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Leading Japanese news app Gunosy launches in the US. But is it ready?

Rick Martin 2014.05.16

A couple of weeks ago Japanese mobile news startup Gunosy launched an English version of their app for the UK. Now today the company has announced that it has released its iOS app in the US as well, with an Android version to follow at the end of the month. The company says that it is targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide. And while I’m usually encouraged to see Japanese companies venturing abroad, there are three reasons I can think of why this app – in its current form – will fail spectacularly. No ‘readability’ view – I’ve written about why I think so before. Gunosy does not provide news articles in a stripped-down, Readability-style view. Most Western news apps, in contrast, do. Check out the view of the same article below, first on Gunosy, then on Pocket. Which would you prefer to read on mobile? Late mover advantage squandered – As a startup, if you enter a market late as Gunosy is now doing, you benefit from seeing what competitors have done, and you have a chance to do it better. Gunosy, for some reason, seems to think it has a chance against the…

A couple of weeks ago Japanese mobile news startup Gunosy launched an English version of their app for the UK. Now today the company has announced that it has released its iOS app in the US as well, with an Android version to follow at the end of the month.

The company says that it is targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide. And while I’m usually encouraged to see Japanese companies venturing abroad, there are three reasons I can think of why this app – in its current form – will fail spectacularly.

No ‘readability’ view – I’ve written about why I think so before. Gunosy does not provide news articles in a stripped-down, Readability-style view. Most Western news apps, in contrast, do. Check out the view of the same article below, first on Gunosy, then on Pocket. Which would you prefer to read on mobile?
Late mover advantage squandered – As a startup, if you enter a market late as Gunosy is now doing, you benefit from seeing what competitors have done, and you have a chance to do it better. Gunosy, for some reason, seems to think it has a chance against the competition without bothering to do anything. In my view, their app does not in any way compare with even the 2012 version of Flipboard (for example), let alone the current one.
Doesn’t serve the user first – Just for kicks, I tried to send an article from Gunosy to Pocket. It worked, but the link that Gunosy lets users share not actually the article link, but a Gunosy link of this format: https://gunosy.today/r/gEqFt. At first I thought it might be just a link shortener, but it’s not, as you can see below. It’s pure Gunosy promotion with a download link and the top, and below too if you scroll down. Warning, this mess may induce flashbacks to the Hootsuite toolbar.

So where is Gunosy’s proposed value add? I confess, I have no idea. Perhaps KDDI knows? I can think of 12 million reasons why they should know!

Gunosy’s push notifications/reminders at different times during the day might be touted as a differentiator, but it’s not really a big selling point.

I think if the company hopes to do well beyond Japan, they’ll need to make some serious user-focused iterations on this app first.

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GREE Ventures closes $50M fund to target Asian startups

Rick Martin 2014.05.16

GREE Ventures has just announced the initial closing of its second fund. Dubbed the AT-I Investment Limited Partnership, this is a 5 billion yen fund (or about $50 million) which it will use to target tech startups in Japan and South East Asia, mostly series A stage companies at about 100 million yen to 300 million yen per company ($1 million to $3 million). Investors in the fund include GREE Inc, SME Support Japan, Credit Saison, Ateam Inc, and Mizuho Capital. The announcement notes that a second closing will likely come later this summer. GREE Ventures (PDF)

GREE Ventures has just announced the initial closing of its second fund. Dubbed the AT-I Investment Limited Partnership, this is a 5 billion yen fund (or about $50 million) which it will use to target tech startups in Japan and South East Asia, mostly series A stage companies at about 100 million yen to 300 million yen per company ($1 million to $3 million).

Investors in the fund include GREE Inc, SME Support Japan, Credit Saison, Ateam Inc, and Mizuho Capital. The announcement notes that a second closing will likely come later this summer.

GREE Ventures (PDF)

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Fujitsu unveils retail store analytics solution to visualize customer movement

Rick Martin 2014.05.16

The folks over at Tech-On have reported about some clever infrared sensor technology from Fujitsu that visualizes the movements of shoppers in a store. By using the recorded data, a store manager can gain insights into whether or not their product displays are effective or find out information about their in-store queues. The solution sounds somewhat similar to that of startup Locarise, which instead determines foot traffic metrics based on wi-fi signals collected from customers’ smartphones. Our readers may recall that Locarise was a special award winner at last October’s OnLab Demo Day. Via TechOn

The folks over at Tech-On have reported about some clever infrared sensor technology from Fujitsu that visualizes the movements of shoppers in a store. By using the recorded data, a store manager can gain insights into whether or not their product displays are effective or find out information about their in-store queues.

The solution sounds somewhat similar to that of startup Locarise, which instead determines foot traffic metrics based on wi-fi signals collected from customers’ smartphones. Our readers may recall that Locarise was a special award winner at last October’s OnLab Demo Day.

Via TechOn

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Japanese e-commerce platform Base raises $3M from Global Brain

Takeshi Hirano 2014.05.15

See the original story in Japanese. Base, the Japanese startup behind the e-commerce platform of the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen (or about $3 million) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Coinciding with this announcement, Global Brain’s Kazuhiko Fukayama has joined the company’s board and East Ventures‘ Takanori Oshiba was appointed as an auditor for the e-commerce company. In addition, the company also announced that former GMO Pepapo executive Hiroto Shin will also join the board as COO. Shin is perhaps best known for launching the e-commerce business Color Me Shop at his previous company. According to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, this funding was planned prior to their previous $2 million funding from CyberAgent. So they’ve succeeded in raising around $5 million as initially planned. Tsuruoka tells us that they have acquired more than 80,000 merchants to date. That’s an impressive total, up from 50,000 merchants when we previously spoke with him back in October. We asked him whether or not his startup can keep growing at a good pace, to which he replied: There are 1.6 million retailers nationwide in Japan. If you consider the number of stores dealing with daily use items,…

base-tsuruoka_featuredimage — Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka

See the original story in Japanese.

Base, the Japanese startup behind the e-commerce platform of the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen (or about $3 million) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Coinciding with this announcement, Global Brain’s Kazuhiko Fukayama has joined the company’s board and East Ventures‘ Takanori Oshiba was appointed as an auditor for the e-commerce company. In addition, the company also announced that former GMO Pepapo executive Hiroto Shin will also join the board as COO. Shin is perhaps best known for launching the e-commerce business Color Me Shop at his previous company.

According to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, this funding was planned prior to their previous $2 million funding from CyberAgent. So they’ve succeeded in raising around $5 million as initially planned.

Tsuruoka tells us that they have acquired more than 80,000 merchants to date. That’s an impressive total, up from 50,000 merchants when we previously spoke with him back in October.

We asked him whether or not his startup can keep growing at a good pace, to which he replied:

There are 1.6 million retailers nationwide in Japan. If you consider the number of stores dealing with daily use items, I think we can target around 300,000 or 400,000 merchants on our platform. But if we consider independent creators as potential merchants, I think there’s no limit to our future growth.

Their t-shirt printing service on the platform got pretty good popularity among users. If they can acquire independent creators providing such services, then there’s a huge potential out there. From that perspective, their market may be overlap with other C2C focused companies in Japan like Mercari and Fril. The more their user base grows, then a variety of potential business model open up.

tsuruoka-at-new-office — At Base’s new office

news

Japanese mobile game giant Donuts invests in app developer Nagisa

Takeshi Hirano 2014.05.15

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Donuts, a mobile game developer and the creator of the video app MixChannel, announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Nagisa. Details of this investment were not disclosed but it appears to be worth about $1 million according to Nagisa’s corporate profile and past funding history. Launched back in 2010, Nagisa operates a messaging app called Balloon, and previously raised 100 million (or about $1 million) from Nissay Capital. Subsequently, they also produced the photo effects app Kame Camera, the diary app Livre, and a virtual idol app The 49th Girl — all of which have surpassed five million downloads cumulatively. The company also tells us that their movie app Slide Movies has acquired over 700,000 downloads in the two months since its launch back in December, and its monthly downloads surpassed 1 million in April alone. The company’s CEO Yoshiyuki Yokoyama told us that they are planning to expand their business to other sectors including C2C (consumer-to-consumer), fashion e-commerce, and games, thus making the most of their rapidly growing user base. As an investor, Donuts is interested in that user base, and is exploring synergy around Donut’s hit movie…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Donuts, a mobile game developer and the creator of the video app MixChannel, announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Nagisa. Details of this investment were not disclosed but it appears to be worth about $1 million according to Nagisa’s corporate profile and past funding history.

Launched back in 2010, Nagisa operates a messaging app called Balloon, and previously raised 100 million (or about $1 million) from Nissay Capital. Subsequently, they also produced the photo effects app Kame Camera, the diary app Livre, and a virtual idol app The 49th Girl — all of which have surpassed five million downloads cumulatively.

The company also tells us that their movie app Slide Movies has acquired over 700,000 downloads in the two months since its launch back in December, and its monthly downloads surpassed 1 million in April alone. The company’s CEO Yoshiyuki Yokoyama told us that they are planning to expand their business to other sectors including C2C (consumer-to-consumer), fashion e-commerce, and games, thus making the most of their rapidly growing user base.

As an investor, Donuts is interested in that user base, and is exploring synergy around Donut’s hit movie app MixChannel through this investment.

Japanese CRM startup Sansan raises $14.6 million

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Leading Japanese news app Gunosy launches in the US. But is it ready?

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