Apple’s Q2 2014 earnings are out, with the company reporting 26% revenue growth in Japan. It is very true that looking at Apple’s year-on-year revenue growth is very flattering towards the Japan market, as you can see in our chart here:
To be precise, Apple’s strong performance in Japan is (of course) powered by the iPhone, where Apple has taken 55% of the smartphone market, and iPhone sales were up 50% year-on-year (according to CEO Tim Cook in the earnings call).
If we step back a little bit, and Apple’s long-term overall revenue picture for Japan is less dramatic, as you can see below. China is very obviously the company’s primary engine for growth in recent quarters.
See the original article written in Japanese Last weekend at the Microsoft Japan Office here in Tokyo, the ninth edition of the Samurai Venture Summit took place. This is a semi-annual startup event organized by Samurai Incubate, and is a great opportunity for investors to find startups in the early seed stages. Here is a quick rundown of the startups that caught our eye at the event. Wine It! Wine It is an app that identify the kind of wine you are drinking by taking picture of the label with a smartphone camera. The app contains data for nearly 11,000 wine brands, including information such as grape variety, the place of production, and cuisines that match the wine. There is an app called Sakenote that helps you to keep track of Japanese sake that you drink. But the main feature of Sakenote is to keep a record of your experience, Wine It is more like a wine encyclopedia. If you can’t find a certain brand of wine in the app, the information will be transferred to a sommelier, and it will be added to the database later on. Wine It! has not succeeded in monetizing just yet, but it could…
Last weekend at the Microsoft Japan Office here in Tokyo, the ninth edition of the Samurai Venture Summit took place. This is a semi-annual startup event organized by Samurai Incubate, and is a great opportunity for investors to find startups in the early seed stages. Here is a quick rundown of the startups that caught our eye at the event.
Wine It!
Wine It is an app that identify the kind of wine you are drinking by taking picture of the label with a smartphone camera. The app contains data for nearly 11,000 wine brands, including information such as grape variety, the place of production, and cuisines that match the wine.
There is an app called Sakenote that helps you to keep track of Japanese sake that you drink. But the main feature of Sakenote is to keep a record of your experience, Wine It is more like a wine encyclopedia. If you can’t find a certain brand of wine in the app, the information will be transferred to a sommelier, and it will be added to the database later on.
Wine It! has not succeeded in monetizing just yet, but it could be possible to create an e-commerce service such as a Sake subscription service.
This initiative began as an incubated startup at D2C, a joint venture of NTT Docomo and ad agency Dentsu.
STARted
Many aspiring fashion designers have dreamt of launching their own brand. But doing so requires a very complicated process. In addition to creating your designs, you need to look for factories and then convince retailers or online stores to sell it.
But using a service like STARted, you need only upload a hand-drawn design of your dress, and STARted takes over the rest of the process. It’s a little early to talk about the potential of the service since it is still in the closed testing phase right now, with plans to launch this summer.
However, if the startup successfully builds a solid platform, perhaps implementing a crowdfunding system, it could become a place that helps designers do business without the usual required capital or risk.
Edulio
Edulio is an online learning platform that launched in Japan earlier this month. The first ‘O’ in MOOC stands for ‘open’, but in contrast, Edulio is a platform that runs closed online courses. It has about 180 clients including training companies and private preparatory schools. The platform lets clients to provide online courses for a closed group of users, and it has a dashboard where clients can track the learning progress of the participants and manage tests and results.
As Youngme Moon, the dean of Harvard Business School’s MBA program, mentioned at the recent New Economy Summit, the audience is not forced to engage, so it is important to build a system that motivates them to participate in learning. Edulio currently lets users who are taking the same course share their achievements, with future plans to strengthening this feature later on.
Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the eighth batch of its incubation program. A “Best Team” and “Special” award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubation period. Let’s take a quick look at those two, and take a look at the other startups that graduated from the program as well. ShouldBee (‘Best Team’ award winner) It is said that typical software development requires that you spend almost 50% of time just testing. What the ShouldBee team provides is an automated testing process for web-based systems that are under development. By using this solution, developers can automate the process of filling and submitting forms on their web app, and it can complete testing 12 times faster than human testers, and reduce cost to one-sixtieth of what would normally be required for conventional human-based testing. Since its launch several months ago, it has acquired 105 companies as users without any significant promotional effort. Jidoteki (‘Special’ award winner) There are many convenient SaaS-based tools out there, such as DropBox or Evernote. But often many corporations resist using…
Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the eighth batch of its incubation program.
A “Best Team” and “Special” award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubation period. Let’s take a quick look at those two, and take a look at the other startups that graduated from the program as well.
ShouldBee (‘Best Team’ award winner)
It is said that typical software development requires that you spend almost 50% of time just testing. What the ShouldBee team provides is an automated testing process for web-based systems that are under development.
By using this solution, developers can automate the process of filling and submitting forms on their web app, and it can complete testing 12 times faster than human testers, and reduce cost to one-sixtieth of what would normally be required for conventional human-based testing.
Since its launch several months ago, it has acquired 105 companies as users without any significant promotional effort.
From the left: ShouldBee’s Hidehito Nozawa, Reo Mori, and Digital Garage CEO Kaoru Hayashi
Jidoteki (‘Special’ award winner)
There are many convenient SaaS-based tools out there, such as DropBox or Evernote. But often many corporations resist using such tools because of their internal guidelines or security reasons. Jidoteki lets SaaS vendors to create a virtual appliance having their apps. It encourages enterprise users to adopt a such SaaS tools by setting up such an appliance behind their firewall.
The Jidoteki team
Orange Magazine
Orange Magazine is a mobile content platform that targets relatively older female users. In contrast with many mobile services that go after the younger generation these days, this team learned that senior women are having difficulties finding information about things like movies, health, travel, and much more.
To address this, they have developed a mobile app that is easy to use, and comfortable to read even for seniors. In order to provide a good user experience and content likely to fit their preference, they asked several older women to curate news articles as well.
For their monetization strategy, they considered partnering with existing book or magazine publishers to distribute their content to premium users through the app.
Astero
Astero is a notification-focused news delivery app that aspires to bring you what you want to know at the right time. Typical users subscribe to many resources or visit many websites to collect things you want to know about. It could be things like appointments, weather updates, public transit updates, or when your favorite publication is on sale in stores.
In order to keep you from missing something important, they have developed an app that focuses on following three factors:
Curation – Opt out of updates likely to be unnecessary to you.
Recommendation engine – They’ve developed an engine using own original algorithm
Notification management – Users can adjust the frequency of notification updates, or even receive a single ‘digest’ of many notifications at once.
They are considering monetizing their service by partnering and integrating with third-party apps.
StudyPact
Our readers may recall that we told you a bit about StudyPact during our recent coverage of the HackOsaka event. It is a service that lets users set a study goal with monetary stakes as a 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 like Duolingo, Anki, Memrise, Coursera and Edx. They launched an Android version of the app several weeks ago, and they have learned their users’ completion rate for online courses has reached 85%. Typically the completion rate for MOOCs is somewhere around a lowly 5%.
Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the next batch of its incubation program starting in July. The application deadline is May 19th.
This past March saw the three year anniversary of the tragic 3.11 earthquake here in Japan. At the time, Line Corporation released a set of stickers to sell on its platform, drawn by kids from the affected regions. The set of 24 stickers, pictured below, were to be sold for 100 yen (or about $1) with proceeds going towards ongoing recovery efforts. According to japan.internet.com this evening, that set of stickers has now raised over 38 million yen (about $370,000) in the six short weeks that they have been available for purchase. Line apparently doesn’t make any money from this, taking only what it needs to handle transaction fees on Apple and Google app stores. The stickers can still be purchased if you’d like to do so, as they’ll be available until September 10 of this year. Line did something similar to assist with Typhoon Haiyan relief in the Philippines last year, raising over $500,000 in that effort. via japan.internet.com
This past March saw the three year anniversary of the tragic 3.11 earthquake here in Japan. At the time, Line Corporation released a set of stickers to sell on its platform, drawn by kids from the affected regions. The set of 24 stickers, pictured below, were to be sold for 100 yen (or about $1) with proceeds going towards ongoing recovery efforts.
According to japan.internet.com this evening, that set of stickers has now raised over 38 million yen (about $370,000) in the six short weeks that they have been available for purchase. Line apparently doesn’t make any money from this, taking only what it needs to handle transaction fees on Apple and Google app stores.
The stickers can still be purchased if you’d like to do so, as they’ll be available until September 10 of this year.
Line did something similar to assist with Typhoon Haiyan relief in the Philippines last year, raising over $500,000 in that effort.
Line released its mobile game Sonic Dash S, developed by Sega, back in late January. The title was made available in a number of Asian countries, but it hadn’t performed very well until a recent 1.1 update gave it a boost in most of its app markets. Still, this is perhaps the most famous IP that Line has featured in a game to date, and I’d expected it to perform far better. I hadn’t given the game a serious look until recently, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts here. Sonic Dash is, as has been pointed out before, more or less a Temple Run clone, requiring you to swipe up/down/left/right to avoid enemies and treacherous obstacles. You can gather and use items you collect, as well as use supporting characters (or Chaos [1]). With the exception of a number of surprising app crashes, I found the gameplay pretty straightforward, with much of the Line integration that we have from the company’s other mobile games. You can get rewards by sharing information to your friends on Line, and even borrow Chao characters from them if you wish. The problem for me is that only one of my 162 Line…
Line released its mobile game Sonic Dash S, developed by Sega, back in late January. The title was made available in a number of Asian countries, but it hadn’t performed very well until a recent 1.1 update gave it a boost in most of its app markets. Still, this is perhaps the most famous IP that Line has featured in a game to date, and I’d expected it to perform far better.
I hadn’t given the game a serious look until recently, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts here. Sonic Dash is, as has been pointed out before, more or less a Temple Run clone, requiring you to swipe up/down/left/right to avoid enemies and treacherous obstacles. You can gather and use items you collect, as well as use supporting characters (or Chaos [1]).
With the exception of a number of surprising app crashes, I found the gameplay pretty straightforward, with much of the Line integration that we have from the company’s other mobile games. You can get rewards by sharing information to your friends on Line, and even borrow Chao characters from them if you wish. The problem for me is that only one of my 162 Line friends is actually playing Sonic Dash – not a good number in comparison to other Line games I’ve played.
With the new 1.1 update a number of changes have been made to the game, with stages shortened and a new character, Blaze (pictured below), added to the list of playable characters [2]. A new beach course has been added to the game as well.
If you’d like to give Line Sonic Dash S a try, you can get it as a free download for iOS or Android. Let us know in the comments if you find it a tad crashy as well!
By ‘Chaos’ I don’t mean the word ‘chaos’ but rather plural of the word ‘Chao’. ↩
You need to spend rings to upgrade to Blaze of course, so it will take a little while before you can unlock her. ↩
The Tokyo incarnation of Startup Weekend has been ongoing for quite some time now [1]. And while the most recent Startup Weekends are held mostly in Japanese to encourage more local involvement, we’re glad to see that this weekend (Friday, April 25th to Sunday, April 27th) will mark the first international-themed event, appropriately dubbed Startup Weekend Tokyo International. We spoke briefly with one of the organizers who explained that even though the regular Startup Weekend Tokyo events have become rather homogenous, there are still many Japanese people interested in international business who would like to meet a more diverse range of people. Similarly, having an international themed event encourages people from other countries who might be here in Tokyo to come out and participate. While the event will be conducted in English, and for anyone here in Tokyo it could be a good opportunity to pitch in English and meet some fun people as well. If you’d like to sign up for this one, you can do so over on Doorkeeper. One of our earliest postings about the event dates all the way back to 2010. ↩
The Tokyo incarnation of Startup Weekend has been ongoing for quite some time now [1]. And while the most recent Startup Weekends are held mostly in Japanese to encourage more local involvement, we’re glad to see that this weekend (Friday, April 25th to Sunday, April 27th) will mark the first international-themed event, appropriately dubbed Startup Weekend Tokyo International.
We spoke briefly with one of the organizers who explained that even though the regular Startup Weekend Tokyo events have become rather homogenous, there are still many Japanese people interested in international business who would like to meet a more diverse range of people. Similarly, having an international themed event encourages people from other countries who might be here in Tokyo to come out and participate.
While the event will be conducted in English, and for anyone here in Tokyo it could be a good opportunity to pitch in English and meet some fun people as well.
If you’d like to sign up for this one, you can do so over on Doorkeeper.
One of our earliest postings about the event dates all the way back to 2010. ↩
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
