Osaka University Photonics Center, which conducts advanced R&D on advanced photonics including laser and nano-optics, held it’s seventh “Photonics Day” on 2nd February at the university’s Suita Campus. This project commenced as a startup/product development project in 2011. Beginning with 4 projects selected in the initial year, followed in 2012 by 3 projects and in 2013 by 2 projects, a total of 9 projects out of 44 applications are being carried out under approval; to date all projects have had some input from the university, whether at faculty or student level.
Of the many project results for this year’s Photonics Day, one of the most noteworthy was “the eco-light bulb adopting a thermal radiation spectrum”. This new type of incandescent light bulb, by opening 100nm-order holes on the filament surface, enables control of hear emission. By cutting down the infrared emission level, the temperature is kept down while realizing a light-emission ratio of nearly 90% which is better than that offered by the light-emitting diode (LED converts 50% of the electric power it uses to light, while the conventional incandescent light bulb offers a conversion ratio of only 10%).
The eco-light bulb adopting a thermal radiation spectrum (Photo by Taijiro Takeda)
White LED lighting has limitations as to wavelengths and thus seem “cold” to the human eye, while incandescent bulbs can realize full wavelengths – some restaurants still retain the old lighting system in the foods section due to this. However, large manufacturers like Panasonic and Hitachi are now dropping production of the old light bulbs so the product can gain this niche market when it becomes available widely.
Other topics such as multilateral collaboration and fund procurement were also discussed at the event. Photonics Center Executive Director Satoshi Kawata noted that he hopes to realize as is Schumpeter’s idea that “innovation is not technological revolution but the building of a new paradigm” and urged participants to actually produce results with their own hands.
Regarding other items unveiled by the Photonics Center, the website links are as below:
See the original story in Japanese.Earlier this month, T-media Holdings, the internet business-focused intermediate stock holding company of Japan’s largest bookstore chain operator Culture Convenience Club (CCC for short, TSE:4756), held its final public screening event for the first batch of its startup incubation program called T-Venture Program, in cooperation with its subsidiaries IMJ and IMJ Investment Partners. CCC is the operator of Japan’s largest bookstore chain Tsutaya. See also: Japanese entertainment retail conglomerate launches startup incubation program This program attracted 110 teams from all over the country. 41 teams made it through the first selection by the judging committee and 12 of them chosen as finalists after the second selection. CCC CEO Muneaki Masuda, serving the event as chief juror, noted that the judges have graded five factors such as value creation, potential, and branding to award 7 finalists out of the dozen. Masuda stressed that they paid close attention to each candidate as to integrity as a platform, proposal for lifestyles, natural aspects, and friendliness rather than a mere membership system. Awarded startups listed below will proceed to the second phase (Incubation 2) of the program, including an integration test with T-site, the versatile information portal site of CCC. Top Award Winner: Agrimedia Supplementary prizes: participating in the program’s…
Earlier this month, T-media Holdings, the internet business-focused intermediate stock holding company of Japan’s largest bookstore chain operator Culture Convenience Club (CCC for short, TSE:4756), held its final public screening event for the first batch of its startup incubation program called T-Venture Program, in cooperation with its subsidiaries IMJ and IMJ Investment Partners. CCC is the operator of Japan’s largest bookstore chain Tsutaya.
This program attracted 110 teams from all over the country. 41 teams made it through the first selection by the judging committee and 12 of them chosen as finalists after the second selection. CCC CEO Muneaki Masuda, serving the event as chief juror, noted that the judges have graded five factors such as value creation, potential, and branding to award 7 finalists out of the dozen.
Masuda stressed that they paid close attention to each candidate as to integrity as a platform, proposal for lifestyles, natural aspects, and friendliness rather than a mere membership system.
Awarded startups listed below will proceed to the second phase (Incubation 2) of the program, including an integration test with T-site, the versatile information portal site of CCC.
Top Award Winner: Agrimedia
Supplementary prizes: participating in the program’s Incubation 2 phase, 300,000 T-points (rewards available at Tsutaya bookstores and affiliated retailers), complimentary one-year subscription to Tsutaya Discas (mail-delivered DVD rental service).
Agrimedia CEO Takashi Morofuji
Tokyo-based startup Agrimedia provides vegetable gardens for rental in suburbs, called Share Batake. What makes them stand out from other providers is that it offers courses on vegetable farming by professional farmers and gardening advisers. Urban gardeners can participate in growing vegetables without bringing their own tools to these garden. One could grow around 20 different kinds of vegetables throughout a year and take the harvests home. The company also offers the premium option of hiring a “garden manager” for those who have no time to take care of the vegetables.
Agrimedia plans to set up a trial garden space at a T-site real store premise in the Tokyo suburb of Shonan, looking for more opportunity to reach potential customers.
Outstanding Startups Award winner: Onemore
Supplementary prizes: participating in the program’s Incubation 2 phase, 100,000 T-points (rewards available at Tsutaya bookstores and affiliated retailers)
Tokyo-based Onemore, the company behind crowdfunding platform called Green Funding, introduced its successful use case having raised for producing novel-based film “The Light Shines Only There” starring the superb Japanese actor Go Ayano. The company proposed a film production-focused crowdfunding site integrated with T-site, leveraging user attribute information associated with T-site user id to present relevant recommendations to potential crowdfunding backers. The company says, other possible merit may include allowing backers to participate in crowdfunding campaigns using T-point reward points, as well as allowing film project owners to invite backers to exclusive events promoting their films.
When a mother keeps recording a 30-second movie clip shooting her child every day for 20 days, Coto Coto’s original movie-editing engine produces a movie consisting of them. The service allows her to ask for a DVD to be sent to the grandparents who typically live apart from their grandchildren.
Coto Coto proposed setting up a booth near the kid’s space in the T-site real store, accepting movie production orders from families and giving them opportunities to enjoy the growth of their children by playing back their memories at a café nearby.
(‘Seicho Cinema’ is a trademark of Coto Coto.)
Speiclal Jury Award winner: Smaoku (Smart Auction) by Zawatt
Smaoku (Smart Auction) is a mobile app inspired by the flash sale concept, aiming to bringing a sense like being at the real auction site. The company wants to buy unwanted items from users at real T-site stores.
Speiclal Jury Award winner: Saka No Tochu (On the Slope)
Kyoto-based Saka No Tochu (On the Slope) provides a subscription-based organic vegetable delivery service, promoting low environmental-load agriculture and new agricultural workers. Japanese farmers are usually small-scaled and their yield is easily affected by natural factors. But the company aims to optimize the cultivation management and farming plans by deploying financial engineering techniques to agriculture, looking to secure valuation of the agricultural industry.
While a conversion rate from trial users to subscribed users are around 10% on typical food delivery e-commerce services, the company targets 25-30% and sees 250,000 yen (about $2,100) in a user’s lifetime value despite a per-user acquisition cost of 5,000 yen (about $42).
T-Point Award winner: Cashback Chintai
Supplementary prize: 50,000 T-points
Cashback Chintai is a platform for rental homes and apartments, charging ad costs to property owners or agents on a total-performance basis so that they have to pay nothing until tenants are found.
The platform gives cashback rewards to tenants who have signed an agreement with a property owner, so these tenants are pleased to inform the platform that the deal is conducted using it. In this way, the platform can catch up with all transactions and charge all property owners or agents whose deals are handled via the platform regardless of whether receiving any report from the latter parties.
Cashback Chintai has listed over 1.8 million properties to date, and is ranked at the top 3 in the industry. The company proposed that they would give users cashback rewards using T-points in partnership with the T-site portal.
Tsutaya Award winner: Filmarks by Tsumiki
Filmarks is a social review site focused on films. Since its launch back in June of 2013, it has acquired more than 4.5 million reviews to date. For instance, brand new film Big Hero 6 acquired 3,904 reviews comparing to Yahoo Movies with 1,451 reviews (as of this writing). It is, at least considered from the movie reviews standpoint, seen being in an invincible position.
The platform will find synergy in collaboration with Tsutaya which provides a huge variety of movie titles both online and offline.
Translated by Sumi Yo via Mother First Edited by Masaru Ikeda
Proofread by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Japanese sewing techniques are one of the things that may be considered to be world-class. While Japanese garment factories support top global apparel brands behind the scenes, many of these factories are faced with financial woes due to cost reductions. Furthermore, Japanese garment factories are facing recruitment difficulties for engineering positions due to the lack of opportunity to promote high-quality manufacturing prowess. On the other hand, many individuals and small businesses have recently launched their independent fashion brands, selling their items over instant online storefronts like Base and Stores.jp. These businesses are always looking to outsource production of fashion items. In order to meet such needs, the Japanese firm Sitateru launched a crowdsourced platform under the same name last March, looking to link independent fashion brands/retailers with garment factories. Sitateru is based out of Kumamoto, a prefecture located in the center of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island. Kumamoto traditionally had many garment factories, but have faced many challenges in recent years. Sitateru CEO Hidekazu Kono says that his team has been building a business network based upon a vision to expand opportunities for highly-skilled workers there. First, independent fashion brands/retailers upload their sample images of the intended outsource item using the service; these images need not be clear, rough…
Japanese sewing techniques are one of the things that may be considered to be world-class. While Japanese garment factories support top global apparel brands behind the scenes, many of these factories are faced with financial woes due to cost reductions. Furthermore, Japanese garment factories are facing recruitment difficulties for engineering positions due to the lack of opportunity to promote high-quality manufacturing prowess.
On the other hand, many individuals and small businesses have recently launched their independent fashion brands, selling their items over instant online storefronts like Base and Stores.jp. These businesses are always looking to outsource production of fashion items. In order to meet such needs, the Japanese firm Sitateru launched a crowdsourced platform under the same name last March, looking to link independent fashion brands/retailers with garment factories.
Sitateru is based out of Kumamoto, a prefecture located in the center of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island. Kumamoto traditionally had many garment factories, but have faced many challenges in recent years. Sitateru CEO Hidekazu Kono says that his team has been building a business network based upon a vision to expand opportunities for highly-skilled workers there.
First, independent fashion brands/retailers upload their sample images of the intended outsource item using the service; these images need not be clear, rough designs or image collages are enough, with even just conceptual ideas being acceptable. Using uploaded base designs, Sitateru’s designers and pattern makers decide which garment factory is relevant and matchmake them with received orders. If there is no problem with a sample product from the test production, both sides will enter into a mass production agreement. Acceptable minimum production volume starts with 10 pieces for one size pattern, 20 pieces for one production lot. Leveraging the platform with a capability of receiving these orders, garment factories can reduce their downtime and work their way out of financial woes.
Sitateru CEO Hidekazu Kawano explained:
Our main target is multi-brand store owners and online-only fashion retailers typically wanting to produce unique products despite the small production lot. We help them leverage highly-skilled manufacturing forces. We have now partnered with a dozen factories across the country, planning to acquire 1,000 fashion retailers as our users.
Sitateru CEO Hidekazu Kawano
He also added that the company wants to partner with over 50 companies and to grow a user base to more than 10,000 retailers by 2016. Sitateru recently started working on a new feature called Premium Product Order, which allows independent brand owners to produce limited-edition items in the same quality level as top global fashion brands, by leveraging high sewing techniques that Japanese garment factories have acquired.
Sitateru secured funds from Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Nippon Venture Capital, and Japanese internet company Livesense (TSE:6054). Details of the investment have not been disclosed but the raised sum likely ranges around hundreds of thousand US dollars. The investment from Livesense is part of the Startup 50 incubation initiative, where entrepreneurs can receive mentorship from Livesense CEO Taichi Murakami and Japanese online recipe site Cookpad CEO Yoshiteru Akita.
Kawano continued:
In view of global fashion trends, starting with tailor-made production, we have experienced the era of mass production and mass consumption represented by the fast fashion industry, but I believe we are now in the era of optimized production and optimized consumption.
“Made by imagination” is our mission. These days people can create what they want to wear, to match their lifestyle. So my company wants to help sustain manufacturing capabilities for fashion items that people want.
Kawano noted that they can receive orders from the global market when they complete their network of garment factories, all across Japan. In addition, they aim to help increase “Made by Japan” brand (rather than “Made in Japan” brand) presence in the future.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Mist Technologies, a startup that has been developing and providing a CDN (content distribution network) platform for rich media content, called MistCDN, announced earlier this week that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum from KDDI Open Innovation Fund, a startup-focused fund operated by Tokyo-based investment firm Global Brain. This round follows the startup’s previous funding of 75 million yen ($636,000) from Sirius Partners back in September 2014. MistCDN is a content distribution network leveraging the WebRTC technology, which requires no server but enables peer-to-peer data transfer using only web browsers between users, technically similar to the concept adopted by Skype. MistCDN allows users to receive content distribution from their near users in network topology. So if you distribute rich media content, which are likely to cause a heavy load for networks, MistCDN enables smooth data traffic without using existing commercial CDN services such as Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and Livelight. Mist Technologies was born out of the 6th batch of KDDI Mugen Labo, the accelerator program by Japan’s second largest telco. Tokyo-based private broadcaster TV Asahi, one of the companies participating in an alliance program for the accelerator, is considering to adopt MistCDN, plus…
Tokyo-based Mist Technologies, a startup that has been developing and providing a CDN (content distribution network) platform for rich media content, called MistCDN, announced earlier this week that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum from KDDI Open Innovation Fund, a startup-focused fund operated by Tokyo-based investment firm Global Brain. This round follows the startup’s previous funding of 75 million yen ($636,000) from Sirius Partners back in September 2014.
MistCDN is a content distribution network leveraging the WebRTC technology, which requires no server but enables peer-to-peer data transfer using only web browsers between users, technically similar to the concept adopted by Skype. MistCDN allows users to receive content distribution from their near users in network topology. So if you distribute rich media content, which are likely to cause a heavy load for networks, MistCDN enables smooth data traffic without using existing commercial CDN services such as Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and Livelight.
Mist Technologies was born out of the 6th batch of KDDI Mugen Labo, the accelerator program by Japan’s second largest telco. Tokyo-based private broadcaster TV Asahi, one of the companies participating in an alliance program for the accelerator, is considering to adopt MistCDN, plus KDDI has decided to deploy it into one of their corporate clients.
Mist Technologies will use the funds to strengthen product and business development and expand to the US.
WebRTC enables a stable data distribution regardless of increasing or decreasing browsing users. Because of the unnecessity of server scale-out, it is an ideal solution for startups, especially for those who provide services requiring huge network traffic but cannot afford to invest much on relevant infrastructure. However, the WebRTC technology requires a wide range of engineering knowledge across multiple layers, so not many Japanese startups have developed a business based on it.
NTT Communications unveiled a platform for developing apps using WebRTC in 2014, called SkyWay. Other available examples leveraging the technology by Japanese startups include Sensei Note, a vertical social network platform for schoolteachers.
Mist Technologies’ CEO Shintaro Tanaka throws a pitch at KDDI Mugen Labo demo day. (Tokyo, July 2014)
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based Fogg launched a mobile app called Cheerz for Android and iOS in early December, which allows users to “cheer” their favorite J-pop idols. The company has partnered with All Blue, a startup that provides idol-focused online media site Tokyo Girls’ Update, for global expansion. Cheerz is a fan engagement app for budding idols, allowing them to share their selfies and snapshots to receive “cheer” endorsements from users. Idols that acquire a large number of “cheer” endorsements can then expand their exposure by appearing on live performances or TV shows. Since its December launch, the Cheerz app has sent over 1 million “cheers” endorsements to participating idols in just three days, followed by 5 million in two weeks, and 10 million “cheer” endorsements in a month. Idols that acquire “cheer” endorsements have the chance to promote themselves via the app’s partnering media, including Tokyo Girls’ Update. Tokyo Girls’ Update will launch a TV show focused on J-pop idols on NHK World/JibTV in April, where budding idols will have a chance to be featured. Fogg and All Blue will work together to help J-pop idols raise their appeal globally, including…
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
Tokyo-based Fogg launched a mobile app called Cheerz for Android and iOS in early December, which allows users to “cheer” their favorite J-pop idols. The company has partnered with All Blue, a startup that provides idol-focused online media site Tokyo Girls’ Update, for global expansion.
Cheerz is a fan engagement app for budding idols, allowing them to share their selfies and snapshots to receive “cheer” endorsements from users. Idols that acquire a large number of “cheer” endorsements can then expand their exposure by appearing on live performances or TV shows.
Since its December launch, the Cheerz app has sent over 1 million “cheers” endorsements to participating idols in just three days, followed by 5 million in two weeks, and 10 million “cheer” endorsements in a month.
Idols that acquire “cheer” endorsements have the chance to promote themselves via the app’s partnering media, including Tokyo Girls’ Update. Tokyo Girls’ Update will launch a TV show focused on J-pop idols on NHK World/JibTV in April, where budding idols will have a chance to be featured. Fogg and All Blue will work together to help J-pop idols raise their appeal globally, including holding live performances for their global fan base.
See the original story in Japanese. Japanese leading toiletries manufacturer Sunstar has recently developed a smart device attachment to a toothbrush on a prototyping basis, called G.U.M Play. The device has a motion sensor that detects the motion of the toothbrush, and transfers data to mobile apps via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). There will be three mobile apps available supporting the attachment device: “Mouth Band” plays music while users brush their teeth “Mouth News” reads aloud news stories while users brush their teeth “Mouth Monster” is an educational app for children while they brush their teeth All these apps record transversal motions and how much time spent upon brushing. Sunstar says it will adopt more advanced sensing technologies, planning to introduce the product to market later this year. Meanwhile, Proctor & Gamble (P&G) announced at the Mobile World Congress 2014 last July that it would introduce Bluetooth 4.0-enabled Oral-B interactive electric toothbrush. The P&G product is already available in stores. Compared to the new Oral-B toothbrush, G.U.M Play will likely cost less because the latter is an attachment device rather than a toothbrush. More devices designed for synchronization with smartphones in acquiring data are seen appearing. While this trend will be further enhanced so that more things will be enabled, the key…
Japanese leading toiletries manufacturer Sunstar has recently developed a smart device attachment to a toothbrush on a prototyping basis, called G.U.M Play.
The device has a motion sensor that detects the motion of the toothbrush, and transfers data to mobile apps via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
There will be three mobile apps available supporting the attachment device:
“Mouth Band” plays music while users brush their teeth
“Mouth News” reads aloud news stories while users brush their teeth
“Mouth Monster” is an educational app for children while they brush their teeth
All these apps record transversal motions and how much time spent upon brushing. Sunstar says it will adopt more advanced sensing technologies, planning to introduce the product to market later this year.
Meanwhile, Proctor & Gamble (P&G) announced at the Mobile World Congress 2014 last July that it would introduce Bluetooth 4.0-enabled Oral-B interactive electric toothbrush. The P&G product is already available in stores. Compared to the new Oral-B toothbrush, G.U.M Play will likely cost less because the latter is an attachment device rather than a toothbrush.
More devices designed for synchronization with smartphones in acquiring data are seen appearing. While this trend will be further enhanced so that more things will be enabled, the key is how device developers can offer the experience that users really need.
The Bridge
Masaru Ikeda
Shintaro Eguchi
Junya Mori
