Docomo Ventures showcases four teams from third incubation batch in Tokyo

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See the original story in Japanese.

Docomo Ventures, an investment arm of the Japanese major mobile company, held a demo day event last week to showcase their incubation initiative, where four companies that graduated from the third batch each made a pitch to an audience of local investors and entrepreneurs.

Unlog (‘Judges and audience’ award winner, ‘Unique Healthcare’ award winner)

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Unlog, literally meaning ‘poo log’, is a free iOS app that lets you input details about each poop that you make. You can specify the size, shape, and color of your poops, as well as input how bad it smelled or whether or not you experienced any discomfort.

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MoneySmart (‘Innovative Life Design’ award winner)

moneysmart

MoneySmart is a personal asset analysis app that offers advise on how to improve your life by altering spending habits. The app allows you to record where and for whom you have spent money. In this way, you can sort out useful or wasteful spending and refer to this information for better money management.

MoneySmart is avaialble for iOS in the iTunes app store.

Oton Glass (‘Social architect’ award winner)

otonglass

Oton Glass is a smart glass for aphasia sufferers, or people who cannot recognize characters or letters. Some 500,000 people in Japan, 1 million in the US, and 250,000 in the UK suffer from this disorder.

Oton Glass recognizes characters and tells users their meaning via a bone conduction speaker in the device. The product is named after the inventor’s father, whose aphasia affliction motivated the inventor to develop the device.

Liquid (‘Sony Select’ award winner)

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Liquid is a fingerprint-based authentication service that allows users to complete payments without the need for a credit card or cash. The service was developed by Fukuoka-based startup Lacknet and offers an alternative to conventional customer loyalty cards at retailers. Their concept is similar to PayTango, a startup born out of Carnegie Mellon University.

TekkyuAR

TekkyuAR

In addition to the aforementioned four team from the latest batch, app development team SMDLab (Smart Design Laboratory) showcased their augmented reality app TekkyuAR to a crowd at this opportunity. The team is comprised of Hosei University students, and won the best award at Docomo Developer Application Contest 2nd in August. Users enjoy the game by controlling a ball in the 3D maze. Below is an interesting demo video clip produced by Epson America. So check it out.


Docomo Ventures recently an new initiative as part of their ‘Open Innovation’ efforts, called 39 Works. This initiative encourages entrepreneurs collaboratively develop a new service with NTT Docomo, so entrepreneurs can start discussing with Docomo Ventures representatives prior to the start of the development of a product or service. In terms of giving entrepreneurs a chance to launch a startup without a product, this concept is similar to Beenos in Japan, as well as local incubators in Los Angeles.

We will monitor the startups that graduated and report on any developments.