Tengami is one of the most stylish mobile games that I’ve seen in a long time. With a graphic aesthetic that mimics a Japanese pop-up book, it’s a puzzle game with wondrous sights and sounds.
It’s a little tricky to understand at first, but there are subtle glowing callout cues that tell you where you should trigger a paper fold. If you find the initial rounds difficult (I confess, I did!) there are some hints over on the official website that will get you through the first few stages.
Since the game’s initial release a couple of weeks back, Japanese fans have apparently taken a liking to the title, as the game briefly broke into the top ten overall apps late in February in the Japanese app store. And it was featured in Apple’s spotlighted games section today, which will surely give it some great exposure.
Interestingly, the game was developed by the UK-based team, Nyamyam, but they’ve apparently made the extra effort to appeal to Japanese users, and have been featured in various Japanese media like 4gamer and Famitsu.
For now Tengami is iOS only, and can be purchased for $4.99 (or 500 yen here in Japan). I’m enjoying the game so far, and if you have the patience for puzzle games and a preference for Japanese style art, you might want to check this one out.
The company is planning to release the game for Windows and OSX later on as well, so stay tuned for those. You can check out the trailer for the game, as well as screenshots below.
Regular readers of The Bridge will remember that I’ve raved about the Notabli app before. It’s an app that lets parent save their children’s moments, in a space that’s private, shared with only friends and family members of your choosing. When I had my first kid, I really wanted a way to share photos with my family back in Canada – but likely many people these days, I have reservations about sharing too much information about my child on Facebook [1]. After a brief flirtation with Glassboard, I eventually settled on Notabli. It had a very easy data export feature that I can use anytime, which I think is key for any sort of memories archive like this. In addition to photos, Notabli has support for video, audio, and even quotes. When you add a moment to your child’s timeline, you also have the option to mark it as a milestone. Obviously, this is an important feature for parents who want to mark things like baby’s first tooth, first words, or first steps [2]. Version 2.0 of Notabli has launched today with some key new features, including a new audio recorder with a very handy trim tool (pictured below), auto-location…
Regular readers of The Bridge will remember that I’ve raved about the Notabli app before. It’s an app that lets parent save their children’s moments, in a space that’s private, shared with only friends and family members of your choosing. When I had my first kid, I really wanted a way to share photos with my family back in Canada – but likely many people these days, I have reservations about sharing too much information about my child on Facebook [1].
After a brief flirtation with Glassboard, I eventually settled on Notabli. It had a very easy data export feature that I can use anytime, which I think is key for any sort of memories archive like this. In addition to photos, Notabli has support for video, audio, and even quotes. When you add a moment to your child’s timeline, you also have the option to mark it as a milestone. Obviously, this is an important feature for parents who want to mark things like baby’s first tooth, first words, or first steps [2].
Version 2.0 of Notabli has launched today with some key new features, including a new audio recorder with a very handy trim tool (pictured below), auto-location tagging for moments, and a more streamlined video/photo picker. I’ve had a chance to test an early 2.0 beta, and I’m really happy with the new additions – but even more delighted that everything I love about v1 is still there!
Notabli’s handy audio trimmer
I got in touch with Jackson Latka, the co-founder of Notabli, who is based in Vermont along with fellow co-founder Jory Raphael. As a new father myself, I started off by asking him about how he manages to balance startup life as a parent, something that I find myself struggling with sometimes. He explains:
What’s worked best for me is to embrace the ebb and flow as much as possible. I don’t feel the traditional take on work-life balance works well for me, so I aim for work-life harmony. Some days require a lot more work than others, but same goes for family. The irony is not lost on me that I often spend my time working on a product to bring families closer together, while spending less time with my own wonderful family. I’m still working on this challenge.
One of the things that has mildly concerned me about Notabli is that it is free. This is one of those rare free services that is so good, you’d gladly pay to help ensure its longevity. So I asked Jackson about their choice to make Notabli a free app instead of a paid one:
We wanted to make sure we built a solid, dependable, and valuable service for Notabli users before monetizing the service. […] We can’t live on free forever. We have some cool things planned for our premium service/purchases.
This is encouraging, because I really want Notabli to be around for a while, hopefully never suffering the same fate as a company like Everpix. As I mentioned above, Notabli’s data-export feature is a godsend, and I really wish more companies would include this. Jackson explained why this feature was so a must-add for them:
It’s important. As parents, we didn’t want our kid-content held hostage by any service, so we made two things a priority while building Notabli:
Parents retain ownership of the content they post about their kids.
The moments you post are always available for download.
He points out that up until now, his company hasn’t done any advertising or PR, and that growth has been entirely organic. Up until this new v2, it has been more or less a public beta for them.
Everything we learned from our first version was used to refine Notabli 2 into an app that is better in almost every way, but maintains the level of simplicity and focus that we think makes Notabli great. In addition to this upcoming release, we also just launched email digests. These have really shown to work well for those friends and family that prefer email, over viewing Notabli moments on the web or in the iOS app.
Given Japan’s enthusiasm for photo apps, I closed by asking Jackson if they have any plans to introduce a localized version of Notabli for Japan. He replies:
We’re definitely exploring localizations and would love to have a Japanese version of Notabli. Any volunteers to help out? Seriously. Email me!
Any readers here who actually are friends with me on Facebook will probably say that I share lots of baby pictures on Facebook. I do share some every once in a while, but when I do, I’m very selective, and visibility is set to a custom group of friends. ↩
I’ve already mentioned a few of the top ideas that came out of Aviary’s recent Photo Hack Day Japan, including ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Before the Filter’. But one of the other projects really resonated with me, as I’m a big user of flash card apps for language learning. Vocagetty was a clever sort of dictionary app proposed by the team of Atsushi Onoda, Hiroshi Kanamura, Shinichi Segawa, Yasushi Takemoto. It makes use of the Getty Images API to pull in pictures associated with the vocabulary you’re studying, and the Imagga API to generate smart crops of those pictures. The idea here is that the pictures will reinforce the word or idea, making for more a effective learning process. Overall Vocagetty impressed at the hackathon [1], taking third place and walking away with 100,000 yen (about $1000). I’m told by Atsushi Onoda that the group will continue to develop Vocagetty, with plans for an upcoming release in April. There are lots of similar learning services and apps already on the market. But it’s an interesting space because companies can choose to be either an all purpose study solution that can be used for any subject (see Anki or Memrise…
I’ve already mentioned a few of the top ideas that came out of Aviary’s recent Photo Hack Day Japan, including ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Before the Filter’. But one of the other projects really resonated with me, as I’m a big user of flash card apps for language learning. Vocagetty was a clever sort of dictionary app proposed by the team of Atsushi Onoda, Hiroshi Kanamura, Shinichi Segawa, Yasushi Takemoto. It makes use of the Getty Images API to pull in pictures associated with the vocabulary you’re studying, and the Imagga API to generate smart crops of those pictures.
The idea here is that the pictures will reinforce the word or idea, making for more a effective learning process. Overall Vocagetty impressed at the hackathon [1], taking third place and walking away with 100,000 yen (about $1000). I’m told by Atsushi Onoda that the group will continue to develop Vocagetty, with plans for an upcoming release in April.
There are lots of similar learning services and apps already on the market. But it’s an interesting space because companies can choose to be either an all purpose study solution that can be used for any subject (see Anki or Memrise for example), or they can target a niche like Japanese language, medical terms, or the periodic table.
I was glad to see Vocagetty incorporate an image solution, because it was a good example of how a flash card or word study service can supplement text-based information.
On a related note, I’ve recently revisited the aforementioned Anki (after a long time away from it) because I wanted to test out its support for automated audio, which can accompany vocabulary by installing one of many add-ons [2]. While many services have a audio for pre-made flash card decks, this capability to bring audio to cards you add yourself is incredibly helpful.
But I think that the one process that many companies in this space overlook is the process of creating cards from vocabulary you find in your travels on the web. This kind of word or sentence mining is a process that I have get to see really well implemented in any flash card system [3]. Ideally it would take the form of a JavaScript bookmarklet (or bookmarklets) for mobile and PC browsers, which you could then use to add new words on the fly as you learn.
It will be interesting to see in what direction Vocagetty takes its service, so stay tuned for more about them later this spring. We’d like to feature comparable services soon as well, so stay tuned.
I should disclose here that I volunteered to act as one of the judges for this competition, as a way to lend some support for a fun community event. ↩
Recruit Life Style, a subsidiary of Japan’s Recruit Holdings, and US-based payment processing company Square announced yesterday they will integrate Recruit’s register tablet app AirRegi and Square’s payment service Square Register later this month. Both companies jointly started accepting applications from store owners for a combination of these services. At the same time, Japanese payment company Coiney also announced yesterday that it has partnered with NTT East. Coiney’s card-swiping solution will be integrated NTT East’s tablet-based register app Raku Regi, and through this partnership store owners using a combination of their technologies will no longer need to enter the billing amount into two different terminals. On a related note, tabled-based register app Yubiregi partnered with cloud-based accounting solution Freee last October, providing convenience for their users in a somewhat similar way. These integrations can reduce time-consuming work when closing the register at the end of the day, helping retail store owners concentrate on more primary tasks.
At the same time, Japanese payment company Coiney also announced yesterday that it has partnered with NTT East. Coiney’s card-swiping solution will be integrated NTT East’s tablet-based register app Raku Regi, and through this partnership store owners using a combination of their technologies will no longer need to enter the billing amount into two different terminals.
On a related note, tabled-based register app Yubiregipartnered with cloud-based accounting solution Freee last October, providing convenience for their users in a somewhat similar way. These integrations can reduce time-consuming work when closing the register at the end of the day, helping retail store owners concentrate on more primary tasks.
Japan’s Line continues to impress in the gaming space, with its recent title Cookie Run accumulating 10 million downloads in its first 30 days. But personally, I was more interested to try out the company’s latest game Line Rangers, which features the company’s own repertoire of characters. I’ve only spent a little time with this game so far, but I really like it a lot. Yet at the same time I’m a little conflicted. Line has completely ripped off one of my favorite tower defense games, Battle Cats, made by another Japanese company Ponos, based in Kyoto. So on the one hand, I’m really disappointed in Line for its “me too” approach. The similarities between the games are especially apparent if you compare the interface/controls in the pictures below. But on the other hand, two cool games are better than one cool game! Get Line Rangers as a free download for iOS or Google Play. I’ll hopefully have more to say about it after I’ve spent a week or so playing with it.
Japan’s Line continues to impress in the gaming space, with its recent title Cookie Run accumulating 10 million downloads in its first 30 days. But personally, I was more interested to try out the company’s latest game Line Rangers, which features the company’s own repertoire of characters. I’ve only spent a little time with this game so far, but I really like it a lot.
Yet at the same time I’m a little conflicted. Line has completely ripped off one of my favorite tower defense games, Battle Cats, made by another Japanese company Ponos, based in Kyoto.
So on the one hand, I’m really disappointed in Line for its “me too” approach. The similarities between the games are especially apparent if you compare the interface/controls in the pictures below. But on the other hand, two cool games are better than one cool game!
Get Line Rangers as a free download for iOS or Google Play. I’ll hopefully have more to say about it after I’ve spent a week or so playing with it.
Japanese internet giant CyberAgent announced today that it has invested in New York-based Dash Labs (Dash.by), a young startup whose service is billed as a sort of FitBit for cars. Details of the investment were not disclosed. Dash works through the installation of a low-cost on-board diagnostic unit that connects your smartphone to your car via Bluetooth. In this way, it enables a range of features, such as giving you a driving score, providing alerts for engine issues or feedback on maintenance issues, or gamified social functions where you can compare your driving to friends. Dash’s Android app was just recently launched, and an iPhone version will follow soon. Even though they are just getting their mobile apps out now, the company claims to have tested its technology for over 18 months, driving a million miles in 30 countries. Dash is part of the 2013 TechStars NYC class of startups. CyberAgent didn’t specify the time of its investment, but it looks like it was part of a $1.2 million financing round from December.
Japanese internet giant CyberAgent announced today that it has invested in New York-based Dash Labs (Dash.by), a young startup whose service is billed as a sort of FitBit for cars. Details of the investment were not disclosed.
Dash works through the installation of a low-cost on-board diagnostic unit that connects your smartphone to your car via Bluetooth. In this way, it enables a range of features, such as giving you a driving score, providing alerts for engine issues or feedback on maintenance issues, or gamified social functions where you can compare your driving to friends.
Dash’s Android app was just recently launched, and an iPhone version will follow soon. Even though they are just getting their mobile apps out now, the company claims to have tested its technology for over 18 months, driving a million miles in 30 countries.
Dash is part of the 2013 TechStars NYC class of startups. CyberAgent didn’t specify the time of its investment, but it looks like it was part of a $1.2 million financing round from December.
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
