Line released its mobile game Sonic Dash S, developed by Sega, back in late January. The title was made available in a number of Asian countries, but it hadn’t performed very well until a recent 1.1 update gave it a boost in most of its app markets. Still, this is perhaps the most famous IP that Line has featured in a game to date, and I’d expected it to perform far better. I hadn’t given the game a serious look until recently, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts here. Sonic Dash is, as has been pointed out before, more or less a Temple Run clone, requiring you to swipe up/down/left/right to avoid enemies and treacherous obstacles. You can gather and use items you collect, as well as use supporting characters (or Chaos [1]). With the exception of a number of surprising app crashes, I found the gameplay pretty straightforward, with much of the Line integration that we have from the company’s other mobile games. You can get rewards by sharing information to your friends on Line, and even borrow Chao characters from them if you wish. The problem for me is that only one of my 162 Line…
Line released its mobile game Sonic Dash S, developed by Sega, back in late January. The title was made available in a number of Asian countries, but it hadn’t performed very well until a recent 1.1 update gave it a boost in most of its app markets. Still, this is perhaps the most famous IP that Line has featured in a game to date, and I’d expected it to perform far better.
I hadn’t given the game a serious look until recently, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts here. Sonic Dash is, as has been pointed out before, more or less a Temple Run clone, requiring you to swipe up/down/left/right to avoid enemies and treacherous obstacles. You can gather and use items you collect, as well as use supporting characters (or Chaos [1]).
With the exception of a number of surprising app crashes, I found the gameplay pretty straightforward, with much of the Line integration that we have from the company’s other mobile games. You can get rewards by sharing information to your friends on Line, and even borrow Chao characters from them if you wish. The problem for me is that only one of my 162 Line friends is actually playing Sonic Dash – not a good number in comparison to other Line games I’ve played.
With the new 1.1 update a number of changes have been made to the game, with stages shortened and a new character, Blaze (pictured below), added to the list of playable characters [2]. A new beach course has been added to the game as well.
If you’d like to give Line Sonic Dash S a try, you can get it as a free download for iOS or Android. Let us know in the comments if you find it a tad crashy as well!
By ‘Chaos’ I don’t mean the word ‘chaos’ but rather plural of the word ‘Chao’. ↩
You need to spend rings to upgrade to Blaze of course, so it will take a little while before you can unlock her. ↩
The Tokyo incarnation of Startup Weekend has been ongoing for quite some time now [1]. And while the most recent Startup Weekends are held mostly in Japanese to encourage more local involvement, we’re glad to see that this weekend (Friday, April 25th to Sunday, April 27th) will mark the first international-themed event, appropriately dubbed Startup Weekend Tokyo International. We spoke briefly with one of the organizers who explained that even though the regular Startup Weekend Tokyo events have become rather homogenous, there are still many Japanese people interested in international business who would like to meet a more diverse range of people. Similarly, having an international themed event encourages people from other countries who might be here in Tokyo to come out and participate. While the event will be conducted in English, and for anyone here in Tokyo it could be a good opportunity to pitch in English and meet some fun people as well. If you’d like to sign up for this one, you can do so over on Doorkeeper. One of our earliest postings about the event dates all the way back to 2010. ↩
The Tokyo incarnation of Startup Weekend has been ongoing for quite some time now [1]. And while the most recent Startup Weekends are held mostly in Japanese to encourage more local involvement, we’re glad to see that this weekend (Friday, April 25th to Sunday, April 27th) will mark the first international-themed event, appropriately dubbed Startup Weekend Tokyo International.
We spoke briefly with one of the organizers who explained that even though the regular Startup Weekend Tokyo events have become rather homogenous, there are still many Japanese people interested in international business who would like to meet a more diverse range of people. Similarly, having an international themed event encourages people from other countries who might be here in Tokyo to come out and participate.
While the event will be conducted in English, and for anyone here in Tokyo it could be a good opportunity to pitch in English and meet some fun people as well.
If you’d like to sign up for this one, you can do so over on Doorkeeper.
One of our earliest postings about the event dates all the way back to 2010. ↩
Beatrobo Inc. has announced today that it has raised $1.1 million from Lawson HMV Entertainment and Genuine Startups, in order to further develop and expand its PlugAir business [1]. Our regular readers are likely aware that Beatrobo, in addition to operating a really fun streaming music service, has developed its PlugAir technology that can be used to share and distribute digital content. It doesn’t have to be music, but it could also be used to share videos or ebooks, for example. This partnership with Lawson, who is very active in the entertainment and ticketing business, is an intriguing twist in Beatrobo’s progression. The startup’s CEO and founder Hiroshi Asaeda explained to us how that tie-up came about: They have connections to the entertainment business, and a channel for distribution, HMV Japan and their ten thousand stores. One of our focuses was to find a distribution channel because our product is physical. Our initial idea was to distribute it at concerts like merchandise, and when we were talking to [Lawson HMV Entertainment], they eventually said they’d invest in us. Asaeda elaborates that Beatrobo will, in fact, license their patent to Lawson so that they can manufacture the device. Obviously if the…
Beatrobo Inc. has announced today that it has raised $1.1 million from Lawson HMV Entertainment and Genuine Startups, in order to further develop and expand its PlugAir business [1]. Our regular readers are likely aware that Beatrobo, in addition to operating a really fun streaming music service, has developed its PlugAir technology that can be used to share and distribute digital content. It doesn’t have to be music, but it could also be used to share videos or ebooks, for example.
This partnership with Lawson, who is very active in the entertainment and ticketing business, is an intriguing twist in Beatrobo’s progression. The startup’s CEO and founder Hiroshi Asaeda explained to us how that tie-up came about:
They have connections to the entertainment business, and a channel for distribution, HMV Japan and their ten thousand stores. One of our focuses was to find a distribution channel because our product is physical. Our initial idea was to distribute it at concerts like merchandise, and when we were talking to [Lawson HMV Entertainment], they eventually said they’d invest in us.
Asaeda elaborates that Beatrobo will, in fact, license their patent to Lawson so that they can manufacture the device. Obviously if the startup were to manufacture PlugAir devices on their own, they’d burn through their funding very, very quickly. So this arrangement brings assistance on the manufacturing side, and also assures reasonably widespread use of the app, which is required by anyone who uses a PlugAir device in order to pull content from the cloud.
A physical, digital key
As you can see in the video below, using PlugAir is almost the same sort of experience as using a USB key. But the technology doesn’t actually store content on the device. As I understand it, it instead receives soundwaves from your phone which are then turned into electric power, launching the device’s microcontroller to get its serial number [2]. They then send that data back to the phone using its microphone input, which unlocks access to cloud content.
I asked Asaeda about the challenge of making people understand that a smartphone’s headphone jack can be used in this way. He affirmed that this indeed an critical challenge:
That’s our goal for this whole year. Techy people will think if it is a gadget that goes in the earphone jack, then it’s a credit card reader. We need to change the whole idea of the earphone jack, and make people understand that you can get content from there. That’s why we started with entertainment. But some people have even asked about medical use, and storing patient or prescription information. It’s a key.
If you think about what Beatrobo has done here, they’ve quite elegantly made it possible for physical limitations to be applied to digital content. I emphasize the word possible here, because whether or not those limitations are actually applied is a decision that the content provider will make themselves. PlugAir could enable limitless copying to your friends’ smartphones, or it could be limited to, for example, giving your friends 90 second samples that expire in 24 hours. Sharing could even be incentivized, with musicians giving you a bonus track if you share samples with three friends.
Asaeda explained what they learned from working with Linkin Park using PlugAir over the past year:
What I noticed from Linkin Park that they didn’t really want the email addresses of fans, but a rather contact point where fans can buy or experience their content.
So if you think of PlugAir as a fan community device, (paying) members of a fan club could receive updated content over and over again in the future. I understand that push notifications will be on the way soon, which will enable fans to stay up to date with the latest content.
There’s a ton of potential in this idea, and Asaeda says flat out that his ultimate goal is to replace the CD:
We want to change music, we love it. Somebody needs to change the industry. Nobody is trying, so I’m going to do it.
The Linkin Park PlugAir
Beatrobo will soon move to a new office. Asaeda nice enough to meet with me as he was packing up his old office.
Lawson HMV Entertainment is one of the three main businesses of Lawson’s larger holding company, which of course, includes its convenience store business. Genuine Startup is a fund spun off from Movida Japan. ↩
There’s also a security chip onboard to prevent copying the device. ↩
This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this: Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile. While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1]. But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the…
Scared?
This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this:
Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile.
While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1].
But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the side of caution by showing the original webpage content in their app, as is, without any effort to ensure that it’s readable on mobile [2]. They have purposefully chosen to not disrupt or challenge current content models.
Let’s look at a few examples from some of Japan’s leading news apps. Here’s Gunosy:
Gunosy does what most Japanese news apps do. They serve up the original web page when the title is clicked, whether its very readable or not. Other Japanese apps that do this are Presso, Romly, Vingow, Mynd, and Kamelio[3]. These news apps are primarily aggregators or curation tools. I wouldn’t go so far as to call any of them ‘news readers’, because technically, you’re just being directed to a traditional reading experience on the source site.
SmartNews’s approach is an interesting one, maybe the only one that is even a little daring. They are one of the few companies to present a readability mode, boasting offline caching as a feature for Japanese users who might be beyond internet signal on the subway. When you tap to read an article on SmartNews, you are flashed an option to read in ‘SmartMode’. This is SmartNews’s more readable view, but it’s presented as something the user must choose to view deliberately. What’s more, when you press back, the app sneakily presents the original source page (see this below). This is a clever way of giving both the publisher and the user what they want, and I’m sure it took them a while to figure out this compromise.
Line News is also mildly daring, showing longer excerpts relating to one story, collected from various sources. Tapping on any of those sources brings you to the original source, however (see lower left), including ads and undesirable cruft (lower right).
Overall I think it is pretty clear that the relationship that exists between content publishers and news apps that tiptoe around their requirements/expectations is not good for innovation in the content space. Publishers cling to old monetization models instead of searching for new ones, and Japanese readers are denied the kind of beautified reading experience that the rest of the world enjoys [4].
Mobile-friendly news sites are far more common in Japan than in other countries, so if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that. the original page view on mobile is typically not so bad. ↩
Kamelio does some interesting things with timelines which I think are admirable, but they still opt to show the original source in this way. ↩
Unless they use something like Pocket, of course, which many do. ↩
Thanks astute Redditor fodawim for pointing out a folder full of translated command strings in Japanese in the GlassVoice apk file (see image below). There’s no word one when Google Glass might come to Japan of course, but this is an indication that Japan will be among the first countries. Considering Google’s recent Maps/Pokemon experiment, this bodes well for my dream of a real-life Pokemon game! On the other hand, we can expect some controversy to surround Glass whenever it does get here, in much the same way that smartphone cameras have been adjusted to combat pervy pictures on trains. Reddit, via Appllio
On the other hand, we can expect some controversy to surround Glass whenever it does get here, in much the same way that smartphone cameras have been adjusted to combat pervy pictures on trains.
Line has just opened up its Creators Market (at creator.line.me), allowing users to register and submit stickers for review as of today. If Line approves your submission, then they will go on sale in May. According to the company’s announcement, users in Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand will be able to purchase at that time, with plans for more regions to come in the future. A set of 40 stickers will sell for 100 yen (or about a dollar), of which 50% goes to the creator. Line is already making a fortune from stickers, as we have pointed out before, and this new initiative will boost that revenue stream even more, and spur more user engagement, Line
Line has just opened up its Creators Market (at creator.line.me), allowing users to register and submit stickers for review as of today. If Line approves your submission, then they will go on sale in May. According to the company’s announcement, users in Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand will be able to purchase at that time, with plans for more regions to come in the future.
A set of 40 stickers will sell for 100 yen (or about a dollar), of which 50% goes to the creator. Line is already making a fortune from stickers, as we have pointed out before, and this new initiative will boost that revenue stream even more, and spur more user engagement,
Singapore-based Viddsee, the operator of an online platform that showcases short films from Asia, announced this week that it has surpassed five million unique viewers since launching in February 2013. The company has also rolled out an editorial feature called Viddsee Buzz, which is a sort of blog/news channel that highlights selected films with greater context. Viddsee aims to bring Asian short films to global audiences, and it will be interesting to see how it can grow from here. I don’t think this genre benefits from a wide fan base as a startup like Tokyo Otaku Mode (which showcases just anime, manga, and cosplay), but no doubt there are many people who wish to explore Asian films in depth, and so its good to have a centralized repository like this on the web. The service has a strong following over on its Facebook fan page so far, with over 42,000 fans. That growth, we understand, has been entirely organic. Viddsee features a selection of video channels, many of which have a regional focus, including Node Japan, which highlights movies from Keio Media Design’s indie film portal, Node.
Singapore-based Viddsee, the operator of an online platform that showcases short films from Asia, announced this week that it has surpassed five million unique viewers since launching in February 2013. The company has also rolled out an editorial feature called Viddsee Buzz, which is a sort of blog/news channel that highlights selected films with greater context.
Viddsee aims to bring Asian short films to global audiences, and it will be interesting to see how it can grow from here. I don’t think this genre benefits from a wide fan base as a startup like Tokyo Otaku Mode (which showcases just anime, manga, and cosplay), but no doubt there are many people who wish to explore Asian films in depth, and so its good to have a centralized repository like this on the web.
The service has a strong following over on its Facebook fan page so far, with over 42,000 fans. That growth, we understand, has been entirely organic.
Viddsee features a selection of video channels, many of which have a regional focus, including Node Japan, which highlights movies from Keio Media Design’s indie film portal, Node.
Japanese gaming powerhouse GungHo Online Entertainment, the maker of the hit mobile game Puzzle & Dragons, announced this week that Princess Punt Sweets – its second most popular smartphone game – has has surpassed eight million downloads in Japan. The only other region where this title is available is in Korea, having launched back in July of 2013 (iOS and Android). I’m surprised that GungHo has not expanded this game to English regions [1], because I think it really has the kind of cute appeal that has helped so many other Japanese apps succeed in overseas markets in the past year or two. It might be an easier sell to overseas markets than Puzzle & Dragons, I think. If you’d like to try out the Japanese version, you can get it as a free download for iOS and Android. GungHo, CNet Japan Note, I’m not counting the game’s prequel, which GungHo has published in English. ↩
Japanese gaming powerhouse GungHo Online Entertainment, the maker of the hit mobile game Puzzle & Dragons, announced this week that Princess Punt Sweets – its second most popular smartphone game – has has surpassed eight million downloads in Japan.
The only other region where this title is available is in Korea, having launched back in July of 2013 (iOS and Android). I’m surprised that GungHo has not expanded this game to English regions [1], because I think it really has the kind of cute appeal that has helped so many other Japanese apps succeed in overseas markets in the past year or two.
It might be an easier sell to overseas markets than Puzzle & Dragons, I think.
If you’d like to try out the Japanese version, you can get it as a free download for iOS and Android.
This week we witnessed yet another entrant into Japan’s mobile news app space. It’s called Mynd, and it comes from Tokyo-based TomyK, led by Tomihisa Kamada. The app has a very beautiful UI with a number of slick translucent elements (pictured below). It also supports a wide range of external services, including Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Pocket, and Hatena. Users can opt to read news at any time, or have a summary delivered to them every morning (like Gunosy does, for example). The single article view defaults to the source’s own web view rather than stripped down text view [1], which is a mistake in my view – but this appears to be common practice among news apps in Japan. It’s interesting to see more and more new apps emerging in this space to challenge the likes of Gunosy and SmartNews. I hope to bring you a closer look at this sector in the near future, so stay tuned for that. For now, if you’d like to give Mynd a try, it’s available as a free download for iOS and Android. Think Instapaper, Readability, or even SmartNews’s ‘Smartmode’. ↩
This week we witnessed yet another entrant into Japan’s mobile news app space. It’s called Mynd, and it comes from Tokyo-based TomyK, led by Tomihisa Kamada.
The app has a very beautiful UI with a number of slick translucent elements (pictured below). It also supports a wide range of external services, including Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Pocket, and Hatena. Users can opt to read news at any time, or have a summary delivered to them every morning (like Gunosy does, for example). The single article view defaults to the source’s own web view rather than stripped down text view [1], which is a mistake in my view – but this appears to be common practice among news apps in Japan.
It’s interesting to see more and more new apps emerging in this space to challenge the likes of Gunosy and SmartNews. I hope to bring you a closer look at this sector in the near future, so stay tuned for that.
For now, if you’d like to give Mynd a try, it’s available as a free download for iOS and Android.
Think Instapaper, Readability, or even SmartNews’s ‘Smartmode’. ↩
If you’re starting to tire of seeing Line’s characters all over the place here in Japan, I have some bad news for you. Line is teaming up with fashion retailer Uniqlo to offer Line Character branded t-shirts as part of the new Uniqlo t-shirt (UT) line-up [1]. In my view, Uniqlo lends some much-needed credibility to Line’s characters, putting them alongside far more established brands like Hello Kitty and Disney. The shirts are on sale now for the very affordable price of 943 yen (or just over $9). Check out Uniqlo’s promo video for the new 2014 line-up below, including the new Line t-shirts about halfway through. (It’s an unlisted video, so if this embed suddenly stops working, you know why!) Via news.ameba.jp As far as I can tell, this is just for Uniqlo stores in Japan. I can’t find the Line t-shirts on the Uniqlo USA website. ↩
If you’re starting to tire of seeing Line’s characters all over the place here in Japan, I have some bad news for you. Line is teaming up with fashion retailer Uniqlo to offer Line Character branded t-shirts as part of the new Uniqlo t-shirt (UT) line-up [1].
In my view, Uniqlo lends some much-needed credibility to Line’s characters, putting them alongside far more established brands like Hello Kitty and Disney. The shirts are on sale now for the very affordable price of 943 yen (or just over $9).
Check out Uniqlo’s promo video for the new 2014 line-up below, including the new Line t-shirts about halfway through. (It’s an unlisted video, so if this embed suddenly stops working, you know why!)
