Our readers may recall we told you that Tokyo-based startup Okan has launched delivery service for Japanese deli foods for corporate customers. [1] The company announced today that it has raised an undisclosed sum from Japanese investment firm CyberAgent Ventures and food delivery company Oisix (TSE:3182).
With the service Office Okan, corporate customers will receive Japanese deli once a month, since the deli lasts about a month. These can be refrigerated, and users can buy it by dropping coins to the collection box on the fridge and prepare it in about minutes. The service was launched in close beta back in November and subsequently officially launched back in March.
The company plans to use the funds to strengthen their operating foundations including improving service operations as well as intensifying system development and marketing efforts. They also plan to explore sharing logistics and sales channels with Oisix for more efficient operations.
Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program. This is the part 1 of our quick rundown. Let’s have a look at the first six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months. Eigooo! Eigooo is an online chat-based English learning service. When they initially launched its mobile app back in February, it initially marked a conversion rate of 1.85%. But we understand that they succeeded in improving it to 2.627% after its interface and function adjustment. In similar services using Skype or other teleconferencing tools, a learning course is typically provided on a person-to-person basis, but is likely to require advance booking and charge users per hour. But Eigooo uses a text-based chat, so its teachers can interact with up ten students simultaneously, which requires no advance booking from students but pay a higher compensation to the teachers. They are also planning to expand to mainland China and Korea in the future, aiming to hit an annual revenue of $60 million and go IPO in five years. BrainWars BrainWars is a social quiz app and…
Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program.
This is the part 1 of our quick rundown. Let’s have a look at the first six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months.
Eigooo!
From the left: Eigooo co-founders Peter Rothenberg, Mizuno Nozue
Eigooo is an online chat-based English learning service. When they initially launched its mobile app back in February, it initially marked a conversion rate of 1.85%. But we understand that they succeeded in improving it to 2.627% after its interface and function adjustment.
In similar services using Skype or other teleconferencing tools, a learning course is typically provided on a person-to-person basis, but is likely to require advance booking and charge users per hour. But Eigooo uses a text-based chat, so its teachers can interact with up ten students simultaneously, which requires no advance booking from students but pay a higher compensation to the teachers.
They are also planning to expand to mainland China and Korea in the future, aiming to hit an annual revenue of $60 million and go IPO in five years.
BrainWars
BrainWars is a social quiz app and pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. See these articles to learn how it works.
Categorific
Categorific is a data-mining service using the image recognition technology. Ikkyo Technology, the startup behind the service, initially started their business with providing a content monitoring service for web service companies, helping them eliminating pirated content from their web services using the same technology.
They have been consulted by their clients about the possibilities of a new business using an enormous collection of images stored for the aforementioned countermeasure application. As a result of that, their team has invented Categorific.
They explained that the new service can be adopted for many purposes. For example, if you sell a sticker for a messaging app like Line, you can help users choose other stickers that they may like, by giving them a recommendation based on the service.
Graph
Shunsuke Takahashi
In Japan, people are trying to find statics over 100 million times an year. Even if you could successfully find the one you wanted, you would need more than an hour to edit or visualize it to be used in your presentation deck.
Graph allows you to find the statistics you want easily and embed it on your blog post. They understand that there are several competitors in this space but most of their platforms have difficulties in search accuracy or usability. So the company plans to focus on increasing the variety of statistics and easy-to-understand infographics. They expect to acquire 1 billion annual page views and monetize it by launching a premium service.
Pedal Forge
Takakazu Nakamura
Pedal Forge aims to allow users to test out a musical instrument before they but it. They will launch a web service enabling users to play the guitar virtually, with aiming to help them choose at home before visiting a guitar shop.
The service will be available in Japanese, English, and French this month. Since musical instrument makers learn that this will help them promote better their products, they are seen willing to provide sampling tone data to the platform.
Sttir
Ryo Tsukahara
When you think about how to compose a song, some people create it from scratch but others would remix songs created by someone else. Sttir wants to focus on serving the latter users and help them easily obtain songs and remix them in a way, as in sharing open source codes in the programmer community. They want to be called a GitHub for musicians.
Live3
Kyohei Tejima
When you have no plan to hang out after hours, it’s likely hard to find an event you may like using conventional ways like typical search engines. Live3 is a mobile app and allows you to match with your nearby events whose organizers still have many tickets unsold.
The service gives you 10 choices of live performances happening nearby every day, and you can buy it on the Live3 website or app if you like it. They plan to monetize it by charging 10% of the ticket price as a commission fee to event organizers. Their average conversion rate is as high as 7.39%.
See the original story in Japanese. Japanese startup-focused VC firm CyberAgent Ventures announced on Monday that it has started accepting applications to pitch at Rising Expo 2014 in Japan, the company’s annual startup conference which will take place in Tokyo on August 8th. Some of our readers may recall that the company held Rising Expo 2013 last September, where mobile live-broadcasting app TwitCasting won the top prize. Unlike the event’s past editions, CyberAgent Ventures is hosting local preliminary rounds in four Asian cities (Jakarta, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo) prior to the main event. If you want to apply, your business should be already live and you should be exploring funding worth more than 100 million yen ($1 million). Startups passing the preliminary screening process will be invited to pitch to major Japanese VC firms and business executives.
Japanese startup-focused VC firm CyberAgent Ventures announced on Monday that it has started accepting applications to pitch at Rising Expo 2014 in Japan, the company’s annual startup conference which will take place in Tokyo on August 8th.
Some of our readers may recall that the company held Rising Expo 2013 last September, where mobile live-broadcasting app TwitCasting won the top prize. Unlike the event’s past editions, CyberAgent Ventures is hosting local preliminary rounds in four Asian cities (Jakarta, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo) prior to the main event.
If you want to apply, your business should be already live and you should be exploring funding worth more than 100 million yen ($1 million). Startups passing the preliminary screening process will be invited to pitch to major Japanese VC firms and business executives.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based crowdsourcing service provider Crowdworks announced yesterday that it has rolled out a platform focused on hardware manufacturing, which aims to give crowdsourced workers a variety of jobs ranging from hardware planning, designs, testing, to sales. The new platform is called MakersWorks. They plan to match hardware manufacturers and construction companies with product designers and CAD engineers using the platform. The company also intends to help companies start developing their products on a mass production basis after prototyping in partnership with 3D printing companies and electronic manufacturing services providers. Through this platform, they expect to transact deals worth several million US dollars a month. We understand that crowdsourcing platforms have to provide their workers with a kind of jobs which are well standardized but less dependent on individual skills. However, hardware manufacturing typically requires engineering expertise dedicated to every task. So it will be interesting to see how the company can enhance their crowdsourcing capability to fit the manufacturing industry.
Tokyo-based crowdsourcing service provider Crowdworks announced yesterday that it has rolled out a platform focused on hardware manufacturing, which aims to give crowdsourced workers a variety of jobs ranging from hardware planning, designs, testing, to sales. The new platform is called MakersWorks. They plan to match hardware manufacturers and construction companies with product designers and CAD engineers using the platform.
The company also intends to help companies start developing their products on a mass production basis after prototyping in partnership with 3D printing companies and electronic manufacturing services providers. Through this platform, they expect to transact deals worth several million US dollars a month.
We understand that crowdsourcing platforms have to provide their workers with a kind of jobs which are well standardized but less dependent on individual skills. However, hardware manufacturing typically requires engineering expertise dedicated to every task. So it will be interesting to see how the company can enhance their crowdsourcing capability to fit the manufacturing industry.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Metaps, the company behind the app monetization platform of the same name, announced yesterday that it has acquired app ranking and analytics site App Data Bank. Since its launch back in 2011, App Data Bank has been publishing reports about app ranking and market analytics for mobile app developers. Through the acquisition, Metaps expects to create synergy with their primary business that helps developers monetize their apps in over 200 countries worldwide.
Tokyo-based Metaps, the company behind the app monetization platform of the same name, announced yesterday that it has acquired app ranking and analytics site App Data Bank.
Since its launch back in 2011, App Data Bank has been publishing reports about app ranking and market analytics for mobile app developers. Through the acquisition, Metaps expects to create synergy with their primary business that helps developers monetize their apps in over 200 countries worldwide.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based PrimeAgain, the startup best known for its mobile apps DecoAlbum and DrawChat, introduced a video chat app called Winker today. The app is available for iOS in English and Japanese. It allows you to take a video clip or a snapshot in a limited time you choose from one to ten seconds for sharing with other users. A user receiving your clip can play or view it just once. The company’s co-founder and CEO Nobuhiro Abe told us what they expect from the app: When you upload a video clip to a social network platform, you will carefully decorate or edit it prior to uploading, since it will remain permanently. Some people appeared in the clip may feel uncomfortable if you publish it to the public. However, you will have less reluctance to upload it if it’s an ephemeral and short-time one. I think this our concept is pretty similar to human memory system where we typically forget past events as time goes by. According to Abe, the SnapChat app has surpassed 70 or 80 million downloads, most of which come from the US market. So there’s no key player in this space…
Tokyo-based PrimeAgain, the startup best known for its mobile apps DecoAlbum and DrawChat, introduced a video chat app called Winker today. The app is available for iOS in English and Japanese. It allows you to take a video clip or a snapshot in a limited time you choose from one to ten seconds for sharing with other users. A user receiving your clip can play or view it just once.
The company’s co-founder and CEO Nobuhiro Abe told us what they expect from the app:
When you upload a video clip to a social network platform, you will carefully decorate or edit it prior to uploading, since it will remain permanently. Some people appeared in the clip may feel uncomfortable if you publish it to the public. However, you will have less reluctance to upload it if it’s an ephemeral and short-time one. I think this our concept is pretty similar to human memory system where we typically forget past events as time goes by.
According to Abe, the SnapChat app has surpassed 70 or 80 million downloads, most of which come from the US market. So there’s no key player in this space especially in the Asian regions. As many of our readers can agree, the Line app dominates the Asian markets while WhatsApp does in Western countries. In a similar way, the company wants to position Winker as the ephemeral video sharing app for Asia while SnapChat mainly serving American users. Abe explained a bit about the app’s uniqueness:
You can invite your friends to Winker using Facebook, Twitter and Line. However, your clips posted on the app will be never shared via these social network platforms. If you link your Winker account to your Twitter account, your Twitter friends and you can follow on Winker each other.
In this space, we’ve seen competitors like Muuk (by Mixi), 5sec snaps (by DeNA), PicChat (by Cinnamon), and Commu Camera (by Yahoo Japan). PrimeAgain plans to differentiate the Winker app from these competitors by adding new functions in the near future. Furthermore, they want to explore a potential monetization model by giving their corporate users an API (application program interface) to allow them to gain access to their official Winker accounts.
Junya Mori
Masaru Ikeda
Takeshi Hirano
