This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.
L to R: Naoki Aoyagi (SVP of Business Division, Gree), Makoto Yamaguchi (Senior Executive Director of Content Creation, Fuji Television Network)
Tokyo-based private broadcaster Fuji TV and online gaming giant Gree recently established “F x G VR Works (tentative name)” based on an agreement to collaborate in developing business and services including content production / distribution as well as platform construction related to Virtual Reality (VR). This project seeks to combine the strengths of the nationally-networked television broadcaster and Gree, which has game and Web development prowess in addition to having announced its first VR title at the Tokyo Game Show in September of 2015.
In connection with such moves the Tokyo-based tech company established its GREE VR Studio last November. Moreover, it has also been a linchpin figure at the Japan VR Summit which was held on May 10th and gathered many of the leading-edge players in this industry. Furthermore it has just this April established an investment fund focused on VR start-ups in the Americas.
Japan VR Summit, Tokyo (May 10th, 2016)
It is said that VR technology can be applied not only to entertainment such as visual programmings and games not to mention theme parks but also may be applied widely to use in the medical and scientific research arenas. 2016 is said to be the break-out year for VR, with Oculus VR having started shipping in March of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) and HTC commencing its HTC Vive product from April. The Sony entertainment unit is also planning to begin sales of its PlayStation VR in October to further expand VR use.
Fuji TV is running from last year within the Fuji TV On Demand (FOD) integrated entertainment service its next-gen image distribution tech-based R&D endeavor “FOD Labo” which offers 360° panoramic VR content along with a 360° VR live performance coverage for the “Love music” TV program. With the collaboration, Fuji TV and Gree will henceforth create more opportunities to experience VR and help this market to develop further in this promising new field that could grow rapidly. For further info, access http://www.fgworks.jp (Japanese).
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Zawatt, the Japanese startup behind an online auction site for brand name items called Smaoku, unveiled today its international interface which enables foreign consumers to purchase authentic second-hand items from Japan. The new interface is available in English and traditional Chinese, aiming to serve buyers in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore (though simplified Chinese is used in Singapore). With the new interface for buyers, sellers in Japan can easily submit their items to foreign buyers in the same manner with they have been doing for buyers in Japan. In addition to eliminating language barriers by machine translation and a Q&A template for interactions between sellers and buyers, generation of documents for export customs declaration, international forwarding service and credit card payments (VISA and MasterCard accepted) are available. Buyers can easily accept inquiries and purchase requests as well as shipping their items to the aforementioned regions. If sellers in Japan want to sell their items internationally, all they have to do is just toggle the ‘International Sales’ switch in their ‘MyShop’ menu in the mobile app. In international deals, a buyer is to bear remittance and shipping charges while 10% brokerage commission…
Tokyo-based Zawatt, the Japanese startup behind an online auction site for brand name items called Smaoku, unveiled today its international interface which enables foreign consumers to purchase authentic second-hand items from Japan. The new interface is available in English and traditional Chinese, aiming to serve buyers in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore (though simplified Chinese is used in Singapore).
Chinese-speaking buyers can easily communicate with Japanese-speaking sellers using a Q&A template on Smaoku.
With the new interface for buyers, sellers in Japan can easily submit their items to foreign buyers in the same manner with they have been doing for buyers in Japan. In addition to eliminating language barriers by machine translation and a Q&A template for interactions between sellers and buyers, generation of documents for export customs declaration, international forwarding service and credit card payments (VISA and MasterCard accepted) are available. Buyers can easily accept inquiries and purchase requests as well as shipping their items to the aforementioned regions.
If sellers in Japan want to sell their items internationally, all they have to do is just toggle the ‘International Sales’ switch in their ‘MyShop’ menu in the mobile app. In international deals, a buyer is to bear remittance and shipping charges while 10% brokerage commission will be charged to a seller when his/her deal is made (5.4% discount rate applied for ‘official shop’ sellers) for domestic deals.
Zawatt fundraised about $2 million last June to focus more on international transactions just released at this time. Despite their having SIG Asia Investments from China invest through this round, it may feel slightly awkward that the aforementioned service area doesn’t include mainland China in the cross-border transaction surge.
According to Zawatt CEO Daisaku Harada, the company is still considering expanding into the mainland market because of high tariffs on luxury brand items, the need to locate servers within China (due to Great Firewall, narrow bandwidth as to overseas connections and ICP license requirement), different online promotional methods (since Facebook is unavailable in China), and different payment methods (people prefer to use UnionPay or Alipay rather than Western credit card brands). Seeing the response in the aforementioned four markets, he says that they will aim to start serving the Chinese market within the year.
I often see many events focused on cross-border e-commerce rather than ‘ordinary’ e-commerce across mainland China. Many cross-border e-commerce platforms deal with daily necessities or expendable supplies from outside China. The second-hand marketplace for brand items can be made because of the existence of Japanese consumers who carefully handle these items on the provision side. This particular segment of second-hand brand items can help Smaoku gain a competitive advantage over giants like Alibaba.
See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s ABBALab, a startup incubator focusing on IoT (Internet of Things) or IoE (Internet of Everything) business, last week announced the establishment of ABBALab IoE 1st Investment Limited Liability Partnership as its new fund. The fund was formed with about 1.5 billion yen (about $14 million) in committed capital from investors including Mistletoe, Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020, Sojitz, Sakura Internet and angel investors. The redemption period of the fund is ten years. Its investment target is not only hardware but also general products or services in IoT / IoE field, while covering wide investment stages from the prototyping stage or a pre-seed round to a series A round phase. Also follow-on investment will be considered according to the situation. In ABBALab, CEO Osamu Ogasahara’s personal assets had been invested in IoT startups so far, with the investment targets being disclosed as well. No New Folk Studio (smart footwear) … See this article Exiii (personalized myoelectric hand) … See these articles Vinclu (smartphone accessory / hologram AI) … See these articles Symax (health condition analyzer inside toilet) … See these articles Fove (eye-tracking Virtual Reality headset) … See these articles Up Perfoma (footballer’s…
Japan’s ABBALab, a startup incubator focusing on IoT (Internet of Things) or IoE (Internet of Everything) business, last week announced the establishment of ABBALab IoE 1st Investment Limited Liability Partnership as its new fund.
The fund was formed with about 1.5 billion yen (about $14 million) in committed capital from investors including Mistletoe, Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020, Sojitz, Sakura Internet and angel investors. The redemption period of the fund is ten years.
Its investment target is not only hardware but also general products or services in IoT / IoE field, while covering wide investment stages from the prototyping stage or a pre-seed round to a series A round phase. Also follow-on investment will be considered according to the situation.
In ABBALab, CEO Osamu Ogasahara’s personal assets had been invested in IoT startups so far, with the investment targets being disclosed as well.
Upon fund establishment, I had an interview with CEO Ogasahara (all question in boldface asked by the writer, and answered by Ogasahara).
First of all, would you explain your activities so far? You had invested your personal assets in ABBALab.
During the past two years, I started ABBALab with Taizo (Son, CEO of Misletoe) as a profit-making corporation, and been involved with investment for prototyping or communication activities. Meanwhile, I have participated in starting up DMM.make AKIBA, IoT Platform of Sakura Internet or Japan Region of OpenFog. Those are all to set a ground from which new startups will be born.
The investment targets steadily increased. Was that within your expectation?
Actually, I could not have met any startups with impact other than my investment targets during the first year. While receiving a few requests for investment examination in one month, I might possibly not have been able to notice promising startups to invest in during prototyping phase with just my senses.
You had run an acceleration program once in ABBALab. Would you tell me the unsuccessful points of the program?
We formed a fellowship system to have businesspersons participate in the activities as mentors, but the cost effectiveness was bad because it was hard for them to work within the startups’ timeframe.
There was also a system to build teams anew by gathering failed startups. Could you provide actual examples?
There was no case where separated individual members had united into one. However, we found a case in which a team manufactured a concept model of a product in combination with a close team, of course with charges though.
How much do you evaluate that in score?
A 70. Although each startup is responsible for its own business, I think I myself could do more in terms of speed or number of matters as an accelerator.
Let’s move on to the topic about the new fund. The return on personal asset-sized investment may be a kind of community creation for example, which means just support. However, fund establishment will produce a financial business aspect. Could I ask you the reason why you formed the fund this time?
For example, it may be not so bad as a portfolio to continue investing a few million yen into 10 to 20 startups per year under the current style. However, even if only ABBALab was given excellent investment targets, there is no guarantee that a better environment would be formed in ten, twenty or fifty years later.
To deal with this, I noticed the need to change the system on the assumption of follow-on such as prototyping, seed and series A. Moreover, it is difficult to run ABBALab in such a style only with personal assets.
I see.
By only increasing the number of shareholders and raising money from them, I think our degree of freedom will be limited as a result, because we just have unlisted startups’ shares in the prototype phase (in most cases), for which valuation is difficult.
So you thought that simply forming fund is easier to understand than fundraising and investing as a corporation.
As for our result of investment activities, we had shown a not-too-bad performance for introduction to investors, where some of the invested startups had succeeded in fundraising during their next round, so that I came to consider raising money by forming a fund as ABBALab, not capital increase.
Is there any change with establishment of the fund?
What the good thing is, simply an increase of the amount and the possibility of follow-on, or possibility of collaboration or additional investment by LPs. By having more concerned people with the fund between us, we can contribute to the resource secure for startups through requests for assistance or mentoring that we have not been able to handle.
One point which will widely change is, when considering follow-on of tens of millions in scale, we have to share that with an advisory board in advance, because we invest the fund received from LPs, not personal assets.
What do LPs (limited partners) expect in addition to investment return?
Foxconn (managing Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020) had already invested in Fove, and Sojitz started supporting a deal with Symax. Also, Sakura Internet is working to adopt Tsumug’s products in home IoT business with Apaman Shop (Japanese rental housing broker).
See the original story in Japanese. Slush Asia website casinoceske.com took place on May 13th and 14th at the Makuhari Messe exhibition halls in Chiba. Among 60 nominees fiercely competing during the 2-day event, Taiwan-based SkyREC — which is developing an analytics platform for real stores — won this year’s startup pitch competition. Taiwanese startups won for two consecutive years following Slush Asia 2015 last year. Top award winner: SkyREC (Taiwan) Supplemental awards: Premium support worth 1 million yen from Google, 55,000 miles point from Japan Airlines, legal services worth $15,000 from the law firm Orrick and 1 million yen in cash from Autodesk SkyREC is a Google Analytics for real stores, allows users to understand how many times and also how long wherein the store customers have been gathing at the most. It will demonstrate a great capability in finding customer flow lines, hot-selling items as well as unpopular items with 12 different core analytics solutions. At a certain store in Taiwan, it could improve in-store customer traffic 10% and monthly revenue 18% after three months since implementing the SkyREC solution. Since its launch in December of 2015, the solution has been adopted by 400 stores, planning to be…
took place on May 13th and 14th at the Makuhari Messe exhibition halls in Chiba. Among 60 nominees fiercely competing during the 2-day event, Taiwan-based SkyREC — which is developing an analytics platform for real stores — won this year’s startup pitch competition. Taiwanese startups won for two consecutive years following Slush Asia 2015 last year.
Top award winner: SkyREC (Taiwan)
Supplemental awards: Premium support worth 1 million yen from Google, 55,000 miles point from Japan Airlines, legal services worth $15,000 from the law firm Orrick and 1 million yen in cash from Autodesk
SkyREC is a Google Analytics for real stores, allows users to understand how many times and also how long wherein the store customers have been gathing at the most. It will demonstrate a great capability in finding customer flow lines, hot-selling items as well as unpopular items with 12 different core analytics solutions.
At a certain store in Taiwan, it could improve in-store customer traffic 10% and monthly revenue 18% after three months since implementing the SkyREC solution. Since its launch in December of 2015, the solution has been adopted by 400 stores, planning to be deployed into 64,000 stores under 30 brands. This startup was born out of the 11th batch of Taiwan’s AppWorks accelerator.
Recruit Strategic Partners award winner: Giroptic (France)
Supplemental awards: 500,000 yen in cash and one-year free rent until September 2016 of TECH LAB PAAK co-working space in Shibuya, Tokyo
Giroptic has developed a camera device which enables capture of 360-degree motion pictures with three micro cameras and three microphones but without any software. In addition to Nokia’s Ozo exhibited in the Slush Asia venue at this time, images captured by three cameras are stitched into one 360-degree video stream in real time with an onboard chip. It can be livestreamed via Wi-Fi too.
Typical use cases include projecting images using a virtual reality-enabled head-mounted display (HMD) or browsing on desktop but users can swipe it directly or horizontally towards where they want to look at. It can be also attached to a light bulb socket and work as a 360-degree CCTV camera which enables image transmissions via Wi-Fi in real time. The team has received about 4,000 pre-orders at a Kickstarter campaign in France. Giroptic has 48 employees in France and San Francisco, and is currently funded at $6.1 million.
PR Times award winner: Meleap (Japan)
Supplemental awards: One-year complimentary use of press release distribution from PR Times
Meleap has developed a sports game environment called Hado, leveraging a combination of several technologies such as spatial perception, smartphone-based HMD and motion sensors. It virtually reproduces decorated rooms and townscapes for up to 10 users upon enjoying games or exercises. They will start with a B2B (business-to-business) model serving leisure and recreational service providers.
The following two finalists could receive no award but were attracting much attention from an audience and judges:
Vectr (Taiwan)
Vectr is a one-stop graphic design platform that has been integrated with markup editor, prototyping tool and other several functions. With a professional account paying $25 monthly fee, users can use create documents making the most of templates, icons, fonts, stock photos, logs and illustration patterns provided on the platform. It also has editors and libraries for animated content, audios and videos as well.
Users can also sell their templates, icons, fonts, stock photos, logos and illustration patterns to other users through a marketplace. The company will take 30% of the price as a commission when the purchase is made.
MoBagel (Taiwan)
By collecting usage of IoT (Internet of Things) or “connected” home appliances, MoBagel provides consumer electronics manufacturers with business intelligence through a dashboard screen. It will help manufacturers understand usage or customer behaviors of their products. With this solution, manufacturers can grab statistics about how frequently their products are being used or demographics of their user base. Through the analysis, manufacturers can gain user insights that will definitely be useful for future product developments such as considering a suitable lifetime of batteries installed in their products.
Having partnered with Softbank, Philips, Panasonic and other consumer electronics companies, the company also secured $1 million in a seed round from 500 Startups, CyberAgent Ventures, SingTel’s Innov8 incubation initiative and Club Clover.
See the original story in Japanese. This article is part of our coverage of Microsoft Innovation Day in Tokyo. Under the theme of ‘innovation by software,’ Microsoft Innovation Award had been established to award a software or service which had achieved realization of innovative ideas. Previous award winners include AgIC (electronic circuit printing technology using conductive ink), Opect (gesture control for surgeons during their operation), Shikumi Design (new-gen music instrument), and TVision Insights (effective TV rating measurement technology). See also: Japan’s AgIC, circuit board printing startup, raises $1.5M for radiant heating technology Japan’s AgIC launches Kickstarter campaign for enhanced version of circuit pattern maker This year, 16 startups covering hardware, AI (artificial intelligence) or IoT (internet of things) had given pitches as finalists. Eventually, the University of Tsukuba Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, developing BioSync which enables synchronous kinesthetic interactions among people, won the Best Team Award and Japan Airlines (JAL) Entrepreneur Award. The following were the jurors for the competition. Yoshiaki Ishii, Director, New Business Policy Office, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Katsura Itoh, Developer and Evangelism Lead, Microsoft Japan Fumihiko Nakajima, Senior Director, Business Development, Dentsu CDC Ken Nishimura, Chief Editor, TechCrunch Japan Shumpei Fukui, Principal, Archetype Tomonori Yako,…
Under the theme of ‘innovation by software,’ Microsoft Innovation Award had been established to award a software or service which had achieved realization of innovative ideas. Previous award winners include AgIC (electronic circuit printing technology using conductive ink), Opect (gesture control for surgeons during their operation), Shikumi Design (new-gen music instrument), and TVision Insights (effective TV rating measurement technology).
This year, 16 startups covering hardware, AI (artificial intelligence) or IoT (internet of things) had given pitches as finalists. Eventually, the University of Tsukuba Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, developing BioSync which enables synchronous kinesthetic interactions among people, won the Best Team Award and Japan Airlines (JAL) Entrepreneur Award. The following were the jurors for the competition.
Yoshiaki Ishii, Director, New Business Policy Office, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
Katsura Itoh, Developer and Evangelism Lead, Microsoft Japan
Fumihiko Nakajima, Senior Director, Business Development, Dentsu CDC
Ken Nishimura, Chief Editor, TechCrunch Japan
Shumpei Fukui, Principal, Archetype
Tomonori Yako, IoT Innovation Center Chief and Executive Consultant, Ufuru
The following introduces seven startups which won the Best Team Award and sponsor awards. Incidentally, every finalist team was provided prizes from accounting software maker Yayoi as well as Microsoft.
The Best Team Award winner / JAL Entrepreneur Award winner: BioSync by Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Tsukuba
BioSync is a device for next-gen rehabilitation by “hacking” human bodies. It consists of a sensor device which measures changes of myogenic potential changes and a device which receives these signals for transmission as potential changes. By linking into / being linked by another person with general cable used for earphones, the device enables an understanding of kinesthetics for physically-disabled people, or realize effective rehabilitation by sharing healthy people’s sense of muscle activities with handicapped people. As an example of use, the team had succeeded in development of feeding spoon for people with neuromuscular disorders.
Jury’s Special Award / The Bridge Award: The Voice by Hmcomm
Hmcomm had started as a technology transfer venture from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and has been developing cloud-based voice recognition engine called The Voice. Although voice recognition R&D has been continuing for many years, it is still far attaining a fully practical level. However, thanks to the rapid progress in hardware or network since 2010s the environment to dramatically improve the processing performance of voice recognition has been set, with the market expanding along with the advance in communication robots. The team is also seeking a solution for problems as to conventional voice recognition technologies, like recognition difficulties during crosstalk or in noisy locations.
Jury’s Special Award: AI-based life science image analysis system by LPixel
Although 90% of the academic papers are publicized with images in recent years, most of the author researchers did not learn about image processing. LPixel analyzes a large quantity of data with high accuracy, outputs images then enables pasting of images onto papers by easy operation which even children can do. It was developed under the concept of having AI as a research assistant. The team has acquired three patents, and LPixel ImageJ Plugins has exceeded 30,000 downloads.
Audience Award / PR TIMES Award: Secual by Secual
Secual is a smart home security service linked to the Internet. It provides WiFi-connectable intruder detection sensors and a cloud service at a low price, and allows users to recognize irregularities in their own house from outside locations via smartphones. The team had obtained the seed fund from Will Group Incubate Fund in June 2015, subsequently fundraising 60 million yen (about $550,000) from lease property agent Ambition and vacation rental startup Adventure in December 2015. In March 2016, it agreed to a strategic capital alliance with Investors Cloud.
Audience Award: Bioelectric-controlled prosthesis by Meltin MMI
Kagura is a next-gen music instrumental platform enabling music to be played just with physical movement, based on distance and gesture recognition technologies. Adopting Intel®RealSense™3D, the app had been launched for Mac in July 2015 then subsequently for Windows. The Shikumi Design team had won the top award in Intel® Perceptual Computing Challenge 2013.
Various kinds of cheap VR (virtual reality) goggles that allow feeling a sense of immersion by inserting smartphones into cardboard box cases have been appearing. However, a major defect of these products is that users cannot touch smartphones’ screen directly to control apps by swiping, scrolling or tapping. Milbox Touch is an electrode seal with high sensitivity for transmitting current change to smartphones, enabling control of apps by touching the surface with the seal.
The White team is applying for a patent on the seal, and aims OEM (original equipment manufacturer) supply to other VR goggles such as Google Cardboard. Currently, the team has been developing a PacMan game for VR as well, also provides a SDK (Software Development Kit) embeddable in games, free of charge. The SDK is available for Unity, Xamarin, iOS and Android. The team plans to start OEM supply of the seal and launch of PacMan at the end of April 2016.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. AdTech startup AdAsia Holdings (hereafter AdAsia), established in Singapore on April 7, has unveiled its service content. AdAsia has commenced provision of AdAsia Digital Platform capable of programmatic buying (auto-purchasing of advertisement frames based on data) and integrated report management system as well as AdAsia Ad Network which is an ad-network aggregating local media in the Southeast Asian region. With programmatic buying, finely detailed configuration of target audience for advertisement can be simplified by minimizing labor in the form of human operation as much as possible through linkage with the companies’ own websites, CRM (customer relationship management) or customer loyalty programs. Advertisers do not have to pay advertisement fees arising from visitors who are out of their target or who visits the websites accidentally. While every ad network such as Google or Facebook requires configuration of distribution conditions, target of advertisement or confirmation of performance reports, AdAsia Digital Platform automates these works in part. By providing services over the AdAsia Digital Platform which has such functions, the firm aims to differentiate AdAsia Ad Network from other conventional ad networks in terms of operational convenience. AdAsia Digital Platform has realized uniform management of performances over…
AdTech startup AdAsia Holdings (hereafter AdAsia), established in Singapore on April 7, has unveiled its service content. AdAsia has commenced provision of AdAsia Digital Platform capable of programmatic buying (auto-purchasing of advertisement frames based on data) and integrated report management system as well as AdAsia Ad Network which is an ad-network aggregating local media in the Southeast Asian region.
With programmatic buying, finely detailed configuration of target audience for advertisement can be simplified by minimizing labor in the form of human operation as much as possible through linkage with the companies’ own websites, CRM (customer relationship management) or customer loyalty programs. Advertisers do not have to pay advertisement fees arising from visitors who are out of their target or who visits the websites accidentally.
While every ad network such as Google or Facebook requires configuration of distribution conditions, target of advertisement or confirmation of performance reports, AdAsia Digital Platform automates these works in part. By providing services over the AdAsia Digital Platform which has such functions, the firm aims to differentiate AdAsia Ad Network from other conventional ad networks in terms of operational convenience.
AdAsia Digital Platform has realized uniform management of performances over any ad network in addition to AdAsia Ad Network. In the future, a video ad network targeting smart TV viewers will be supported, which is currently in development by the firm.
As of launch date, AdAsia Digital Platform had already been scheduled for implementation in 30 companies including US automakers or major Japanese confectionery makers, and the firm plans to achieve sales of $10 million within 2016.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
The Bridge
Masaru Ikeda
According to Zawatt CEO Daisaku Harada, the company is still considering expanding into the mainland market because of high tariffs on luxury brand items, the need to locate servers within China (due to Great Firewall, narrow bandwidth as to overseas connections and 
Takeshi Hirano
