An intriguing smart-toy dubbed Moff officially launched here in Japan last week, getting attention from several media outlets leading up to its release. It’s a wearable wristband device that lets kids play using physical motion to create sound effects for any object they might be holding. You can get a better idea for how that works in the video below.
Moff is developed by a team organized at a local hackathon event in Osaka. The team participated in last year’s SF Japan Night where they pitched their product. At that time, Moff was a toy that attached to other toys, but after making improvements, they turned it into a wearable device.
Moff CEO Akinori Takahagi came up with the idea when he was examining the way kids play with toys:
Kids get bored with new toys so quickly. And parents just repeat buying and throwing toys away. It’s a waste of money. To solve this issue, I came up with the idea for a device that lets kids play in many ways depending on their imagination.
The Moff wristband connects to a smartphone or a tablet device through BLE. When Moff turns on, the app on the connected device generates sounds corresponding to the motion of your hand. It could be sound effects, voices, or background music. So for example, it could be the sound of a guitar, a ray gun, or even a even a Star Wars lightsaber.
Moff uses a three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope. These sensors recognize your physical motion and generate sound accordingly. Data is accumulated in the cloud, and the team hopes to utilize this data to improve the device’s precision and complex motion. They are also considering offering a SDK and making a developer´s platform.
The device is covered with silicon and its battery is said to last for about 40 to 50 hours, and can be replaced by the user if it wears out. The wrist band can be adjusted for various sizes.
Takahagi explained about the pricing:
We are thinking to make it around 3000 to 4000 yen (or about $30 to $40). Regarding production, we decided to outsource to a factory that develops BLE equipment in-house. Normal factories purchase BLE equipment and use it to create products, which increases their costs. But we can reduce costs by working with factories that make BLE equipment on their own. We aim to minimize the cost and charge for content like extra sounds within the app.
Moff plans to show their product at events in March and April, such as at Mobile World Congress and SXSW. The company plans to fundraise for development in March through crowdfunding. Their first production lot is scheduled to be available in July or August of this year.
Tokyo-based Mixi announced today that it has partnered with Chinese internet giant Tencent to bring its popular Monster Strike game to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao. Mixi’s Monster Strike is an RPG for iOS and Android, and since its launch last October, the title has acquired over three million users. Our readers may recall its rapid growth has helped the company return to profit, with Mixi’s game department general manager Hiroki Morita moving up to take on the CEO role. Coinciding with the Tencent partnership, Mixi will start an aggressive promotion of Monster Strike in Japan tomorrow, including a new TV commercial (see below) broadcast on many networks.
Tokyo-based Mixiannounced today that it has partnered with Chinese internet giant Tencent to bring its popular Monster Strike game to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao.
Mixi’s Monster Strike is an RPG for iOS and Android, and since its launch last October, the title has acquired over three million users. Our readers may recall its rapid growth has helped the company return to profit, with Mixi’s game department general manager Hiroki Morita moving up to take on the CEO role.
Coinciding with the Tencent partnership, Mixi will start an aggressive promotion of Monster Strike in Japan tomorrow, including a new TV commercial (see below) broadcast on many networks.
See the original article in Japanese HackOsaka 2014, held earlier this month in Osaka, featured a pitch contest where 10 startups pitched their services and products. I’d like to introduce the prize winning startups below. Gold Prize: Waygo Awarded 500,000 yen ($5000), a round-trip ticket to London sponsored by British Airways, a Pebble Watch. Waygo is a translation app using that uses OCR technology. When the user scans Chinese sentences with their smartphone camera, the app will translate that sentence into English even without an internet connection. We previously mentioned this app when we covered Echelon 2013 and Innovation Weekend Grand Finale 2013. Last year, the startup took part in 500 Startups’ incubation program, and subsequently raised $900,000. CEO Ryan Rogowski shared two updates at the event. The first is that they are going to release a new version of their app that translates Chinese into Japanese. The other (and perhaps the most interesting one) is that they are now developing a prototype app for Google Glass. Silver Prize: TransferGo Awarded 300,000 yen ($3000), Pebble Watch Many people need to make international money transfers. But service charges at banks can be expensive, as are other transfer services like Western Union….
HackOsaka 2014, held earlier this month in Osaka, featured a pitch contest where 10 startups pitched their services and products. I’d like to introduce the prize winning startups below.
Gold Prize: Waygo
Awarded 500,000 yen ($5000), a round-trip ticket to London sponsored by British Airways, a Pebble Watch.
Waygo CEO/founder Ryan Rogowski
Waygo is a translation app using that uses OCR technology. When the user scans Chinese sentences with their smartphone camera, the app will translate that sentence into English even without an internet connection. We previously mentioned this app when we covered Echelon 2013 and Innovation Weekend Grand Finale 2013. Last year, the startup took part in 500 Startups’ incubation program, and subsequently raised $900,000.
CEO Ryan Rogowski shared two updates at the event. The first is that they are going to release a new version of their app that translates Chinese into Japanese. The other (and perhaps the most interesting one) is that they are now developing a prototype app for Google Glass.
Silver Prize: TransferGo
Awarded 300,000 yen ($3000), Pebble Watch
TransferGo co-founder/CEO Daumantas Dvilinskas
Many people need to make international money transfers. But service charges at banks can be expensive, as are other transfer services like Western Union.
TransferGo, a startup based in Lithuania and London, offers international money transfers service at reasonable price. The transfer flow goes like this:
A user transfers money to the local TransferGo account, thus paying only a domestic transfer fee
TransferGo will then send the money from the TransferGo’s local account to a TransferGo account in the recipient’s country, and then on to the recipient.
The transfer fee is £2.50 plus 1.5% of the total amount of transferred. The company’s real rate of return is pretty high at 70%, and they have acquired licenses from authorities in the countries where they offer the service.
TransferGo was launched in May of 2013, and the number of the transfers in the first month was 941. But in January of 2014, that number shot up to 6,837. Currently they have 21,000 users and 98% of them said they want to recommend the service to friends. TransferGo is currently only available in Europe, but the startup aims to expand to other areas, including Asia.
Bronze Prize: StudyPact
Awarded 100,000 yen ($1000), Pebble Watch
StudyPact is a service that lets users to set a study goal and monetary stakes as as sort of bet with themselves. For example, you can set a goal of studying English for two hours a week, and then set the target stakes at $5. If you reach that goal, you get $5, but if not, you have to pay $5. In the event that you have to pay, the fee is split in half among users who supported the goal and the rest will go to StudyPact.
To realize more effective learning platforms, the startups plans to tie up with other educational platforms and services like Duolingo, Anki, Memrise, Coursera and Edx. The prototype that implemented Anki is expected to be released in early March, and there are plans develop apps for Android, Chrome, FireFox and iPhone. They’re now participating in an accelerator program hosted by Open Network Lab, so let’s wait and see what they present at the demo day in a few months.
Crosscorp Prize: Slumbor
Awarded 1-year free pass to co-working spaces run by Crosscorp in Singapore, Jakarta, Delhi, and Ho Chi Minh City.
AnSing Technology CEO Dr. Hu Junhao
Slumbor is a Singapore-based startup producing a sort of smart mat designed to be put under your pillow. The mat has sensors that acquire various data, which are then transferred to the user’s smartphone via BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). The startup currently attends a program run by the IoT incubator, HAXLR8R. They plan to raise funds at Kickstarter later on.
In addition to these four prize winners, I’d like to introduce two more startups that stood out for me in the competition.
Ontrox
Ontrox CEO, Kazuki Arita
Ontrox is a startup aspiring to reduce traffic jams by using big data. The CEO says that by using such data, you can see certain patterns of traffic jams in cities. The advantage of Ontrox, he says, lies in their unique technology that can visualize the pattern of traffic jams and shorten the processing time for visualization.
The same technology can be used for other purposes such as analyzing and optimizing computer network data, or analyzing users’ online behavior on e-commerce sites. The startup was selected as one of 10 startups to participate in SVIP (Silicon Valley Innovative Program) hosted by the Japan External Trade Organization, which aims to launch global services from Silicon Valley.
Warrantee
Warrantee, an Osaka-based startup, aims to digitalize product warranties. When you buy a product, you typically have to fill out information on a paper form to validate the warranty. But because this is a time consuming process, many users skip it.
Warrantee proposes a one-stop process, registering personal data in advance on their service. In this way the user can quickly register warranties for different products or from different companies. There are many cases where retail stores offer additional paid warranties, so the startup plans to earn a service charge from retailers by motivating users to opt into such additional warranties. Another business opportunity lies in tying up with retailers, allowing them to utilize user data accumulated on Warrantee for the retailer promotions.
Online streaming video company Hulu has announced (English/Japanese) that it will sell it’s service to Nippon Television. Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins noted in a blog post: We have now reached a point in the growth of the business in Japan where we feel the best path forward is to sell the company to a strategic buyer. I’m announcing today that Hulu’s Japan business is to be acquired by Nippon Television Network Corporation (Nippon TV), who will assume the day-to-day operations and management of the business at the closing of the transaction. There was actually some foreshadowing to this, as more and more Nippon TV content had been making it onto Hulu recently. As a subscriber I’ve noticed this happen, but I’m not certain whether I will still be a subscriber in the future. Hopkins expressed confidence that Hulu Japan is “in very good hands”. However I’m skeptical as to whether or not Nippon TV will strive to obtain a diverse range IP, instead of just showing mostly their own. We don’t know any subscriber numbers for Hulu Japan, but of course, if the numbers were good, we’d have heard about it. So I’ll assume they’re poor. To give you another…
Aggressive advertising for Hulu Japan in Shibuya, 2012.
Online streaming video company Hulu has announced (English/Japanese) that it will sell it’s service to Nippon Television. Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins noted in a blog post:
We have now reached a point in the growth of the business in Japan where we feel the best path forward is to sell the company to a strategic buyer. I’m announcing today that Hulu’s Japan business is to be acquired by Nippon Television Network Corporation (Nippon TV), who will assume the day-to-day operations and management of the business at the closing of the transaction.
There was actually some foreshadowing to this, as more and more Nippon TV content had been making it onto Hulu recently. As a subscriber I’ve noticed this happen, but I’m not certain whether I will still be a subscriber in the future. Hopkins expressed confidence that Hulu Japan is “in very good hands”. However I’m skeptical as to whether or not Nippon TV will strive to obtain a diverse range IP, instead of just showing mostly their own.
We don’t know any subscriber numbers for Hulu Japan, but of course, if the numbers were good, we’d have heard about it. So I’ll assume they’re poor. To give you another perspective, the Hulu Plus app is currently ranked a lowly 806th overall in the Japan iOS App Store, compared to 252nd overall in the US.
In the early days of the Hulu Japan I recall seeing advertising installations for Hulu Japan in Tokyo’s busy Shibuya station. But over the past year or so I can’t recall seeing any such advertising anywhere.
Hulu Japan launched back in late 2011, initally at a monthly subscription price of 1480 yen (about $15). That price was subsequently dropped to 980 yen in April of 2012. As you can see by Hulu Plus’s rise in the rankings (see middle of the chart below) that move did have a positive effect, but apparently it was not enough.
The folks over at Tokyo-based startup community Creww.me have announced an interesting new addition to their marketplace, with a new credit card offering in cooperation with Credit Saison. A representative explains: Startups often don’t have enough credit to obtain corporate credit cards. So this card was created for startups to be more flexible in this regard. Startups often pay for things like ads or server costs using their personal credits cards, since payment for such services are often by credit card only. So it’s a problem all startups have. We think this credit card should solve this problem.
The folks over at Tokyo-based startup community Creww.me have announced an interesting new addition to their marketplace, with a new credit card offering in cooperation with Credit Saison. A representative explains:
Startups often don’t have enough credit to obtain corporate credit cards. So this card was created for startups to be more flexible in this regard. Startups often pay for things like ads or server costs using their personal credits cards, since payment for such services are often by credit card only. So it’s a problem all startups have. We think this credit card should solve this problem.
Earlier this week we told you about the Back to the Future web app, which was the first prize winner at the recent Photo Hack Day Japan event, held by Aviary [1] . The second place winner from the event was perhaps an equally clever idea, shifting the focus from improving your photos with filters and effects to honing the user’s composition skills. It’s called ‘Before the Filter’, and it introduces users to basic photography concepts like the rule of thirds, showing some examples of that technique in use. It then uses a grid or template overlay on your phones’s screen/viewfinder to help you use the same technique yourself, providing editing tips after the picture is taken. Subsequent edits can be made using the Aviary editor, which the team implemented using the Aviary API. The pair of developers who made the app – Ben Watanabe and Antony Tran – managed to get a working app up on Google Play before the hackathon was even finished. I was curious to find out how the two could pull this off so quickly. So I got in touch with them by mail after briefly meeting at the event. Ben explains that it was…
Antony Tran and Ben Watanabe, with Wyatt Jenkins of Shutterstock
Earlier this week we told you about the Back to the Future web app, which was the first prize winner at the recent Photo Hack Day Japan event, held by Aviary[1] . The second place winner from the event was perhaps an equally clever idea, shifting the focus from improving your photos with filters and effects to honing the user’s composition skills.
It’s called ‘Before the Filter’, and it introduces users to basic photography concepts like the rule of thirds, showing some examples of that technique in use. It then uses a grid or template overlay on your phones’s screen/viewfinder to help you use the same technique yourself, providing editing tips after the picture is taken. Subsequent edits can be made using the Aviary editor, which the team implemented using the Aviary API.
The pair of developers who made the app – Ben Watanabe and Antony Tran – managed to get a working app up on Google Play before the hackathon was even finished. I was curious to find out how the two could pull this off so quickly. So I got in touch with them by mail after briefly meeting at the event. Ben explains that it was largely because of Antony’s ability to code for a quick paper prototype for Android:
Android is great for hackathons with just hours of review time needed to get on the store, compared to weeks (for iOS). Antony is a wizard with Android and is ridiculously fast at developing a UI. I had trouble designing in Sketch to keep up with his live coding.
Antony is actually an Android developer at Origami, an up-and-coming Japan-based startup that we have covered on this site in the past. As for Ben, has produced his own iOS photo app Cobypic in the past, but he wanted to get more familiar with Android during this hackathon. Update: Ben clarifies he is the founder of a Tokyo startup called TenTen (TenTen Tech Ltd. in Japan with its parent company in Hong Kong.
The two also benefited, says Ben, from great photos contributed by his brother Alex, which Antony says “give [the app] a very polished feel […] that sets us apart from others.” Before the Filter won second place at Photo Hack Day, walking away with 200,000 yen (about $2000) in prize money, as well as $1000 from Aviary awarded for the best use of their API.
The idea of improving pictures at their very root, in the imagination of the photographer, is an intriguing and much overlooked notion in the currently mobile photography landscape packed with filter-stacking and sticker decorations. But now that smartphone cameras have improved to the point where they can produce quality images, it’s certainly a valuable service for any aspiring mobile photographer.
Junya Mori
Masaru Ikeda
Rick Martin
