Tokyo-based Astamuse, the company behind the online platform for researchers and workers in the intellectual property field, announced today it has launched the English edition of the service for the global audience. The platform is serving over 1 million users in Japan with:
Patent application data which have been filed over the last 20 years in Japan
Over 10.5 million cases of technical information categorized in more than 38 different technical fields
Analysis of about 300,000 Japanese companies in their technological strength
These have been available only in Japanese until today, but the company launched the global edition to promote Open Innovation activities in developed countries and Reverse Innovation activities in developing countries using Japanese advanced technologies.
It is understood that the company aims to help workers worldwide involved in intellectual property connect with each other by providing Japanese users with a translation of intellectual property-related documents from the US and European countries, and vice versa for Western users.
From my perspective, I often see many cases where I need technological expertise. So I think the platform of intelligence like Astamuse.com will definitely contribute to business people and reporters as well as workers in the R&D industry.
See the original story in Japanese. ZenFotomatic is a cloud-based automated photo cropping and enhancement tool and was recently introduced by an Osaka-based startup called Glams. Since its beta launch back in September 2013, the service has acquired more than 1,200 accounts from Japan as well as over 600 accounts from abroad. Photos often need to be color corrected or trimmed before uploading to a website, regardless of how much carefully you consider camera settings like resolution or white balance when you take a photo. It is not difficult to enhance one or two photos manually. But for apparel e-commerce sites that list a number of item photos this task can be very time-consuming and even hinder their regular business operations. Glams has also its own online store in Japan’s largest online shopping mall Rakuten. In suffering from busy, yet non-productive, routine tasks every day, the Osaka outfit came up with the idea developing ZenFotomatic to improve the situation. The company’s co-founder and CEO Daisuke Miura told us a bit about it. Unlike big fashion e-commerce sites, in-mall online stores have to list a new item as soon as it arrives. Because the earlier you can list it, the higher…
ZenFotomatic is a cloud-based automated photo cropping and enhancement tool and was recently introduced by an Osaka-based startup called Glams. Since its beta launch back in September 2013, the service has acquired more than 1,200 accounts from Japan as well as over 600 accounts from abroad.
Photos often need to be color corrected or trimmed before uploading to a website, regardless of how much carefully you consider camera settings like resolution or white balance when you take a photo. It is not difficult to enhance one or two photos manually. But for apparel e-commerce sites that list a number of item photos this task can be very time-consuming and even hinder their regular business operations.
Glams has also its own online store in Japan’s largest online shopping mall Rakuten. In suffering from busy, yet non-productive, routine tasks every day, the Osaka outfit came up with the idea developing ZenFotomatic to improve the situation. The company’s co-founder and CEO Daisuke Miura told us a bit about it.
Daisuke Miura
Unlike big fashion e-commerce sites, in-mall online stores have to list a new item as soon as it arrives. Because the earlier you can list it, the higher rank in a search result your item will be listed in. So it’s more likely for you to acquire potential buyers.
However, the photo enhancement process is very tough for online stores, especially for the ones with a small team like us. We are a five-person team but were often forced to work overnight for enhancing photos. We thought that more than a few online merchants have the same problem. To address it, I was jestingly discussing with New Zealander engineer Blain Hosford in my team, and he subsequently completed ZenFotomatic.
If you set a certain threshold in the app, it can automatically detect the boundary of a object and its background in a photo using a proprietary algorithm, which is obviously the core technology. It has no feature yet to learn user preference, but if you claim that your picture is inappropriately processed, it will be transferred to the Glams engineering team and they will analyze it to optimize the algorithm.
Their service prices start from 2,500 yen (almost $25) for enhancing 100 photos. The service is originally designed for small-sized and shorthanded online stores, but now even several big e-commerce companies are using it as well, so it seems like they also have a monthly flat rate pricing plan for such heavy users.
We understand that they maintain its focus on the Japanese market for now but wants to begin global expansion as money can be raised while an appropriate operating officer in addition to good engineers can be hired. The Glams CEO added:
The e-commerce ratio in Japan is as low as 3%, which is obviously lower than that of the US (5 to 7%) and UK (9%). I think there will be more opportunities available outside the country. Our service is non-verbal so we really want to reach out to the global market in the future.
Image composite feature
The company recently added a new feature that allows you to composite your preferred images very easily. For online store owners, it makes you easier to add stickers or logos to a number of your existing photos in a batch operation.
When I heard about this feature for the first time, I couldn’t understand why there is a need for it because from the developer’s perspective, I thought these image composite features are usually supported on the e-commerce platform side. In a response to my question, Miura explained:
Our potential users are small and medium-sized online store owners. Many of their stores are located in a big online mall, where they have no way to generate composited images dynamically. They usually complete processing images on their desktops and upload such completed static images to the website. So we added the feature and enabled users to complete these processes in a batch operation on the ZenFotomatic cloud.
Talking about e-commerce solutions, we like to imagine big ones designed for big e-commerce players. But I think Glams added this feature in order to provide more convenience to in-mall store owners.
I often hear from Japanese e-commerce company NetPrice.com’s CEO Teruhide Sato, who’s best known for having invested in payments processors and logistics operators in Turkey, India, and Indonesia, that there’s a common pattern for the e-commerce industry in the process of spreading in any country. Now we see several fulfillment services for e-commerce operators in developing countries, so we may probably expect ZenFotomatic to become one of the standards and an essential item for all e-commerce players around the world soon.
See the original story in Japanese. Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore. Why so confident? Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors: Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20. Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region…
Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore.
Why so confident?
Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors:
Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20.
Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region because we’ve seen no competitors focused on such a niche space.
Adding multilingual options
Many of their users come from Japan and the Southeast Asian regions. To address a latency issue for them, the company’s cloud facilities are located in Singapore and Osaka, Japan. Using the funds raised this time, they plan to set up another facility in Palo Alto to prepare for their expansion to the US market and also add user support offices in Palo Alto and Indonesia to the existing locations in Singapore and Osaka. Fujimoto explained:
Since WordPress accounts for over 20% of all websites in the world, everyone knows how it’s sure to monetize. We’re still as young as six months old, but we’ve been receiving many takeover offers from companies like telcos in Asia and Silicon Valley-based companies expecting expansions to the Asian markets. But we have no intention to accept their offers for now.
Sova is also in talk with a undisclosed Japanese hosting company to provide a white label service for their customers. So you’ll be able to see a WordPress cloud hosting service branded with a major Japanese company pretty soon. The service is currently available in English and Japanese, but plan to add Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Spanish to its language options next month.
Launching freemium hosting plan
Earlier this week, the company started accepting applications for their freemium hosting plan called Sova WP Free. Now that they’ve got the funds and a measurable number of paying users, so they thought it’s good to launch the premium plan to gain their awareness amongst potential customers. Fujimoto added:
It’s a freemium service but has a feature to boost the capacity of your environment to withstand up to 1 million daily page views. We’re developing our own ad network platform, which will enables blog owners using our service to monetize their content. It’s also available for mobile browsing. Typical WordPress templates are limited in its variety of design, but we will provide many templates using responsive designs and give users more choices.
We understand that they are trying to secure a series A funding worth an amount ranging from $10 to $15 million by the end of October.
I was curious about how Fujimoto have been working prior to this business. He told me that he started his own business while he was attending Kyoto University. Subsequently he launched an IT business and sold it over to a big Japanese IT company back in 2009. He’s busy flying back and forth between Singapore and Palo Alto for setting up their first office in the US.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Casy (apparently pronounced ‘Carjee’), the startup offering crowdsourced housekeeping services under the same name, was officially launched today and also announced that it has raised an undisclosed sum of investment from Japanese startup incubator Beenos. Both husband and wife in more than 60% of all households in the country. [1] This situation has led to an expansion of the Japanese housekeeping market, which surpassed $960 million in FY2012 and shows nearly a 20% annual growth. [2] Despite the fact that more people think they have to keep a good balance between work and family, only high-income households are using housekeeping services since they can still be as expensive as $40 to $50 per hour. CaSy’s CEO Hiroki Ikeda saw a potential out there because he also has a child but both he and his wife hold jobs. He told us what prompted him to launch the service: I’ve used several housekeeping services, they typically asked me to sign many forms before closing the deal, and I was weary. I felt wary also because I couldn’t understand how they could try to match the personality of a housekeeper they arranged to sent me with…
Tokyo-based Casy (apparently pronounced ‘Carjee’), the startup offering crowdsourced housekeeping services under the same name, was officially launched today and also announced that it has raised an undisclosed sum of investment from Japanese startup incubator Beenos.
Both husband and wife in more than 60% of all households in the country. [1] This situation has led to an expansion of the Japanese housekeeping market, which surpassed $960 million in FY2012 and shows nearly a 20% annual growth. [2]
Despite the fact that more people think they have to keep a good balance between work and family, only high-income households are using housekeeping services since they can still be as expensive as $40 to $50 per hour.
CaSy’s CEO Hiroki Ikeda saw a potential out there because he also has a child but both he and his wife hold jobs. He told us what prompted him to launch the service:
I’ve used several housekeeping services, they typically asked me to sign many forms before closing the deal, and I was weary. I felt wary also because I couldn’t understand how they could try to match the personality of a housekeeper they arranged to sent me with my needs.
Compared to existing services in this field, we were told that CaSy has three key differentiators:
Available for as low as 2,500 yen ($25) per hour – This was made possible by eliminating wasteful processes and improving operations.
Online booking available for 24 hours a day – You can complete your reservation within one to two minutes using your desktop or smartphone. (See Figure at right, click to enlarge)
Stringently selected housekeepers – The company conducts an interview with every single housekeeper before they hire him/her. You can ask them to show you the profile of a housekeeper before you order them to send you him/her. By doing this over again, the more times you use the service, the more accurately they can send you a housekeeper who is likely to fit your needs.
At the time of launch, available services include cleaning living room, bathroom, kitchen, etc. Starting with the central area of Tokyo, they plan to expand service area to more cities gradually and hire more housewives, etc. as housekeepers.
In commemorating the launch, the company is running a promotion campaign where you can get discounts when you or your friend sign up for the service. Ikeda finally explained what they expect to bring users through the service:
We want to assist busy families and working couples in their child care. We are aiming to give people more time with their family members.
According to a report by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. ↩
According to a report by Japan’s Yano Research Institute. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Some of our readers may know Japanese recruiting company LiveSense succeeded in IPO back in 2012 with the business model giving rewards to users when securing a new job using the company’s platform. This business model has been adopted at more than a few sites in this space, and such companies include Taiwan-based job search site Job178 which recently fundraised from Japanese internet company Mixi. Following this trend, Job Talents was officially launched back in March in Thailand. The service was launched by Yojiro Koshi who was previously working with Japanese mobile ad network company Nobot (acquired by Japanese telco KDDI’s subsidiary Mediba back in 2011) for their business developments in Thailand. He figured out that the new wave of innovation has not yet reached the Thai recruiting industry, and is trying to bring never-before-seen services to this space. Koshi told us how they plan to evolve their business from now: We plan to add a feature that helps our users create their resumes. Because many people are not used to create a resume or have no custom to attach their portrait to it. We recently invited a Thai consultant to our team. She…
Following this trend, Job Talents was officially launched back in March in Thailand. The service was launched by Yojiro Koshi who was previously working with Japanese mobile ad network company Nobot (acquired by Japanese telco KDDI’s subsidiary Mediba back in 2011) for their business developments in Thailand. He figured out that the new wave of innovation has not yet reached the Thai recruiting industry, and is trying to bring never-before-seen services to this space. Koshi told us how they plan to evolve their business from now:
We plan to add a feature that helps our users create their resumes. Because many people are not used to create a resume or have no custom to attach their portrait to it. We recently invited a Thai consultant to our team. She has been helping a lot of local people get employed again in Thailand. We will also give our users advice on creating a resume or an employment interview.
Japanese gaming publisher Donuts is hiring game designers for their local subsidiary in Thailand using Job Talents.
The company is currently a five-person team comprising of Japanese, Thai, and American staff. One of the biggest issues they are facing is that they are not able to roll out additional features and interface improvements so fast. In order to address this, they expect to raise money this summer for hiring new engineers, and are exploring funding opportunities for it now.
In this space in the Southeast Asian region, we’ve seen competitors like Jobtopgun (Thailand), jobsDB (Hong Kong), and JobStreet.com (Malaysia). Koshi is devoting himself to adjusting his service to the needs of the Thai job seekers, and he has receiving advice from famous Thai entrepreneur Natavudh Pungcharoenpon, CEO of Thai e-publication startup Ookbee which recently fundraised from Japanese system integration company Trans Cosmos.
Since its launched earlier this year, Job Talents has acquired about 1,000 job seekers and 100 companies, so they still need to work harder to show a more active presence amongst the Thai people. We understand that their marketing still depend only on Facebook ads Google Adwords, so I expect them to do it better making good use of the Line app which has the world’s second largest user population in Thailand.
See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s startup-focused investment firm CyberAgent Ventures announced today that it has formed a new fund worth 5 billion yen (about $50 million) called CA Startup Internet Fund No.2. This is because of closing their previous fund CA Startup Internet Fund No.1. Comparing to the previous one worth about $24 million, the new fund is almost double in size and is planned for investment of an amount ranging from $100,000 to $1 million in every single startup they choose. The company’s vice president Tomoki Shirakawa explained how they plan to proceed from here: We’ll keep looking to companies in the internet business space but planning to expand our coverage beyond it. I don’t mean we will lower a threshold. We’ll be on the lookout for interesting startups and try to discuss with more entrepreneurs. Increasing opportunities to meet up with aspiring and active entrepreneurs is one of their focus. As part of such an effort, they will hold a meetup event called Startup Workout on July 2nd, where Takaya Shinozuka, CEO of Japan’s members-only hotel booking site operator Loco Partners, will share his success and failure experiences with an audience. Shirakawa says his team is…
Japan’s startup-focused investment firm CyberAgent Ventures announced today that it has formed a new fund worth 5 billion yen (about $50 million) called CA Startup Internet Fund No.2. This is because of closing their previous fund CA Startup Internet Fund No.1.
Comparing to the previous one worth about $24 million, the new fund is almost double in size and is planned for investment of an amount ranging from $100,000 to $1 million in every single startup they choose. The company’s vice president Tomoki Shirakawa explained how they plan to proceed from here:
We’ll keep looking to companies in the internet business space but planning to expand our coverage beyond it. I don’t mean we will lower a threshold. We’ll be on the lookout for interesting startups and try to discuss with more entrepreneurs.
Increasing opportunities to meet up with aspiring and active entrepreneurs is one of their focus. As part of such an effort, they will hold a meetup event called Startup Workout on July 2nd, where Takaya Shinozuka, CEO of Japan’s members-only hotel booking site operator Loco Partners, will share his success and failure experiences with an audience.
Shirakawa says his team is always looking forward to hearing from entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs. So if you have any good idea in your mind, I’d recommend you not to hesitate to drop him a line.
Junya Mori
Masaru Ikeda
Yukari Mitsuhashi
