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Level up your to-do list with this fun app from Japan

LvUP
to do

SCORE 1,200

Rick Martin 2014.01.07

I’ve experimented with a number of to-do apps over the years, with perhaps my favorite ones to date being Task Paper and Quadranto [1]. But I was curious to hear about LvUp recently, a made-in-Japan to-do list app that recently got some love on a popular Japanese television show.

The app is deceptively simple, with just a list of tasks on the main screen, and radio buttons you can push when you’ve completed them. At that point you’re congratulated by a fun ‘level-up’ sound and awarded some points for a job well done.

But if you dig a little bit under the surface, LvUP has even more features.

Tap on a task and you’ll find lots of meta-data under the hood, including points for tasks, an optional date field, and alerts if you want them. There’s also an option for repeating tasks, with even further sub-options for daily, weekly, monthly, or a specified number of days.

On the main screen in the bottom right, you’ll also find a chart icon. Tap on that and it brings you to a pretty graph of your completed tasks over time.

LvUP was initially released back in 2012, and it is currently the fourth ranked iOS app in Japan’s ‘health and fitness’ category after its recent TV appearance. If you’d like to give it a try, you can pick it up for 100 yen (or $0.99) over on the App Store.

I love Quadranto, but I’m a little discouraged that syncing has been botched in the iOS version. Nevertheless, I still use it on my Mac. ↩

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Xibao: Helping China’s online merchants advertise better

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.06

CTO of Xibao, Alex Farfurnik, on the right (photo cred) China’s top e-commerce site, Taobao, accounts for a whopping 80% share of the nation’s e-commerce market. But even with so many sellers setting up a shop on Taobao, most of them don’t adequately understand how to sell products on the platform. That’s where Xibao comes in. Xibao’s system helps optimize ads and use Taobao’s ad platform more effectively. According to co-founder, Alex Farfurnik, the company offers three plans at a monthly fixed rate. Pricing starts at 0–100 yuan ($0–17) for a freemium plan, 1000 yuan ($170) for a standard plan, and 15,000 yuan ($2500) for a VIP plan. 17 months have passed since the launch of its ad optimization platform, Super Driver, And the total customers subscribing to paid plans has surpassed 40,000. Advertisement fees paid by Taobao through Xibao have surpassed $150 million. At first, Xibao was launched as a service for small businesses. But the business grew because of a partnership with Taobao, and Xibao began offering the service to major companies as well. XiBao now has partnerships with internet giants like Tencent, Qihoo, JD.com, and Baidu. Generally, sellers place ads on Taobao to lead customers to their…

China’s top e-commerce site, Taobao, accounts for a whopping 80% share of the nation’s e-commerce market. But even with so many sellers setting up a shop on Taobao, most of them don’t adequately understand how to sell products on the platform. That’s where Xibao comes in.

Xibao’s system helps optimize ads and use Taobao’s ad platform more effectively. According to co-founder, Alex Farfurnik, the company offers three plans at a monthly fixed rate. Pricing starts at 0–100 yuan ($0–17) for a freemium plan, 1000 yuan ($170) for a standard plan, and 15,000 yuan ($2500) for a VIP plan. 17 months have passed since the launch of its ad optimization platform, Super Driver, And the total customers subscribing to paid plans has surpassed 40,000. Advertisement fees paid by Taobao through Xibao have surpassed $150 million.

November 11th is widely referred to as ‘E-commerce Day’ on the Chinese internet. This year the sales on Tmall.com, the online retailer spun off from Taobao, reached 35.019 billion yuan ($5.6 billion) for the day. The above picture is from a monitoring room at Tmall.com.

At first, Xibao was launched as a service for small businesses. But the business grew because of a partnership with Taobao, and Xibao began offering the service to major companies as well. XiBao now has partnerships with internet giants like Tencent, Qihoo, JD.com, and Baidu.

Generally, sellers place ads on Taobao to lead customers to their shops. But it turns out that this is not necessarily cost-effective. For example, there was a case when a Tmall seller placed ads on Qihoo, leading viewers to Tmall from there. With this strategy, the cost performance of the ad was 50 times higher than ads placed directly on Tmall. Xibao looks at all the indicators including transactions and advertising ROI to manage the best ad space.

In the upcoming year, Xibao aims to release two apps and acquire 100,000 freemium accounts.

*On November 11th, Xibao staff was working overnight at TechTemple. Every year on this day, all the staff work non-stop.*

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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,…

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. ↩

Level up your to-do list with this fun app from Japan

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