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Former Livedoor CEO launches restaurant recommendation app

Masaru Ikeda 2013.11.07

See the original story in Japanese. The Japanese economy appears to be getting better recently. In the startup scene in particular, we’ve seen more than a few acquisitions and fundings. This improved economic situation may have precipitated an interesting new mobile app too. Japanese entrepreneur Takafumi Horie (a.k.a. Horiemon) recently unveiled Teriyaki, an app that provides users with recommendations of the best restaurants in Japan. The app is available for free on both iOS and Android, but users have to pay a monthly subscription of 400 yen (about $4) via an in-app purchase. The app provides recommendations of restaurants and dishes based on curation by celebrity foodies called “Teriyakists”. They include high-profile restaurant guide editors, food-focused TV producers, and even Horiemon himself. At the recent launch party at a restaurant in Shibuya, Horie explained how his team plans to evolve our dining experiences: Even while I was in jail, I was thinking to develop this kind of app. There is still little information available in the app at the moment, but its volume will eventually be ten times larger than now. We’ll be launching an English and Chinese version in the upcoming few months using crowdsourced translation services, and also…

horiemon_sonoyamamakie — From the left: Takafumi Horie and Makie Sonoyama (cooking specialist)

See the original story in Japanese.

The Japanese economy appears to be getting better recently. In the startup scene in particular, we’ve seen more than a few acquisitions and fundings. This improved economic situation may have precipitated an interesting new mobile app too. Japanese entrepreneur Takafumi Horie (a.k.a. Horiemon) recently unveiled Teriyaki, an app that provides users with recommendations of the best restaurants in Japan.

The app is available for free on both iOS and Android, but users have to pay a monthly subscription of 400 yen (about $4) via an in-app purchase.

The app provides recommendations of restaurants and dishes based on curation by celebrity foodies called “Teriyakists”. They include high-profile restaurant guide editors, food-focused TV producers, and even Horiemon himself.

At the recent launch party at a restaurant in Shibuya, Horie explained how his team plans to evolve our dining experiences:

Even while I was in jail, I was thinking to develop this kind of app. There is still little information available in the app at the moment, but its volume will eventually be ten times larger than now. We’ll be launching an English and Chinese version in the upcoming few months using crowdsourced translation services, and also a version featuring restaurants in east coast US cities. With hopes of global expansion potential, we decided to name the app ‘Teriyaki’ — something familiar to non-Japanese people too.

By the end of this month, the app will cover 700 restaurants profiles across the country. Through a partnership with Pocket Concierge, it will give you opportunities to dine at restaurants introduced on the app, where it is likely difficult to book a reservation.

By next spring, the app is expected to add e-commerce functions, with the ability to order local specialties from any part of the country online, in an effort to monetize the app.

curators — Teriyakists – foodies curating restaurants for the app

news

Tokyo Office Tour: SpinningWorks wants to bring bookworms back to offline bookstores

Masaru Ikeda 2013.11.06

SpinningWorks is a Tokyo-based startup that has been involved in providing a variety of web services since 2010. Among its past services is Qlippy, an SDK for adding social functions to various e-book reader apps and platforms. It raised 41 million yen (approximately $535,000 at that time) from several Japanese investment firms in October of 2011. I recently visited to see Yoichi Shirakata, the founder/CEO of SpinningWorks, and asked him what they are working on these days [1]. In addition to providing the Qlippy SDK service, the company launched a new service called TakeStock almost one year ago. It collects inventory updates on books from major bookstores all across the country, and lets you know where you can buy your favorite book in your neighborhood. He explained: There are almost 14,000 bookstores in Japan. Our service lets you to check inventory updates from 1,400 bookstores, which accounts for almost 40% of all sales in online and offline bookstores. We know the majority of our userbase uses Internet Explorer, which indicates our service is being used by the average consumer rather than especially tech-savvy people. Some users are willing to buy online, but others want to compare with other items or…

SpinningWorks is a Tokyo-based startup that has been involved in providing a variety of web services since 2010. Among its past services is Qlippy, an SDK for adding social functions to various e-book reader apps and platforms. It raised 41 million yen (approximately $535,000 at that time) from several Japanese investment firms in October of 2011.

I recently visited to see Yoichi Shirakata, the founder/CEO of SpinningWorks, and asked him what they are working on these days [1].

In addition to providing the Qlippy SDK service, the company launched a new service called TakeStock almost one year ago. It collects inventory updates on books from major bookstores all across the country, and lets you know where you can buy your favorite book in your neighborhood. He explained:

There are almost 14,000 bookstores in Japan. Our service lets you to check inventory updates from 1,400 bookstores, which accounts for almost 40% of all sales in online and offline bookstores. We know the majority of our userbase uses Internet Explorer, which indicates our service is being used by the average consumer rather than especially tech-savvy people.

Some users are willing to buy online, but others want to compare with other items or have a look before buying.

When you look for a book to buy, our service helps you buy it online as well as offline. If you prefer not to wait for something to be delivered, our service lets you know where you can buy it right away at a place nearby. In this way, we can present consumers other retailers with e-commerce giants like Amazon or Rakuten in line as their options.

The company started its service focusing on books, since the market volume in Japan is said to be as much as 1.9 trillion yen (approximately $19 billion). Every single title has a unique code (ISBN), which makes the process easier to systemize than other markets such as fashion apparel. In Japan, almost all books are sold at the listed prices at almost all stores, so consumers can choose to buy solely based on their conveniences.

Shirakata revealed that the Japanese e-commerce market accounts for only 2.8% of all commercial activities here in the country, which indicates it still has much room to grow [2]. In the future, by enhancing the services beyond book distribution, he expects to help more offline businesses find potential customers, giving them a chance to buy things they can’t find online.

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Website translation tool WorldJumper launches freemium version

Masaru Ikeda 2013.11.06

See the original post in Japanese. WorldJumper provides website translation services for affordable rates by making the most of a combination of machine translation, human translation, and a database of past translation results. Tokyo-based Yaraku, the startup behind the service, announced today it has launched a freemium version of the service that allows you to translate your website for free. With this new version, the company is encouraging more hotels or exporters to create websites in foreign languages (Japanese, English, Korean, and simplified and traditional Chinese). Our readers may recall the company raised about 110 million yen ($1.1 million) from several Japanese investors back in May. It also partnered with crowdsourced translation service Conyac back in September. Unlike conventional translation services, WorldJumper outsources orders to third-party agencies, but it also accumulates frequently-used translation requests and results in its database for future reference. In this way, it helps keep translation costs down while still improving quality over time. The freemium version does have some limitations however, such no customer support and ads inserted in the translated pages. If you want to polish the quality of the results, you can order a fully human translation for a fee. The company expects to…

See the original post in Japanese.

WorldJumper provides website translation services for affordable rates by making the most of a combination of machine translation, human translation, and a database of past translation results. Tokyo-based Yaraku, the startup behind the service, announced today it has launched a freemium version of the service that allows you to translate your website for free.

With this new version, the company is encouraging more hotels or exporters to create websites in foreign languages (Japanese, English, Korean, and simplified and traditional Chinese).

Our readers may recall the company raised about 110 million yen ($1.1 million) from several Japanese investors back in May. It also partnered with crowdsourced translation service Conyac back in September. Unlike conventional translation services, WorldJumper outsources orders to third-party agencies, but it also accumulates frequently-used translation requests and results in its database for future reference. In this way, it helps keep translation costs down while still improving quality over time.

The freemium version does have some limitations however, such no customer support and ads inserted in the translated pages. If you want to polish the quality of the results, you can order a fully human translation for a fee.

The company expects to see over 10,000 websites using the service by next April. We hope it can help many startups here in Japan reach out to global markets.

news

Japan’s Meetrip acquired by social game developer Donuts, relocates to Bangkok

Masaru Ikeda 2013.11.05

Meetrip is a service that gives you a chance to discover authentic travel experiences arranged by locals in 14 cities across Asia. Tokyo-based Duckdive, the startup behind the service, announced today that it is to be acquired by Tokyo-based social gaming developer Donuts for a undisclosed sum. The latter previously acquired Social Lunch, a website that helps students find jobs. Coinciding with this announcement, the startup revealed that it will relocate its base from Tokyo to Bangkok, where the gaming company has a development center. The startup was launched back in June by Takashi Kiyama and his co-founder Nobuhiro Ariyasu, who recently sold private lesson portal Cyta.jp to Cookpad for over 1 billion yen. In this space, we’ve seen more than a few travel discovery sites from Japan, such as KitchHike, Voyagin, and Trippiece.

Meetrip is a service that gives you a chance to discover authentic travel experiences arranged by locals in 14 cities across Asia. Tokyo-based Duckdive, the startup behind the service, announced today that it is to be acquired by Tokyo-based social gaming developer Donuts for a undisclosed sum. The latter previously acquired Social Lunch, a website that helps students find jobs.

Coinciding with this announcement, the startup revealed that it will relocate its base from Tokyo to Bangkok, where the gaming company has a development center. The startup was launched back in June by Takashi Kiyama and his co-founder Nobuhiro Ariyasu, who recently sold private lesson portal Cyta.jp to Cookpad for over 1 billion yen.

In this space, we’ve seen more than a few travel discovery sites from Japan, such as KitchHike, Voyagin, and Trippiece.

news

Tokyo Office Tour: Nightley brings behavioral consumer data to geo-analytics

Masaru Ikeda 2013.11.03

Tokyo-based Nightley develops location-based analytics technologies. The startup was launched back in 2011 by CEO Yutaka Ishikawa who previously worked with Japanese web service company NetAge [1]. Nightley recently developed social media analytics engine Trexa, and started providing social media analytics to GIS service providers as part of their service Nightley GIS Mesh Data. I recently visited the company’s office near Shibuya to hear more from Ishikawa about this initiative. As some of our readers may know, several Japanese system integration companies have partnered with Twitter as a data reseller, obtaining rights to collect data using the Twitter API. Similarly Japanese big data solution provider Hottolink also partnered with US company Gnip back in October to distributing Gnip’s analytics data in Japan [2]. NTT Docomo also recently started selling mobile spatial statistics based on the usage of its mobile subscribers. I asked Ishikawa how his company differentiate from these big players. He explained: Conventional players typically give you an accumulation of longitude and latitude values with tweets or posts. These values tell you where users are or were, but they don’t give you insights about which floor or what store in a shopping mall they are in, or what they…

Tokyo-based Nightley develops location-based analytics technologies. The startup was launched back in 2011 by CEO Yutaka Ishikawa who previously worked with Japanese web service company NetAge ^[1].

Nightley recently developed social media analytics engine Trexa, and started providing social media analytics to GIS service providers as part of their service Nightley GIS Mesh Data. I recently visited the company’s office near Shibuya to hear more from Ishikawa about this initiative.

As some of our readers may know, several Japanese system integration companies have partnered with Twitter as a data reseller, obtaining rights to collect data using the Twitter API. Similarly Japanese big data solution provider Hottolink also partnered with US company Gnip back in October to distributing Gnip’s analytics data in Japan ^[2]. NTT Docomo also recently started selling mobile spatial statistics based on the usage of its mobile subscribers.

nightley-gis-mesh-data — Nightley GIS Mesh Data (visualized sample)

I asked Ishikawa how his company differentiate from these big players. He explained:

Conventional players typically give you an accumulation of longitude and latitude values with tweets or posts. These values tell you where users are or were, but they don’t give you insights about which floor or what store in a shopping mall they are in, or what they are doing.

Our solution gives you more visibility around such attributes of users, and I believe this is our advantage, helpful in creating more efficient marketing efforts or planning store roll-outs.

When Ishikawa launched the company a few years ago, he was selling location analytics data a direct sales basis. But he subsequently learned there are business opportunities only among a very niche segment of marketing people in Japan. So he changed their sales strategy to intensify partnering efforts with big GIS players or enterprise system integrators ^[3].

They already have clients in need of geographical data plentiful with various organic attributes. I thought partnering with them would be much easier. They also have geographical analytics solutions, but it’s not very organic. I realized the complementary potential of working with GIS companies.

He expects the solution to be used not only for O2O solutions but also by people and companies working on more accurate area targeting.

The company is looking for funding opportunities and more engineers to help develop further growth. If you are interested in being a part of the team, don’t hesitate to contact them via this page.

NetAge was originally launched back in 1999 by Japanese serial entrepreneur Kiyoshi Nishikawa. The company was subsequently rebranded to ngi group, and became United which is well-known for mobile app CocoPPa. Apart from the company, Nishikawa launched a new incubation company called NetAge again a couple of years ago.↩
Hottolink is a subsidiary of Internet marketing agency Opt (TSE:2389). The former recently unveiled it was approved to be listed on the TSE Mothers market, a stock market for emerging companies. The IPO is scheduled to take place on December 9th.↩
Nightley recently partnered with Japanese system integration company Fujitsu for co-developing the lattter’s location data cloud service Spatiowl, and area marketing solution provider Giken Shoji International.↩

news

Japan’s Zozotown unveils new app, but some fashion retailers want to ban it from stores

SCORE 1,220

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.31

Start Today, the company behind Japanese fashion commerce site Zozotown, recently announced that it is receiving applications for a new sort of Showrooming feature for offline fashion retailers. It is called Wear and it launches today. The service uses a mobile app (for iOS and Android) that lets consumers scan a barcode of a clothes item at a participating offline retailer, and then purchase it online on Zozotown or other sites. When you buy online, a sales commission will then be paid from Zozotown to the retailer. This is called ‘showrooming’, and is becoming more common consumer behavior not only in Japan but also in the US and China. According to Nikkei, some retailers are receptive to Zozotown’s efforts — but others are not. Lumine, a fashion mall chain in Tokyo, has asked their tenent stores to prohibit photo-shooting in stores by consumers, a firm stance against the showrooming wave. In contrast, Japanese department store Parco has partnered with the e-commerce company and agreed to receive a commission when the store succeeds in driving traffic to Zozotown. We are told that about 200 fashion brands will participate in the program. We’ve seen major e-commerce players exploring new opportunities in this…

Start Today, the company behind Japanese fashion commerce site Zozotown, recently announced that it is receiving applications for a new sort of Showrooming feature for offline fashion retailers. It is called Wear and it launches today.

The service uses a mobile app (for iOS and Android) that lets consumers scan a barcode of a clothes item at a participating offline retailer, and then purchase it online on Zozotown or other sites. When you buy online, a sales commission will then be paid from Zozotown to the retailer. This is called ‘showrooming’, and is becoming more common consumer behavior not only in Japan but also in the US and China.

According to Nikkei, some retailers are receptive to Zozotown’s efforts — but others are not. Lumine, a fashion mall chain in Tokyo, has asked their tenent stores to prohibit photo-shooting in stores by consumers, a firm stance against the showrooming wave. In contrast, Japanese department store Parco has partnered with the e-commerce company and agreed to receive a commission when the store succeeds in driving traffic to Zozotown. We are told that about 200 fashion brands will participate in the program.

We’ve seen major e-commerce players exploring new opportunities in this space. Amazon Japan is intensifying fashion sales by leveraging its same-day delivery advantage. Meanwhile Rakuten launched an e-commerce store in partnership with popular fashion retailer Beams back in May. Japan’s leading fashion retailer Magaseek partnered with NTT Docomo and to try to cultivate a revenue stream using the latter’s mobile subscriber userbase.

In addition to this latest initiative, Start Today has been busy as well, acquiring e-commerce platform developer Stores.jp back in July, and partnering with fashion coordination site iQON last year.

It will be interesting to see how the company will evolve the fashion retail scene in Japan. Our Bridge team is now working on a report on the O2O market in Japan and around the world. We expect to share some of our insights here soon, so please stay tuned.

news

Japanese startup detects social media threats to kids, warns parents

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.29

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup A’s Child (pronounced as Ace Child) recently launched a web service that aims to protect children from bullying and other threats stemming from social media interactions. It’s called Filii. The service lets you analyze your children’s posting or messaging through social media (with their approval), and it will notify you to take counter- or preventative measures when any cause for concern is detected. These days, with words like sexting creeping into mainstream conversation, social media and messaging apps are coming under greater scrutiny. But the fact is many of these undesirable issues arise not from the social media platforms, but by malicious users. The operators of these platforms are requested to deploy countermeasures, but Japanese telecommunication law prohibits operators from tapping or interfering with users’ communications. To keep a moral and legal balance, Filii wants to give Japanese parents an option to protect your children using technology. The company plans to partner with local governments, schools, crime prevention organizations, and personal security service companies like Mimamorl. Filii claims that its technology can work to help ensure the security of not only children, but also adults. For example in Korea, where the suicide…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup A’s Child (pronounced as Ace Child) recently launched a web service that aims to protect children from bullying and other threats stemming from social media interactions. It’s called Filii. The service lets you analyze your children’s posting or messaging through social media (with their approval), and it will notify you to take counter- or preventative measures when any cause for concern is detected.

These days, with words like sexting creeping into mainstream conversation, social media and messaging apps are coming under greater scrutiny. But the fact is many of these undesirable issues arise not from the social media platforms, but by malicious users. The operators of these platforms are requested to deploy countermeasures, but Japanese telecommunication law prohibits operators from tapping or interfering with users’ communications.

To keep a moral and legal balance, Filii wants to give Japanese parents an option to protect your children using technology. The company plans to partner with local governments, schools, crime prevention organizations, and personal security service companies like Mimamorl.

Filii claims that its technology can work to help ensure the security of not only children, but also adults. For example in Korea, where the suicide rate is very high, data analysis company Daumsoft succeeded in developing a technology that can identify persons exhibiting suicidal behavior by analyzing their tweets or interactions on social media.

A’s Child was founded earlier this month by two engineers who previously work with a systems integration company. The startup is based out of Samurai Startup Island, an incubation space in Tokyo.

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Japanese mobile payments processor Coiney secures $8M in funding

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.28

Japan’s Nikkei reported that Tokyo-based mobile payments processor Coiney will soon raise up to 800 million yen (approximately $8 million) from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, the country’s state-run investment fund which promotes emerging technology businesses. Our readers may recall that the startup raised 500 million yen ($5 million) back in August from Credit Saison, one of Japan’s top credit card companies. The company expects to transact more than 1 trillion yen ($10 billion) through its payment platform in the next five years. Coiney was launched back in March of 2012 by ex-PayPal Japan employee Naoko Samata, and has been providing mobile payments solutions using swipe card readers for smartphones. In Japan, other competitors in this space are Square, Paypal Here, and Rakuten Smartpay. On a related note, it was announced a couple of weeks ago that the aforementioned fund announced will also invest up to 1 billion yen ($10 million) in another payments processor company, Royal Gate.

Japan’s Nikkei reported that Tokyo-based mobile payments processor Coiney will soon raise up to 800 million yen (approximately $8 million) from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, the country’s state-run investment fund which promotes emerging technology businesses.

Our readers may recall that the startup raised 500 million yen ($5 million) back in August from Credit Saison, one of Japan’s top credit card companies. The company expects to transact more than 1 trillion yen ($10 billion) through its payment platform in the next five years.

Coiney was launched back in March of 2012 by ex-PayPal Japan employee Naoko Samata, and has been providing mobile payments solutions using swipe card readers for smartphones. In Japan, other competitors in this space are Square, Paypal Here, and Rakuten Smartpay.

On a related note, it was announced a couple of weeks ago that the aforementioned fund announced will also invest up to 1 billion yen ($10 million) in another payments processor company, Royal Gate.

news

Viibar wins OnLab demo day with crowdsourced video production solution

Open Network Lab

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.27

See the original story in Japanese. All photos courtesy of Open Network Lab. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program. The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program. Viibar (The Best Team Award winner) Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills. The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos. Locarise (The Special Award winner)…

See the original story in Japanese. All photos courtesy of Open Network Lab.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program.

The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program.

Viibar (The Best Team Award winner)

Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills.

The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos.

Locarise (The Special Award winner)

Locarise is an analytics solution for retail stores. By placing small sensors inside and around your store, the system can collect metrics such as how many people passed in front of the store and how many customers you have served.

The system’s web-based dashboard shows you these metrics, as well as other things like visit duration, and retention rate. For a business owner monitoring many store locations, you can easily stay up to date on real-time target rates for KPIs at many stores in a single interface.

Shakring

Regardless of location, culture, or language, this mobile app lets you to ask or tell other users what you’re looking at. By scanning barcodes, it also helps you find details about what you have in your hand.

When the app’s creator, Hyongchol, Kim visited a drug store here in Japan, he saw a young Indian confused about cold medicine he should buy. Since he couldn’t read Japanese characters, he hesitated to buy the medicine despite the fact that Kim told him which one it was. This experience motivated Kim to create the app, which he is preparing for iOS and Android platforms.

Style With

Style With is an e-commerce site for men, helping them coordinate their outfits. Users’ preferences are classified according to the ’taste graph’ concept, and you will receive about five different outfit proposals of outfits every month that you might like. The platform can monetize by letting a user buy any item from the outfits proposed. It targets male users may not be very bold in their fashion but want to purchase clothes that will turn some heads.

Ednity

Ednity is a vertical social network for school classes. By putting teachers, students, and their parents in a sort of loop, it will help them build a collaborative education environment. The platform gives you a dashboard to manage notifications from school and your homework, and also provides a virtual white board for hand-drawn content that can be shared between teachers and their children.

Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the upcoming batch of its incubation program starting next January. The application deadline is November 8th. The incubator’s parent company, Digital Garage, will also launch a co-working space in San Francisco pretty soon, where their incubated startups will be able to establish a base.

To commemorate the launch of the facility, the company plans to host Global Pitch 2013 on November 4th, and New Context Conference 2013 in San Francisco on November 5th and 6th. That’s just before digital agency Btrax’s SF Japan Night event at Pivotal Labs on November 7th.

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Tokyo Office Tour: Freee takes small businesses for a walk in the cloud

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.25

Freee is the Tokyo-based startup behind a cloud-based accounting solution. Readers may recall it has previously raised seed funding worth 50 million yen (about $523,000) back in December, and raised series A funding worth 270 million yen ($2.7 million) back in July. They recently relocated their office, and we visited the new location to speak with Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki and COO Sumito Togo to hear about their future plans. The company recently partnered with Tokyo-based startup Ubiregi, integrating the Freee accounting platform with the latter’s cloud-based POS (point of sales) system earlier this month. For small retailers or restaurant owners, this integration lets you automate your back office tasks, ranging from daily cash to accounts. By making use of such a service, they can save a lot of time and refocus their efforts on providing a better experience for their customers. In Japan, the penetration rate of cloud services is very low, not only at big companies but also at SMEs. Cloud services can easily provide up-to-date solutions for users. In order to encourage business people to change the paradigm of the Japanese business scene, we need to provide something more than cloud services. If we can create something…

Freee is the Tokyo-based startup behind a cloud-based accounting solution. Readers may recall it has previously raised seed funding worth 50 million yen (about $523,000) back in December, and raised series A funding worth 270 million yen ($2.7 million) back in July.

They recently relocated their office, and we visited the new location to speak with Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki and COO Sumito Togo to hear about their future plans.

The company recently partnered with Tokyo-based startup Ubiregi, integrating the Freee accounting platform with the latter’s cloud-based POS (point of sales) system earlier this month. For small retailers or restaurant owners, this integration lets you automate your back office tasks, ranging from daily cash to accounts. By making use of such a service, they can save a lot of time and refocus their efforts on providing a better experience for their customers.

In Japan, the penetration rate of cloud services is very low, not only at big companies but also at SMEs. Cloud services can easily provide up-to-date solutions for users. In order to encourage business people to change the paradigm of the Japanese business scene, we need to provide something more than cloud services. If we can create something special in the Japanese market, we can top the global market at the same time.

In the past for SME owners, when you bought software for your back office operations, you were forced to buy a cheap edition if you couldn’t pay high license fees. Many companies could not use the full features of software that enterprises were making the most of. We thought this was ridiculous and we wanted to develop solutions to help SMEs liberate themselves from routine tasks and use more time for doing creative jobs.

Their team is working on adding new features to the platform but paying attention to keeping it simple so that people who are not accounting-savvy can keep using them. In the future, they expect to add several features like an instant-submission income tax report, and automating payroll calculations.

On their 12-person team Freee has seven engineers, but is hiring new people who can work on a variety of issues ranging from mobile app development to server-side maintenance. If any of our readers are interested, feel free to contact the company via thier recruiting page.

Masaru Ikeda

Articles

Former Livedoor CEO launches restaurant recommendation app

Tokyo Office Tour: SpinningWorks wants to bring bookworms back to offline bookstores

Website translation tool WorldJumper launches freemium version

Japan’s Meetrip acquired by social game developer Donuts, relocates to Bangkok

Tokyo Office Tour: Nightley brings behavioral consumer data to geo-analytics

Japan’s Zozotown unveils new app, but some fashion retailers want to ban it from stores

Japanese startup detects social media threats to kids, warns parents

Japanese mobile payments processor Coiney secures $8M in funding

Viibar wins OnLab demo day with crowdsourced video production solution

Viibar (The Best Team Award winner)

Locarise (The Special Award winner)

Shakring

Style With

Ednity

Tokyo Office Tour: Freee takes small businesses for a walk in the cloud

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