Tokyo-based Realworld, the company that operates a crowdsourcing/rewards platform in Japan, has announced that it has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market on Friday. The company will be listed on September 18th with plans to offer 220,700 shares for public subscription and to sell 73,600 shares in over-allotment options for a total of 270,400 shares. The underwriting will be led by Daiwa Securities.
Its share price range will be released on August 29th, bookbuilding is scheduled to start on September 2nd and pricing on September 9th. According to the consolidated statement, they posted a revenue of 2 billion Japanese yen ($20 million) and an ordinary profit of 36 million yen ($351,000), or a net profit of 2 million yen ($20,000).
Since establishment in July 2005, the company has been operating several crowdsourcing/rewards platforms such as Crowd and Lifemile, the latter being acquired from CyberAgent in 2011. The combined total of users across these several platforms is 8.5 million.
Tokyo-based Quan, the Japanese startup behind mobile apps like MyStickerShop and Lounge, announced today that it has invested in Bangkok-based game startup Magic Box Asia. Magic Box Asia was founded by Vincent Setiwan, co-founder of Bangkok’s co-working space Launchpad and the co-founder of Japanese anime creation crowdfunding site Anipipo. The company provides a smartphone game platform and app localization service for the Southeast Asian region with an emphasis on the Thai market. Since its launch in 2011, Quan has launched smartphone app MyStickerShop in partnership with Thailand’s leading telco AIS, as well as developed the Japanese versions of popular mobile games from Thai developers such as Kiragames, PocketPlayLab, and PromptNow. The company fundraised an undisclosed sum from Japanese e-commerce giant Netprice.com and investment company East Ventures in 2012. See also: How a small Japanese startup is helping Thailand’s biggest telco win new 3G subscribers WeChat turns to Japanese startup Quan for mobile sticker content Inside Bangkok’s growing startup scene
Tokyo-based Quan, the Japanese startup behind mobile apps like MyStickerShop and Lounge, announced today that it has invested in Bangkok-based game startup Magic Box Asia.
Magic Box Asia was founded by Vincent Setiwan, co-founder of Bangkok’s co-working space Launchpad and the co-founder of Japanese anime creation crowdfunding site Anipipo. The company provides a smartphone game platform and app localization service for the Southeast Asian region with an emphasis on the Thai market.
Since its launch in 2011, Quan has launched smartphone app MyStickerShop in partnership with Thailand’s leading telco AIS, as well as developed the Japanese versions of popular mobile games from Thai developers such as Kiragames, PocketPlayLab, and PromptNow. The company fundraised an undisclosed sum from Japanese e-commerce giant Netprice.com and investment company East Ventures in 2012.
See the original article in Japanese. Japanese internet marketing company Allied Architects (TSE:6081) launched its first overseas subsidiary in Singapore in April. The company, Allied Asia Pacific, has basically two roles: bringing Allied’s service developed in Japan, such as Monipla, to the global market, and developing a new global service of their own. Allied Asia Pacific launched its first service called ReFUEL4 on July 30th. Based on an approval from Facebook as its official API partner and partnership with Nanigans, one of Facebook’s strategic preferred marketing developers, the company has started providing a crowdsourced Facebook ad design platform for advertisers worldwide. According to Allied Asia, a Chinese gaming company and a telco from the Southeast Asian region will start using the service tomorrow as a group of their first clients. While they are many available spaces that crowdsourced business can be applied to, the wonder is why they have chosen to focus on Facebook ads. Kazuhiro Takiguchi, the managing director for Allied Asia as well as managing the ReFUEL4 project, explained why. Facebook ads are ‘consumed’ faster Typical TV commercials aim to imprint their messages on viewers by showing them the same clip as many times as possible. Looking at…
Japanese internet marketing company Allied Architects (TSE:6081) launched its first overseas subsidiary in Singapore in April. The company, Allied Asia Pacific, has basically two roles: bringing Allied’s service developed in Japan, such as Monipla, to the global market, and developing a new global service of their own.
Allied Asia Pacific launched its first service called ReFUEL4 on July 30th. Based on an approval from Facebook as its official API partner and partnership with Nanigans, one of Facebook’s strategic preferred marketing developers, the company has started providing a crowdsourced Facebook ad design platform for advertisers worldwide.
According to Allied Asia, a Chinese gaming company and a telco from the Southeast Asian region will start using the service tomorrow as a group of their first clients. While they are many available spaces that crowdsourced business can be applied to, the wonder is why they have chosen to focus on Facebook ads. Kazuhiro Takiguchi, the managing director for Allied Asia as well as managing the ReFUEL4 project, explained why.
Facebook ads are ‘consumed’ faster
Kazuhiro Takiguchi, Managing Director of Allied Asia Pacific
Typical TV commercials aim to imprint their messages on viewers by showing them the same clip as many times as possible. Looking at what’s happening on Japanese private TV networks these days, many startups developing mobile games or news curation apps are investing a lot of money to broadcast their TV commercials so that consumers are aware of these products. TV commercials allow you to promote your “stuff” efficiently, but they merely keep broadcasting over the long haul because it is costly.
Meanwhile, Facebook ads allows one to easily target a niche in the potential global user base for affordable rates though it doesn’t reach a vast consumer base like TV commercials can do. Facebook gives you a dashboard where one can easily narrow down a segment of an ad target, but many companies running global marketing campaigns usually submit their ads through one of Facebook’s 50 preferred marketing developers or 13 strategic preferred marketing developers. They provide an ad submitting and management tool as well as serving one as an agent for Facebook advertising.
Takiguchi explained why he has developed the crowdsourced platform:
While Facebook ads are cost effective, the more impressions an ad receives, the more likely it will bore users because they recognize they have looked at it before. So advertisers keep creating new designs one after another to prevent viewers from getting bored with your ad. However, typical advertisers can never catch up with the pace to keep creating it. That’s why we developed a crowdsourced platform focused on creating Facebook ad designs.
Despite over $10 billion revenue from its global annual ad sales, Facebook earns only 5% of that from the Japanese market. That’s why ReFUEL4 targets the global market rather then Japanese market alone. On the platform, over 2,500 crowdsourced creators from many countries, including the US, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, have been proposing designs to advertisers according to their preference orders.
Considering the locality advertising, if one wants to appeal to Indonesian consumers, for example, the platform encourages one more to crowdsource to Indonesian creators who usually better understand the market trend in Indonesia.
Advertisers use this screen to receive proposals from crowdsourced creators
Guaranteed CTR for advertisers, motivating creators for better designs
While ReFUEL4 is an ad production platform rather than an ad network platform, what’s unique is that it guarantees CTR (click through rate) for advertisers. Advertiser can order designs to crowdsourced creators using the platform at any time, but a creator can get no reward for his/her production unless advertisers adopt it and ad viewers (Facebook users) provide a favorable reputation to the published ad design by clicking it. Takiguchi elaborated how it works.
When submitting an offer, crowdsourced creators will propose their designs for the ad. If one take such an offer and it performs well, 3% of the ad revenue from the adopted design will be paid to its creator and Allied Asia on a 50/50 basis.
ReFUEL4′s dashboard for crowdsourced creators shows the CTRs of ad designs developed by other creators as well as own works. So it will let one understand what kind of designs will be favorably accepted and help earn more money. Takiguchi added:
We want to encourage more creators to get involved in bigger-budget promotion campaigns. And we’ve developed the platform so that creators can get money depending on how well their works have been performed for advertisers. While production cost is usually limited in the ad industry, advertisers can pay more if their ad shows better performance. Our creators can have larger dreams because our platform can pay them on a percentage basis.
Process workflow among parties concerned
Why Facebook ads?
There are many businesses that a crowdsourced platform can be applied to. If you look at these platforms only in banner ads designing, we’ve seen services like C-team by Recruit or startups like New York-based Dispop which came from Tel Aviv, Israel and fundraised $725,000. In a response to my question about why ReFUEL4 is focused on Facebook ads designing, Takiguchi explained:
Because our platform guarantees the minimum CTR, we have to work with a platform which has a technology helping keeping it high. The answer is Facebook or Google. I think even Twitter is still to come. Furthermore, Facebook ads have fewer format patterns, which can be implemented to a crowdsourced platform more easily.
Advertisers using the ReFUEL4 platform submit their ads to Facebook via aforementioned marketing company Nanigans. Based on a partnership with the latter company, Allied Asia can receive creation orders from advertisers for the crowdsourced platform without any massive promotion effort.
Allied Asia is currently developing a type of image recognition technologies behind the crowdsourced platform, to enable them to suggest how advertisers or creators should expose their products or put texts and images in ad designs for better performance.
With ReFUEL4, it is very interesting that the performance of an ad will have direct impact on the income of those who created it, which may also impact the business model of the conventional ad industry in the near future.
Seven years ago, Tokyo-based entrepreneur Yang Yang Xi launched the language-learning platform Lang-8. He came up with the idea while studying language at Kyoto University. See also: Lang-8: The language learning startup that’s playing the long game His company, also called Lang-8, fundraised an undisclosed sum from Tokyo-based VC firm CyberAgent Ventures in January. Because startups usually fundraise to launch a new business or expand their current business so we’ve been interested in how they will take a next step from there. That’s exactly what we want to tell you today. A new product from Lang8, HiNative gives users who are studying a language an easy way to connect to native speakers of that language. Typical language learners often have to refer to a dictionary or consult a foreign language teacher to learn appropriate expressions. However, a dictionary takes a grammatical and a formal approach, which does not work well for daily conversation, and a teacher is not always around to help. HiNative is just the app to overcome these problems. It allows users the choice of one of four question templates to query a native speaker on the platform (see below picture). Users are notified of their answers to…
Lang-8 co-founder and CEO YangYang Xi（喜洋洋）
Seven years ago, Tokyo-based entrepreneur Yang Yang Xi launched the language-learning platform Lang-8. He came up with the idea while studying language at Kyoto University.
His company, also called Lang-8, fundraised an undisclosed sum from Tokyo-based VC firm CyberAgent Ventures in January. Because startups usually fundraise to launch a new business or expand their current business so we’ve been interested in how they will take a next step from there. That’s exactly what we want to tell you today.
A new product from Lang8, HiNative gives users who are studying a language an easy way to connect to native speakers of that language.
Typical language learners often have to refer to a dictionary or consult a foreign language teacher to learn appropriate expressions. However, a dictionary takes a grammatical and a formal approach, which does not work well for daily conversation, and a teacher is not always around to help.
HiNative is just the app to overcome these problems. It allows users the choice of one of four question templates to query a native speaker on the platform (see below picture). Users are notified of their answers to their questions via e-mail.
You will set your native language(s) and the language(s) you are interested in when signing up for the service, so you will be requested to answer when another user puts a question on your language. The app is developed based on a responsive web design so you can comfortably keep using it on a smartphone or tablet as well as on a desktop.
Xi explained what has triggered his team to start developing HiNative:
With the Lang-8 platform, we initially thought that blogging is a good way to learn foreign languages with communication. But to keep blogging requires users to sustain a high motivation. While many web services have been shifting to mobile, blogging or writing a long story using a mobile interface is pretty difficult. So we had to develop something beyond the Lang-8 platform.
If a native speaker were standing next to you, it would be easy for you to ask him or her for a proper native phrase. But it’s not substantial. That’s why we developed HiNative.
Xi and his team have developed HiNative leveraging all the experience they’ve learned from the Lang-8 platform both in good sides and bad sides. Despite the fact that they launched the HiNative app as early as several months ago, they are already confident for user acquisition but are more focusing on tactics to improve user retention rate. Xi elaborated:
For a better user engagement, I think what users experience during their first visit to our service is a key. That’s why we’ve been running usability tests a bunch of times. Duolingo nicely marked 36 million downloads worldwide. But they are a content-based platform. We believe that a social network approach will be a main stream in the language learning platform. We aim to be the top platform in the social-based language learning category.
He added that the user active rate of the HiNative app is pretty better than that of the Lang-8 platform. In order to give users much better experience, they will launch an iOS app some day next month, as well as planning to start developing an Android version soon.
Tokyo-based Monstar Lab, the company that provides crowdsourced offshore app development service Sekai Lab, announced last week that it has fundraised 120 million yen (approximately $1.2 million) from East Ventures, SMBC Venture Capital, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital. See also: Sekai Lab: Crowdsourcing platform lets Japanese companies find developer teams around Asia The company launched Sekai Lab in March, where Japanese companies can crowdsource their app development tasks at affordable rates from over 300 teams comprising 3,000 crowdsourced engineers from 10 countries. The company will use the funds to boost business expansion through their subsidiary in Singapore, aiming to transact more than $10 million in deals, as well as acquire 100,000 crowdsourced engineers in three years. Monstar Lab also provides Monstar Channel, an online music distribution service for merchants and consumers.
The company launched Sekai Lab in March, where Japanese companies can crowdsource their app development tasks at affordable rates from over 300 teams comprising 3,000 crowdsourced engineers from 10 countries. The company will use the funds to boost business expansion through their subsidiary in Singapore, aiming to transact more than $10 million in deals, as well as acquire 100,000 crowdsourced engineers in three years.
Monstar Lab also provides Monstar Channel, an online music distribution service for merchants and consumers.
See the original story in Japanese. On Friday, Japans CyberAgent Ventures held its annual Rising Expo 2014 event which showcased up-and-coming 15 startups to a crowd of local investors and entrepreneurs [1]. Unlike past editions, the investment firm held preliminary events at their regional offices in Seoul, Beijing, and Jakarta prior to the finals where 15 teams, including 5 foreign startups, competed by pitching their product to attendees. Last year smartphone-based livestreaming app TwitCasting won the top prize, and the startup subsequently fundraised $5 million. Among the 15 participating startups this time, Space Market was chosen as the audience favorite. Top prize winner: Space Market (also winning the Recruit Career prize and the Sumitomo Fudosan prize) Space Market lists unused or idle venues and allows users to pick one to rent on demand for business needs such as corporate meetings, shareholder meetings, training courses, and other events. Reservations are made online. 2nd Prize winner: Hachimenroppi (also winning the AGS Consulting prize) Hachimenroppi buys fish from markets and brokers across the country and delivers it to Japanese restaurants or diners, according to specific needs. It was previously outlined in specific details about how it works, so please check it out ….
On Friday, Japans CyberAgent Ventures held its annual Rising Expo 2014 event which showcased up-and-coming 15 startups to a crowd of local investors and entrepreneurs [1].
Unlike past editions, the investment firm held preliminary events at their regional offices in Seoul, Beijing, and Jakarta prior to the finals where 15 teams, including 5 foreign startups, competed by pitching their product to attendees.
Last year smartphone-based livestreaming app TwitCasting won the top prize, and the startup subsequently fundraised $5 million. Among the 15 participating startups this time, Space Market was chosen as the audience favorite.
Top prize winner: Space Market (also winning the Recruit Career prize and the Sumitomo Fudosan prize)
Space Market lists unused or idle venues and allows users to pick one to rent on demand for business needs such as corporate meetings, shareholder meetings, training courses, and other events. Reservations are made online.
2nd Prize winner: Hachimenroppi (also winning the AGS Consulting prize)
Hachimenroppi buys fish from markets and brokers across the country and delivers it to Japanese restaurants or diners, according to specific needs. It was previously outlined in specific details about how it works, so please check it out . They recently fundraised $4.5 million last month following the previous round back in October.
3rd Prize winner: VIP Plaza (from Indonesia)
Co-founded by former Rakuten Indonesia director Tesong Kim and former investment banker Yoga S. Sugiharto. VIP Plaza lists fashion items from international and Indonesian brands at daily discounts of 30% to 80%. They plan to add other categories like men’s fashion, beauty and home products, aiming for expansion into other countries in Southeast Asia.
The Tohmatsu prize winner: Utagoe
Utagoe’s Moment Diary is a free journal app with a calendar, allowing users to make notes with timestamps, adding texts, images, videos, and audio. Since its launch in January 2011, the app has acquired over 5 million unique users with 30 million downloads from 211 countries on iOS and Google Play. Women in Asia region make up the majority of users. The company plans to integrate the app with wearable devices. They fundraised from KLab and KLab Ventures in January.
The SMBC Nikko Securities Prize winner: iCare
ICare provides a cloud-based medical record management platform for occupational physicians called Catchball. It helps physicians better serve patients and share updates with the companies that these patients are working for to improve their working conditions.
The Intelligence Prize winner: Glider Associates
Glider Associates provides news curation app Antenna, which delivers over 600 articles from over 230 news media oulets. Big companies had been allocating promotion budgets for mass media advertising for many years, but the company thinks it can encourage these companies to partially set it aside to run native ad promotions on the news app. They plan to launch an English version for global expansion.
The following startups did not win but gave interesting pitches.
PurpleCow
PurpleCow provides a crowdsourcing service called Crevo specializing in animated videos. The service was launched in March and acquired 100 video production requests in the first two weeks.
iCook (Taiwan)
iCook provides an online recipe sharing service in Taiwan. The startup fundraised from CyberAgent Ventures in October 2012 and subsequently partnered with Rakuten in January 2013.
Bequ.com (China)
Bequ.com is a travel-focused social networking service, allowing users to connect with official tour guides and fellow travelers. It also provides tools to create travel plans and record travel experiences.
Pocket Supernova
Pocket Supernova provides a video clip decoration and sharing app called Unda, which allows users to create 20-second video message clips for private use as well as for sharing with other users. They graduated from 500 Startups. See our previous interview with the Pocket Supernova team.
Oriflamme
Developers of the Oriflamme team previously worked at DeNA where they produced the global hit game Blood Brothers. They want to overwhelm the global market with castle building RTS (real-time strategy) games as well as social games casting popular characters.
Toyro
Toyro provides a comparison platform focused on life insurance and medical insurance products called Insnext, gwhich gives the best answer to consumers using the life expenses simulator. The company fundraised an undisclosed sum of investment from CyberAgent Ventures in November.
Kabuku
Kabuku provides a 3D printing marketplace called Rinkak, where anyone with 3D data can open shops on the platform and sell products based on their designs. The startup fundraised $2 million from CyberAgent Ventures, Fuji Startup Ventures, and Nissay Capital in June.
Japanese beverage company Calpis runs a time-limited promotion campaign using the Rinkak 3D printing platform where a user can win a “miniature statue” with his or her face by uploading their portrait.
Tunedra (Korea)
Tunedra is an iOS app that allows users to create original songs. When singing or humming a tune while launching the app, it will automatically add chords or an accompaniment to the melody and allow the user to share it with others.
Matchmove Global (Indonesia)
Matchmove Global provides an entertainment platform for international brands. As credit cards are not common in Southeast Asia, the company issues pre-paid cards approved by global credit card brands and sells them to consumers at convenience stores or retail stores.
Similar to regular credit cards, their pre-paid cards have unique card numbers so that users can settle online payments at e-commerce or in-game app purchases by entering the numbers.
All finalists pitched at Rising Expo 2014
Disclaimer: The author was one of the selection judges. ↩
Takeshi Hirano
Masaru Ikeda
