This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
Japan’s AgIC, a startup born out of the University of Tokyo with the remarkable electrically conductive ink technology, launched a new Kickstarter campaign today, raising funds for an enhanced version of the AgIC Circuit Marker. The new product is called Erasable Circuit Marker, which allows users to erase circuit patterns that they have drawn with silver nano ink.
Through user feedback, the AgIC team learned that many users need the ability to erase circuit patterns that they have drawn. So they included an eraser in the new version.
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. A2mato (pronounced as ‘ani-mart’) is a C2C flea market app focused on goods relating to Japanese subculture. Tokyo-based 7-bites, the company behind A2mato, announced today that it has fundraised an undisclosed amount from several Japanese investors. This round was led by CyberAgent Ventures with participation from East Ventures and angel investors like Ryu Okada (DeNA co-founding member) and Osamu Shibata. This follows their previous funding of $295,000 in June 2013. A2mato allows users to sell and buy their anime goods, fanzines, manga books, games, cosplay costumes, figures, and cards. Since its launch in January, the marketplace has listed over 250,000 items. An iOS app is available here. Upon this funding, 7-bites has partnered with Aucfun, the Japanese company behind a price comparison site under the same name. Aucfun acquired an undisclosed amount of 7-bites shares from shareholders in this round. Through this partnership, the two companies will integrate their systems – leveraging Aucfan’s database of prices and profiles for more than 20 million items. 7-bites CEO Shota Sawada explained: As our integration proceeds, users will be allowed to find items listed on A2mato through Aucfan.com. C2C users are less…
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
A2mato (pronounced as ‘ani-mart’) is a C2C flea market app focused on goods relating to Japanese subculture. Tokyo-based 7-bites, the company behind A2mato, announced today that it has fundraised an undisclosed amount from several Japanese investors. This round was led by CyberAgent Ventures with participation from East Ventures and angel investors like Ryu Okada (DeNA co-founding member) and Osamu Shibata. This follows their previous funding of $295,000 in June 2013.
A2mato allows users to sell and buy their anime goods, fanzines, manga books, games, cosplay costumes, figures, and cards. Since its launch in January, the marketplace has listed over 250,000 items. An iOS app is available here.
Upon this funding, 7-bites has partnered with Aucfun, the Japanese company behind a price comparison site under the same name. Aucfun acquired an undisclosed amount of 7-bites shares from shareholders in this round. Through this partnership, the two companies will integrate their systems – leveraging Aucfan’s database of prices and profiles for more than 20 million items.
7-bites CEO Shota Sawada
7-bites CEO Shota Sawada explained:
As our integration proceeds, users will be allowed to find items listed on A2mato through Aucfan.com. C2C users are less internet-literate and less familiar with market values. So we will list market quotes in item lists on the A2mato website through the integration.
Nearly a year has passed since our launch, and we’ve seen heavy users spending as much as 100,000 yen ($865) a month. They are mostly fangirls who buy goods of their favorite anime characters.
However, it was slow going for A2mato in its early days and has been struggling to grow the first three months since the launch.
Sawada continued:
We have drastically improved the user interface to enhance the perspicuity, changing one column to two. Results were good, and our users has been increasing in number since April. Today the user growth has reached 20% to 25% on a month-over-month basis, and their retention rate hit more than 40%. After a user submits an item on our app, it takes about five minutes to close the deal. We aim to shorten this time.
Sellers want to sell their items faster; buyers want to buy their items faster. So more users will use various flea market apps, and a fast selling market will win. We will enlarge our user base and accelerate the speed from the discovery of an item to its purchase for users. Because our app is focused on a niche market, it is more likely to matchmake sellers and buyers than other Japanese flea market apps like Mercari and Fril.
7-bites aims to transact 100 million yen a month in six months, 200 million yen a month by November of 2015. They expect their user base to grow by increasing public exposure through advertisements, etc.
The company will use the funds to strengthen marketing, user support, as well as enhance functionality.
See the original story in Japanese. Japanese game developer Gumi’s IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange was approved today. The company will be listed on 9 December. Gumi was launched in June 2007 to provide a feature phone-based social network service under the same name. Subsequently they entered the mobile game development business and introduced notable titles via DeNA, Gree, and other app distribution channels. In July 2013, Gumi co-founded a company called Alim in partnership with Fuji Startup Ventures and B Dash Ventures, where they introduced a global smash-hit gaming title Brave Frontier. The company partnered with Japanese messaging company Line in August. See also: Feeding Asia’s growing games appetite: Gumi Asia CEO on expansion beyond Japan Japanese gaming company Gumi raises $50M, partners with Sega Networks for US market Reps from GREE, DeNA, and Gumi discuss how to win in global gaming
Japanese game developer Gumi’s IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange was approved today. The company will be listed on 9 December.
Gumi was launched in June 2007 to provide a feature phone-based social network service under the same name. Subsequently they entered the mobile game development business and introduced notable titles via DeNA, Gree, and other app distribution channels.
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Kyoto- and Silicon Valley-based Nota, the company that provides screen capture and cloud storage platform Gyazo, announced today that it has fundraised $2 million from Japanese Internet company Opt, as well as two VC firms; YJ Capital and Miyako Capital. Gyazo allows users to capture a screenshot and share it with other users via a simple URL. Since its release in 2011, the service has acquired 3.75 million monthly unique users and about 13 million monthly uploads of screenshots. The service is available for free, but premium membership menu for corporate users provides additional features like enabling access privilege for their files, user support, as well as integration with Microsoft Office applications. In a view of geographical distribution, Nota has about 3,000 premium and freemium users – North America (33%), Europe (37%), Japan (14%), and Russia (4%). Prior to launching Gyazo, Nota developed a book search engine called Calil that allows users to make retrievals across libraries in Japan. CEO Isshu Rakusai started programming when he was 12. He has introduced news clipping software Kamicopi and has been approved as a “super creator” by the Japanese governmental IT promotion authority,…
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
Kyoto- and Silicon Valley-based Nota, the company that provides screen capture and cloud storage platform Gyazo, announced today that it has fundraised $2 million from Japanese Internet company Opt, as well as two VC firms; YJ Capital and Miyako Capital.
Gyazo allows users to capture a screenshot and share it with other users via a simple URL. Since its release in 2011, the service has acquired 3.75 million monthly unique users and about 13 million monthly uploads of screenshots.
The service is available for free, but premium membership menu for corporate users provides additional features like enabling access privilege for their files, user support, as well as integration with Microsoft Office applications. In a view of geographical distribution, Nota has about 3,000 premium and freemium users – North America (33%), Europe (37%), Japan (14%), and Russia (4%).
Prior to launching Gyazo, Nota developed a book search engine called Calil that allows users to make retrievals across libraries in Japan. CEO Isshu Rakusai started programming when he was 12. He has introduced news clipping software Kamicopi and has been approved as a “super creator” by the Japanese governmental IT promotion authority, IPA in 2003.
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Colorful Board released a fashion coordination app called Sensy on 7 November. The app will “learn” (store in memory) an individual’s fashion preference using artificial intelligence and propose outfits to one’s likings. The Sensy app shows several items, and one can choose “like” or “not like” for each of these. By continuing this process, the artificial intelligence in the app learns one’s preference and generally improves a recommendation’s accuracy. If one finds any favorite fashion item to buy in the recommendation, a person may easily jump into an online store via the app selling that item. The company has allied with over 1,600 fashion brands including those which have not yet been introduced in Japan, so users can gain recommendations regarding a wide variety of available items. Through the machine learning process, the app will come to obtain a fashion sense similar to the one an individual has. By adding “sophistication” from fashion models and stylists to it, the app will assist in the selection of appropriate items, called the Sense Link function. Colorful Board has been developing the core technology using artificial intelligence in partnership with Keio University Professor Dr. Eitaro Aiyoshi and Chiba University Professor Dr. Takashi Okamoto. Patents for this…
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
Tokyo-based startup Colorful Board released a fashion coordination app called Sensy on 7 November. The app will “learn” (store in memory) an individual’s fashion preference using artificial intelligence and propose outfits to one’s likings.
The Sensy app shows several items, and one can choose “like” or “not like” for each of these. By continuing this process, the artificial intelligence in the app learns one’s preference and generally improves a recommendation’s accuracy. If one finds any favorite fashion item to buy in the recommendation, a person may easily jump into an online store via the app selling that item. The company has allied with over 1,600 fashion brands including those which have not yet been introduced in Japan, so users can gain recommendations regarding a wide variety of available items.
Through the machine learning process, the app will come to obtain a fashion sense similar to the one an individual has. By adding “sophistication” from fashion models and stylists to it, the app will assist in the selection of appropriate items, called the Sense Link function.
Colorful Board has been developing the core technology using artificial intelligence in partnership with Keio University Professor Dr. Eitaro Aiyoshi and Chiba University Professor Dr. Takashi Okamoto. Patents for this technology are pending in the U.S.
Conventional recommendation systems like those adopted on Amazon uses the collaborative filtering approach to produce recommendations, which makes proposals based on preference sets of those who are similar to a user in profile. In contrast, the Sensy app will make recommendations based on one’s preference only so the method will work properly even when recommending brand new or niche items, which are unlikely to be found in the preference sets of other users.
The app design was directed by Daito Manabe, an artist from “video jockey” group Rhizomatiks. This prominent VJ team is known for producing music videos for J-pop music idol unit Perfume.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Creema, the startup behind a C2C marketplace for handmade items, announced 7 November that it has introduced an iOS app for the service. The company fundraised 100 million yen ($1 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund in June and has developed the app using the funds with the aim to improve accessibility for their mobile users. Since its launch in 2010, Creema has listed over 650,000 handmade items and acquired over two million monthly visitors. Their monthly transaction volume is seeing good growth and has doubled in comparison with five months ago when they partnered with Japanese telco KDDI coinciding, with the aforementioned funding. In differentiation with other C2C marketplaces like Mercari and Fril, Creema is focused on handmade items, allowing users to interact with creators and order their custom-made items as well as listed items. While this version of the app allows buyers to browse and purchase items only, a new version, which is scheduled to go live mid-November, will support the function that enables sellers to submit their items to the marketplace. In this space Taiwan-born handmade marketplace Pinkoi, which is backed by Japan’s Infinity Venture Partners, has been expanding into Japanese where they have adopted the “Mobile First” strategy. Pinkoi has released its localized Android and iOS apps for Japanese users, so the…
Tokyo-based Creema, the startup behind a C2C marketplace for handmade items, announced 7 November that it has introduced an iOS app for the service. The company fundraised 100 million yen ($1 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund in June and has developed the app using the funds with the aim to improve accessibility for their mobile users.
Since its launch in 2010, Creema has listed over 650,000 handmade items and acquired over two million monthly visitors. Their monthly transaction volume is seeing good growth and has doubled in comparison with five months ago when they partnered with Japanese telco KDDI coinciding, with the aforementioned funding. In differentiation with other C2C marketplaces like Mercari and Fril, Creema is focused on handmade items, allowing users to interact with creators and order their custom-made items as well as listed items.
While this version of the app allows buyers to browse and purchase items only, a new version, which is scheduled to go live mid-November, will support the function that enables sellers to submit their items to the marketplace.
In this space Taiwan-born handmade marketplace Pinkoi, which is backed by Japan’s Infinity Venture Partners, has been expanding into Japanese where they have adopted the “Mobile First” strategy. Pinkoi has released its localized Android and iOS apps for Japanese users, so the launch of Creema’s mobile app at this time means that the Japanese company is ready for a battle with the Taiwanese competitor.
Junya Mori
Takeshi Hirano
Shintaro Eguchi
Masaru Ikeda
