THE BRIDGE

Masaru Ikeda

Masaru Ikeda

Masaru started his career as a programmer/engineer, and previously co-founded several system integration companies and consulting firms. He’s been traveling around Silicon Valley and Asia exploring the IT industry, and he also curates event updates for the Tokyo edition of Startup Digest.

Articles

Korean car-navigation startup raises $2.7M from CyberAgent Ventures, other investors

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Korea’s beSUCCESS reported on Monday that Seoul-based LOC&ALL, the startup behind car navigation app Kimgisa, has raised $3 billion Korean won (approximately $2.7 million) from Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures and two Korean investment firms, Neoplux and Partners Venture Capital. Prior to this funding, the company raised seed funding of 1 billion won ($930,000) from Partners Venture Capital in January. With these new funds, they plan to intensify their engineering and marketing efforts with the initial goal of expanding to Japan, with Mainland China and Indonesia to follow later. Kimgisa is a location-based app for iOS and Android that acts as a sort of touch-screen sat-nav device. Since its launch back in 2010, it has acquired more than 5 million users despite the fact that major Korean mobile carriers have similar apps installed by default on their smartphones. The company projects that its primary revenue source to come from big data, an accumulation of user information including their destinations. They are also planning to sell advertising opportunities to Korean companies like Poing (restaurant booking), GooDoc (hospital finder), Saltlux (big data solution) and Korean web portal Naver. The company was founded back in May of 2010 by three Busan natives: Jonghwan Park, Wontae…

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Korea’s beSUCCESS reported on Monday that Seoul-based LOC&ALL, the startup behind car navigation app Kimgisa, has raised $3 billion Korean won (approximately $2.7 million) from Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures and two Korean investment firms, Neoplux and Partners Venture Capital. Prior to this funding, the company raised seed funding of 1 billion won ($930,000) from Partners Venture Capital in January. With these new funds, they plan to intensify their engineering and marketing efforts with the initial goal of expanding to Japan, with Mainland China and Indonesia to follow later.

Kimgisa is a location-based app for iOS and Android that acts as a sort of touch-screen sat-nav device. Since its launch back in 2010, it has acquired more than 5 million users despite the fact that major Korean mobile carriers have similar apps installed by default on their smartphones.

The company projects that its primary revenue source to come from big data, an accumulation of user information including their destinations. They are also planning to sell advertising opportunities to Korean companies like Poing (restaurant booking), GooDoc (hospital finder), Saltlux (big data solution) and Korean web portal Naver.

The company was founded back in May of 2010 by three Busan natives: Jonghwan Park, Wontae Kim, and Myeongjin Sin, and all of whom previously conducted studies on location-based services at KTIT, the R&D body of Korea Telecom. It has hired many engineers from KOSDAQ-listed mobile solution provider Point-i.

Couples app Pairy wins top prize at Docomo Innovation Village demo day

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See the original story in Japanese. Docomo Innovation Village, the incubation initiative of Japan’s NTT Docomo, hosted a demo day event on Thursday, showcasing startups graduating from the first batch of its incubation program. The event invited a number of guest speakers and judges including Docomo president Kaoru Kato, 500 Startups’ partner George Kellerman, and Skype co-founder/Atomico partner Niklas Zennström. Presenters were the six startups that qualified for the first batch back in April. It has been interesting to see how they have evolved over the past several months. Based on the qualification by the telco’s employees and the initiative’s mentors, grand prize and the ‘best stretch’ awards were presented to two out of the participating six startups. The award winner will receive a trip to Silicon Valley including a visit to 500 startups’ incubation office. Grand prize winner: Pairy ¶ Pitched by Toshimasa Takahashi, Pairy is a mobile app for couples that lets them to look back on the events they shared together. According to a survey, more than 40% of all couples in Japan look history back to see what they have talked about as far as a month back on social media. But it’s not easy to…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Docomo Innovation Village, the incubation initiative of Japan’s NTT Docomo, hosted a demo day event on Thursday, showcasing startups graduating from the first batch of its incubation program. The event invited a number of guest speakers and judges including Docomo president Kaoru Kato, 500 Startups’ partner George Kellerman, and Skype co-founder/Atomico partner Niklas Zennström.

Presenters were the six startups that qualified for the first batch back in April. It has been interesting to see how they have evolved over the past several months.

Based on the qualification by the telco’s employees and the initiative’s mentors, grand prize and the ‘best stretch’ awards were presented to two out of the participating six startups. The award winner will receive a trip to Silicon Valley including a visit to 500 startups’ incubation office.

Grand prize winner: Pairy

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Pitched by Toshimasa Takahashi, Pairy is a mobile app for couples that lets them to look back on the events they shared together. According to a survey, more than 40% of all couples in Japan look history back to see what they have talked about as far as a month back on social media. But it’s not easy to retrieve your interactions from all the messages you’ve exchanged with other people. Pairy is designed specifically for interactions within couples, with the intention of eliminating this searching process.

To date the startup has acquired 120,000 users, which rose by 156% three months ago when it joined the incubation program. The service’s main userbase is people in their 20s. It has 6 million monthly pageviews and there are 50,000 ‘date spots’ registered.

Their users are growing by 120% a month without any massive promotional activities, and they expect it to reach one million and become the top apps of its kind by October of 2014. The startup is planning to monetize by adding three functions: photobook creation, premium service, and advertising. It’s now looking to raise 60 million yen ($600,000) from potential investors, with plans to launch another app for couples to use after they get married.

“Best stretch” award winner: Coromo

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Presented by Hokuto Inoue, Coromo allows you to change your smartphone homescreen to suit any occasion: work, leisure, or home — all using a NFC card. If you install the app, you can create your own home screen with HTML5 as well.

The startup recognizes that a home screen is something that you see more than any other apps or screen. It is planning to partner with conferences or venues and provide them with this solution that can show event updates to their attendees. According to Inoue, it has been decided that this year’s Tokyo Motor Show will provide updates to their attendees using the platform. When you leave the event venue, you will be sent to the platform’s e-commerce site, the Coromo Store, in the app. This helps user retention and B2C-based monetization. Even if smartphones are replaced by wearable devices in the future, there will be still potential in the business since the concept of homescreens will remain.

DecoAlbum and Drawchat

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DecoAlbum is a mobile app that allows users to decorate and share photos. Readers may recall that we interviewed them back in May. To date the app has 2 million users, almost double what it was before joining the incubation program. 70% of users are from outside Japan, although Japan and Thailand represent the biggest userbases.

The company recently unveiled a mobile app called Drawchat, which lets users to exchange hand-drawn images using Facebook’s messaging feature. They plan to keep introducing apps using Facebook APIs, and they hope to reach 10 million downloads by 2014.

FunPicty

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FunPicty is a set of funny photo apps, available for both iOS and Android. Most funny photo decoration apps are usually short-lived. For developers, it’s tough to see how to prolong the life of such apps. So the startup put a bunch of these apps together in a single app, thus creating a platform where users can share funny apps.

To date it has seen 5 million downloads and acquired 300,000 monthly active users. The company expects this will reach 1 million users by 2014. The service was pitched by Kou Honna, of Soda.

Kumitasu

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Kumitasu is an app for people with a food allergy, helping you buy allergy-free ingredients from e-commerce sites by specifying what allergen ingredients are contained in a food product. The idea was pitched by Mayu Ishikawa of Willmore.

In Japan, 14.2% of households have children with a food allergy, and at schools many children have to be served with allergy-free meals at lunch. So now it has become an unavoidable issue for the entire community. The startup received help from 30 housewives and developed a database with ingredients for more than 40,000 food products available on the Japanese market. Users can easily find a cookie product, for example, which contains no egg.

The company expects to generate annual sales of 1.5 billion yen ($15 million) in the next three years through subscription-based business models and affiliates traffic to partner e-commerce sites like Lotte, D Shopping, Mogumogu, and Radish-boya. The startup is also planning to sell allergy-focused ingredient data to food distributors, and hopes to introduce a mobile app by the end of this year. Their upcoming features recipes for allergy-free meals, premium services that helps users find allergy-free menu at restaurants, and additional features for diabetics and others with dietary-restrictions

The startup just launched their service but is exploring a series A funding with hopes to acquire 500,000 users in a year and 3 million users in three years.

Nanovel

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Nanovel was developed by Takashi Asami, who previously worked as a film producer. In the past, he established a project to gather story ideas for the theme “Can a 10-minute story impress people?” Building on this, his colleague subsequently made a film titled La Maison en Petits Cubes (The House of Small Cubes) and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2009.

Inspired by the concept, Asami developed a platform where people can subscribe to novels comprised of less than 2,000 Japanese characters. These short novels are written by 50 professionals, including high profile script writers and copywriters, and users can read up to 16 different novels a month for free. Their user retention rate a remarkably high as 68.5%.


We will be keeping our eyes on how these startups can evolve the local startup scene by speaking with them as often as we can. Docomo Innovation Ventures is now inviting applicants for the second batch of the incubation program here.

Japanese social media promotion startup raises $1.5M

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See the original story in Japanese. Interest marketing is a Tokyo-based startup focused on social media marketing for brands. The startup announced today that it has raised 150 million yen (approximately $1.5 million) from Japanese investment firm Nissay Capital. The total amount of funds in this round is assumed to exceed 200 million yen ($2 million), as it expects to receive additional funding from other VC firms next month. The startup introduced a social media promotion tool called Kolor back in March. Based on requests from advertisers, this service shows you ads in the form of missions to be completed. When you finish a mission, you will be able to receive a reward that can be later be redeemed for discounts or products at partnering merchants. In the six months since its launch in March, the startup has acquired 40 advertisers and the service’s iOS app has seen 40,000 downloads. According to the company, its main userbase is males in their 30s who are relatively familiar with digital services. Kolor has two primary aspect: it is a tool to improve recognition for brands, and an O2O tool for merchants to invite potential customers to their physical tools. In the first…

The Interest Marketing team. CEO Hikari Sakai is in front.
The Interest Marketing team. CEO Hikari Sakai is in front.

See the original story in Japanese.

Interest marketing is a Tokyo-based startup focused on social media marketing for brands. The startup announced today that it has raised 150 million yen (approximately $1.5 million) from Japanese investment firm Nissay Capital. The total amount of funds in this round is assumed to exceed 200 million yen ($2 million), as it expects to receive additional funding from other VC firms next month.

The startup introduced a social media promotion tool called Kolor back in March. Based on requests from advertisers, this service shows you ads in the form of missions to be completed. When you finish a mission, you will be able to receive a reward that can be later be redeemed for discounts or products at partnering merchants. In the six months since its launch in March, the startup has acquired 40 advertisers and the service’s iOS app has seen 40,000 downloads. According to the company, its main userbase is males in their 30s who are relatively familiar with digital services.

Kolor has two primary aspect: it is a tool to improve recognition for brands, and an O2O tool for merchants to invite potential customers to their physical tools. In the first sector, the service’s competitors include Monipla (by Allied Architects), Crocos (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2012), and Fantastics (by Gaiax).

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Kolor

So how can the startup expand its business in such a fiercely competitive arena? I asked Sakai about his future plan.

The more interesting missions (ads) we can present on Kolor, the more users we can acquire. So that it’s all about getting as many interesting missions as we can from our advertisers. We need to keep motivating advertisers to use the platform. When we offer a mission to our users on the platform, we pay attention to see what segments of the userbase the advertiser should specifically target.

The current version of Kolor is only integrated with Facebook, but the startup aspires to enhance the service further, developing a social media promotion tool that requires no social media integration.

On a related note, Interest Marketing acquired fellow startup company Appoi earlier this month. Appoi was founded by Hikari Sakai (also the head of Interest Marketing) and has been providing a calendar view service for sharing entertainment event updates with other users. He tells us why he merged these two companies prior to the funding.

Appoi was founded back in February of 2012 for [serving] the US market, and subsequently we started providing its white label service to major Japanese entertainment businesses such as E-plus (online box office) and Avex (music company). I’ve been running Interest Marketing as a startup focused on developing new services like Kolor. Coinciding this latest funding, we needed to focus our resources to a company. That’s why I had our two companies merge.

Transferring engineers over from Appoi, Interest Marketing is now about a 30-people team. Back in August, the startup partnered with Japanese credit card company Credit Saison and online reward program NetMile, which will help them accelerate user acquisition growth.

While B2C-focused social media tools are on the decline, the B2B2C field has great potential to expand further. In Sakai’s words, Japanese businesses’ usage of social media is not yet mature and still has much room to be cultivated.

KDDI Mugen Labo unveils 5 new incubated startups

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KDDI Mugen Labo is the incubation arm of Japan’s second largest telco, KDDI. It recently unveiled five startups that qualified to participate in the fifth batch of its incubation program. They will receive mentoring in residency at the incubator as well as free rental of smartphone or tablet devices. Here’s a quick rundown of the startups and what they will be working on. Zukan.com Zukan.com is a consumer-generated photo curation site that aims to create a variety of encyclopedias. The platform was developed by two engineers from Kyushu University’s graduate school. One example of how it works is a curated picture book that introduces 2,700 species of fish shown in 34,000 pictures. Dr. Wallet Some of our readers may recall that we recently featured this personal finance data entry solution that simply scans your receipts. Dr. Wallet does not use OCR (optical character recognition) but instead depends on human-powered data entry to ensure accuracy, sorting and classifying your purchases as well. With this human element, the company can achieve data entry accuracy of up to 99.98%, likely enough to ease users’ concerns of erroneous input. The startup is backed by Incubate Fund. SmaOku SmaOku, a Japanese portmanteau of ‘Smart’ and…

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KDDI Mugen Labo is the incubation arm of Japan’s second largest telco, KDDI. It recently unveiled five startups that qualified to participate in the fifth batch of its incubation program. They will receive mentoring in residency at the incubator as well as free rental of smartphone or tablet devices.

Here’s a quick rundown of the startups and what they will be working on.

Zukan.com

Zukan.com is a consumer-generated photo curation site that aims to create a variety of encyclopedias. The platform was developed by two engineers from Kyushu University’s graduate school. One example of how it works is a curated picture book that introduces 2,700 species of fish shown in 34,000 pictures.

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Dr. Wallet

Some of our readers may recall that we recently featured this personal finance data entry solution that simply scans your receipts. Dr. Wallet does not use OCR (optical character recognition) but instead depends on human-powered data entry to ensure accuracy, sorting and classifying your purchases as well. With this human element, the company can achieve data entry accuracy of up to 99.98%, likely enough to ease users’ concerns of erroneous input. The startup is backed by Incubate Fund.

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SmaOku

SmaOku, a Japanese portmanteau of ‘Smart’ and ‘Auction’, is a mobile auction app focused on second-hand clothes for females. Users can create their own store in as little as three minutes using a smartphone. The service was developed by Tokyo-based startup Zawatt, which has been developing notable web services like WishScope and Ohaco. CEO Daisaku Harada believes conventional auction sites don’t fit with user behaviors in the smartphone era, and so he is aspiring to develop a more simple auction platform.

PEDALRest

PEDALRest is a finalist from a recent Startup Weekend Tokyo event. In Tokyo, illegal bicycle parking near railway stations is a big problem for many local governments. But from the commuter’s point of view, it can be hard to find a parking space. This service connects you with landlords who have idle spaces, allowing you to easily find a space for your bicycle. It makes our communities a marginally easier place to live in, and it eliminates the danger of costly parking fines.

Aoi Zemi

Aoi Zemi (‘zemi’ here means ‘seminar’), is a live-streamed online lecture service for junior high students. Their focus is to provide informative live programming as well as opportunities to interact with other users by sharing something they’re calling ‘timelines’. Live-streaming is available for free, but you will be charged for watching recorded lecture programs.

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This 5th batch of the incubator program will start very shortly, and we can expect to see the results of their efforts at their presentation event three months from now.

In conversation with Survey Monkey CEO Dave Goldberg

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Last week featured a number of international tech events here in Tokyo, including the Tokyo Game Show and ad:tech Tokyo. I was asked to serve on some panels at ad:tech, and moderated a fireside chat with Dave Goldberg, who is a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and also the husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. For those unfamiliar with his work, he’s the CEO of Survey Monkey, a cloud-based, web survey development company, which raised $800 million from several investors (including Google) back in January. Prior to joining the company in 2009, he started his first media company, Launch Media, back in 1993, which was subsequently acquired by Yahoo for $12 million in 2001. According to Dave, the Survey Monkey has acquired over 68,000 users in the Japanese market alone, and he says both user and revenue growth are strong. The company has 15 million users in total around the world. Survey Monkey has acquired over 68,000 users in the Japanese market alone Coinciding with this his visit to Tokyo, he unveiled a new feature for Japanese users called Question Bank. The feature aims to make survey creation easier and faster by presenting samples of recommended Q&A sets to reduce bias…

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Image credit: Hideyuki Nakanishi

Last week featured a number of international tech events here in Tokyo, including the Tokyo Game Show and ad:tech Tokyo. I was asked to serve on some panels at ad:tech, and moderated a fireside chat with Dave Goldberg, who is a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and also the husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

For those unfamiliar with his work, he’s the CEO of Survey Monkey, a cloud-based, web survey development company, which raised $800 million from several investors (including Google) back in January. Prior to joining the company in 2009, he started his first media company, Launch Media, back in 1993, which was subsequently acquired by Yahoo for $12 million in 2001.

According to Dave, the Survey Monkey has acquired over 68,000 users in the Japanese market alone, and he says both user and revenue growth are strong. The company has 15 million users in total around the world.

Survey Monkey has acquired over 68,000 users in the Japanese market alone

Coinciding with this his visit to Tokyo, he unveiled a new feature for Japanese users called Question Bank. The feature aims to make survey creation easier and faster by presenting samples of recommended Q&A sets to reduce bias and give you more accurate answers.

Typically, when I have a chance to speak with entrepreneurs or investors from Silicon Valley, there’s one thing I can’t help but ask about. The most prominent startups in the Japanese market are from the gaming industry. But in the US, we’ve seen many exits for startups that serve enterprises. Why is there such a big difference in the two ecosystems?

He answered that there was a rise in the entertainment and consumer-focused gaming industry in the US, but the trend is changing. He says you can see user demographics changing at Evernote, as the service first targeted individuals but subsequently many office workers started using it to share documents with colleagues. Many companies have adopted it as a business tool, and he calls this phenomenon the ‘consumerization of business tools’. Dave adds that in Japan, when companies choose what tools should be used, it is typically a top-down decision where those at the top make their employers use the same tools. He notes this business culture gap makes it difficult for Japanese startups to succeed with business-focused innovations.

He closed with some sound advice for Japanese entrepreneurs:

Don’t fear failure, hire people who are smarter than you, and get all the support you can get.

QuerySeeker helps app developers find the source of sudden downloads

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The Tokyo Game Show 2013 this past weekend showcased more than just games. Some companies were exhibiting solutions for game developers, one of the most interesting being QueryEye, a Nagoya-based startup that provides a marketing analysis solution. For mobile developers, if you see a sudden download surge for your app, you may have difficulty in figuring out what caused the spike. But QueryEye’s solution QuerySeeker gives you insight based on metrics and analytics that it collects. It continually crawls more than 45 million pages of popular blogs and app-focused websites. In this way you can figure out what social media post or online article helped give your app a boost. QuerySeeker was recently upgraded and so that now it can give you analytics in almost real time, updating every minute. It can be used for apps in a variety of app stores, like Apple’s AppStore, Google Play, KDDI’s au Smartpass, NTT Docomo’s dmenu, Amazon Kindle Store, the iTunes iBook Store, and Google Books. A single analysis package for an app is available for a monthly charge starting at 148,000 yen (about $1,500) not including the initial setup fee. The company was founded back in 2010 by Masashi Mizuno, known for…

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The Tokyo Game Show 2013 this past weekend showcased more than just games. Some companies were exhibiting solutions for game developers, one of the most interesting being QueryEye, a Nagoya-based startup that provides a marketing analysis solution.

For mobile developers, if you see a sudden download surge for your app, you may have difficulty in figuring out what caused the spike. But QueryEye’s solution QuerySeeker gives you insight based on metrics and analytics that it collects.

It continually crawls more than 45 million pages of popular blogs and app-focused websites. In this way you can figure out what social media post or online article helped give your app a boost.

QuerySeeker was recently upgraded and so that now it can give you analytics in almost real time, updating every minute. It can be used for apps in a variety of app stores, like Apple’s AppStore, Google Play, KDDI’s au Smartpass, NTT Docomo’s dmenu, Amazon Kindle Store, the iTunes iBook Store, and Google Books. A single analysis package for an app is available for a monthly charge starting at 148,000 yen (about $1,500) not including the initial setup fee.

The company was founded back in 2010 by Masashi Mizuno, known for contributing insightful mobile market analysis in Japanese tech media.

In the area of user retention, we’ve recently seen more than a few solution providers, including planBCD, Growth Push, Fello, and Korea’s 5Rocks. What QuerySeeker provides is somewhat different but helps developers find more efficient ways to market their apps and bring in more users.

Translation startup Conyac partners with World Jumper, introduces new API

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Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, announced today that it has partnered with Yaraku, the provider of website translation tool World Jumper. Since its launch back in 2009, Anydoor has been providing translation services between multiple languages using crowdsourced workers. The company recently set up its first overseas office in San Francisco, and is intensifying its global expansion efforts to better serve users worldwide and diversify the language base of its crowdsourced workers. To date the startup has raised a total of approximately 40 million yen ($431,000) from several Japanese investors. World Jumper was launched last year, and has been a translation service mainly for website owners. The company outsources orders to third-party agencies (such as Conyac or Gengo), but it also accumulates frequently-used translation requests and results in its database for future reference. This results in better translation results without the need to outsource to agencies, and it helps keep translation costs down while the quality improves as time goes by. The company raised 110 million yen (about $1.1 million) from several Japanese investors back in May. By joining forces, the two startups expect to serve more translation needs, but at affordable rates. Surely this sector…

conyac-worldjumper-logos

Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, announced today that it has partnered with Yaraku, the provider of website translation tool World Jumper.

Since its launch back in 2009, Anydoor has been providing translation services between multiple languages using crowdsourced workers. The company recently set up its first overseas office in San Francisco, and is intensifying its global expansion efforts to better serve users worldwide and diversify the language base of its crowdsourced workers. To date the startup has raised a total of approximately 40 million yen ($431,000) from several Japanese investors.

World Jumper was launched last year, and has been a translation service mainly for website owners. The company outsources orders to third-party agencies (such as Conyac or Gengo), but it also accumulates frequently-used translation requests and results in its database for future reference. This results in better translation results without the need to outsource to agencies, and it helps keep translation costs down while the quality improves as time goes by. The company raised 110 million yen (about $1.1 million) from several Japanese investors back in May.

By joining forces, the two startups expect to serve more translation needs, but at affordable rates. Surely this sector will be positively impacted by recently announced Tokyo Olympic Games coming up in 2020. With the partnership, Conyac also changed its web interface today and released a new API that allows third-party developers to integrate the translation solutions with their apps.

Japan’s Studio Ousia to launch new affiliate solution for bloggers

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Studio Ousia is the Tokyo-based startup known for its smartphone browser add-on Phroni. That service scans whatever website you’re browsing and augment the keywords with links to useful information resources such as Wikipedia or YouTube. The startup is currently developing a new affiliate solution for bloggers called Linkplaza, which is scheduled to launch by the end of the year. Today the startup began gathering 100 beta users who can try out the technology and give feedback. The new service is a server-side solution instead of what they’ve been doing with Phroni on the client-side. For media publishers or bloggers, you can easily add affiliate links to texts in your post by inserting a few lines of code to your blogging application. When your reader mouses over any of the links, a menu featuring supplementary links will be pop up on screen. In this space, we’ve seen several competitors develop similar technologies, such as Skimlinks and Viglink. Back in April, Kyodo News Agency reported that Skimlinks had raised an unknown amount of investments from NYC-based Greycroft Partners, Texas-based blog network Forum Foundry, Japanese angel investors Hiro Maeda, and Ryota Matsuzaki to expand to global markets, including Japan. This seems to indicate…

logo-linkplaza

Studio Ousia is the Tokyo-based startup known for its smartphone browser add-on Phroni. That service scans whatever website you’re browsing and augment the keywords with links to useful information resources such as Wikipedia or YouTube. The startup is currently developing a new affiliate solution for bloggers called Linkplaza, which is scheduled to launch by the end of the year. Today the startup began gathering 100 beta users who can try out the technology and give feedback.

The new service is a server-side solution instead of what they’ve been doing with Phroni on the client-side. For media publishers or bloggers, you can easily add affiliate links to texts in your post by inserting a few lines of code to your blogging application. When your reader mouses over any of the links, a menu featuring supplementary links will be pop up on screen.

In this space, we’ve seen several competitors develop similar technologies, such as Skimlinks and Viglink. Back in April, Kyodo News Agency reported that Skimlinks had raised an unknown amount of investments from NYC-based Greycroft Partners, Texas-based blog network Forum Foundry, Japanese angel investors Hiro Maeda, and Ryota Matsuzaki to expand to global markets, including Japan. This seems to indicate that the space will pick up momentum in the Japanese blogsphere soon as well.

Studio Ousia is an standout graduate from Keio University SFC’s incubation program. The company raised 70 million yen (about $864,000) from Nissay Capital back in February of last year.

link plaza

15 Japanese startups pitch at Rising Expo 2013, TwitCasting takes top prize

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See our Japanese coverage of Rising Expo here On Friday, Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures held its annual Rising Expo 2013 event which showcased up-and-coming 15 startups to a crowd of local investors and entrepreneurs [1]. Last year smartphone-based credit card payment provider Coiney won the top prize of 2 million yen (about $20,000), and the startup subsequently raised 100 million yen ($1 million) from CyberAgent Ventures, East Ventures, and an individual angel investor. Among the 15 participating startups this time around, TwitCasting was chosen as the audience favorite by way of voting. TwitCasting is a mobile live-broadcasting application that was launched back in February of 2010. Its userbase is currently around 3 million, a larger total than Ustream currently has in Japan. Almost 20% of it user base comes from the overseas, and it is getting more and more popular in places like Brazil and the Middle East. It raised 64.8 million yen (approximately $648,000) from East Ventures and Japanese entrepreneur Masao Ito (who runs User Local). TwitCasting was pitched by Yosuke Akamatsu (@Yoski) of Moi Corp. For this competition, every single finalist had 10 minutes for their pitch, longer than most other startup events. This gave Akamatsu a chance to…

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See our Japanese coverage of Rising Expo here

On Friday, Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures held its annual Rising Expo 2013 event which showcased up-and-coming 15 startups to a crowd of local investors and entrepreneurs [1]. Last year smartphone-based credit card payment provider Coiney won the top prize of 2 million yen (about $20,000), and the startup subsequently raised 100 million yen ($1 million) from CyberAgent Ventures, East Ventures, and an individual angel investor. Among the 15 participating startups this time around, TwitCasting was chosen as the audience favorite by way of voting.

twitcasting-at-risingexpo2013

TwitCasting is a mobile live-broadcasting application that was launched back in February of 2010. Its userbase is currently around 3 million, a larger total than Ustream currently has in Japan. Almost 20% of it user base comes from the overseas, and it is getting more and more popular in places like Brazil and the Middle East. It raised 64.8 million yen (approximately $648,000) from East Ventures and Japanese entrepreneur Masao Ito (who runs User Local).

TwitCasting was pitched by Yosuke Akamatsu (@Yoski) of Moi Corp. For this competition, every single finalist had 10 minutes for their pitch, longer than most other startup events. This gave Akamatsu a chance to explain the app’s user experience by showing a live online chat being broadcast by some high school girls. In a response to his question “Why you are TwitCasting”, the girls answered “Because its fun”. This impressed the audience a lot, possibly because typical middle-aged men usually have no chance to talk with young girls!

Like Coiney, which won the grand prize award at last year’s event, TwitCasting is expected to accelerate its global expansion and user acquisition moving forward.

To learn about all the other startups that pitched at Rising Expo, check out our overview below.

15 Startups from Rising Expo

1. Kosodate Share (co-operative childcare), pitched by Keiko Koda (Asmama)

This service allows you to ask other users in your neighborhood to take care of your children. Available tasks vary from babysitting to taking them to schools or kindergartens when you can’t manage. For parents, when you ask someone for a nursery task using the service, it will charge 500 yen (about $5) as a usage fee. The fee covers insurance in case of emergency, and which will ease your concerns about your child’s safety. To date the service has acquired more than 3,000 users.

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2. Conyac.cc, pitched by Naoki Yamada (Anydoor)

Conyac is a crowdsourced translation service for individual and corporate users. The company recently set up a San Francisco office and is intensifying its global service expansion. In terms of user demographic, the company’s major clients include buzz marketing sites, media websites, and social gaming studios. The startup has fundraised 40 million ($400,000) from United, Skylight Consulting, angel investor Anri Samata.

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3. Cafetalk, pitched by Kohtaro Hashizume (Small Bridge)

Cafetalk is a C2C marketplace focused on learning foreign languages online. The service itself does not provide any learning service but rather it connects teachers with students. To date it has acquired 15,000 students and 2,000 teachers who have posted more than 1,000 available lessons. The company has recently seen more than a few teachers who can make a living through this marketplace only. According to a Searchina interview with CEO Hashizume with, the service is in high demand among females in their 30s, who typically want to learn foreign languages as a hobby.

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4. Factelier, pitched by Toshio Yamada (Life Style Accent)

This startup claims to enable fashion enthusiasts buy Louis Vuitton-class fashions for prices as reasonable as Uniqlo. By eliminating the middleman between fashion retailers and clothing factories, the startup succeeded in bringing low-priced but high-quality Japan-made clothes to consumers worldwide. Prior to launching this startup, CEO Toshio Yamada worked at Gucci Paris when attending university, and he subsequently worked at Fashionwalker.com, one of Japan’s leading fashion e-commerce sites and the host of Tokyo Girls Collection. Readers may recall that my colleague Yukari Mitsuhashi previously spoke with him about how the company plans to change the industry.

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5. Kawaii Museum JPN, pitched by Taketo Tanaka

Kawaii Museum is a global platform for distributing Japanese character franchises. To date it has acquired more than 4 million likes on Facebook and several tens of thousand users for its Pinterest-like curation website. The startup is currently being developed by Ruby programmer Taketo Tanaka (below) who previously worked with DeNA. It was chosen back in March to be included in the fouth batch of KDDI Mugen Labo’s incubation program.

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6. Relux, pitched by Takaya Shinozuka (Loco Partners)

Relux is a satisfaction-guaranteed marketplace for Japanese inns. Every month its user number grows by 1.5 times, and the company expects to see more traffic from all around the world. To date the startup has received investments worth 60 million yen ($600,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and Recruit Incubation Partners. You can also check out our previous interview with Shinozuka.

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7. Base, pitched by Yuta Tsuruoka (Base)

Base is a Shopify-like instant e-commerce platform developed by Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. Since its launch back in November of 2012, the company has acquired more than 40,000 merchants. It raised 23 million yen ($230,000) back in January, and is aiming to transact 100 million yen ($1 million) in deals by the end of this year.

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8. Event Regist, pitched by Kosuke Hirayama (Event Regist)

Event Regist provides a platform for event organizers to market their events and issue tickets online. The service is available in Japanese, English, Indonesian, Thai, and traditional Chinese. Many players are fiercely competing in C2C-based ticket deals (e.g. Ticket Street or Ticket Camp), and its B2C business is dominated by box office companies (e.g. Ticket Pia). So the startup has decided to focus on the B2B business model. It raised seed investment from East Ventures, Skyland Ventures, and Shinwa Agency back in June, and has exclusively handled ticket issuing for events like the Tokyo Game Show 2013 and CEATEC 2013 Japan.

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9. Ubiregi, pitched by Keita Kido

Ubiregi is a cloud-based POS (point of sales) system that uses an iPad at storefronts. Compared to conventional systems, it can be eailsy deployed and maintained, especially for individual merchants like small restaurants, standing bars, and accessory shops. The startup was launched by Keita Kido in August of 2010, and raised around 20 million yen (over $200,000) from Voyage Ventures and Kronos Fund. It also has a capital tie-up with SalesForce.com. To date it has acquired 7,000 merchants nationwide, with the expectation of reaching 20,000. That would account for 1% of the Japanese cash register market.

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10. WebPay, pitched by Kei Kubo (FluxFlex)

WebPay is an easy-to-install, API-based card payment solution for Japanese e-commerce companies. In order to give developers an easy interface for payments, the startup partnered with GMO Payment Gateway, one of the oldest and biggest payment processing companies in Japan. Upon its official launch, the company also received an undisclosed amount of funding from CyberAgent Ventures, Architype, and GMO Payment Gateway.

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11. SLASH 7, pitched by Nobuhiro Hayashi (pLucky)

Slash–7 aims to gives website owners sophisticated data analysis for reasonable rates. Many executives at Japanese companies are becoming increasingly interested in making the most of big data analysis to improve their business. This company’s CEO believes it has an advantage over similar services (like Mixpanel) in terms of offering a variety of features for a cost. The company previously raised 20 million ($200,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and Incubate Fund.

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12. planBCD, pitched by Kenji Sudo (KAIZEN platform)

PlanBCD is a platform that helps developers improve the user interface of their web services. It provides developers with an A/B testing environment, especially useful for improving web content and interfaces. Using the service, you can also crowdsource the UI and UX improvement process. It raised seed funding worth $800,000 from Gree Ventures, GMO Venture Partners, and CyberAgent Ventures back in August.

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13. Seconds, pitched by Miku Hirano (Spicy Cinnamon)

Seconds is a mobile app for sharing photos between intimate friends or family members. You just take a photo, and choose your desired album for upload. Photos added are immediately visible to members who have access to that album, and those members can also upload pictures as well. The app was launched back in April, and it has acquired more than 40,000 users from three Asian countries in two months. It was incorporated in Singapore back in October and has engineers in HoChi Minh City (Vietnam) and Bangkok (Thailand). It received seed funding back in December from CyberAgent Ventures and other angel investors.

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14. TwitCasting (see above)

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15. Candy, pitched by Yosuke Fukada (Yoyo Holdings)

Incorporated in Singapore, this company plans to form a mobile economic ecosystem in emerging markets such as the Philippines. Since very few people pay with credit cards in these upcoming Southeast Asian markets, the company believes there are huge opportunities to cultivate business around monetary needs over there. Candy is a platform that gives users rewards which can be used to pay their cellphone bills in return for completing ‘microtasks’ such as participating in an online survey.

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  1. Disclaimer: I was involved in a preliminary screening process at the competition to choose the finalists with the other judges.  ↩

DrawChat lets you send hand-drawn pictures over Facebook Messenger

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See the original story in Japanese. Prime Again is a Tokyo-based startup known for having developed the photo decoration app DecoAlbum. Readers may recall that we interviewed them back in May. Recently the company unveiled a new app called DrawChat, allowing users to exchange messages using drawings and stickers. The app is available for both iOS and Android in Japanese, Thai, Chinese (simplified and traditional), and English. It costs 250 yen (or $2.99), but is currently free until September 9th as part of a limited time offer. While Line, Kakao Talk, and other messaging apps are competing fiercely in the Asia region, Facebook messaging is still somewhat inadequate when it comes to expressing yourself as you might with some mobile chat apps. While Facebook has 340 million monthly active users in the region, so companies cannot help but using for their user acquisition efforts. Send decorated messages to any of your Facebook friends The Draw Chat app makes use of Facebook’s Chat API. When you use the app, it’s easy to forget that it’s even running on the Facebook platform. You can send decorated messages to any of your Facebook friends, regardless of whether or not they have the app…

See the original story in Japanese.

drawchat-logo

Prime Again is a Tokyo-based startup known for having developed the photo decoration app DecoAlbum. Readers may recall that we interviewed them back in May. Recently the company unveiled a new app called DrawChat, allowing users to exchange messages using drawings and stickers. The app is available for both iOS and Android in Japanese, Thai, Chinese (simplified and traditional), and English. It costs 250 yen (or $2.99), but is currently free until September 9th as part of a limited time offer.

While Line, Kakao Talk, and other messaging apps are competing fiercely in the Asia region, Facebook messaging is still somewhat inadequate when it comes to expressing yourself as you might with some mobile chat apps. While Facebook has 340 million monthly active users in the region, so companies cannot help but using for their user acquisition efforts.

Send decorated messages to any of your Facebook friends

The Draw Chat app makes use of Facebook’s Chat API. When you use the app, it’s easy to forget that it’s even running on the Facebook platform.

You can send decorated messages to any of your Facebook friends, regardless of whether or not they have the app themselves. The company hopes people will use DecoAlbum to keep track of memories with friends, and that they will use DrawChat for their instant messaging. Among Facebook’s many APIs, there are very few apps using Facebook’s Chat API. The company aspires to dominate this niche by releasing more apps using the API.

Prime Again was chosen to be included in the first batch of startups at Docomo Innovation Village. The incubator plans to hold a Demo Day event on September 26th, where startups will unveil what they’ve been working on during the last six months.

The incubator started accepting applications for the second batch of the program yesterday. For startups that want to follow the example of PrimeAgain, now is a good time to apply.

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