Sensei Note, a new social network service for teachers, has officially launched in Japan. The service was originally started as an online market place for teaching materials, but it has since evolved into a closed social service for teachers. Its users are restricted to just teachers or to people who want to be a teacher.
Sensei Note took over a year to launch its official website. We heard from CEO and co-founder Haruki Asatani about what took so long.
Haruki Asatani
I’ve visited teachers throughout Japan to speak with them face-to-face. I sometimes even stayed at their homes. I wanted to have a deep understanding about their needs, and even things not really related to their work.
In the end, I realized that the problems they face cannot always be solved by sharing file-based content. And I became convinced that a community where teachers gather and share their knowledge is much more valuable than just a content sharing platform.
The most common image of knowledge sharing in a teacher community is that it’s passed down by experienced teachers to new ones through word of mouth. But on Sensei Note, it is also possible for young teachers to share their knowledge with experienced ones. The relationship among users is very horizontal.
The service could potentially have a viral effect, if teachers recommend it to other their peers when gathered in a school’s teacher lounge for example.
Sensei Note bulletin board
Monetizing a community
Asatani is passionate about improving the educational environment. His previous work experience at Bennese Corporation (a Japanese educational service company) and his own personal experiences have resulted in a strong interest in educational issues. He believes it is essential to build a teacher community first, and the revenue can come later. But the most important thing is to initially create solid and thriving community.
We are trying to tie up with local NPOs, many of whom have contacts with local teachers. So when we explain the concept of Sensei Note to NPOs, they happily refer teachers to us. We also approached universities so that aspiring teacher can use our platform as well. 130 universities are telling their students about Sensei Note. The service is free, so they have no reason not to recommend it to students.
If the service is free, then how do they plan to monetize it? Asatani has an idea.
There are actually many companies that want to approach teachers, students, and their parents, many of them offering information services or selling educational materials. Most of them operate through agencies, and have no channel to directly approach teachers. But Sensei Note could them reach teachers directly by letting them provide educational content on site.
For example, one company provides videos on career development for students on Sensei Note. One such video has been watched by 400 students by teachers. The content itself is free, but companies can benefit by gaining more recognition among teachers and students.
Sensei Note wants to solve other issues faced by schools and teachers, not just using its own marketing budget but also via government funding or corporate social responsibility programs.
Advice from a friend
Asatani first announced Sensei Note a year and a half ago at a Startup Weekend Tokyo event. While I wasn’t at the event myself, I recall hearing that he left Benesse right after winning the event in order to focus on Sensei Note. It struck me at the time that he has remarkable passion for his vision. About a year passed since then his team has been focusing on developing the service without external funding during that time. Nakatani elaborated on his motivation:
After I quit Benesse, I had an opportunity to go for drinks with a friend from my university. He had become a teacher, and he talked about his passion for why he had done so. Many new teachers have concerns, but they all have to manage their classes alone. I felt that I should support them, and that feeling really pushed me to build Sensei Note.
Now that Sensei Note has finally launched, I hope the team can come closer to their vision, and find fundraising opportunities in the near future.
Hong Kong-based Snaptee, a startup that lets you to design and sell custom apparel via its mobile app, has just announced an new partnership program enabling third-party app’s to place Snaptee orders. And the first application to take advantage of this opportunity will be Japan’s Manga Camera app, a popular service that transforms your picture into manga-style art. In their announcement, Snaptee CEO WaiLun Hong remarked on the tie-up: We are big fans of Manga Camera and were thrilled when they recognized this partnership as a unique opportunity to tap into a new revenue stream and extend their users’ connection to their brand. Now, with a tap of a button, all Manga Camera comics can be taken by their creators into the Snaptee app and turned into wearable art. I’ve not yet used Snaptee, but in the past I have made a T-shirt with a picture of my own face on it, looking upwards, giving myself a thumbs-up [1]. So I like the creative potential behind a platform like Snaptee, and that potential will only get better as they add more apps to their list of partners, tapping into the user bases of other services, and giving those apps a…
Hong Kong-based Snaptee, a startup that lets you to design and sell custom apparel via its mobile app, has just announced an new partnership program enabling third-party app’s to place Snaptee orders. And the first application to take advantage of this opportunity will be Japan’s Manga Camera app, a popular service that transforms your picture into manga-style art.
In their announcement, Snaptee CEO WaiLun Hong remarked on the tie-up:
We are big fans of Manga Camera and were thrilled when they recognized this partnership as a unique opportunity to tap into a new revenue stream and extend their users’ connection to their brand. Now, with a tap of a button, all Manga Camera comics can be taken by their creators into the Snaptee app and turned into wearable art.
I’ve not yet used Snaptee, but in the past I have made a T-shirt with a picture of my own face on it, looking upwards, giving myself a thumbs-up [1]. So I like the creative potential behind a platform like Snaptee, and that potential will only get better as they add more apps to their list of partners, tapping into the user bases of other services, and giving those apps a new means of monetizing.
Snaptee also announced today that their platform has surpassed the 1 million designs milestone. While the company declined to tell us how many orders they’ve shipped, we’re told that about half of the designs come from the US, followed by China and Japan. Interestingly, Japan has about three times the conversion rate as the US, reflecting the country’s relative comfort with buying on mobile.
Everyone needs a shirt like this, in my opinion. ↩
Checking back in on our Puzzle & Dragons expansion watch, GungHo Online Entertainment’s hit mobile game surpassed 26 million downloads as of March 23, maintaining it’s steady pace of growth (see chart below). Of course as it’s Japanese user base saturates, overseas markets will become more important. The company has recently reached the following milestones in overseas markets, according to Gamebiz.jp: March 7th – reached 3 million downloads in North America March 11 – reached 1 million downloads in Hong Kong and Taiwan March 15 – reached 2 million downloads in Korea The US and Europe will be key markets moving forward, so we’ll keep an eye on GungHo’s efforts there. China could be interesting too after the company tests the waters in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Checking back in on our Puzzle & Dragons expansion watch, GungHo Online Entertainment’s hit mobile game surpassed 26 million downloads as of March 23, maintaining it’s steady pace of growth (see chart below). Of course as it’s Japanese user base saturates, overseas markets will become more important. The company has recently reached the following milestones in overseas markets, according to Gamebiz.jp:
March 7th – reached 3 million downloads in North America
March 11 – reached 1 million downloads in Hong Kong and Taiwan
March 15 – reached 2 million downloads in Korea
The US and Europe will be key markets moving forward, so we’ll keep an eye on GungHo’s efforts there. China could be interesting too after the company tests the waters in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Japanese mobile giant Line Corporation announced today that its recently released Line Mall mobile commerce application has been downloaded 1.2 million times in its first two weeks [1]. There have been 100,000 items made available for sale during that period, in during which Line has decided not to take any commission from sellers here in Japan. The company says that of those items, more than 20,000 have sold. This is a beta period of sorts for Line Mall, which is set to make its official launch later in the year. Line (Japanese) As of March 19. ↩
Japanese mobile giant Line Corporation announced today that its recently released Line Mall mobile commerce application has been downloaded 1.2 million times in its first two weeks [1]. There have been 100,000 items made available for sale during that period, in during which Line has decided not to take any commission from sellers here in Japan. The company says that of those items, more than 20,000 have sold.
This is a beta period of sorts for Line Mall, which is set to make its official launch later in the year.
Wearable Tech Japan 2014 was largely devoid of startups (with the exception of Moff) in the main exhibition area. But on the corporate side, there was one interesting project from Japan’s Brilliant Service Corporation that was getting some attention from visitors. The company’s Mirama product is – in its current form – a rather heavy head-mounted display that lets you make gestures in front of your face to control the see-through onscreen interface in front of your eyes. You can perform a number gestures, including thumbs up for ok, thumbs down for cancel, and even frame a picture with your fingers to snap off a picture. The interface also lets you push on screen buttons, do handwriting with your fingers (my handwriting was pretty awful), and even send and receive email using an onscreen menu. The prototype is available for sale from the company’s website, and there’s also a SDK provided for those who would like to hack it further. Prototype packages do not come cheap however, ranging in price from 3 million yen (almost $30,000) to 200,000 yen for a Mirama sensor kit. I had a chance to try out the Mirama glasses, and it was a really fun…
Wearable Tech Japan 2014 was largely devoid of startups (with the exception of Moff) in the main exhibition area. But on the corporate side, there was one interesting project from Japan’s Brilliant Service Corporation that was getting some attention from visitors.
The company’s Mirama product is – in its current form – a rather heavy head-mounted display that lets you make gestures in front of your face to control the see-through onscreen interface in front of your eyes. You can perform a number gestures, including thumbs up for ok, thumbs down for cancel, and even frame a picture with your fingers to snap off a picture.
The interface also lets you push on screen buttons, do handwriting with your fingers (my handwriting was pretty awful), and even send and receive email using an onscreen menu.
The prototype is available for sale from the company’s website, and there’s also a SDK provided for those who would like to hack it further. Prototype packages do not come cheap however, ranging in price from 3 million yen (almost $30,000) to 200,000 yen for a Mirama sensor kit.
I had a chance to try out the Mirama glasses, and it was a really fun experience. The weight of the device nearly broke my nose, but it was still pretty interesting. If you’d like to preview what happens on the Mirama screen, check out the demo video below.
We previously featured the beautifully designed writing/moment sharing platform Hi, taking it for a test drive last July during its private beta period. Just by chance I happened to visit the site yesterday only to be met with a brief server error. Today I know why, as the service is back online, now available for everyone. While Hi is an interesting and useful service, observing its beta period has really taught me the value of beautifully designed content. The typography and layout of articles on Hi are so good, that even you just added Lorem Ipsen text and a picture of your butt, it would probably still look incredible [1]. I suspect people want to write there because it’s a container that enhances their writing instead of just containing it. The beta period has also nurtured Hi’s community features, which have been improved leading up to launch. Having said all this, I confess that I’ve not written anything on Hi for a while. I still prefer to own my content myself, in a way that works for me. But all the same, I do have some regrets that my stuff is still not as pretty as Hi. I encourage you…
We previously featured the beautifully designed writing/moment sharing platform Hi, taking it for a test drive last July during its private beta period. Just by chance I happened to visit the site yesterday only to be met with a brief server error. Today I know why, as the service is back online, now available for everyone.
While Hi is an interesting and useful service, observing its beta period has really taught me the value of beautifully designed content. The typography and layout of articles on Hi are so good, that even you just added Lorem Ipsen text and a picture of your butt, it would probably still look incredible [1]. I suspect people want to write there because it’s a container that enhances their writing instead of just containing it. The beta period has also nurtured Hi’s community features, which have been improved leading up to launch.
Having said all this, I confess that I’ve not written anything on Hi for a while. I still prefer to own my content myself, in a way that works for me. But all the same, I do have some regrets that my stuff is still not as pretty as Hi.
I encourage you to read co-founder Craig Mod’s typically epic welcome post, which gives an overview of the service far more eloquent than anything I could pen here. So go read it.
I started perusing it in Pocket, but then I realized what I was doing and happily opened it in Safari instead.