is available for the download here. Currently it’s in Japanese only.
Our readers may recall that Japanese robotics company Schaft was recently acquired by Google and won the DARPA robotics challenge trials. Bloomberg reported yesterday that the company’s co-founder Takashi Kato will form a new 2 billion yen fund (approximately $19 million) for Japanese startups focused on biotechnology and energy efficiency segments. It will be called 246 Capital. In the process of negotiating with Google during the acquisition process, he tried to get funds from 10 investment firms and the state-run fund Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ). But his efforts didn’t work out. In response to this disappointing experience, he plans to launch a scheme to help Japanese engineers and scientists get funding to complementary to their research and development expenses. Kato hopes to invest in companies developing cancer treatment devices and analytics technology for genetics since his own mother died from skin cancer. Efforts from successful entrepreneurs that help others in the ecosystem is really a great thing to see in Japan. Our readers may recall that we recently featured a number of up-and-coming robotics startups from Japan, many of whose founders grew out from the creative digital company TeamLab. Via Bloomberg
Takashi Kato (picture from his website)
Our readers may recall that Japanese robotics company Schaft was recently acquired by Google and won the DARPA robotics challenge trials. Bloomberg reported yesterday that the company’s co-founder Takashi Kato will form a new 2 billion yen fund (approximately $19 million) for Japanese startups focused on biotechnology and energy efficiency segments. It will be called 246 Capital.
In the process of negotiating with Google during the acquisition process, he tried to get funds from 10 investment firms and the state-run fund Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ). But his efforts didn’t work out. In response to this disappointing experience, he plans to launch a scheme to help Japanese engineers and scientists get funding to complementary to their research and development expenses. Kato hopes to invest in companies developing cancer treatment devices and analytics technology for genetics since his own mother died from skin cancer.
Efforts from successful entrepreneurs that help others in the ecosystem is really a great thing to see in Japan. Our readers may recall that we recently featured a number of up-and-coming robotics startups from Japan, many of whose founders grew out from the creative digital company TeamLab.
See the original story in Japanese. Silicon-valley based Hapyrus, a Japanese startup focused on developing big data solutions, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million from investors in Japan and the US, including 500startups. Coinciding with these funds, the startup will rebrand itself as FlyData and set up a local subsidiary in Japan. The company is led by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa, who previously worked with a number of prominent Japanese startups like Dennotai (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2000), Simplex Technology (TSE:4340), and Sirius Technology (also acquired by Yahoo Japan, 2010). They launched a new service called ‘FlyData for Amazon Redshift’ back in February, allowing automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data-warehouse service. The decision to rebrand reflects the company’s intention to focus on providing and developing its FlyData service. Fujikawa explained the rationale behind this change at a press briefing yesterday: We’ve been originally developing middleware solutions for Hadoop, but I was so surprised when I saw Amazon Redshift for the first time. I thought that no other options besides Hadoop could deliver big data solutions that work, but in fact Amazon Redshift can do it for about $1,000 an year –…
From the left: Kei Hareyama (country manager), Koichi Fujikawa (founder/CEO), and Daniel Saito (vice president)
Silicon-valley based Hapyrus, a Japanese startup focused on developing big data solutions, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million from investors in Japan and the US, including 500startups. Coinciding with these funds, the startup will rebrand itself as FlyData and set up a local subsidiary in Japan.
The company is led by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa, who previously worked with a number of prominent Japanese startups like Dennotai (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2000), Simplex Technology (TSE:4340), and Sirius Technology (also acquired by Yahoo Japan, 2010).
They launched a new service called ‘FlyData for Amazon Redshift’ back in February, allowing automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data-warehouse service. The decision to rebrand reflects the company’s intention to focus on providing and developing its FlyData service.
Fujikawa explained the rationale behind this change at a press briefing yesterday:
We’ve been originally developing middleware solutions for Hadoop, but I was so surprised when I saw Amazon Redshift for the first time. I thought that no other options besides Hadoop could deliver big data solutions that work, but in fact Amazon Redshift can do it for about $1,000 an year – extremely cheaper than conventional technology. When Amazon’s mentor team came to visit 500startups where we were residing, they gave us a complimentary account for Amazon Redshift. When we tried it, it yielded 10 to 100 times better performance than Hadoop. It was then that we were convinced that we could not win with Hadoop.
While an abundant of solutions for cloud data processing are available, many companies have difficulty in uploading their data, and for many, their data remains in an on-premises environment. We found that there will be a pressing need to solve this issue, which led us to focus on our FlyData business.
But it wasn’t easy reaching this conclusion. Fujikawa’s co-founders left the company because of a gap in their ideas about business strategy. But he believed in the potential of his business and raised $925,000 from investors in Japan and the US last summer. He succeeded in hiring competent workers through Japanese social recruiting platform Wantedly.
For companies, since FlyData technology uploads your data from an on-premise RDBMS (rational database management system) to cloud-based data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, you need to install a FlyData component on your RDBMS server. The component for MySQL is available for now, and components for PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server will follow soon.
Since the 2013 launch, FlyData for Amazon RedShift has acquired more than 40 corporate users and has over 40% growth in sales every month. They’ve seen a striking increase in the growth here in Japan, across sectors like social gaming, ad tech, and digital marketing. Fujikawa noted that they have prominent clients like Brightroll, Upworthy, Datalot, Enish, and Tokyo Otaku Mode.
FlyData is also a qualified member of the Amazon Redshift Partners program, where we can find a number of their competitors, including Informatica, Talend, Attunity, and SnapLogic. Fujikawa explained a little more about their advantage over these competitors:
From my perspective, Informatica and Talend has many problems in supporting cloud platforms. And Attunity and SnapLogic have not yet made an impact in the Japanese market. In terms of a presence in Japan and the Asia Pacific region, I believe we have an advantage.
Furthermore, Amazon is good at cloud computing but is not as good with data located that’s located in a client’s on-premise environment. But we can handle it, so that we think we’re a good complementary service to Amazon. For the time being, we are currently providing the service for Amazon, which is leading this space, but partnering with other platforms like Google Big Query might be a potential option for us in the future.
Along with the launch of their subsidiary in Japan, a number of notable individuals have joined their management team. Their vice president of sales and international growth Daniel Saito co-founded Rimnet (one of Japan’s oldest internet providers, later acquired by PSINet) and was involved in launching MySQL K.K. Kei Hareyama was appointed as the country manager for the Japanese market, bringing over 12 years experience in the data analytics sector to the table.
In Japan, we’ve seen quite a few startups providing business centric services for global markets. On a related note, Treasure Data, another notable Japanese startup focused on big data solutions, also received angel investment worth $2.75 million back in 2012, with funds coming from several investors including Jerry Yang (Yahoo co-founder) and Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto (the inventor of the Ruby programming language).
Traveloco is a travel service for Japanese people who are traveling outside the country for the first time. It aims to connect Japanese travelers with Japanese residents at their travel destinations, so as to enhance their travel experiences. The site was launched in an early alpha phase back in May of 2013. According to the site, there are over one million Japanese people who reside outside of Japan, and over 17 million Japanese people travel to foreign countries. The common and unvoidable problem for these travelers is the language barrier that often restricts them from certain discoveries. To avoid such missed opportunities, Traveloco facilitates Japanese foreign residents to assist Japanese travelers. By registering on Traveloco, travelers can ask questions to local guides about local information. You can ask for general recommendations, or ask specific questions such as what dish is the best choice at certain popular restaurants. Sending private messages is free, but further assistance (such as a guided tour or acting as a translator) will require a premium user account that can be purchased with a credit card or by PayPal. Currently, there are 60 Japanese foreign residents on the service, spanning 30 major cities like New York and…
Traveloco is a travel service for Japanese people who are traveling outside the country for the first time. It aims to connect Japanese travelers with Japanese residents at their travel destinations, so as to enhance their travel experiences. The site was launched in an early alpha phase back in May of 2013.
According to the site, there are over one million Japanese people who reside outside of Japan, and over 17 million Japanese people travel to foreign countries. The common and unvoidable problem for these travelers is the language barrier that often restricts them from certain discoveries. To avoid such missed opportunities, Traveloco facilitates Japanese foreign residents to assist Japanese travelers.
By registering on Traveloco, travelers can ask questions to local guides about local information. You can ask for general recommendations, or ask specific questions such as what dish is the best choice at certain popular restaurants. Sending private messages is free, but further assistance (such as a guided tour or acting as a translator) will require a premium user account that can be purchased with a credit card or by PayPal.
Currently, there are 60 Japanese foreign residents on the service, spanning 30 major cities like New York and Paris. Traveloco aims to acquire as many as 1,000 registered local guides in over 100 cities by the end of 2014.
Traveloco is aspiring to be a sort of virtual Japanese town in the future. Let’s wait and see if it can succeed.
Based on our previous article, in Japanese China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site. The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive. But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date. So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even…
China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site.
The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive.
But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date.
So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even after a user breaks up with his girlfriend, he cannot send RoseOnly roses to a new girlfriend. In a way, that makes them extra special for anyone who receives them.
On Chinese Valentine’s Day, the sales on RoseOnly reached 11 million yuan ($1.8 million). Approximately 11,000 men sent roses using the service. And this success led the company to raise $10 million from Tencent in its series B round, and they opened their first brick-and-mortar stores in September.
The company says that it plans to launch a new service for men to send chocolates to women. I am sure that they are targeting for February 14th with this initiative. For more information, you can check out the RoseOnly promo video below.
Masaru Ikeda
Junya Mori
Yukari Mitsuhashi
