Sekai Lab: Crowdsourcing platform lets Japanese companies find developer teams around Asia

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See the original article in Japanese

Sekai Lab, a company under Singapore-based music/game company Monstar Lab, has launched a crowdsourcing platform. It lets companies in Japan find engineers from all around the world, but still using Japanese.

With the rapid spread of smartphones in Japan, more and more app developers are needed these days. Sekai Lab COO Ikkei Okuma thought that the company could provide a solution to match Japanese companies with skilled engineers in Asian countries such as China and Vietnam. Okuma explains:

There are many great engineers in Asia. But there is no platform in Japanese to match them with companies in Japan, making it very difficult for companies to outsource their work. Workers registered on most crowdsourcing platforms are individuals, which makes it hard to outsource a big project using crowdsourcing platforms. Sekai Lab aims to address these issues.

The cost of human resources on Sekai Lab are relatively low. And by providing Asian engineers with high skill sets, the company hopes to alleviate the shortage of engineers currently plaguing Japan.

So how does it work? Development processes are executed through communication between the developer team and the company that outsourced the work. And depending on the project, Monstar Lab can provide support as well.

On the Sekai Lab website, you can find engineers across many different categories, such as the type of app required, cost, and the past experience of the team.

sekailabo team

Okuma also told us a little about how they screen teams for registration.

For the time being, we only register companies who have an office in Japan, in addition to their developer base outside Japan. We meet the team face-to-face and confirm their past experience. We gather information about the team leader and put it on our website.

In Japan, crowdsourcing service is getting lots of attention these days, with Lancers and Crowdworks showing remarkable growth. Can crowdsourcing beyond Japan’s borders be successful as well? We’ll keep watching Sekai Lab, so stay tuned.