Japanese footwear e-commerce company Locondo announced last week that it had raised 500 million yen (or $4.6 million) in a series C round from Japanese investment firm Jafco. The company uses the funds to fulfill their logistics needs and relocate their headquarters to Shibuya, Tokyo.
Locondo was launched in October 2010 with 76 million yen ($760,000) funding from Rocket Internet. Since its launch in February 2011, their e-commerce site has acquired 600,000 users and over 40% of their users buy at least one pair of footwear a year via the platform. Annual shipping revenue reached 5 billion yen ($50 million) last year.
Beginning October, the company started diversifying its lineups beyond footwear to sportswear and home interiors as well as enhancing its promotional efforts, including setting up an official Line account.
See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s Goodpatch has been providing rapid prototyping tool Prott in beta since April, but it was officially launched on Wednesday. Coinciding with this, they introduced an iOS app for prototyping as well as existing web apps for Macintosh and Windows. This newly introduced version is integrated with internal communication tools such as Slack and Hipchat, which allows the sharing of updates on prototyping using the Prott app in an engineering team. Goodpatch also announced that the Prott app has been adopted by global design consulting firm Ideo, Yahoo Japan, DeNA for their internal app development. See also: Tokyo Office Tour: At new office, Goodpatch preparing official launch of prototyping tool Upon the official launch, Goodpatch also unveiled pricing plans for Prott. The price is determined by the number of prototyping projects a user has developed using the platform; one project is free, three projects cost $14 yen a month (Starter plan), unlimited projects costs $25 yen a month (Pro plan), and $99 yen a month (Team plan). According to Goodpatch founder and CEO Naofumi Tsuchiya, Prott has acquired about 7,000 users in about eight months since the launch of its beta version. Taiwan-based Pop,…
Japan’s Goodpatch has been providing rapid prototyping tool Prott in beta since April, but it was officially launched on Wednesday. Coinciding with this, they introduced an iOS app for prototyping as well as existing web apps for Macintosh and Windows. This newly introduced version is integrated with internal communication tools such as Slack and Hipchat, which allows the sharing of updates on prototyping using the Prott app in an engineering team.
Goodpatch also announced that the Prott app has been adopted by global design consulting firm Ideo, Yahoo Japan, DeNA for their internal app development.
Upon the official launch, Goodpatch also unveiled pricing plans for Prott. The price is determined by the number of prototyping projects a user has developed using the platform; one project is free, three projects cost $14 yen a month (Starter plan), unlimited projects costs $25 yen a month (Pro plan), and $99 yen a month (Team plan).
Prott iOS app
According to Goodpatch founder and CEO Naofumi Tsuchiya, Prott has acquired about 7,000 users in about eight months since the launch of its beta version. Taiwan-based Pop, a competitor, has acquired about 300,000 users in two years since its launch in late 2012. Prott’s figure shows a good start because Goodpatch has not done any promotion.
In the global trends in this space, US-based popular prototyping tool Invision has fundraised about $35 million in total, as well as Axure, US-based wireframe tool for enterprise users, is generating about $200 million annual revenue, so there is huge potential in this market.
Tsuchiya explained the Prott app advantages:
Anyone can start using Prott without preliminary knowledge, which is obviously our strength. Users tell us they love Prott because they can start prototyping in a few seconds after using the app for the first time.
Tsuchiya outlined his growth strategy:
We can develop more services beyond the prototyping tool. But we are not interested in integrating Prott with other crowdsourced platforms because crowdsourcing may cause decreased wages for skilled designers. Nevertheless we may create an online community that matches idea owners with developers because the Prott app allows idea owners to present their ideas about an app regardless of whether they have any engineering skills or not. App developers can leverage outcomes from the platform to hire new people by presenting images of services they want to create.
Goodpatch sets UX/UI design as their core competence and aims to launch more services in this space. With loyal support from the startup and app developer community, the company is aiming for an IPO in the near future.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based SmartNews, the startup behind curated news reader app SmartNews, launched app version 2.0 in Japan and the US on Thursday, and is available on the AppStore and GooglePlay in both countries. The new version includes an interface for readers in the US that allows the changing of app settings to US mode so that users can to check trending news updates in the US. It also supports the iOS Widgets feature and allows users to see headlines in the Notification Center of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The app’s US mode interface inherits user interfaces and features that Japanese users have been endorsing, but it has also rolled out improvements based on a user test in the US. Upon the launch in the US, SmartNews has partnered with several US-based news media such as Re/Code, The Verge, and Quarz. They aim to partner with more media companies in the US. SmartNews fundraised 35 million yen in August, and subsequently appointed former Conde Nast business development director Bernie Davis as media partner relation head, former Williamson-Dickie Japan vice president Yohei Matsuoka as marketing head, and former Huffington Post Japan editor-in-chief Shigeki Matsuura as…
Tokyo-based SmartNews, the startup behind curated news reader app SmartNews, launched app version 2.0 in Japan and the US on Thursday, and is available on the AppStore and GooglePlay in both countries.
The new version includes an interface for readers in the US that allows the changing of app settings to US mode so that users can to check trending news updates in the US. It also supports the iOS Widgets feature and allows users to see headlines in the Notification Center of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
The app’s US mode interface inherits user interfaces and features that Japanese users have been endorsing, but it has also rolled out improvements based on a user test in the US. Upon the launch in the US, SmartNews has partnered with several US-based news media such as Re/Code, The Verge, and Quarz. They aim to partner with more media companies in the US.
Ring is a device worn on a finger that gives users the ability to control and interact with other devices. Logbar, the company behind the device, announced that it will start shipping the Ring on October 9. See also: As Ring meets its Kickstarter goal, we wonder — Is it just vaporware? How does Ring actually work? The company attracted some $880,000 in funding from more than 5,000 backers via a Kickstarter campaign. They had planned to start shipping the device in July, but postponed the date to August. The schedule was postponed once again to September as they changed the device’s design and added a button. The company’s e-mail to the Kickstarter campaign backers on September 29 states that the shipping date is now set for October 9. However, the date is the actual shipping day, so the Ring will probably reach the backers’ fingers by late October. via DMM.make
Ring is a device worn on a finger that gives users the ability to control and interact with other devices. Logbar, the company behind the device, announced that it will start shipping the Ring on October 9.
The company attracted some $880,000 in funding from more than 5,000 backers via a Kickstarter campaign. They had planned to start shipping the device in July, but postponed the date to August. The schedule was postponed once again to September as they changed the device’s design and added a button.
The company’s e-mail to the Kickstarter campaign backers on September 29 states that the shipping date is now set for October 9. However, the date is the actual shipping day, so the Ring will probably reach the backers’ fingers by late October.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation platform Conyac, unveiled a new translation platform called Conyac Front in beta last week. The platform allows website owners to turn their sites into multilingual versions using crowdsourced translation forces. The fee includes a hosting charge (about $100 a month for each language), a translation charge, and other optional charges when needed. The company is inviting monitor users, where up to 20 companies can use the new platform without paying translation and optional charges until December. Anydoor CEO Naoki Yamada says they will start charging for the service next January. Conyac Front helps companies develop multilingual websites. The localization process, including translation, usually requires a massive workload, where the most difficult part is selecting correct words in translation. We also have the English version, and we know the word picking process in translation for delivering right context is quite difficult. We have to see if translation results are naturally expressed for native speakers and terminology is also common to many people in the industry. So we understand that many startups postponed launching multilingual websites despite the fact that they have typically announced their global expansion. How will…
Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation platform Conyac, unveiled a new translation platform called Conyac Front in beta last week. The platform allows website owners to turn their sites into multilingual versions using crowdsourced translation forces.
The fee includes a hosting charge (about $100 a month for each language), a translation charge, and other optional charges when needed. The company is inviting monitor users, where up to 20 companies can use the new platform without paying translation and optional charges until December. Anydoor CEO Naoki Yamada says they will start charging for the service next January.
Conyac Front helps companies develop multilingual websites. The localization process, including translation, usually requires a massive workload, where the most difficult part is selecting correct words in translation.
We also have the English version, and we know the word picking process in translation for delivering right context is quite difficult. We have to see if translation results are naturally expressed for native speakers and terminology is also common to many people in the industry. So we understand that many startups postponed launching multilingual websites despite the fact that they have typically announced their global expansion.
How will the new platform solve this problem? Yamada said that the platform enables the translation of websites dynamically using a proxy server. Conyac Front crawls a website and lists an index of webpages. Website owners can point to the part that is common across these webpages (such as menu or site description) and order a translation.
Website owners do not need to build a multilingual interface. When a user visits a website, the platform will detect their access location. If the access is from outside your language region, the platform will transfer the access to a proxy server and show translated results.
Translated results will be dynamically updated, which will allow website owners to adopt the platform even for websites using content management systems such as WordPress. But the company says that some membership-based websites, which typically require a user login process or a paywall, may not work properly in transferring user access to the proxy server.
The platform is more suited for translating corporate websites rather than news websites like The Bridge, where content is not often updated and very few technical terms are used.
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. In addition to Iemo’s acquisition announcement today, Japanese young women-focused fashion curation site Mery also unveiled it has been acquired by Japanese internet company DeNA. They have avoided media exposure, so this is the first time we have covered the company. Peroli, the company behind Mery, is a new company and their shareholders include founders, East Ventures, Anri, and some other undisclosed investing companies. The company was launched in August of 2012 by Ayataro Nakagawa, who previously co-founded online art collection dictionary site Atokore with Crowdworks‘ managing director Shuzo Narita. Rumor has it that they have shown good growth, and we have learned that they have acquired over 1.2 million monthly unique users as of September. Some 90% of customers are mobile-phone users, indicating that Iemo and Mery successfully rode the wave of smartphone adoption. Typical curated media sites work to boost page views, but Nakagawa has found another way to drive his business, which is in a e-commerce fashion sector crowded with competitors like iQon, Zozotown, Stores.jp, Sumally, and Origami. Nakagawa explained his growth strategy: We want to give users a discovery-based shopping experience rather than one where…
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
In addition to Iemo’s acquisition announcement today, Japanese young women-focused fashion curation site Mery also unveiled it has been acquired by Japanese internet company DeNA. They have avoided media exposure, so this is the first time we have covered the company.
Peroli, the company behind Mery, is a new company and their shareholders include founders, East Ventures, Anri, and some other undisclosed investing companies.
Peroli’s Ayataro Nakagawa
The company was launched in August of 2012 by Ayataro Nakagawa, who previously co-founded online art collection dictionary site Atokore with Crowdworks‘ managing director Shuzo Narita. Rumor has it that they have shown good growth, and we have learned that they have acquired over 1.2 million monthly unique users as of September. Some 90% of customers are mobile-phone users, indicating that Iemo and Mery successfully rode the wave of smartphone adoption.
Typical curated media sites work to boost page views, but Nakagawa has found another way to drive his business, which is in a e-commerce fashion sector crowded with competitors like iQon, Zozotown, Stores.jp, Sumally, and Origami.
Nakagawa explained his growth strategy:
We want to give users a discovery-based shopping experience rather than one where users find an item by name. What we have learned from our one year of experience is that people choose a product based on their sense of themselves. By strengthening our engineering force in partnership with DeNA, we want to cultivate this space from scratch.
Qualitative search methods for fashion e-commerce require high-level search technology and a tremendous amount of item data. For example, Mery’s competitor Sumally took nearly three years to build a database of over 50 million fashion items. For example, Summaly, Mery’s competitor, took nearly three year to build a database of over 50 million fashion items.
Mery has acquired 1.2 million users, and it will be interesting to see how they progress in such a saturated and highly competitive space.
Masaru Ikeda
Junya Mori
Yuki Kai
Takeshi Hirano
