Tokyo-based Line, the company behind the messaging app of the same name, held a press event today called “LINE Showcase 2014”, where it unveiled the launch of three new services.
This feature allows users to sell their own stickers on Line’s marketplace. To date Line has been providing stickers made by the company’s own designers. But this allows all users and third-party developers to make money by creating their own stickers.
Your stickers will be reviewed before they make it onto the marketplace. You can participate in the marketplace for free, and a set of 40 different stickers can be sold for 100 yen (approximately $1). 50% of those sales will go to sticker designers. The feature will be launched this coming April.
Line Business Connect
This feature allows corporate users to engage your customers more effectively using the messaging app. By providing an API, it allows you to connect to your customers using your own CRM (customer relationship management) solutions or other in-house tools.
For example, users could place an order for pizza by sending a designated sticker to a pizza delivery chain, or hail a cab by sending your geographical location using the app.
(This is a literal translation from its Japanese name)
This feature is similar to Skype in that it lets users call landline or mobile phones at affordable rates. All you need to pay is the connection charge which starts at 2 yen (or about 2 US cents) per minute. The service is planned to be launched in March, and will be available for calls to Japan, the US, Mexico, Spain, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Meanwhile, some news sources recently reported that the company would be possibly acquired by Japanese telco Softbank. But the company’s COO Takeshi Idesawa denied that rumor at the conference today.
This is an abridged version of the original report in Japanese. The HackOsaka 2014 conference recently took place here in Japan, with the aim of boosting the startup community in Japan’s Kansai region. This year Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky and Berg CEO Matt Webb were invited as special guests. Pebble, of course, is the smart watch developer that was funded by Y-Combinator. Berg is based in London, offering an ‘Internet of Things’ cloud platform for third-party developers. Together with Masahiko Inada, the CEO of Kabuku [1], they participated in an panel discussion moderated by journalist Tsuruaki Yukawa. While many major companies in Japan have their headquarters in Tokyo, many CEOs are originally from Osaka. Yukawa explained a little about Osaka’s history of entrepreneurship: My father was a merchant. In fact, when I was a kid, all the parents except maybe one were merchants. Even though there are strong entrepreneurship roots in Osaka, the city is not the startup hub in Japan. Everyone goes to Tokyo. What should we do? Matt noted that the situation is similar to what London previously experienced: A lot of startups in London left for the USA. Because we didn’t have funds, there was no way…
The HackOsaka 2014 conference recently took place here in Japan, with the aim of boosting the startup community in Japan’s Kansai region. This year Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky and Berg CEO Matt Webb were invited as special guests. Pebble, of course, is the smart watch developer that was funded by Y-Combinator. Berg is based in London, offering an ‘Internet of Things’ cloud platform for third-party developers. Together with Masahiko Inada, the CEO of Kabuku [1], they participated in an panel discussion moderated by journalist Tsuruaki Yukawa.
While many major companies in Japan have their headquarters in Tokyo, many CEOs are originally from Osaka. Yukawa explained a little about Osaka’s history of entrepreneurship:
My father was a merchant. In fact, when I was a kid, all the parents except maybe one were merchants. Even though there are strong entrepreneurship roots in Osaka, the city is not the startup hub in Japan. Everyone goes to Tokyo. What should we do?
Matt noted that the situation is similar to what London previously experienced:
A lot of startups in London left for the USA. Because we didn’t have funds, there was no way to tie up with big companies. We didn’t have a community.
Of course, community plays an important role in any startup scene. And Eric stressed the benefits that the startup community provides in Silicon Valley.
When you develop a minimum viable product, you can get both positive and negative feedback from the community. Taking that feedback into account, and continuing development in a constructive manner is important.
At a large company, a CEO can get feedback from his or her board members. But at a startup, a founder often has to rely on himself or herself. Because of this, community support can be just as important as fundraising and market chance.
Matt said it is important to name a community if you want to develop it. The area around Old Street station in East London had been called Silicon Roundabout, but later the UK government named the area TechCity with the intention to invite more startups there. This has helped to raise public awareness. People started thinking about entrepreneurship, getting together in order to create a community.
Matt: Organizing events is important as well. In London, events related to hardware startups are held about twice a month. Job events and networking events are held almost every week.
Eric: People in Osaka have already started doing important things. This event has a pitch contest. This is quite important to help build a community.
TechCity in London took a much different path than Silicon Valley. In the same way, I’m optimistic that Osaka can develop it’s own unique startup culture, something different from Tokyo or Fukuoka.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based WebPay Holdings [1], a startup providing Stripe-compatible payment processing solutions for web services, announced yesterday that it has raised 110 million yen (approximately $1.1 million) from CyberAgent Ventures and two other undisclosed VC firms. Prior to this round, the company raised an undisclosed amount of funding from CyberAgent Ventures, Architype, and GMO Payment Gateway upon its launch back last year. The company says they plan to use the funds for hiring more engineers to improve their solution’s usability in order to serve their users better. Previously known as FluxFlex. ↩
Tokyo-based WebPay Holdings [1], a startup providing Stripe-compatible payment processing solutions for web services, announced yesterday that it has raised 110 million yen (approximately $1.1 million) from CyberAgent Ventures and two other undisclosed VC firms. Prior to this round, the company raised an undisclosed amount of funding from CyberAgent Ventures, Architype, and GMO Payment Gateway upon its launch back last year.
The company says they plan to use the funds for hiring more engineers to improve their solution’s usability in order to serve their users better.
Our readers may recall that Start Today Co. Ltd, the operator of Japanese fashion commerce giant Zozotown, launched its ‘Wear’ app back in October. The application is a fashion coordination search service, letting you save photos of clothes, upload pictures of your own styles, or scan barcodes when you show to get detailed information about an item. In participating stores, you can even buy that item online at Zozotown. Start Today is announcing (today) that the Wear app has surpassed a million downloads, and they’ll be running a promotional commercial for Wear here in Japan starting on March 19th. We’re interpreting this as a sign that the app is off to a reasonably good start, in spite of initial resistance from some local retailers over its showrooming features.
Our readers may recall that Start Today Co. Ltd, the operator of Japanese fashion commerce giant Zozotown, launched its ‘Wear’ app back in October. The application is a fashion coordination search service, letting you save photos of clothes, upload pictures of your own styles, or scan barcodes when you show to get detailed information about an item. In participating stores, you can even buy that item online at Zozotown.
Start Today is announcing (today) that the Wear app has surpassed a million downloads, and they’ll be running a promotional commercial for Wear here in Japan starting on March 19th. We’re interpreting this as a sign that the app is off to a reasonably good start, in spite of initial resistance from some local retailers over its showrooming features.
Readers may recall that we have written much about Kyoto-based startup Qooq Inc, whose Yesterscape app provides a new and interesting way to view photos of the past. But viewing old photos according to location is just one way show images of the past. This past weekend at Photo Hack Day Japan [1], hosted by Aviary and Mixi, the winning project for the two-day hackathon was a similar solution to view photos of the past. But instead of narrowing the presentation by location, the ‘Back to the Future’ web app (as it was dubbed) grouped images by topic according to a keyword search. The project was created by Theeraphol Wattanavekin, a developer working here in Japan, and three other team members (Rapee Suveeranont, Yoonjo Shin, and Thiti Luang) who joined him remotely [2]. The app made use of the Getty Images API and used Leap Motion as an interface, in order to create a sort of walk through time experience. As you can see in the picture above, Theeraphol did a search for the term ‘computer’ with image results restricted to a time range of 1972 to 2012. Using Leap Motion, he could walk through the timeline by making a…
Readers may recall that we have written much about Kyoto-based startup Qooq Inc, whose Yesterscape app provides a new and interesting way to view photos of the past. But viewing old photos according to location is just one way show images of the past. This past weekend at Photo Hack Day Japan[1], hosted by Aviary and Mixi, the winning project for the two-day hackathon was a similar solution to view photos of the past. But instead of narrowing the presentation by location, the ‘Back to the Future’ web app (as it was dubbed) grouped images by topic according to a keyword search.
The project was created by Theeraphol Wattanavekin, a developer working here in Japan, and three other team members (Rapee Suveeranont, Yoonjo Shin, and Thiti Luang) who joined him remotely [2]. The app made use of the Getty Images API and used Leap Motion as an interface, in order to create a sort of walk through time experience.
As you can see in the picture above, Theeraphol did a search for the term ‘computer’ with image results restricted to a time range of 1972 to 2012. Using Leap Motion, he could walk through the timeline by making a sort of stepping motion with both hands. Of course, it doesn’t take much to imagine possible applications for such a presentation. Aviary CEO Tobias Peggs mentioned that something like this would be interesting for kids to use in a museum, for example.
Walk through the history of the computer using ‘Back to the Future’ web app
I was personally more impressed with the actual design of the timeline (above), and if you think about integrating more photo sources, especially rich sources like museums or historical archives or even news organization, then it could be really exciting. In a way, it looks like a more refined version of Timeline.js from Knight Lab, which has been popular among news organizations (we’ve used it here on The Bridge as well). I hope that the team can keep developing this project, or alternatively make it available in a way that is easy for people to use [3].
Back to the Future was chosen as the winning project out of the 23 projects that were presented, walking away with 300,000 yen as the top prize, the Leap Motion API prize of Leap controllers for all team members and a Unity3D license, and the Gettyimages Connect API prize of a 50,000 yen gift card. There were lots of other fun ideas developed over the weekend, and hopefully we can tell you about more of them soon.
If you’d like to see more photos from event, do check out the album over on our Facebook page.
Theeraphol and his team also won the prize for best use of the Leap Motion API.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I volunteered to participate as one of the judges as a way of lending some support for this competition. ↩
I understand the three others are co-founders of Boonmee Lab, though Rapee and Yoonjo have worked in Japan like Theeraphol. ↩
Theeraphol has made his code available on Github (I hope he doesn’t mind me linking to it), and I managed to get it running myself, but not entirely functional due to the Chrome web security issue. (Note that it only runs on Chrome for now.) ↩
We spoke to Japan-based startup Wantedly back in December, discussing their online social job platform that leverages your social graph to give you a better chance at the job you love. And as of today, that platform is accessible via a brand new Wantedly iOS app as well. A few weeks back I spoke with the two Wantedly team members who worked on this app, Feras Yasin and Rei Kubonaga [1]. What I found most interesting was that they both come from very different backgrounds – Feras from design and Rei from mathematics – but apparently they found a way to work very well with each other and within their team. The app itself will be familiar to you if you’re accustomed to the web/desktop version of Wantedly. You’ll see a list of projects/jobs, which is just the same as in the PC version. But in the app there is also a “Today’s Pick-up” that features a few selected jobs each day. Feras (pictured right) explained the intention here is to make it seem almost like a news reader here. Initially I thought this section would have to be curated, but he reassured me that they have an algorithm doing…
We spoke to Japan-based startup Wantedly back in December, discussing their online social job platform that leverages your social graph to give you a better chance at the job you love. And as of today, that platform is accessible via a brand new Wantedly iOS app as well.
A few weeks back I spoke with the two Wantedly team members who worked on this app, Feras Yasin and Rei Kubonaga [1]. What I found most interesting was that they both come from very different backgrounds – Feras from design and Rei from mathematics – but apparently they found a way to work very well with each other and within their team.
Feras Yasin
The app itself will be familiar to you if you’re accustomed to the web/desktop version of Wantedly. You’ll see a list of projects/jobs, which is just the same as in the PC version. But in the app there is also a “Today’s Pick-up” that features a few selected jobs each day. Feras (pictured right) explained the intention here is to make it seem almost like a news reader here. Initially I thought this section would have to be curated, but he reassured me that they have an algorithm doing the dirty work here. He adds:
Visually the app is more like an SNS with the friend-list view. This is one of the features that is unique to the mobile app. It’s a place where you can see who among your friends is using Wantedly [2]. Another button shows the activity of your friends within the app.
Feras tells me that his own development skills are self-taught, having picked up javascript to make the transition from Flash as it became obsolete. This new app was his first foray into Xcode, in fact, so clearly he’s a fast learner.
So why develop a native iOS app, instead of just making their platform into a mobile-friendly web app? Why not make an Android app too? Rei says that they’ve found many Wantedly users access the platform from iOS, and at a rate of about three times that of Android users. But nevertheless, they do hope to make an Android version eventually too.
It’s especially interesting to hear 26-year-old Rei talk about this app, as he confesses he didn’t even use a computer when he studied natural mathematics at the University of Kyoto. But he quickly decided that in order to do more, he wanted to supplement his math skills by learning programming:
In high school I was very good at math, but you can rarely see the impact on society with math. But in business the impact is rapid and easily seen. I wanted to incorporate my math in a way that could be used for business, and that meant learning to code.
Given that Wantedly’s CEO Akiko Naka has some coding background herself, I was curious to hear what kind of development dynamic they had within the team. Often developers are segregated from teams, especially here in Japan – but I had a feeling that wasn’t the case with Wantedly. Their communications rep Nozomi Umenai elaborated on how their meetings typically proceed:
We share the concept of a new project, then Akiko, engineers, and the designer work close together. She knows exactly what she wants, and also what we lack. It’s nice to have someone who has coding background, a more clear vision, and knowledge of the output of the product. […] In Japanese companies, engineers are not often valued as much as they should, and with bosses who have non-coding backgrounds it can be hard to communicate with them.
Rei Kubonaga
While their product is currently just for Japan’s domestic market (in Japanese only), I understand they’re hoping to have a version for English or some other language soon. Most of the people I’ve spoken with there display an fluency in English that is regrettably uncommon in the Japanese startup scene, so communication won’t be an issue for them.
In a great show of dogfooding, both Feras and Rei were hired using Wantedly, and as far as I can tell they both look like smart pick-ups. And if the company can continue to hire good talent with diverse talents and backgrounds, they should be able to expand their service well.
Above all else, the Wantedly platform does offer a unique value to both employers and job seekers. So I’m really looking forward to seeing how they grow. If you’d like to give the new app a try, get it here.
I’m told there were some others who helped as well, but my understanding is that the app was primarily made by these two. ↩
You can also see friends that are not using Wantedly, but they are clearly presented with a Facebook icon rather than their own avatar. ↩