Team Slush, the organizer team behind Finland’s annual tech startup conference Slush, announced today that it will hold its first Asian edition in Tokyo on April 24th, called Slush Asia.
The organizing team for the Tokyo event is led by Antti Sonninen, former Rovio Entertainment Japan GM and now Beatrobo COO, and will invite prominent people in the tech industry as guest speakers, including Supecell CEO Ilkka Paananen, Rovio’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka, Mistletoe CEO Taizo Son, and DeNA founder Tomoko Namba.
The Bridge is proud to serve the Tokyo event as a media sponsor, so please stay tuned for more updates.
Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based PurpleCow, the startup behind crowdsourced animation production platform Crevo and crowdsourced logo design platform DesignClue, announced today that it has fundraised 100 million yen ($840,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and B Dash Ventures. The company also announced it will rebrand its company name to Crevo Inc. See also: Meet the Japanese company looking to change online video by crowdsourcing animation Japan’s Designclue wants to build Asia’s largest logo crowdsourcing market Crevo allows users to choose a creator from the portfolio page and then order various video work, such as promotion videos for an app, or a YouTube ad with custom scenario and characters. In addition to matching clients and creators, Crevo is actively involved with the production process until the end of the project. Since its launch in March 2014, the crowdsourced animation production platform has acquired over 250 corporate users and transacted orders worth over 100 million yen ($840,000) to date. The company will use the funds to strengthen system development and marketing. Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by Kurt Hanson
PurpleCow (to be rebranded as Crevo) CEO Kensuke Shibata
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.
Tokyo-based PurpleCow, the startup behind crowdsourced animation production platform Crevo and crowdsourced logo design platform DesignClue, announced today that it has fundraised 100 million yen ($840,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and B Dash Ventures. The company also announced it will rebrand its company name to Crevo Inc.
Crevo allows users to choose a creator from the portfolio page and then order various video work, such as promotion videos for an app, or a YouTube ad with custom scenario and characters. In addition to matching clients and creators, Crevo is actively involved with the production process until the end of the project.
Since its launch in March 2014, the crowdsourced animation production platform has acquired over 250 corporate users and transacted orders worth over 100 million yen ($840,000) to date. The company will use the funds to strengthen system development and marketing.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies launched a website translating service called WOVN.io in August. It instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment only by adding a single Javascript code to the website source. Since its launch, the service has been adopted to 4,000 website and created 120,000 translated webpages. While about 100 pages were translated each day in September, it has since grown to 600 to 700 pages a day. See also: From Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto: 13 startups pitch at Launch Pad competition Wovn.io recently added premium plans, which allows website owners to customize embedded WOVN.io widgets and translate more than five translated pages of their website. The premium edition provides three different plans according to the number of pages requiring translation: Startup, Business, and Enterprise. The Startup type is available for a monthly charge of $19, providing translation for up to 100 pages of a website. When an original page containing a WOVN JavaScript code is updated, WOVN.io will automatically detect that and create an updated translation for website visitors. While the Startup plan limits a translated language selection to one language, upper range plans like Business and Enterprise can create webpages…
Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies launched a website translating service called WOVN.io in August. It instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment only by adding a single Javascript code to the website source. Since its launch, the service has been adopted to 4,000 website and created 120,000 translated webpages. While about 100 pages were translated each day in September, it has since grown to 600 to 700 pages a day.
Wovn.io recently added premium plans, which allows website owners to customize embedded WOVN.io widgets and translate more than five translated pages of their website. The premium edition provides three different plans according to the number of pages requiring translation: Startup, Business, and Enterprise.
The Startup type is available for a monthly charge of $19, providing translation for up to 100 pages of a website. When an original page containing a WOVN JavaScript code is updated, WOVN.io will automatically detect that and create an updated translation for website visitors. While the Startup plan limits a translated language selection to one language, upper range plans like Business and Enterprise can create webpages in more than three languages using machine translation.
The price of the Enterprise plan is available upon request. In addition to aforementioned features, Minimal Technologies plans to add new features such as web server customization and A/B testing.
When I previously wrote about WOVN.io, several readers asked about how SEO (search engine optimization) performance for WOVN-installed websites is considered. The company has confirmed that translated pages are appropriately indexed by the Google search engine in their internal test, and will publish a library this spring so that website owners can place critical SEO measures on the translated pages of their website.
In addition to founder/CEO Takaharu Hayashi and co-founder Jeff Sandford, Minimal Technologies recently added a French engineer and a Taiwanese sales representative to the team. In view of which languages are in high demand for translating website pages using WOVN.io, Chinese is ranked top followed by Korean and Spanish. They plan to focus on developing and marketing an enterprise version for Japanese companies.
L to R: CEO Takaharu Hayashi, co-founder Jeff Sandford
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by Masaru Ikeda and Kurt Hanson
Manila-based Yoyo Holdings [1], the Japanese-led startup known for its mobile rewards platform Candy, announced last week that it has launched a lock screen-based rewards platform for Android users in Indonesia, called PopSlide. The app is available on Google Play in Indonesia. The platform distributes news, weather forecasts, other updates, and ads to your smartphone lock screen. In return for viewing such information, users receive rewards for free Internet access on their smartphone. See also: Mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings raises $1.3 million From Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto: 13 startups pitch at Launch Pad competition Prior to Indonesia, Yoyo Holdings launched PopSlide in the Philippines in August last year, where the app surpassed 100,000 downloads in only 10 days after launch and stayed on top of the free Lifestyle Category of the Google Play store for 30 days. Their advertisers include major global brands such as McDonald’s, Nestle, Unilever, Intel, and CNN. Yoyo Holdings will launch the service in India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, aiming to serve over 400 million Android users in Southeast Asia. Edited by Kurt Hanson Incorporated in Singapore. ↩
Manila-based Yoyo Holdings[1], the Japanese-led startup known for its mobile rewards platform Candy, announced last week that it has launched a lock screen-based rewards platform for Android users in Indonesia, called PopSlide. The app is available on Google Play in Indonesia.
The platform distributes news, weather forecasts, other updates, and ads to your smartphone lock screen. In return for viewing such information, users receive rewards for free Internet access on their smartphone.
Prior to Indonesia, Yoyo Holdings launched PopSlide in the Philippines in August last year, where the app surpassed 100,000 downloads in only 10 days after launch and stayed on top of the free Lifestyle Category of the Google Play store for 30 days. Their advertisers include major global brands such as McDonald’s, Nestle, Unilever, Intel, and CNN.
Yoyo Holdings will launch the service in India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, aiming to serve over 400 million Android users in Southeast Asia.
Tokyo-based ad tech startup Fringe81 announced on Friday that it has fundraised 420 million yen (about $3.53 million) from iStyle Capital, NTT Docomo Ventures, Gree, Dentsu Digital Holdings, and TBS Innovation Partners [1]. The company will use the funds to strengthen human resources for further development of ad server solutions for mobile media sites. Fringe81 was launched in 2005 under the former name of RSS Kokokusha (literally meaning RSS ad agency) where they had been focused on advertising in RSS feeds. Rebranded to Fringe81 in 2010, the company has added several new ad tech solutions including Digitalice, a cloud-based ad server platform that allows advertisers and media companies to analyze ad performance as well as user behavior and how these users crawl the websites after viewing ads. Coinciding with the funding, Fringe81 announced that Kazuhiro Obara, former executive director at Rakuten and former senior manager at Google Japan, has joined the management board in order to accelerate business development. Via TechCrunch Japan Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy iStyle Capital is the investment arm of iStyle, the company behind Japan’s leading cosmetics review portal @Cosme. TBS Innovation Partners is the investment arm of Tokyo-based private broadcaster Tokyo Broadcasting System, or TBS for short. ↩
Fringe81 CEO Yuzuru Tanaka speaks at Movida School in 2013. Photo by Shintaro Eguchi
Fringe81 was launched in 2005 under the former name of RSS Kokokusha (literally meaning RSS ad agency) where they had been focused on advertising in RSS feeds. Rebranded to Fringe81 in 2010, the company has added several new ad tech solutions including Digitalice, a cloud-based ad server platform that allows advertisers and media companies to analyze ad performance as well as user behavior and how these users crawl the websites after viewing ads.
Coinciding with the funding, Fringe81 announced that Kazuhiro Obara, former executive director at Rakuten and former senior manager at Google Japan, has joined the management board in order to accelerate business development.
iStyle Capital is the investment arm of iStyle, the company behind Japan’s leading cosmetics review portal @Cosme. TBS Innovation Partners is the investment arm of Tokyo-based private broadcaster Tokyo Broadcasting System, or TBS for short. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121) announced today that it will acquire membership-based fashion commerce company Muse&Co for 1.762 billion yen ($14.8 million). This means that Muse&Co will take a major step forward in as early as three years since its launch back in February of 2012. See also: Japanese fashion commerce site Muse＆Co passes $1M in monthly sales Japanese fashion startup Muse & Co raises $3.4 million Muse&Co has successfully brought the flash sales method to the mobile commerce space, seeing a monthly revenue ranging from several hundred thousand US dollars in as soon as a year since launch. Mixi said in a statement that this acquisition will contribute to their smart device businesses in terms of sharing expertise for service operations. This is because about 80% of user traffic for the fashion commerce service comes from smartphone users. Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121) announced today that it will acquire membership-based fashion commerce company Muse&Co for 1.762 billion yen ($14.8 million). This means that Muse&Co will take a major step forward in as early as three years since its launch back in February of 2012.
Muse&Co has successfully brought the flash sales method to the mobile commerce space, seeing a monthly revenue ranging from several hundred thousand US dollars in as soon as a year since launch.
Mixi said in a statement that this acquisition will contribute to their smart device businesses in terms of sharing expertise for service operations. This is because about 80% of user traffic for the fashion commerce service comes from smartphone users.
Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
Takeshi Hirano
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Masaru Ikeda
