Tokyo-based digital media outlet Wired.jp reported on Wednesday that eight successful entrepreneurs from Japan have joined forces and launched a new startup-focused investment fund called Tokyo Founders Fund.
The founding members represent an impressive lineup of the Japanese startup community:
Yusuke Asakura (former CEO of Mixi, visiting scholar at Stanford University)
Inspired by San Francisco-based Founders Fund started in 2005 by the Paypal founders, Kobayashi decided that Japan also needed a similar startup investment founders fund while building a network with local investors and entrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay Area where he is based. According to Kobayshi’s recent post on Facebook, the fund will offer a small amount of investment to pre-seed and seed stage startups around the world.
Details of the fund’s activities have not been decided, but the eight-person team will discuss this in a closed Facebook group while looking to give their invested entrepreneurs functions as a knowledge sharing platform around launching businesses and a hub for connecting them with each others.
See the original story in Japanese. Our readers may recall that Tokyo-based Polyglots secured a seed round funding from East Ventures in March. The company is best known for developing an English newsreader app under the same name, allowing Japanese users to learn English while reading news updates with many useful features such as managing unfamiliar English words in the app. The app has attracted more than 200,000 Japanese users to date since its launch one year ago. Polyglots launched a new newsreader app called Mondo on Friday, aiming to help people learn Japanese. The app targets foreigners living in Japan, Japanese-language learners around the world, as well as people interested in Japanese culture. Adopting adaptive learning technologies to Japanese-language learners Kanji (Chinese characters) and ambiguity in expressions are the hardest parts in learning Japanese. To overcome these obstacles, practice makes perfect so users have to read as many Japanese sentences as possible. Similarly to the Polyglots app, the Mondo app allows Japanese-language learners to choose their favorite news category and read news articles in Japanese, leveraging useful features like the in-app dictionary and vocabulary notebook. News articles can be sorted by the difficulty of context and the estimated time…
Our readers may recall that Tokyo-based Polyglots secured a seed round funding from East Ventures in March. The company is best known for developing an English newsreader app under the same name, allowing Japanese users to learn English while reading news updates with many useful features such as managing unfamiliar English words in the app. The app has attracted more than 200,000 Japanese users to date since its launch one year ago.
Polyglots launched a new newsreader app called Mondo on Friday, aiming to help people learn Japanese. The app targets foreigners living in Japan, Japanese-language learners around the world, as well as people interested in Japanese culture.
Adopting adaptive learning technologies to Japanese-language learners
Kanji (Chinese characters) and ambiguity in expressions are the hardest parts in learning Japanese. To overcome these obstacles, practice makes perfect so users have to read as many Japanese sentences as possible. Similarly to the Polyglots app, the Mondo app allows Japanese-language learners to choose their favorite news category and read news articles in Japanese, leveraging useful features like the in-app dictionary and vocabulary notebook.
News articles can be sorted by the difficulty of context and the estimated time to finish reading so that users can easily choose one to fit their free time. The smart scroll feature lets users read articles more quickly to help them quickly acquire Japanese reading skills.
Aiming to attract tens of millions of people worldwide
By connecting the Polyglots app with user and data profiles, Polyglots wants to become a comprehensive communication platform for linguistics, where Japanese users learning English and non-Japanese speakers learning English can connect to each other. Beyond the online community based on the app, the company plans to bring users offline activities, such as local guides at destinations around the world.
Polyglots Founder and CEO Junya Yamaguchi elaborated:
As the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 approaches, I think the understanding of Japanese culture in the world is still insufficient. By keeping people around the world informed with the real images of Japan, we want more people to become interested in Japan and visit some day.
The company is considering offering sightseeing services to foreign visitors to Japan while partnering with local governments and media companies in Japan. Its name is derived from Zenmondo, a cryptic dialogue between a Zen monk and his disciple. The company aims to acquire 100,000 users for the Mondo app, followed by attracting tens of millions of people worldwide with two services in several years.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Oneteam has fundraised a 60 million yen (about $480,000) seed round from CyberAgent Ventures. Oneteam focuses on development of communication service with the same name, under concept of “Your Team, in the palm of your hand.” It allows teams having a certain common purpose, including companies or any other such organization, to proceed with projects regardless of the members’ location or time. While the product is still in development, Oneteam plans to fulfill main functions such as ability to self introduce, in order to deepen mutual understanding within the team, or communicating for collaborative work between members. Requirements upon cooperation Oneteam was launched just this year. Akira Sasaki, CEO of this startup, had been involved in artificial intelligence research at Musashi Institute of Technology (now known as Tokyo City University). There he became interested in communication technologies, and after graduation joined Japanese large ad company Tokyu Agency. Following this, he moved to Recruit and worked on development of travel and property media publications. An experience of having difficulties in cooperaetion when he was in charge of managing business across six Asian countries had a great influence upon Sasaki. He explained: The biggest…
Tokyo-based startup Oneteam has fundraised a 60 million yen (about $480,000) seed round from CyberAgent Ventures.
Oneteam focuses on development of communication service with the same name, under concept of “Your Team, in the palm of your hand.” It allows teams having a certain common purpose, including companies or any other such organization, to proceed with projects regardless of the members’ location or time.
While the product is still in development, Oneteam plans to fulfill main functions such as ability to self introduce, in order to deepen mutual understanding within the team, or communicating for collaborative work between members.
Requirements upon cooperation
Oneteam was launched just this year. Akira Sasaki, CEO of this startup, had been involved in artificial intelligence research at Musashi Institute of Technology (now known as Tokyo City University). There he became interested in communication technologies, and after graduation joined Japanese large ad company Tokyu Agency. Following this, he moved to Recruit and worked on development of travel and property media publications.
An experience of having difficulties in cooperaetion when he was in charge of managing business across six Asian countries had a great influence upon Sasaki.
He explained:
The biggest problem was to let projects work efficiently. Differences in time, cultures and languages made communications complicated, and I did not even know what kind of communications they had in place. Then Kondo came from Japan and helped me when I was struggling.
Sasaki and co-founder Kyohei Kondo shared the experience of difficulties in the Asian field, and that led to the establishment of Oneteam.
When I was involved in a project with a major Thai company, 40 to 50 staffers were constant working. I noticed that it became possible to cooperate with them gradually through polite correspondence even if differences in culture and customs or business manners exist.
He continued:
The situation was similar in Indonesia and Vietnam. I experienced and learned that we can cooperate with whomever having a certain common purpose by building a trustful relationship and supported through joint activities, regardless of nationality or culture.
Importance of smartphones and Asia
After that, Sasaki joined the newly-launched Kaizen Platform, Japanese sartup behind an A/B testing platform, and charged mainly with leading business operations. There he again was faced with difficulties in implementing projects collaboratively. Sasaki elaborated:
Although the team was communicating over online tools like Slack and Qiita, it became hard to catch up afterward with the high volume of communication being exchanged while I was out on sales. While it would be no problem with desk workers, I was made awareness of issues that it would be rather hard for occupations entailing much out-of-office work or involving meetings, such as planners or salesmen.
After having been involved in various projects, Sasaki thought that only issues-oriented communications linked to specifics can match the business style of an upcoming information society as the number of staff and communication between them increase on a project.
In addition to needs for issue-based communications, Sasaki also noticed the importance of leveraging smartphones through his experience in Asia. He added:
I saw situations where several staffers had to share one desktop PC in the Asian workplace. On the other hand, the penetration rate of smartphones is very high in Asia. Therefore, I thought that the communication tool should be based on smartphones.
I had to make a move in 2015 anyhow. Because 2015 was the year when AEC (ASEAN Economic Community) was to start, with expectations that a larger number of Asian companies will expand their business beyond borders into locations overseas, I had to make a move. Under these circumstances, Oneteam offers a collaborative communication platform based on smartphones which supports improvement of business environment as well as productivity between Japanese and Southeast Asian companies.
Redevelopment of e-mail and intranet
Oneteam’s goal is to redevelop communication tools in business areas such as the intranet or e-mail. There are some reasons why Southeast Asia is a suitable market for the purpose of replacing conventional tools. Sasaki says:
At Southeast Asian companies, the business environment has not improved well yet, for example some companies have not adopted the intranet or some employees use free mail addresses due to a high employee turnover rate. I think that Oneteam will be accepted in these Asian environment.
Oneteam plans to soon launch a profile app which enables smooth self-introduction for employees. Firstly, the app assists introduction to characters or backgrounds of members in a project, and then Oneteam is to offer a communication tool afterwards.
Many players are competing for redevelopment of communication tools. The tools have become easier to use, but still are not perfect. Let us check out in a while what Oneteam offers as solutions for users unsatisfied with conventional services.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Vesper, developer of TableSolution and BeautySolution, reservation and customer management platforms for restaurants and beauty salons, announced earlier this month that they have raised 200 million yen (approximately $1.6 million) in funding from Japanese investment firm Jafco as well as angel investors. With this latest funding, Vesper is looking to carry out the necessary system development for global expansion and strengthen their sales personnel. In January of this year,Vesper CEO and founder Yu Taniguchi told us they were moving towards completing the last of their then 1,200 total installments of the company’s services with large scale businesses including Hotel Nikko Tokyo and others. [1] Since then approximately half a year has passed, and while the current number of total installations is not open to the public at this time, average installations of the service for restaurant use would seem to have increased by 27 times since January. In the same period of six months, restaurants which have adopted TableSolution have seen an increase in reservations in orders of 33 times compared to last year, with number of guests increasing about 32 times. According to Taniguchi total account cancellations so far are close…
Tokyo-based startup Vesper, developer of TableSolution and BeautySolution, reservation and customer management platforms for restaurants and beauty salons, announced earlier this month that they have raised 200 million yen (approximately $1.6 million) in funding from Japanese investment firm Jafco as well as angel investors. With this latest funding, Vesper is looking to carry out the necessary system development for global expansion and strengthen their sales personnel.
In January of this year,Vesper CEO and founder Yu Taniguchi told us they were moving towards completing the last of their then 1,200 total installments of the company’s services with large scale businesses including Hotel Nikko Tokyo and others. [1]
Since then approximately half a year has passed, and while the current number of total installations is not open to the public at this time, average installations of the service for restaurant use would seem to have increased by 27 times since January.
In the same period of six months, restaurants which have adopted TableSolution have seen an increase in reservations in orders of 33 times compared to last year, with number of guests increasing about 32 times. According to Taniguchi total account cancellations so far are close to zero. In fact he says, with the exception restaurants using the service actually closing down, account termination has been highly unlikely.
So, what exactly are the merits of this kind of online reservation system for a restaurant?
Restaurants using TableSolution are able to offer three different ways to take reservations: regular telephone reservations with online customer management, online reservations through the restaurant’s website, and telephone reservations using automated voice answering system.
Taniguchi provided data from one user case in which a biergarten style restaurant using TableCheck saw a 150% increase in reservation guests compared to before when they were only accepting telephone reservations. [2] Furthermore, they saw an additional 11% increase when adopting TableSolution’s automated voice answering reservation service which was released around January this year.
With TableSolution’s store tending structure, one advantage is that even if the phone line is tied up when another reservation call comes in, the answering system will accept reservations automatically. The system connects to the telephone via Twillio, helping to prevent missed opportunities to take reservations during busy hours.
As a result, this restaurant was able to increase their reservations through a combination of being able to take new reservations even during non-business hours and reducing reservations lost due to tied up phone lines at peak business hours. Of course it’s important to keep in mind that this is the only user case study that has been provided by Vesper, which may or may not tell the whole story, but it does seem worth acknowledging that a restaurant has actually been able to use this system to favorable results.
One of the biggest factors affecting businesses that use online services geared towards restaurants is of course the level of difficulty involved in adopting these systems. However if you observe the advancement of competitors such as other booking management services and tablet-based POS (point of sale) cash register systems, those challenges may very soon be a thing of the past. Surely this is one effect of the sudden widespread use of smart devices in business.
Regarding future plans Taniguchi says they will be focusing mainly on global expansion and extending their services to include options such as payment functions and more. Moving into the international market, they are looking particularly at Taiwan and other Asian countries. Being a considerably international company in terms of its employees, as well as Taniguchi himself being born and raised overseas, there doesn’t seem to be any strong concern regarding cultural barriers.
On Vesper’s website they’ve published their 8-point company policy. Personally I like the first one the most: “Act like there’s no tomorrow.”
The competition between Japan based reservation and booking services, as well the growth of these companies is becoming something quite interesting to see.
Translated by Connor Kirk Edited by Masaru Ikeda
This number includes total combined installations of both of TableSolution and BeautySolution. ↩
TableCheck is the name of the service on the user side, as opposed to TableSolution which is what restaurants see. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. A country like Japan is apt to attempt making it convenient just by implementing high tech. However, in contrast to Japan’s e-commerce industry which enhances conversion by utilizing artificial intelligence these days, Thailand’s chat-based one provides much higher user experiences than any other advanced platforms. While Japan created a public transportation system by introducing e-money on behalf of tickets, stations in Europe or Korea originally without ticket barriers are rather convenient; on the contrary, there is no need for implementing costs. Needless to say, implementing high technologies does not always meet users’ convenience or satisfaction. The idea of ‘simple is best’ not only can be applied to designs, but to apps or systems. Japan’s Quick Money Recorder, provided by Tokyo-based startup Smart Idea, is an app for household account book with the very concept of ‘simple is best.’ It focuses only on simple input of articles and money amount, while other similar apps have been enhancing automatic reading receipts or cooperation with online systems. About three years after its launch, Quick Money Recorder has achieved 3 million downloads in total for Android and iOS this month. Shohei Ejiri, formerly worked on product marketing at…
A country like Japan is apt to attempt making it convenient just by implementing high tech. However, in contrast to Japan’s e-commerce industry which enhances conversion by utilizing artificial intelligence these days, Thailand’s chat-based one provides much higher user experiences than any other advanced platforms. While Japan created a public transportation system by introducing e-money on behalf of tickets, stations in Europe or Korea originally without ticket barriers are rather convenient; on the contrary, there is no need for implementing costs.
Needless to say, implementing high technologies does not always meet users’ convenience or satisfaction. The idea of ‘simple is best’ not only can be applied to designs, but to apps or systems.
Japan’s Quick Money Recorder, provided by Tokyo-based startup Smart Idea, is an app for household account book with the very concept of ‘simple is best.’ It focuses only on simple input of articles and money amount, while other similar apps have been enhancing automatic reading receipts or cooperation with online systems. About three years after its launch, Quick Money Recorder has achieved 3 million downloads in total for Android and iOS this month.
Shohei Ejiri, formerly worked on product marketing at Nokia, set up a marketing research company MobileMarketing.JP in 2005. Subsequently he started Smart Idea as an app developer in 2012. The team has been developing apps only for household account book and related needs, namely Quick Money Recorder for easy input of money amount from receipt, and Kaimonoreko (literally meaning “shopper’s recorder”) for recording money amount not to exceed the estimate while shopping.
Ejiri explains:
When I started Smart Idea, there was no household account book apps to which I could stick to for long, as with many people around me. Therefore, I set out to develop Quick Money Recorder, aiming at enabling continuous use, even for me.
Quick Money Recorder allows you to input articles and money amount in only two seconds upon purchasing items. It is assumed to have been input on the spot. To reduce the trouble associated with household account book upon input or habit-building, eventually I chose this style.
User feedbacks show that this approach was right. MAU (Monthly Active Users) of Quick Money Recorder are 800,000 and DAU (Daily Active Users) are 150,000 for Android and iOS, that is, one in four users uses the app continuously. According to questionnaires for users conducted by Smart Idea last year, the satisfaction rate reached 96%.
Ejiri elaborated:
Our users are70% women and 30% men. Many of the women use the app for management of the household, and married men it use in managing their allowance. Also poor college student users can often be seen using it.
In addition, after the Lehman collapse, more and more people are getting overwhelmed by excessive credit-card loans in the U.S.; thus the necessity of financial literacy came to be discussed. As a result, our app may have some opportunities to be introduced at school classes and so forth.
Holding annual user events, user interviewing every half years, and questionnaires every three months, Smart Idea collects and archives requests for function addition or improvement of the app as video or text forms. By bringing users’ opinions with them directly to the development team in Hanoi, Vietnam, Smart Idea motivates them and shares a sense of need for continuous development.
Ejiri added:
When smartphones were first introduced, mainly tech users used them. However, as feature phones disappear gradually, main users of smartphones are shifting to ordinary people not familiar with tech. Such kind of users does not need functions like account aggregations.
While many of other apps feature the receipt reading function based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition), their recognition rates can never achieve 100% anyhow. Manual input is the simplest. I bet there is no absolute solution to a problem of household account book as to easy and continuous input. Nevertheless, trying to resolve this problem has been set as our mission.
As reported earlier, Pie, information-sharing platform for business, also unveiled their strategy that they aim to differentiate with Slack by targeting non-tech geeks as users. Today smart devices have been distributed to people regardless of being tech-savvy or not, thereby every app would become bipolarized depending on its users’ utilization time or frequency. Although it may be niche, there can be possibilities of new markets for startups.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Nightley, a Japanese startup developing analytics technologies using geographical data, launched a service this month called Inbound Insight, which visualizes how visitors to Japan behave on the map by leveraging what they post on social media platforms. Inbound Insight is available via two service plans: Behavioral Data Visualization Plan and Analytics Data Purchase Plan. As a freemium service, the former plan provides users with a heatmap on the map, popular destination rankings, and behavioral data via charts. In addition, premium users paying a monthly subscription fee of 100,000 yen ($800) also offers a route map showing how visitors are traveling around Japan, estimated nationality deviation (only for visitors from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand), estimated gender deviation (only for visitors from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), visiting venue data, posted words on social media platform, and attached pictures. User subscriptions will be updated every three months. The latter plan offers analytics data in a CSV format during the dates a user designates, with attributes like data and time, latitude and longitude, prefecture, city or town, street or block name, venue name, user ID, assumed gender, estimated nationality, posted text, and URL…
Tokyo-based Nightley, a Japanese startup developing analytics technologies using geographical data, launched a service this month called Inbound Insight, which visualizes how visitors to Japan behave on the map by leveraging what they post on social media platforms.
Inbound Insight is available via two service plans: Behavioral Data Visualization Plan and Analytics Data Purchase Plan.
As a freemium service, the former plan provides users with a heatmap on the map, popular destination rankings, and behavioral data via charts. In addition, premium users paying a monthly subscription fee of 100,000 yen ($800) also offers a route map showing how visitors are traveling around Japan, estimated nationality deviation (only for visitors from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand), estimated gender deviation (only for visitors from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), visiting venue data, posted words on social media platform, and attached pictures. User subscriptions will be updated every three months.
The latter plan offers analytics data in a CSV format during the dates a user designates, with attributes like data and time, latitude and longitude, prefecture, city or town, street or block name, venue name, user ID, assumed gender, estimated nationality, posted text, and URL for attached pictures. Starting at 500,000 yen ($4,000), the fee for this plan varies depending on duration and geographical coverage on what a user wants to grab the statistics in.
Nightley has been developing analytics technologies leveraging social interactions in Japanese, but the company has developed additional technologies to detect user language on social media platforms, their nationality, and whether they are in Japan or overseas.
Inbound Insight gives users analytics based on interactions from Twitter, Sina Weibo and other social network platforms. Meanwhile, private posts and log data from other, closed apps are not made subject to use as source of the statistics.
Nightley will market the product to government offices, the tourism industry, hotels, shopping malls, and store associations in Japan because they intend to invite foreign visitors to their sites, aiming to acquire 100 corporate users for the visualization plan as well as 20 corporate users for the data purchase plan.