Tokyo-based Allied Architects(TSE:6081) announced yesterday it has set up a subsidiary in Singapore. It’s called Allied Asia Pacific, and it will administrate operations around the company’s marketing services in the region, including the ‘Monipla for Facebook’ marketing platform in Vietnam and Taiwan.
Our readers may recall that the company recently partnered with Silicon Valley-based growth hacking startup AppSocially. So I expect this expansion is intended to assist such partner services in reaching out to local businesses in the region.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Freee, the operator of a cloud-based accounting solution of the same name, has raised $8 million from two venture capital firms, including DCM and Infinity Venture Partners. This is according to a Nikkei reported earlier this morning. Prior to this funding, the company secured a $500,000 in seed round funding from DCM back in March of last year, and a $2.7 million series A round of funding from DCM and Infinity Venture Partners back in July. The total amount of funding to date has reached $11.2 million since the company’s launch back in July of 2012. For more information about the company, check out our brief interview below with their execs from back in October. In this space, their competitor Money Forward also raised $5 million from Jafco back in October.
Tokyo-based Freee, the operator of a cloud-based accounting solution of the same name, has raised $8 million from two venture capital firms, including DCM and Infinity Venture Partners. This is according to a Nikkei reported earlier this morning.
Prior to this funding, the company secured a $500,000 in seed round funding from DCM back in March of last year, and a $2.7 million series A round of funding from DCM and Infinity Venture Partners back in July. The total amount of funding to date has reached $11.2 million since the company’s launch back in July of 2012. For more information about the company, check out our brief interview below with their execs from back in October.
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based Chintai Joho Co., the startup behind apartment search portal Cashback Chintai, announced today that it has fundraised 100 million yen (about $975,300) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Their portal allows property agents to list apartments on a pay-per-performance basis, which doesn’t require them to pay any adverting fee until a contract is made with a tenant. If you agree on a contract for an apartment via the website, some ‘housewarming’ reward money will be given to you. At this time, the property company can be notified that a deal was been made via the website, because they are billed at this time. Since its beta launch back in November of last year, they have been rapidly growing, with over 1.2 million apartments listed during the busy relocation season last month. They plan to use the new funds to step up system development and marketing, as well as enrich the content on their website. The smartphone-optimized interface for the site will be launched early next month. Shifting an industry Some of our readers may aware that entrepreneur Shoji Endo is on the company’s board of directors. He launched…
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.
Tokyo-based Chintai Joho Co., the startup behind apartment search portal Cashback Chintai, announced today that it has fundraised 100 million yen (about $975,300) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain.
Their portal allows property agents to list apartments on a pay-per-performance basis, which doesn’t require them to pay any adverting fee until a contract is made with a tenant. If you agree on a contract for an apartment via the website, some ‘housewarming’ reward money will be given to you. At this time, the property company can be notified that a deal was been made via the website, because they are billed at this time.
Since its beta launch back in November of last year, they have been rapidly growing, with over 1.2 million apartments listed during the busy relocation season last month. They plan to use the new funds to step up system development and marketing, as well as enrich the content on their website. The smartphone-optimized interface for the site will be launched early next month.
Shifting an industry
Shoji Endo
Some of our readers may aware that entrepreneur Shoji Endo is on the company’s board of directors. He launched his first business while attending university, and subsequently joined Japanese job search company Livesense (TSE:6054) as director in its early stages. You may recall we reported last year about the acquisition of his previous startup DreamPass.
At Livesense, he deployed the concept giving users congratulatory money when they were hired through the company’s job search portal. It subsequently helped Livesense defeat many other job sites. Now he is bringing this idea to the property business.
Unique apartment portal model?
A performance-based revenue model using the concept giving users congratulatory money is not new. So why has no one tried it in the property business industry? According to the company’s CEO Isshin Kaneuji, it’s likely just how the industry works. Considering things from an accounting perspective, typical property agents have specific figures for how much they pay for each apartment search sites, regardless of whether that effort results in contracts. He explained:
Some estate agent franchisers buy and book ad spaces for affiliated stores. In some cases, this cost is included in a franchise fee that the stores will pay every month. Conversion-based billing is cost-effective for agents when listing their apartment ads, but it may be difficult for small stores to request their affiliating franchiser to change the fee scheme.
It will be interesting to see how their website evolves this space where other two big players (Recruit’s Suumo and Homes) still dominate.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based travel startup Trippiece announced today that it has launched an English version to assist international travelers visiting Japan. Since its launch back in 2011, it has been serving Japanese users. Now with the launch of this English version the company hopes to establish a global user base. Prior to launch, they established a subsidiary in Singapore, hiring Shuying Yao as overseas marketing manager. She will be committed to user engagement and marketing in Asian regions. They currently have no plan to serve languages other than English. Trippiece allows you to create a travel plan and gather others who are keen to join. There is a troublesome chicken/egg issue when you launch on a web service of this kind. That is, if there are no travel plans on the platform, you cannot invite more users. And without users, you cannot have travel plans. The company’s founder and CEO Ian Ishida has learned a lot about this issue, having experienced it when they launched the original Japanese version. He explained how they will try to avoid it this time around: To ensure the quality of the travel plans we provide, we will ask selected foreigners…
Tokyo-based travel startup Trippiece announced today that it has launched an English version to assist international travelers visiting Japan. Since its launch back in 2011, it has been serving Japanese users. Now with the launch of this English version the company hopes to establish a global user base.
Singapore-based marketing manager Shuying Yao
Prior to launch, they established a subsidiary in Singapore, hiring Shuying Yao as overseas marketing manager. She will be committed to user engagement and marketing in Asian regions. They currently have no plan to serve languages other than English.
Trippiece allows you to create a travel plan and gather others who are keen to join. There is a troublesome chicken/egg issue when you launch on a web service of this kind. That is, if there are no travel plans on the platform, you cannot invite more users. And without users, you cannot have travel plans. The company’s founder and CEO Ian Ishida has learned a lot about this issue, having experienced it when they launched the original Japanese version. He explained how they will try to avoid it this time around:
To ensure the quality of the travel plans we provide, we will ask selected foreigners living in Japan to create their travel plans. If they can lead a tour, other foreign visitors will not need to worry about a language issue when taking that tour.
But if we depend only on our users’ efforts in having a solid collection of travel plans, we won’t be able to form a community of users. So we will make about 30 travel plans by the launch of the English edition. We’re not interested in how many international users we can acquire, but we aim to have 1,000 users traveling to Japan using our website six months from now.
In this space, we’ve also seen many competitors like Asoview, Voyagin, PlayLife, and Trip. Trippiece has a relatively long history, but how can they stand out from the others? Ishida explained:
Our uniqueness is that we create an opportunity for experience. A travel plan will be executed just once, in contrast with other services which usually sell their tours or plans multiple times. What we do is help users establish a social graph through travel, rather than just helping them travel.
Consequently, some of their users have voluntarily organized a club for diving lovers, for example. Others could find boyfriends and girlfriends through a tour they have attended.
In Japan, central and local governments have been committed to cultivating the so called MICE (meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibitions) market needs, with the aim of surpassing 20 million international travelers annually to Japan heading towards the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. With that in mind, Trippiece plans to acquire over 10,000 users who will use the website and visit Japan a year from now.
Tokyo-based recipe sharing service Cookpad (TSE:2193) announced yesterday that it has acquired Indonesian [1] recipe site Dapur Masak, buying a 60% stake for US$600,000 from founder Soegianto Widjaja. Cookpad announced back in January that it had invested an undisclosed amount for a 40% share of Dapur Masak. Our readers may recall Cookpad also acquired US-based Allthecooks and Spain’s Mis Recetas back in December. via Venture Now Based in Singapore. ↩
Tokyo-based recipe sharing service Cookpad (TSE:2193) announced yesterday that it has acquired Indonesian [1] recipe site Dapur Masak, buying a 60% stake for US$600,000 from founder Soegianto Widjaja. Cookpad announced back in January that it had invested an undisclosed amount for a 40% share of Dapur Masak.
Our readers may recall Cookpad also acquired US-based Allthecooks and Spain’s Mis Recetas back in December.
See the original article, written in Japanese With Tokyo chosen as host for the 2020 Olympics, the city is likely to get more and more attention from tourists. Of course among the many tourists expected to come to Japan, many will be Muslim. Tokyo International Airport recently opened a prayer room for Muslims, but there are other issues to work on. One such issue is food. For example, when I spend time with Muslim friends in Tokyo, it can be difficult to find alcohol-free soy sauce and menus which don’t contain pork. But one entrepreneur has stepped up to try to solve this problem. Fukuoka-based Kyushu Lab has launched an Android app called HalalMinds. It enables users to scan the bar code of any product to identify if it is halal, or permissable for Muslims to eat. The app also has a Qibla Compass feature, which lets Muslims to determine the right direction for performing prayers. Japan already has a Muslim population of about 150,000, and about the same number live in South Korea too. Nearly 1.2 million Muslims visit Japan every year either for sightseeing or for business. Kyushu Lab wants to help serve this demographic as potential users…
With Tokyo chosen as host for the 2020 Olympics, the city is likely to get more and more attention from tourists. Of course among the many tourists expected to come to Japan, many will be Muslim. Tokyo International Airport recently opened a prayer room for Muslims, but there are other issues to work on. One such issue is food. For example, when I spend time with Muslim friends in Tokyo, it can be difficult to find alcohol-free soy sauce and menus which don’t contain pork. But one entrepreneur has stepped up to try to solve this problem.
Fukuoka-based Kyushu Lab has launched an Android app called HalalMinds. It enables users to scan the bar code of any product to identify if it is halal, or permissable for Muslims to eat. The app also has a Qibla Compass feature, which lets Muslims to determine the right direction for performing prayers.
Japan already has a Muslim population of about 150,000, and about the same number live in South Korea too. Nearly 1.2 million Muslims visit Japan every year either for sightseeing or for business. Kyushu Lab wants to help serve this demographic as potential users or HamalMinds.
The app was developed by Indonesian student Agung Pambudi, a member of Kyushu Lab who has lived in Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Finland. Along with his doctoral studies in Kyushu University, he put a lot of effort into developing this app. He explained:
As a Muslim, we need to live our everyday lives with halal food and drink. But it is hard to find such products in Japan because some processed foods contain pork or alcohol. Also, we even recognize meat not processed in a permissible way as non-Halal. We developed HalalMinds with the aim to of bringing it to not only Japanese users, but to users around the world.
Considering the overall size of Muslim population, even here in Japan, I think there is much potential to monetize such an app. I recall a team of university students who designed an app called C@ndy, a sort of Craiglist for Muslims.
Singapore-based startup Bitsmedia launched an app called Muslim Pro which lets you find halal restaurants and read the Koran. That app achieved 4 million downloads in March 2014.
HalalMinds released its Android app early this month, and an iOS version will follow at the end of this month.
Masaru Ikeda
Takeshi Hirano
