Tokyo-based ResuPress, known for its social networking platform Storys.jp, announced today it has launched a bitcoin exchange called Coincheck.
Users can buy, sell, or send bitcoins after depositing money into a bank account designated by the company. ResuPress charges a commission of 1% on bitcoins bought, withdrawn, or remitted through the platform. To prevent fraud or money laundering, users must submit identification to withdraw more than 10,000 yen ($100) per a day.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Ptmind, the startup that operates heatmap access analytics solution Pt engine (previously known as Ptmind, and especially known as Miapex outside Japan), announced today that it has launched an Android native app version in closed beta. Conventional versions of the solution support heatmap analytics for web apps on mobile but not the ones for native apps. Comprised of tracking and reporting SDKs (software developer kits), the Android native app version analyzes user behavior on news curation apps, for instance, which typically have dynamic scrollviews or screen changes. So Ptmind expects a wider range of app developers to use the solution to analyze user behavior. The solution has such functions as: Analytics reporting available without a desktop Heatmap analytics available in real-time access or for past access in the last 30 days Reporting available on mobile anytime, anywhere Even on apps using dynamic scrollviews or screen changes, animated analytics heatmap can be overlapped on a real-time app screen showing accordingly. (see video below, 08sec to 15sec) Since its global launch in October 2013, Pt engine has been adopted by over 4,500 mobile websites in Japan alone. Developers interested in the new version can apply…
Tokyo-based Ptmind, the startup that operates heatmap access analytics solution Pt engine (previously known as Ptmind, and especially known as Miapex outside Japan), announced today that it has launched an Android native app version in closed beta.
Conventional versions of the solution support heatmap analytics for web apps on mobile but not the ones for native apps. Comprised of tracking and reporting SDKs (software developer kits), the Android native app version analyzes user behavior on news curation apps, for instance, which typically have dynamic scrollviews or screen changes. So Ptmind expects a wider range of app developers to use the solution to analyze user behavior.
The solution has such functions as:
Analytics reporting available without a desktop
Heatmap analytics available in real-time access or for past access in the last 30 days
Reporting available on mobile anytime, anywhere
Even on apps using dynamic scrollviews or screen changes, animated analytics heatmap can be overlapped on a real-time app screen showing accordingly. (see video below, 08sec to 15sec)
Since its global launch in October 2013, Pt engine has been adopted by over 4,500 mobile websites in Japan alone. Developers interested in the new version can apply for a test integration on the company’s website. The company says an iOS native app version will follow.
See the original story in Japanese. 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. Led by the company’s founder Masaaki Kikuchi (holding a 67.28% stake), its major shareholders include Incubate Fund, Nissay Capital, Recruit Strategic Partners, and Mobilecom.
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.
Masaru Ikeda
Takeshi Hirano
