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Japan’s Showcase Gig secures series A funding, starts nationwide operations

Takeshi Hirano 2014.01.29

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based digital marketing startup Showcase Gig, the startup behind ‘O:der’ (apparently pronounced ‘order’), announced today that it has raised funds from Nissay Capital and Nippon Venture Capital. The exact details of the funding were not disclosed but we understand that the amount is in the millions (US dollars). According to the startup’s CEO Takefumi Nitta, this is series A funding to follow their angel round secured at the company’s began back in February of 2012. Since the launch of O:der back in July, the company has been providing a suite of CRM solutions for small-sized retailers, comprising of two iOS apps, one for consumers and the other for merchants. The consumer app has a mobile wallet feature that lets you pay by credit card before picking up a product at the shop. Nitta told us they have implemented their solutions at 25 stores to date, and they expected to expand to 50 stores by the end of February. They’ve taken their time to carefully select stores to implement their solution. About 70% of their initial users have used the tool more than twice, which convinced them that it was a solid CRM tool for…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based digital marketing startup Showcase Gig, the startup behind ‘O:der’ (apparently pronounced ‘order’), announced today that it has raised funds from Nissay Capital and Nippon Venture Capital. The exact details of the funding were not disclosed but we understand that the amount is in the millions (US dollars).

According to the startup’s CEO Takefumi Nitta, this is series A funding to follow their angel round secured at the company’s began back in February of 2012.

Since the launch of O:der back in July, the company has been providing a suite of CRM solutions for small-sized retailers, comprising of two iOS apps, one for consumers and the other for merchants. The consumer app has a mobile wallet feature that lets you pay by credit card before picking up a product at the shop. Nitta told us they have implemented their solutions at 25 stores to date, and they expected to expand to 50 stores by the end of February.

They’ve taken their time to carefully select stores to implement their solution. About 70% of their initial users have used the tool more than twice, which convinced them that it was a solid CRM tool for small businesses. With the funds raised this time around, the company plans to expand their operations beyond Tokyo prefecture. Nitta adds:

Rather than expanding our business, we are currently focusing on validating our product with stores that are more conscious about digital technologies for retail sales. In addition to small independent stores, we’d like to acquire larger store chains to use our solutions in the future.

Our readers may recall that he has been involved in notable offline businesses too, producing Tokyo Girls Collection, one of the country’s biggest fashion events, and mixiXmas, a campaign run by Mixi.

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Creator of popular homescreen app CocoPPa launches new profile exchanging app ‘iam’

Takeshi Hirano 2014.01.28

See the original article in Japanese Japan’s Fogg Inc is a subsidiary company of United Inc, the developer of popular home screen decoration app CocoPPa 1. And last week Fogg launched a profile card exchanging app named iam. With this app, you can manage all your profile information including telephone numbers and social media accounts, and exchange that profiles with other iam users. The app is available for free on iOS. Profile exchanging apps are something we have seen many times before, with Bump being one of the leading app’s in that area, acquired by Google in 2013. Here in Japan specifically, we have startups such as EverConnect and Sansan provide services for managing business cards. I am not going to go into details about the different features of iam. But I’d like to encourage you to download the app and experience it for yourself. For now, I’d like to focus on the two people behind the app. The CEO of Fogg, Yusuke Sekine, is responsible for starting the fast-growing app, CocoPPa. I spoke with Sekine and Hiroki Teshima, the executive officer at United. Teshima spoke of when the idea of CocoPPA came about, when he convinced the company to…

See the original article in Japanese

Japan’s Fogg Inc is a subsidiary company of United Inc, the developer of popular home screen decoration app CocoPPa 1. And last week Fogg launched a profile card exchanging app named iam. With this app, you can manage all your profile information including telephone numbers and social media accounts, and exchange that profiles with other iam users. The app is available for free on iOS.

Profile exchanging apps are something we have seen many times before, with Bump being one of the leading app’s in that area, acquired by Google in 2013. Here in Japan specifically, we have startups such as EverConnect and Sansan provide services for managing business cards.

I am not going to go into details about the different features of iam. But I’d like to encourage you to download the app and experience it for yourself. For now, I’d like to focus on the two people behind the app.

The CEO of Fogg, Yusuke Sekine, is responsible for starting the fast-growing app, CocoPPa. I spoke with Sekine and Hiroki Teshima, the executive officer at United. Teshima spoke of when the idea of CocoPPA came about, when he convinced the company to let him make a small team to create a service. At the time social gaming was at a peak back then, and developer salaries were rising fast.

Teshima: I collected new graduates. And while their potential skills are high, they don’t have much experience in developing apps. Then I was referred by Kobayashi-san (former CEO of Nobot) to Sekine-san.

Sekine joined Teshima’s team and released a music service app named Discodeer. It went on to achieve 1.8 million downloads, and subsequently got the attention of DeNA. That led Sekine to get involved with DeNA’s new service, Groovy.

Teshima: But our team still had the resources to start another service. We brainstormed ideas, but nothing really clicked. So one day, I invited Sekine-san to join our team meeting.

The meeting was only for an hour. And Teshima was not even there because of another appointment. But at that meeting, the idea of CocoPPa was born.

Sekine: Since most of our team members were women, we came up with some beauty or healthcare service. […] Then the topic happened to turn to Mixi, and how cute their icon was.

Home screens in iOS are not easy to customize. Sekine was researching about the URL scheme for app icons, and he realized that it wasn’t so hard to change app icons. Our female members’ had the idea of making a community to share these icons, and thus first outline of CocoPPa was born.

CocoPPa has gone on to surpass 18 million downloads around the world. And that’s how Teshima and Sekine came to be in charge of building smartphone businesses within United.

Now let’s circle back to iam. When there are already so many competitors in this field, how can iam be successful? Sekine says:

Sekine: Where we’d like to innovate is on the complexity social networking and reducing paper waste. With iam, users can manage multiple profiles, or even create a variety of profiles to choose from later when they want to send it to another user.

So depending on the person with whom you want to share your profile, you can choose which one to send.

At the beginning, we have narrowed down our target users. First was college students. College students tend to seek out a service that enables a high level of customization.

The app was initially tested by about 1000 college students, and was then released from stealth mode to be made public. I hear that creating temporary URLs are very useful way to make profile exchanging viral among friends.

I asked Sekine if an “intrapreneur” can be successful when the atmosphere of the team remains a bit loose. But Sekine says “I told the members that we have to make it this year. If we don’t, there will be no next year for us.”

The team is aiming for 1.3 million downloads by the end of May. That figure represents one sixth of all college students in Japan.

Fogg was founded in June 2013, as the first startup under United’s startup initiative ‘U-Start’. United holds 66% of its shares, and Yusuke Sekine, Fogg’s CEO, holds 34%. ↩

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Japanese language learning startup Lang-8 secures funding from CyberAgent Ventures

Takeshi Hirano 2014.01.20

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Lang-8, which runs a language learning platform based on peer corrections, announced today that it has raised funding from CyberAgent Ventures. The exact details of the funding were not disclosed. Lang-8 has acquired over 730,000 users from 219 countries and regions around the world, with about 70% coming from outside Japan. According to the company’s CEO Yangyang Xi, they plan to use these funds to develop a new service, and add three more engineers to their current three-person team. Xi initially launched the language learning platform when he was attending Kyoto University. Seven years have passed since then up until this funding. He notes that he has received much assistance from other entrepreneurs: Many people gave me advice for fundraising, including, Kensuke Furukawa (Nanapi), Ryusuke Matsumoto (Community Factory), Kiyo Kobayashi (serial entrepreneur, ex-CEO of Nobot), and Taku Harada (Peatix). But since I was running a service with a small team, I wanted to keep doing it ourselves without fundraising. But we started to explore funding opportunities back last July, and got a good response. When I met with Koichiro Yoshida (Crowdworks), he told me to meet with all available VC firms around…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup Lang-8, which runs a language learning platform based on peer corrections, announced today that it has raised funding from CyberAgent Ventures. The exact details of the funding were not disclosed.

Lang-8 has acquired over 730,000 users from 219 countries and regions around the world, with about 70% coming from outside Japan. According to the company’s CEO Yangyang Xi, they plan to use these funds to develop a new service, and add three more engineers to their current three-person team.

Xi initially launched the language learning platform when he was attending Kyoto University. Seven years have passed since then up until this funding. He notes that he has received much assistance from other entrepreneurs:

Many people gave me advice for fundraising, including, Kensuke Furukawa (Nanapi), Ryusuke Matsumoto (Community Factory), Kiyo Kobayashi (serial entrepreneur, ex-CEO of Nobot), and Taku Harada (Peatix). But since I was running a service with a small team, I wanted to keep doing it ourselves without fundraising. But we started to explore funding opportunities back last July, and got a good response. When I met with Koichiro Yoshida (Crowdworks), he told me to meet with all available VC firms around him and try to raise funds.

Takanori Yokoi (Increments) also gave me sound advice. I’ve been sticking to metrics and logic, but he told me I should speak with more courage and not sweat the small stuff.

Every time I talked with Xi, he tended to be a little nervous about doing something new, despite the fact that his service has great potential. If he kept going in this way, I think he wouldn’t be able to create a disruptive service. After this new fundraising, perhaps he will be more aggressive.

And while I can’t disclose too much at this time, he actually is preparing to launch a new service. We’ll take a further look at it when the time comes.

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Next-gen Japanese wheelchair startup, Whill, closes seed funding with a total of $1,750,000

Takeshi Hirano 2014.01.09

See the original article in Japanese Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Earlier this week the startup unveiled that it has raised funds from Vegas Tech Fund, 500Startups, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and individual angel investors back on November 6th. The total amount of funding raised in this round is $750,000, completing the company’s seed funding of $1.75 million in total. Vegas Tech Fund, also involved in this most recent funding, includes Zappos’ Tony Hsieh as a partner CEO. Coinciding with the announcement, Whill has renewed its company website and has began online pre-orders. According to the CEO Satoshi Sugie, the company has already sold out the 50 available machines by pre-order, and there are over 100 users waiting to buy. They first plan to market the products in the US and are aiming to for a Japan release in late 2014. Sugie said that he wants to use the funding raised this time not only for Whill’s development but also to add some human resources, such as persons who can perform maintenance on the machine. He thinks it is very important to attain a high level of customer satisfaction. The company is also looking…

See the original article in Japanese

Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Earlier this week the startup unveiled that it has raised funds from Vegas Tech Fund, 500Startups, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and individual angel investors back on November 6th.

The total amount of funding raised in this round is $750,000, completing the company’s seed funding of $1.75 million in total. Vegas Tech Fund, also involved in this most recent funding, includes Zappos’ Tony Hsieh as a partner CEO. Coinciding with the announcement, Whill has renewed its company website and has began online pre-orders.

According to the CEO Satoshi Sugie, the company has already sold out the 50 available machines by pre-order, and there are over 100 users waiting to buy. They first plan to market the products in the US and are aiming to for a Japan release in late 2014.

Sugie said that he wants to use the funding raised this time not only for Whill’s development but also to add some human resources, such as persons who can perform maintenance on the machine. He thinks it is very important to attain a high level of customer satisfaction.

The company is also looking for business development persons and field engineers. Anyone keen to get involved should consider getting in touch. Sugie is currently exhibiting at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas.

Seeing more and more Japanese startups trying to break into overseas markets is very encouraging for the other startups in Japan. We will also keep an eye on Whill to see how they progress.

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Japanese mobile flea market startup Mercari adds former Mixi CFO to board

Mercari

Takeshi Hirano 2014.01.05

See the original article in Japanese To win in a competitive market, building strong management is necessary for a company. An increasingly competitive market in Japan is the flea market app space. Mercari, one of the leading players in this field, announced this past month that Fumiaki Koizumi, the former CFO of Mixi, would join as a board member. Koiziumi previously worked for Daiwa Securities SMBC and took charge of the IPOs for Mixi and DeNA. After he left Mixi, he has been supporting startups, and his recent addition to the board of directors at Trippiece drew some attention as well. At Mercari, he is currently not in a specific managerial position. But he might assume a title later on. Coinciding with this announcement, Mercari also released some interesting figures. The company says that the total number of items listed on their app has surpassed 1 million since the app went live in July 2013. They say that 10,000 items are added to the app everyday. As this market gets more competitive, what kind of strategy does Mercari have? We spoke to Shintaro Yamada, the CEO of Mercari, and Fumiaki Koizumi about this. The Bridge: First of all, I’d like…

See the original article in Japanese

To win in a competitive market, building strong management is necessary for a company. An increasingly competitive market in Japan is the flea market app space.

Mercari, one of the leading players in this field, announced this past month that Fumiaki Koizumi, the former CFO of Mixi, would join as a board member. Koiziumi previously worked for Daiwa Securities SMBC and took charge of the IPOs for Mixi and DeNA. After he left Mixi, he has been supporting startups, and his recent addition to the board of directors at Trippiece drew some attention as well.

At Mercari, he is currently not in a specific managerial position. But he might assume a title later on. Coinciding with this announcement, Mercari also released some interesting figures. The company says that the total number of items listed on their app has surpassed 1 million since the app went live in July 2013. They say that 10,000 items are added to the app everyday.

As this market gets more competitive, what kind of strategy does Mercari have? We spoke to Shintaro Yamada, the CEO of Mercari, and Fumiaki Koizumi about this.

The Bridge: First of all, I’d like to know how Koizumi-san will get involved in the management of the company.

Yamada: As we expand the business, building strong management is key. The company’s advisor, Atsushi Ishikawa (former vice-president of Unoh Inc., CSO of Wonderplanet Inc.) was the first hire of CyberAgent and understands very well what kind of problems a startup goes through as it expands. He points out these possible problems in advance. I invited Koizumi-san as CFO, but I expect him to be active in the overall business, and in PR, aggressive PR. We had been focusing on development, and couldn’t spare much resources for PR so far.

The Bridge: Koizumi-san recently joined Trippiece as well, right?

Yamada: We encourage double work, and I invested in Smartnews myself. So, we don’t have any problem with that.

The Bridge: What do you think of the flea market app space?

Koizumi: Since resources in our society are limited, I was interested in C2C transactions as a solution. And now that this trend moving forward, I’d like to be a part of it.

The Bridge: What strategy do you have for PR and marketing? Will you put advertisements in magazines and such mass media?

Koizumi: We don’t have a plan to put large resources into advertisement.

The Bridge: Japan’s C2C market won’t grow without significant effort. We previously featured classifieds site Jmty.jp and looked at their challenges. What do you think is the key to succeeding in the C2C market?

Yamada: I was talking about this with my friends who have management experience. What makes Mercari different from others is that we really care about the product. For example, we carefully look at points where users drop out from the purchasing process, and try to improve it.

Koizumi: Our customer support is simple, but we think that a good user experience is very important.

Whenever I speak with Yamada, I’m always impressed with his passion to make a perfect product. Considering that the most of the members of Mercari have been engineers, bringing new perspective to make the product more sophisticated must be important. A user-friendly interface and a solid app is inevitable for consumer service.

The competition among flea market apps will be fierce in 2014. It reminds me of the past competition in the group buying market. Stay tuned to see who can win out in this space.

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Japanese mobile game developer Gumi to partner with Fuji TV

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.25

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based gaming company Gumi is expected to announced a comprehensive partnership with Fuji Media Holdings today, the stock holding company the Japanese TV network giant. The company plans to launch a joint venture worth 500 million yen (approximately $4.8 million) with Fuji Startup Ventures, the investment arm of the media conglomerate. CNet Japan reports the new venture will be called Fuji & Gumi Games. In addition, the gaming company will announce significant funding from the media company and B Dash Ventures. We are told by sources we trust that it will be worth tens of millions of dollars. Gumi previously established Alim, a joint venture gaming company with Fuji Startup Ventures and B Dash Ventures back in July. Their first gaming title Brave Frontier has done quite well this year. Fuji TV has been seeking new revenue streams beyond its primary business. And as a result, both companies have agreed to an extensive business partnership at this time. Gumi has already started marketing many of its mobile games globally, including titles produced by their subsidiaries in Singapore and Korea. The funds raised at this time will be use to fuel the company’s global expansion….

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based gaming company Gumi is expected to announced a comprehensive partnership with Fuji Media Holdings today, the stock holding company the Japanese TV network giant. The company plans to launch a joint venture worth 500 million yen (approximately $4.8 million) with Fuji Startup Ventures, the investment arm of the media conglomerate. CNet Japan reports the new venture will be called Fuji & Gumi Games.

In addition, the gaming company will announce significant funding from the media company and B Dash Ventures. We are told by sources we trust that it will be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Gumi previously established Alim, a joint venture gaming company with Fuji Startup Ventures and B Dash Ventures back in July. Their first gaming title Brave Frontier has done quite well this year. Fuji TV has been seeking new revenue streams beyond its primary business. And as a result, both companies have agreed to an extensive business partnership at this time.

Gumi has already started marketing many of its mobile games globally, including titles produced by their subsidiaries in Singapore and Korea. The funds raised at this time will be use to fuel the company’s global expansion. We have reached out to Gumi CEO Hironao Kunimitsu and Fuji Startup Ventures’ manager Yoshiro Taneda for more on this development. So please stay tuned.

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Riding a media curation trend, Japanese entrepreneur launches interior design photo service

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.23

See the original article in Japanese In North America, photo curation platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Fancy has achieved dramatic growth in the past few years. Here in Japan we have a similar list concept called ‘Matome’, which roughly translates as ‘collecting information’. Blogs that collect and edit threads from 2channel, Japan’s biggest message board, and Naver Matome, a popular curation platform, are attracting lots of traffic. Such curated media are moving into more verticals recently, focusing on specific themes. Increased use of smartphones seems to be driving this trend as well. Another curation-focused media service that just recently launched is Iemo. It’s an online lifestyle site that specializes in interior decoration and housing. Iemo’s CEO, Mari Murata, is a female serial entrepreneur, previously one of the first hires by Japanese internet giant CyberAgent. The service is very simple. The users can create pages using interior design images from its database of 15,000 pictures. Upon the service’s release, there were about 2000 pages are already listed on the site. I expect that there are many users who check the site with their smartphones during their spare time. Iemo was modeled after US-based Houzz, which attracts around 16 million users per…

See the original article in Japanese

In North America, photo curation platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Fancy has achieved dramatic growth in the past few years. Here in Japan we have a similar list concept called ‘Matome’, which roughly translates as ‘collecting information’. Blogs that collect and edit threads from 2channel, Japan’s biggest message board, and Naver Matome, a popular curation platform, are attracting lots of traffic. Such curated media are moving into more verticals recently, focusing on specific themes. Increased use of smartphones seems to be driving this trend as well.

Another curation-focused media service that just recently launched is Iemo. It’s an online lifestyle site that specializes in interior decoration and housing. Iemo’s CEO, Mari Murata, is a female serial entrepreneur, previously one of the first hires by Japanese internet giant CyberAgent.

The service is very simple. The users can create pages using interior design images from its database of 15,000 pictures. Upon the service’s release, there were about 2000 pages are already listed on the site. I expect that there are many users who check the site with their smartphones during their spare time.

Iemo was modeled after US-based Houzz, which attracts around 16 million users per month. Murata said that the images in their database are borrowed from over 20 housing businesses, but users can add their own images as well.

My initial impression of the site was that it was pretty sophisticated, likely due to the founder’s past experiences in startups. Another Japanese competitor in the field, RoomClip reached 100,000 posts last September.

Considering the user shift to smartphones, it might be a good time to launch this kind of photo curation service now. I think we will see more similar media focused on other themes in the near future.

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Lancers CEO Yosuke Akiyoshi on obstacles facing crowdsourcing in Japan

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.19

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 See the original article in Japanese We conducted many interviews about consumer-to-consumer (C2C) businesses at the recent Infinity Ventures Summit. Today we have a conversation from that event that we had with Yosuke Akiyoshi, the CEO of Lancers, a leading startup in Japan’s crowdsourcing space. The Bridge: Here I’ve been interviewing many people from the C2C businesses. One of the hot topics among those people lately is Crowdworks’ recent fund raising. Akiyoshi: Looking back on the five years since we launched our crowdsourcing business, the space has really changed a lot. We target people with basic knowledge of the internet, and among those people, words such as ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘Lancers’ became better known. It took four years for the total number of users (workers who receive orders) to reach 100,000. The number rapidly grew to 200,000 this October, and 220,000 last month. It could surpass 300,000 early next year. But some users still feel they don’t fully understand the system. So, we need to better educate them. In that sense, the 1.1 billion yen (raised by Crowdworks) means a lot in developing the industry. The Bridge: You announced…

This is part of our coverage of Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

See the original article in Japanese

We conducted many interviews about consumer-to-consumer (C2C) businesses at the recent Infinity Ventures Summit. Today we have a conversation from that event that we had with Yosuke Akiyoshi, the CEO of Lancers, a leading startup in Japan’s crowdsourcing space.

The Bridge: Here I’ve been interviewing many people from the C2C businesses. One of the hot topics among those people lately is Crowdworks’ recent fund raising.

Akiyoshi: Looking back on the five years since we launched our crowdsourcing business, the space has really changed a lot. We target people with basic knowledge of the internet, and among those people, words such as ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘Lancers’ became better known. It took four years for the total number of users (workers who receive orders) to reach 100,000. The number rapidly grew to 200,000 this October, and 220,000 last month. It could surpass 300,000 early next year. But some users still feel they don’t fully understand the system. So, we need to better educate them. In that sense, the 1.1 billion yen (raised by Crowdworks) means a lot in developing the industry.

The Bridge: You announced today that Lancers will have partnership with GMO Epsilon Inc.

Akiyoshi: GMO Epsilon offers payment services, and lots of work opportunities will arise due to the implementation of the service. Many of such work orders will be placed on Lancers.

The Bridge: The fast-growing aspects of crowdsourcing tend to get a lot of attention. But many services struggle to build a solid culture for C2C and B2C businesses. What kind of issues do you face?

Akiyoshi: Users are increasing, and I don’t see any problem with that. The problem lies on the side of the companies. Currently, there are a core group of companies who are accustomed to the system. But the goal is for any company to use the system. And there are issues that need to be overcome.

The Bridge: I see.

Akiyoshi: First, direction. When a company places an order, it needs to divide the work. But many companies get stuck at this point.

The Bridge: For example, for a web-design work order, work needs to be divided into coding, writing, and programming, with an order made for each. We plan to solve this issue by holding seminars for companies and dividing up the process control of the system. Also, product managers who can understand and handle the process are needed. We aim to implement more training to increase the amount of such product mangers. We need to enlighten companies.

The Bridge: When you enlighten companies, so to speak, which advantages of Lancers do you emphasize?

Akiyoshi: We tell them the overall advantages in speed, cost and resources.

The Bridge: What about users who receive orders? How do you educate them? I heard you often visit local areas.

Akiyoshi: I have already visited about 15 regions. I realized it is important to have face-to-face communication and to solve such issues. … There are few jobs in local regions. Businesses in Tokyo take jobs from the local. There are few useful communities where you can find opportunities, unlike Tokyo.

The Bridge: How long do you think it will take for crowdsourcing to be accepted as a new kind of work style?

Akiyoshi: It depends on how we measure the success, although we have set a metric. Right now, there are about 200 workers who can make a living just from their Lancers work. We’d like to increase that figure to 10,000 by 2017. But it will take much longer to completely change people’s way of working.

The Bridge: It will certainly take a while. So what number or metric do you currently care about the most?

Akiyoshi: Focusing on improving the users’ experiences, we pay attention to the repeat customer rate. Of course we look at the number of the work orders and the member total at the same time.

The Bridge: Thank you for your time.

I got the impression that more workers understand the concept of crowdsourcing these days. But there are still lots of obstacles that get in the way of companies using crowdsourcing. It’s not only about speed and cost, but quality needs to be considered. And it requires more understanding from companies about how to use the system and handle the process control. That knowledge is not open enough, and it becomes an obstacle.

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Japan’s online laundry service, Lenet, is growing fast

SCORE 1,115

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.18

See the original article in Japanese WhitePlus is a Japanese startup that offers an online laundry service called Lenet. It lets users request a pick up of their laundry, which will then be cleaned and delivered to their home. Recently, on December 2nd, membership for this laundry service surpassed 40,000 people. That total is three times bigger than a year ago. The latest upgrade of the service took place on September 30th, with the price reduced, and the minimum delivery time being cut to 2 days. The company raised funds in August of 2013, and since then they have been growing their business. For such a paid service, one of the indicators we should look is the rate of repeat customers, a sign user satisfaction. Ryosuke Saito, the company’s CEO and CMO, told us a little about that. The Bridge: It seems sales has been growing well for you. Do you have any indicators that show how much? Saito: We cannot disclose detailed figures, but as an example, the CVR of new users is increasing since our renewal at the end of September. To increase our repeat user rate, we changed the price as well. Since we implemented our membership…

See the original article in Japanese

WhitePlus is a Japanese startup that offers an online laundry service called Lenet. It lets users request a pick up of their laundry, which will then be cleaned and delivered to their home. Recently, on December 2nd, membership for this laundry service surpassed 40,000 people. That total is three times bigger than a year ago.

The latest upgrade of the service took place on September 30th, with the price reduced, and the minimum delivery time being cut to 2 days.

The company raised funds in August of 2013, and since then they have been growing their business. For such a paid service, one of the indicators we should look is the rate of repeat customers, a sign user satisfaction.

Ryosuke Saito, the company’s CEO and CMO, told us a little about that.

The Bridge: It seems sales has been growing well for you. Do you have any indicators that show how much?

Saito: We cannot disclose detailed figures, but as an example, the CVR of new users is increasing since our renewal at the end of September. To increase our repeat user rate, we changed the price as well. Since we implemented our membership fee (premium membership costs 315 yen, or about$3 per month), we have reduced the discount rate for members from 20% to 35%, with intention of making the price lower than regular offline laundry services. Also, by making a delivery time of two days, we hoped to increase user satisfaction.

Lenet doesn’t own a cleaning facilities. It uses those of partners. And by reviewing the process from inspection to packaging, the overall process is made even more efficient. As a result, they could shorten the delivery time. But to do all this, they have also hired industry professionals who have much experience.

The Bridge: The business model is to use available resources without having to own your own cleaning facilities. But can you easily scale this business without owning such facilities?

Saito: Our next challenge it to increase our capacity. And yes, that means we need to find facilities. Now we are planning to establish a facility with a business partner. From there we can expand out from that, sort of as the center of other facilities to come later.

For the business model of this type of business, one advantage was that it didn’t require too many resources. That’s why Linet utilized partners, tying up with five different facilities.

However, as he told me in a previous interview, the industry is quite closed. I heard some stories about how the business can be quite hard on young new-comers. And perhaps that’s why they need to establish their own facilities.

Partner factories have the advantage of receiving more orders through the tie-up. According to Saito, he wanted to make his factory into a center where they can check and ensure operations are streamlined.

This attempt by Linet to bring a traditionally offline service online is definitely worth watching. So stay tuned to see how they do!

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Handie: An affordable, functional prosthetic hand, made in Japan with 3D printing

Takeshi Hirano 2013.12.17

See the original article in Japanese Before we go any further, please check out the movie above. What you’re looking at is one of the many prototype devices developed for the recent Gugen hardware contest held in Tokyo on December 7th. Its developers are a team of three (a software engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a designer) who came together for this contest and developed this device. Users can create a functioning prosthetic arm by connecting the device with a smartphone, sensors, and a 3D printer. Affectionately named ‘Handie’, the prosthetic arm won contest. Gugen is an event focused on identifying business-oriented hardware prototypes, and provides reward to top talent. A member of its executive committee, Yasunori Okajima, says the number of entries reached almost 200 this year. Before participants were mostly those who enjoy creating electronics as a hobby. But this time, however, I see many more participants creating things that are business-oriented. ‘Makers’ is more than just a buzzword Chris Anderson is a genius at creating buzzwords. He finds the structure of latest trends, and expresses that trend with one powerful word to facilitate an entire movement. When he published the books The Long tail and Free, even…

See the original article in Japanese

Before we go any further, please check out the movie above. What you’re looking at is one of the many prototype devices developed for the recent Gugen hardware contest held in Tokyo on December 7th. Its developers are a team of three (a software engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a designer) who came together for this contest and developed this device. Users can create a functioning prosthetic arm by connecting the device with a smartphone, sensors, and a 3D printer. Affectionately named ‘Handie’, the prosthetic arm won contest.

Gugen is an event focused on identifying business-oriented hardware prototypes, and provides reward to top talent. A member of its executive committee, Yasunori Okajima, says the number of entries reached almost 200 this year.

Before participants were mostly those who enjoy creating electronics as a hobby. But this time, however, I see many more participants creating things that are business-oriented.

‘Makers’ is more than just a buzzword

Chris Anderson is a genius at creating buzzwords. He finds the structure of latest trends, and expresses that trend with one powerful word to facilitate an entire movement. When he published the books The Long tail and Free, even though the concepts were not brand new, many businesses then followed those trends. His most recent work, Makers, is no exception. Here in Tokyo, 3D printers appeared in many places all of a sudden, and media too have begun paying attention to this trend. A Makers boom suddenly started, but it soon cooled off.

What we need is not just a temporary trend or buzzword, but more initiatives like Gugen that try to tap into the inherent potential of the concept.

Three components for hardware creation

There are three components typically associated with developing hardware or electronics:

Create molding: exterior design.
Create software: the fusion of online and built-in software
Create electronics: open-source hardware such as Arduino

Because we can easily see and touch exteriors, 3D printers quickly became a sort of symbol for Makers. And this process of creating something from scratch is definitely exciting.

Handie’s exterior can be created at a reasonable price thanks to 3D printers. With data and printers, Handie can be created anywhere. However, there are two other important factors involved in building Handie:

All the software is smartphone apps, which cuts down the cost.
Motors and sensors are not customized parts. By putting general parts together, the team could create this device much faster.

Of course, Handie is not the kind of device anyone can develop. The most amazing part is its mechanical design. While multiple motors are typically needed to move fingers, the team managed to do it with only one motor.

And while not everyone can develop this level of device, as long as the developer has the core idea and the experience, they can create advanced devices like Handie.

Potential for business

Why is this new way of creating hardware and electronics getting so much attention right now? One of the reasons is that it represent significant potential for business expansion. When it comes to creating something entirely, the important thing to keep in mind is this notion of expansion.

Handie could never have been built without smartphone software. Yet with only smartphone apps Handie cannot be built. This is what I mean when I talk about expansion. As a result of such ideas, the shift from two dimensions to three dimensions has now accelerated.

For those who are interested in what kind of hardware can be developed by individuals, we’d like to list some of the other entries in the Gugen contest 1.

Squama

Squama is a screen that lets users can control transparency. At the contest, the developer mentioned that the panel can make an office more open while it also protecting privacy. In addition, it has an energy-saving effect in heated rooms.

Universal Earphones

This earphone automatically recognizes if it was put into your left of right ear, and then proceeds to play the right sounds.

Handie

As mentioned above, it aims to provide reasonably priced prosthetic arms using just a 3D printer and smartphone apps. It’s only for the people who lost a hand or the finger, it could be used as “a third arm” for everyone in the future.

Telemba

Telemba is a video-chat Robot created by connecting android devices and other electronic parts with a Roomba (robotic vacuum cleaner). It was quite amazing to watch the team members participated in the awards ceremony through Telemba.

PocoPoco

PocoPoco is an intuitive and sophisticated music interface. Each part was carefully chosen to realize elegant movement of the interface. PocoPoco played a short performance at the event, drawing a significant the audience.

You can see the whole list of entries on their website. ↩

Takeshi Hirano

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