It was in 2015 that the city of Gotemba led by young Mayor Yohei Wakabayashi availed climbers scaling Mt. Fuji from the Shizuoka side with sturdy lavatory structures able to double as emergency shelters in the event of natural disasters (now, the sheds could be equipped with alarm-sensors to turn them into better sanctuaries…). But since April this year there has been a major push in Gotemba to harness technology emanating from a Japanese startup ー albeit via major telecommunications carrier KDDI, which has just announced the buyout of said startup.
Soracom, established in 2014 by former Amazon Web Services (AWS) evangelist Ken Tamagawa, has been offering Internet of Things (IoT) service over circuits leased from the giant NTT group ー formerly the Japanese phone monopoly. The startup last year decided to help KDDI, which has a mobile telephony service called au, build its own IoT network. It is upon this technology that Mt. Fuji entryway Gotemba decided to collaborate in realizing a system to keep track of climbers using the pathway leading up to the mountaintop.
Screenshot of the website
Beginning on August 10, 2017 (a day before the newly-instituted Japanese Mountain Day holiday) an IoT-based tracking experiment is being conducted. IoT sensors have been placed along the hiking route, enabling a more accurate count by the municipal authorities as to those trekking up the Mt. Fuji pathway… search & rescue helicopters in particular being faced with hazards when flying near Japan’s highest mountain.
With technical support from KDDI’s research institute, a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) network being run on the KDDI LoRa PoC Kit ー underpinned by Soracom tech prowess utilized to develop said kitー will be tried out until the end of this mountain-climbing season.
It is said KDDI had been eyeing a sizable corporate buyout within the information-communication sector after being beat to the punch by SoftBank in the attempt to acquire mobile carrier eAccess some years ago. Interestingly, KDDI until recently has been working with another startup Colopl, which is strong in games but in past few years have pushed drone use, aiming to utilize IoT and VR/AR for promotion of rural communities in Japan. Furthermore, KDDI has been working with another startup, Fukuoka-based SkyDisc, regarding tropical fruit cultivation as well. It remains to be seen how startups will handle their relations with KDDI.
See the original story in Japanese. Based in the western Japanese city of Fukuoka, Nayuta has been offering new technologies that combine IoT (Internet of Things) and blockchain. The company announced on Thursday that it has raised 140 million yen (about $1.3 million) in a seed round from Tokyo-based VC firm Jafco (TSE:8595) and a single unnamed individual investor. For the Fukuoka company which had been running on bootstrap mode relying on its two founders’ resources, this is the first financial injection from investors. Using the funds, the company will be focused on developing “the 2nd layer technologies” and related applications. Named from the Sanskrit word meaning novemdecillion, Nayuta was founded back in March of 2015 by its CEO Kenichi Kurimoto who had been working on development of SoC (System on Chip) and research of software algorithm for LSI (large scale integration) circuits. The company has been dedicated to developing blockchain technologies (especially around public blockchain) for actual use in the real world. Blockchain is under the spotlight as a scheme for developing decentralized platforms. The concept is surely good but it still has various problems to solve for actual use, such as requiring users to wait 10 minutes on…
Nayuta’s founder and CEO Kenichi Kurimoto Image credit: Masaru Ikeda
Based in the western Japanese city of Fukuoka, Nayuta has been offering new technologies that combine IoT (Internet of Things) and blockchain. The company announced on Thursday that it has raised 140 million yen (about $1.3 million) in a seed round from Tokyo-based VC firm Jafco (TSE:8595) and a single unnamed individual investor. For the Fukuoka company which had been running on bootstrap mode relying on its two founders’ resources, this is the first financial injection from investors. Using the funds, the company will be focused on developing “the 2nd layer technologies” and related applications.
Named from the Sanskrit word meaning novemdecillion, Nayuta was founded back in March of 2015 by its CEO Kenichi Kurimoto who had been working on development of SoC (System on Chip) and research of software algorithm for LSI (large scale integration) circuits. The company has been dedicated to developing blockchain technologies (especially around public blockchain) for actual use in the real world.
Blockchain is under the spotlight as a scheme for developing decentralized platforms. The concept is surely good but it still has various problems to solve for actual use, such as requiring users to wait 10 minutes on average to confirm a transaction, needing to lower the dealing cost to enable micropayments and the maximum capacity of seven transactions per second, among others. Until these problems are solved, blockchain is unlikely to support massive IoT and social infrastructures.
As one of the solutions, US-based Blockstream and other brockchain startups have succeeded in enabling rapidly-processable end-to-end micropayments services by developing Lightning Network technologies. Leveraging Kurimoto’s background, Nayuta specializes in developing the 2nd Layer technologies for IoT products along with the Lightning Network concept, planning to develop the necessary utility tools for every app in partnership with user companies. The company has unveiled that it is in potential partnership talks with a certain leading company, but Kurimoto says they will leverage the funds and focus more on acquiring additional partners and engineers.
While Nayuta had been operating based out of co-working spaces like Tenjin Color in Fukuoka as well as Finolab in Tokyo, the company will soon set up an independent office space so that their current and future employees can work more comfortably and conveniently. However, the company says it is flexible about where its engineers will work and where to hire developers.
Nayuta recently won the runner-up at the MUFG Digital Accelerator 2nd Batch Demo Day.
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
Nayuta won the runner-up at the MUFG Digital Accelerator 2nd Batch Demo Day. Image credit: Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Monstar Lab, the company providing crowdsourced offshore app development service Sekai Lab, announced on Thursday that it has fundraised 700 million yen (about $6.4 million US) in the fourth round. This round was led by YJ Capital, the investment arm of Yahoo Japan (TSE:4689), with participatin from VC firms including Shinsei Corporate Investment and Fenox Venture Capital, in addition to Shimane-based local businesses like San-in Chuo TV Broadcasting and Tanabe. This round follows their previous $2.5 million funding from Shimane-based Gogin capital and others back in November of 2016, $3.3 million funding from Pasonatech and DG Incubation back in November of 2015, and about $1 million funding from East Ventures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital back in 2014. With the latest funding, the company has raised at least a total of 1.45 billion yen (about $13.2 million) from investors to date. Similar to the reason why Gogin Capital participated in the previous round, getting companies like San-in Chuo TV Broadcasting and Tanabe as a shareholder may have something to do with the fact that Monstar Lab has a development location in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture. While offering existing offshore app development services…
Tokyo-based Monstar Lab, the company providing crowdsourced offshore app development service Sekai Lab, announced on Thursday that it has fundraised 700 million yen (about $6.4 million US) in the fourth round. This round was led by YJ Capital, the investment arm of Yahoo Japan (TSE:4689), with participatin from VC firms including Shinsei Corporate Investment and Fenox Venture Capital, in addition to Shimane-based local businesses like San-in Chuo TV Broadcasting and Tanabe.
This round follows their previous $2.5 million funding from Shimane-based Gogin capital and others back in November of 2016, $3.3 million funding from Pasonatech and DG Incubation back in November of 2015, and about $1 million funding from East Ventures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital back in 2014. With the latest funding, the company has raised at least a total of 1.45 billion yen (about $13.2 million) from investors to date.
Similar to the reason why Gogin Capital participated in the previous round, getting companies like San-in Chuo TV Broadcasting and Tanabe as a shareholder may have something to do with the fact that Monstar Lab has a development location in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture. While offering existing offshore app development services as well, the company plans to invite more engineers from overseas to these locations within Japan, looking to help improve the situation in and around Shimane where companies still struggle with lack of system engineers.
With the recent acquisition of Danish app agency Nodes, the Tokyo company now has 17 locations worldwide for sales and app development efforts. With the latest funding, the company says it will aim to help Japanese companies expand into the Europe and US markets (localization and digital marketing), curate cutting-edge technologies and products from the global market, as well as expecting to receive more orders of outsourced app development work in the Europe and US markets.
See the original story in Japanese. Taiwan-based AI startup GliaCloud told The Bridge today that it has secured $500,000 in a seed round. This round was led by Infinity Venture Partners (IVP) with participation from unnamed several angel investors. GliaCloud has been developing a AI-powered video creation and editing platform called GliaStudio. By understanding a topic that a user presents in form of sentences, the platform can automatically curate and edit images, video clips and infographics, also adding auto-generated subtitles or synthesized narration to them. The company’s signature technologies enabling these functions include content management, natural language processing, computer vision and video search. The company has partnered with 10 media companies in the Greater China region, keeps generating more than 1,000 video clips each day. Partnering companies include Toutiao, the Chinese news curating app which recently fundraised $2 billion, in addition to Taiwanese leading tech news media BusinessNext. GliaStudio supports English, Chinese and Japanese languages, aiming to primarily target e-commerce platforms and merchants as well as media companies in Greater China and Japan. With this funding having Japan-based IVP participate in as an investor, further massive expansion into the Japanese market can be probably expected. Especially for distributed media leveraging…
Taiwan-based AI startup GliaCloud told The Bridge today that it has secured $500,000 in a seed round. This round was led by Infinity Venture Partners (IVP) with participation from unnamed several angel investors.
GliaCloud has been developing a AI-powered video creation and editing platform called GliaStudio. By understanding a topic that a user presents in form of sentences, the platform can automatically curate and edit images, video clips and infographics, also adding auto-generated subtitles or synthesized narration to them. The company’s signature technologies enabling these functions include content management, natural language processing, computer vision and video search.
The company has partnered with 10 media companies in the Greater China region, keeps generating more than 1,000 video clips each day. Partnering companies include Toutiao, the Chinese news curating app which recently fundraised $2 billion, in addition to Taiwanese leading tech news media BusinessNext.
GliaStudio supports English, Chinese and Japanese languages, aiming to primarily target e-commerce platforms and merchants as well as media companies in Greater China and Japan. With this funding having Japan-based IVP participate in as an investor, further massive expansion into the Japanese market can be probably expected. Especially for distributed media leveraging a bunch of video clips to attract viewers, the platform allows media companies to create and upload their clips to social media platforms autonomously.
GliaCloud was founded in July of 2015 by Taiwanese Canadian entrepreneur David Chen, who is strong in engineering cloud technologies and previously founded Taipei-based AdTech startup Tagtoo. The company won the Aliyun Award at the Tech in Asia Singapore startup competition back in 2016.
See the original story in Japanese. Phil Libin, the Russian-born tech entrepreneur raised in the US, left Evernote which he nurtured into one of the most successful startups to commence his career in startup investment and entrepreneur support last year. He recently founded a AI startup studio called All Turtles this year. At the debut event of All Turtles held in Tokyo in late July, Libin stated the reason for the establishment of All Turtles: I think the innovation model centered upon Silicon Valley is not enough. The ideas that can raise billions of dollars are only required there, and creators are needed to be CEO in addition to creating ideas and products. A person with writing ability is never required to found a publisher, or a person who loves music is never required to found a music label, and yet a creator is required to possess so many abilities beside making an excellent product and popularizing it in the world of startups. Most of startups’ failure can be due to work outside of making the product such as management or fundraising. The AI startups studio which supports and allows startups to concentrate on their products leading to success –…
Phil Libin, the Russian-born tech entrepreneur raised in the US, left Evernote which he nurtured into one of the most successful startups to commence his career in startup investment and entrepreneur support last year. He recently founded a AI startup studio called All Turtles this year.
At the debut event of All Turtles held in Tokyo in late July, Libin stated the reason for the establishment of All Turtles:
I think the innovation model centered upon Silicon Valley is not enough. The ideas that can raise billions of dollars are only required there, and creators are needed to be CEO in addition to creating ideas and products. A person with writing ability is never required to found a publisher, or a person who loves music is never required to found a music label, and yet a creator is required to possess so many abilities beside making an excellent product and popularizing it in the world of startups.
Most of startups’ failure can be due to work outside of making the product such as management or fundraising. The AI startups studio which supports and allows startups to concentrate on their products leading to success – is All Turtles.
Eight projects shown below have already joined All Turtles which got started in San Francisco.
Growbot……chatbot for improvement of employees’ incentive
Replika……personal AI friend, learns through text conversations
In addition to the eight projects above, two stealth projects have been ongoing in San Francisco. LEADE.RS is a pivot of the new startup conference organized by Loic Le Meur who had formerly managed Le Web.
Regarding the Tokyo base, All Turtles is going to open its office this fall, and start accepting applications for the first batch which will start with five teams from April 1st of 2018. Japan’s Digital Garage (TSE:4819) having much experience in incubation support through Open Network Lab will support its operation. All Turtles will also start operations at the Paris base in the same program timeline with the Tokyo base.
Phil Libin shows a mug repaired by the Kintsugi technique.
All Turtle has fundraised more than $20 million in total, and the investors include Xavier Niel who recently completed the world’s biggest startup campus Station-F, Boston-based VC firm General Catalyst which Phil Libin serves as a Senior Advisor, Hiroshi Mikitani who is CEO of Japan’s Rakuten (TSE:4755) and Digital Garage. Since the full announcement of its operation is planned at a later date, the number of investors or supporters is expected to increase further.
In this event, Libin mentioned the chance to create new value from failure referring to “Kintsugi”… the Japanese art of restoring broken pottery… and said there are so many concepts applicable to startup policy in Japanese culture.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
From left: Phil Libin and Kaoru Hayashi (CEO of Digital Garage)
The article was authored by Jun Hasegawa, CEO of Bangkok-based FinTech startup Omise, and was first appeared on his own Medium feed. It has been reproduced by The Bridge with the approval of him. See also: Omise acquires dtac’s payment services provider Paysbuy to accelerate growth in SEA (e27) Omise Supplements VC Funding Through Abstemious Token Offering (ETHNews) Japan, Thai startups unite to support younger selves; Inaugural meeting held with ministers Omise secures $17.5M to become Southeast Asia’s largest online payments gateway While ICOs have been around for a number of years, only until 2016–2017 did we start to the a whole hosts of ICOs and ICO funded projects entering the mainstream world. I for one have made the decision to step into the center of the ICO activities with hopes that through this unprecedented experience I would challenge myself to learn and grow, while also contributing back to strengthen the blockchain ecosystem in the long run. How did I get here? In 2013 I founded Omise as an e-commerce platform based out of Thailand. Though the efforts to grow out this business I experienced first hand how outdated payment processors, gateways and financial institutions impeded e-commerce growth across the…
Omise CEO Jun Hasegawa
The article was authored by Jun Hasegawa, CEO of Bangkok-based FinTech startup Omise, and was first appeared on his own Medium feed. It has been reproduced by The Bridge with the approval of him.
While ICOs have been around for a number of years, only until 2016–2017 did we start to the a whole hosts of ICOs and ICO funded projects entering the mainstream world. I for one have made the decision to step into the center of the ICO activities with hopes that through this unprecedented experience I would challenge myself to learn and grow, while also contributing back to strengthen the blockchain ecosystem in the long run.
How did I get here?
The Omise team introduced their beta service at Echelon Thailand in 2014.
In 2013 I founded Omise as an e-commerce platform based out of Thailand. Though the efforts to grow out this business I experienced first hand how outdated payment processors, gateways and financial institutions impeded e-commerce growth across the Asia-Pacific region. In realizing this, my co-founder and I pivoted Omise to became a fully-devoted fintech company focused on providing the most reliable and secure online payments services.
About a year after we launched Omise payment I stumbled across this technology called blockchain, and more specifically Ethereum-based blockchain. This was back in early 2015 when ETH 1 was valued less than US$ 1. I immediately became fascinated by this technology and the promise it brings to scaling Omise’s business.
Since my introduction to the blockchain technology, Omise has committed itself to supporting and strengthening ways to bring this promising technology into mainstream business.
Blockchain community
There are several aspects of what makes blockchain technology so attractive to me personally. The first is, of course, the technological potential. However, there is also another very important aspect that often is glazed over by mainstream world but I feel deserves a greater spotlight: the blockchain community and its ecosystem.
Having submerged myself in the open source technology world both through OmiseGO blockchain and Omise payment, I am truly convinced the unique value of open source technology is its surrounding community. With this, I believe it is Omise and OmiseGO’s responsibility as a member of the wider community to help contribute to and grow it.
From the very beginning of OmiseGO (initially called Omise Blockchain Lab) Donnie and I took the approach of viewing community contribution, sustainability and scalability as a core part when benchmarking our “return on investment”. For instance, Omise provided funding to support the Ethereum’s DEVgrants as well as to DEVCON 1 and 2. Every time we decided to provide funding to support a community initiative,
I’m certain our board members were thinking to themselves “Crazy Jun, here we go again”. However, I fully believe in the community approach and I do believe our contribution, though modest, have provided us with the opportunity to build stronger network of relations amongst the blockchain and Ethereum community.
I would like to reaffirm that Omise and OmiseGO are committed to continuing it’s support to the blockchain and Ethereum community as we move forward into the future.
One example is our long-term supportee “Raiden network” which has been based on Ethereum (Git link). Heiko Hees, CEO at Raiden network, is a distinguished person who has been taking an approach, from an early stage, to the problem of transaction speed (known as “TPS”) that Ethereum will sooner or later be confronted with.
Subsequently, we continued to build more and more relationship with other members including founders of Ethereum and other leading roles in this community-crypto society.
Have you ever attempted to take apart the field of finance? Today’s society employs cash, credit cards, points and other units which both express and alternate primary values in a real form. Thanks to a variety of units, it enables us to make an exchange from one unit to another. Because barter trade was often difficult to apply a measure properly to every single value, people were willing to make a common system that we all agree on.
Accordingly, community was born and currency as a common system was invented. (You can imagine a situation like “This chocolate is worth $1. Do you agree on a price?”) The idea of currency began to widely spread and the society admitted the use of currency as a measuring tool for measuring thousands of values.
Nevertheless, the political (“centralized”) orientation favoring some particular belief by each nation led to produce separate currencies which are in need of some form of administration. As it turned out, the society found a value-alternative method in a temporary sense but ended up with more complicated societies and stood too far from the establishment as a united world.
Furthermore, a form of cash advance into credit cards and other convenient figures. If you are ought to take apart credit cards, they project the amount of money he or she could afford for in advance and gather used-values into one place. In spite of this, due to the spread of the internet across the world, our societies were in search of more convenient methods.
After all, that is where cryptocurrencies came in. The cryptocurrencies were epoch-making architecture which remedies a problem caused by the centralized authority that human history has been facing for a long time. Thanks to its architecture, they make a progress of decentralized system in the true sense.
The other side of the coin is that, this unique system requires greater coordination amongst multilateral participants since participants could influence on the system itself. To put it shortly, participants in the community are really important. It has to be designed to ensure that decision-making is based on whether a majority of participants in the community agree on.
The standard practice is that we can hardly claim a majority of the population becomes the thief in our society, in the same way, wholesome and right decisions are almost surely made for the community.
Yet it is no longer the case with ICO; ICO could potentially demolish the ecosystem in the society & in the community. You might come up with the question “Why OmiseGO is associated with ICO then? We consider ICO as a revolutionary method to raise funds in the next generation and it has an unbelievable potential unless we mistake the method of investment.
Therefore, OmiseGO conducts ICO. In the meanwhile, we are aware of some points.
Ensure many participants can participate.
Raise funds only we need.
“Giving without expectation in return” mindset.
Always stay close to the community (pre & post ICO as well)
Transparency.
We came to the conclusion with these elements in accordance with the active discussions in Slack, Twitter, Reddit, and so on. On the basis of the above, we have been updating our ICO, including a shift form Public ICO to Private ICO.
It is quite possible to raise xx M USD in 30 seconds from a viewpoint of a demand in the current market if we release the address to the public. Still, we cannot leave the theory “rich grow richer” in this manner. Therefore, we decided to take an opposite direction, departing from a conventional wisdom in terms of the ICO. Of course, we neither treat our approach as consensus -gaining among all, nor wish that will happen. However, after all things considered with a decent amount of time we spent on the discussion on how to wholesomely sustain the ecosystem, we arrived at such conclusion.
A method of ICO will keep progressing and come into common. It is not surprising that a government will engage into ICO one day. Yet until then, testifying whether ICO is a better solution over the conventional methods in terms of the fund raising will ultimately affect our society in the future. Moreover, it is essential for a new society of the cryptocurrencies too.
We don’t mean to mention their names, but if you are the member of the society, you should keep in mind that disruption only occurs in a state with “already-developed”, not with “under developed.” We are meant to raise the standard in order to develop an ecosystem by coexisting and less conflicting each other. Harmonization is the key success factor. Personally, I am not very pleased with the ICO that seemingly intends to raise a mint of money in one year or money with no upper limit because it might corrupt the ecosystem.
(I do not deny the projects. All projects seem interesting and splendid.)
Ecosystem by OmiseGO
OmiseGO has set a goal: Online payment for everyone. Throughout our experience as a business operator in the past two and a half years allows us to explore pain points of customers and infrastructure providers. In order to solve their problems, we kept running full speed. And then we realized that in order to achieve our goal in a true sense, we are in charge of building our ideal ecosystem. Some may say our proposals are quite unrealistic and other giant corporations with sufficient financial resource will eventually take actions instead.
But what is the most important is how fast to put it into practice. It is certainly possible that only we cannot achieve that. But as stated above, if we work together in the society in full harmony, our idea is more likely to become reality.
Omise boosts to our full speed ahead in a true sense. Omise payment continues to provide business and individual customers an acceptance that can receive values. OmiseGO constructs a network as it will serve as a useful venue for exchanging values.
And above all, we are looking forward to making a more exciting announcement in Q3/2017.
The Bridge
Masaru Ikeda
