This week we witnessed yet another entrant into Japan’s mobile news app space. It’s called Mynd, and it comes from Tokyo-based TomyK, led by Tomihisa Kamada.
The app has a very beautiful UI with a number of slick translucent elements (pictured below). It also supports a wide range of external services, including Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Pocket, and Hatena. Users can opt to read news at any time, or have a summary delivered to them every morning (like Gunosy does, for example). The single article view defaults to the source’s own web view rather than stripped down text view [1], which is a mistake in my view – but this appears to be common practice among news apps in Japan.
It’s interesting to see more and more new apps emerging in this space to challenge the likes of Gunosy and SmartNews. I hope to bring you a closer look at this sector in the near future, so stay tuned for that.
For now, if you’d like to give Mynd a try, it’s available as a free download for iOS and Android.
Think Instapaper, Readability, or even SmartNews’s ‘Smartmode’. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Open Network Lab, the startup incubator operated by Digital Garage and its affiliated companies, announced today it has started accepting applications for the ninth batch of its seed accelerator program. This batch will run from July to September of this year, with qualifying startups able to work from the incubator’s Daikanyama space (in Tokyo). Participants can also work at the recently established DG717 venue in San Francisco, where they can develop products, explore funding opportunities, and receive mentoring in the heart of the US startup community. Since its launch back in 2010, the program has incubated 45 startups over the past eight batches. Many of their graduates have been aggressively seeking business opportunities in Silicon Valley and Japan. You may recalled movie crowdsourcing platform Viibar raised $3 million from Globis Capital Partners and Gree Ventures back in February. On a related note, the incubator will hold a demo day on April 23rd to showcase startups from their eighth batch, so please stay for our coverage of that event. You can also check out our previous articles covering past demo days. Your submissions for the ninth batch will be accepted until May 19th.
A workshop held at DG717, Digital Garage’s incubation space in San Francisco.
Tokyo-based Open Network Lab, the startup incubator operated by Digital Garage and its affiliated companies, announced today it has started accepting applications for the ninth batch of its seed accelerator program.
This batch will run from July to September of this year, with qualifying startups able to work from the incubator’s Daikanyama space (in Tokyo). Participants can also work at the recently established DG717 venue in San Francisco, where they can develop products, explore funding opportunities, and receive mentoring in the heart of the US startup community.
Since its launch back in 2010, the program has incubated 45 startups over the past eight batches. Many of their graduates have been aggressively seeking business opportunities in Silicon Valley and Japan. You may recalled movie crowdsourcing platform Viibar raised $3 million from Globis Capital Partners and Gree Ventures back in February.
On a related note, the incubator will hold a demo day on April 23rd to showcase startups from their eighth batch, so please stay for our coverage of that event. You can also check out our previous articles covering past demo days.
Your submissions for the ninth batch will be accepted until May 19th.
See the original article written in Japanese Bento.jp, a new lunch delivery service for busy business people, launched last week. Now with just a few taps on your smartphone, you can get your freshly made bento box lunch [1] delivered in around 20 minutes, at a costs of 800 yen ($8) including the delivery fee. I interviewed the company’s CEO Atsumasa Kobayashi, who previously worked in Itokuro (a company later transferred to KLab), involved in launching its social games division and Shanghai branch office. He came back to Japan in 2013 and founded Bento.jp Inc this past January. Currently, he runs the company, along with engineer Masahiro Saito. He explains coming up with the idea for the service through his own experience. It was a time when I was so busy that I didn’t have many other choices than to go to convenience stores to get lunch to bring back to the office. I wished I had more options. I’d like to provide more alternatives for those who feel the same way, bringing some innovation to the existing lunch market which hasn’t changed in a long time. How is Bento.jp different from other food delivery services? The big difference is…
Bento.jp, a new lunch delivery service for busy business people, launched last week. Now with just a few taps on your smartphone, you can get your freshly made bento box lunch [1] delivered in around 20 minutes, at a costs of 800 yen ($8) including the delivery fee.
I interviewed the company’s CEO Atsumasa Kobayashi, who previously worked in Itokuro (a company later transferred to KLab), involved in launching its social games division and Shanghai branch office. He came back to Japan in 2013 and founded Bento.jp Inc this past January. Currently, he runs the company, along with engineer Masahiro Saito. He explains coming up with the idea for the service through his own experience.
It was a time when I was so busy that I didn’t have many other choices than to go to convenience stores to get lunch to bring back to the office. I wished I had more options. I’d like to provide more alternatives for those who feel the same way, bringing some innovation to the existing lunch market which hasn’t changed in a long time.
How is Bento.jp different from other food delivery services? The big difference is its convenience, a sort of Uber – but for lunches. Bento.jp reminds me of UberRUSH, a new service recently launched by Uber, which delivers packages on foot or by bike in New York city. Kobayashi adds:
Like Amazon, more and more companies are starting to deliver orders on the same day or the following day. What’s the next step? I’m sure more companies will try to deliver within hours, and then in less than an hour. Bento.jp wants to meet that expectation and bring customers what they want soon after they want it.
The bento that the company currently offers is the kind most people are familiar with, with things like rice and fried chicken. Their bento lineup is created by a chef with experience at the Michelin-starred French restaurant Chez Naka. The company plans to add more quality Bento to this lineup in the future.
Bento.jp first looks to achieve stable sales of about 1000 bento a day. And while the delivery area is currently limited to Shibuya, Dogenzaka and Roppongi, it aims to expand to other busy area later on.
The number of startups offering food-related services are growing around the world. If a company like Bento.jp can successfully respond to the customers’ needs, I believe there is a lot of potential to win repeat customers.
If you work in the area where service is available, do give Bento.jp a try. You can download the app for free from the App Store.
A bento lunch is a Japanese take-out box packed with rice and variety of side dishes, usually for one person. ↩
Ample, the Tokyo-based startup behind cosplay photo sharing platform of the same name, announced today that it has raised an undisclosed sum of funding from Japan’s online learning company Hitomedia and entrepreneur/investor Takafumi Horie. Since its launch back in October of 2012, the platform has acquired more than 40,000 photos and over 210,000 likes on Facebook, and has users from about 60 countries worldwide. The company plans to use these funds to strengthen its team so it can better serve its users, and develop additional features such as a personalized interface. For Hitomedia, this is the fourth tech startups investment in its history, following US-based social commerce platform Fancy, online English learning school Langrich, and mobile food recommendation app Teriyaki. via Venture Now
Ample, the Tokyo-based startup behind cosplay photo sharing platform of the same name, announced today that it has raised an undisclosed sum of funding from Japan’s online learning company Hitomedia and entrepreneur/investor Takafumi Horie.
Since its launch back in October of 2012, the platform has acquired more than 40,000 photos and over 210,000 likes on Facebook, and has users from about 60 countries worldwide. The company plans to use these funds to strengthen its team so it can better serve its users, and develop additional features such as a personalized interface.
For Hitomedia, this is the fourth tech startups investment in its history, following US-based social commerce platform Fancy, online English learning school Langrich, and mobile food recommendation app Teriyaki.
See the original article written in Japanese Cookpad, the Japanese online recipe platform, is largely recognized as a “user first” service. The Cookpad app recently surpassed 20 million downloads, and their latest data shows nearly 70% of access to the service comes from smartphones. This past February, the company built a mobile-first team. Among the company’s 70 engineers, about 10% joined the team. Aside from app development and operations, the company is pushing towards a mobile-first policy, encouraging web engineers to focus on mobile-related work. I spoke with Toshihiro Yagi and Kentaro Takiguchi, who have just joined this mobile-first team. Both have experience developing Android apps, and both came to Cookpad less than a year ago. The development of the Android app started within the device division of the media department, which later turned into the mobile-first team. The project started in October of last year, and after half a year of development, the Android app officially launched this past March. The mobile version of Cookpad originally started as a website formatted for smartphones. At that time, even though the division had dozens of web engineers, it had only one Android engineer. To adapt to the increasing number of users…
Toshihiro Yagi and Kentaro Takiguchi from the mobile-first team
Cookpad, the Japanese online recipe platform, is largely recognized as a “user first” service. The Cookpad app recently surpassed 20 million downloads, and their latest data shows nearly 70% of access to the service comes from smartphones.
This past February, the company built a mobile-first team. Among the company’s 70 engineers, about 10% joined the team. Aside from app development and operations, the company is pushing towards a mobile-first policy, encouraging web engineers to focus on mobile-related work.
I spoke with Toshihiro Yagi and Kentaro Takiguchi, who have just joined this mobile-first team. Both have experience developing Android apps, and both came to Cookpad less than a year ago.
The development of the Android app started within the device division of the media department, which later turned into the mobile-first team. The project started in October of last year, and after half a year of development, the Android app officially launched this past March.
The mobile version of Cookpad originally started as a website formatted for smartphones. At that time, even though the division had dozens of web engineers, it had only one Android engineer. To adapt to the increasing number of users on smartphones, it was decided to offer Cookpad as a native app.
The team of four (three Android engineers and one designer) worked together to develop the Android app. They collaborated on the app’s UI and usability, using the engineer’s knowledge of things like OS guidelines. Based on the mockup created by the designer, they worked towards creating the best app they could.
Consistent UX/UI
The iOS app for Cookpad had been already released, so the team had to be careful that the Android app design would not be influenced too much by that. To ensure that the app was easy to use, the team continued releasing small, incremental updates. One such update, for example, had the menu icon located in the left-top corner. The team learned that some users don’t recognize that the icon can be tapped to display a menu, and so they they implemented a tutorial message a the initial log-in to address the issue.
Takiguchi: It took much time to figure out to what extent the usability and UI of our iOS and Android apps should be unified. Many people say there should be a consistent user experience for iOS and Android, and the UI should be designed differently. But that’s a very difficult thing to do.
Through these small improvements, eventually the amount of time users spent on the Android app increased 30% more than they had seen with the previous version, which looked more like the service’s web interface. Swifter movement through content inside the app and improved tab display (such as today’s recipe and top recipe) also contributed much to this success. Yagi explained that one of the most important things to keep in mind during this kind of development is to keep asking if a feature is really necessary, and if it is easy to use.
Results that get attention
Cookpad has an internal blog where members share ideas. Since last November the company has also organized a meeting called Potechi where engineers outside and inside the company get together to share technical tips. Potechi takes place every week within the company, and every month for the external meet. Each iOS or Android engineer is given five minutes to present their tips.
Yagi: Engineers at Cookpad are all highly motivated and have great technical skills. When we find a problem, we all do our best to solve it.
Takiguchi: Our CEO often says that each member has to keep a career goal in our mind when we work. He says we should create results that will attract headhunters’ attention.
Cookpad currently look for mobile engineers. To work on the mobile-first team, the most important thing is to have strong passion for app development rather than technical skills and experiences.
Yagi: We look to see if the candidate codes at home or outside the work place. We look for someone who looks like they cannot help but code at any occasion.
The value of female engineers
At present, all members of mobile-first team are men. Even in the company as a whole, female engineers amount to only 10% of the total. Engineers are expected to see things from the user’s perspective in order to find the best usability and UI by working with designers. Therefore, they hope they can add a force of female engineers as well.
Yagi: We interview users and hear their opinion. But when we reflect on app design, we might need to filter out perspectives that come from the male point of view. I believe that if the engineer is a woman, then it can effect the app design a lot. So we really hope female engineers can join our team.
It is not going to far to say that a major service like Cookpad could set the standard for app usability and UI. If you are passionate about creating apps, you might want to join their Potechi meeting. The next one takes place on May 14th.
If you’re starting to tire of seeing Line’s characters all over the place here in Japan, I have some bad news for you. Line is teaming up with fashion retailer Uniqlo to offer Line Character branded t-shirts as part of the new Uniqlo t-shirt (UT) line-up [1]. In my view, Uniqlo lends some much-needed credibility to Line’s characters, putting them alongside far more established brands like Hello Kitty and Disney. The shirts are on sale now for the very affordable price of 943 yen (or just over $9). Check out Uniqlo’s promo video for the new 2014 line-up below, including the new Line t-shirts about halfway through. (It’s an unlisted video, so if this embed suddenly stops working, you know why!) Via news.ameba.jp As far as I can tell, this is just for Uniqlo stores in Japan. I can’t find the Line t-shirts on the Uniqlo USA website. ↩
If you’re starting to tire of seeing Line’s characters all over the place here in Japan, I have some bad news for you. Line is teaming up with fashion retailer Uniqlo to offer Line Character branded t-shirts as part of the new Uniqlo t-shirt (UT) line-up [1].
In my view, Uniqlo lends some much-needed credibility to Line’s characters, putting them alongside far more established brands like Hello Kitty and Disney. The shirts are on sale now for the very affordable price of 943 yen (or just over $9).
Check out Uniqlo’s promo video for the new 2014 line-up below, including the new Line t-shirts about halfway through. (It’s an unlisted video, so if this embed suddenly stops working, you know why!)
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
Yukari Mitsuhashi
