news

Aviary to host its Photo Hack Day in Tokyo, registration now open

Rick Martin 2014.02.10

A few months back we wrote about New York-based Aviary, which at the time was making an effort to establish itself in Japan. And now this month, an upcoming event will be a big part of that effort, as Aviary’s recently announced hackathon, Photo Hack Day, is set to take place on the weekend of February 22/23. As we have noted previously, Japan is perhaps the most enthusiastic mobile photography nation, and we have covered an incredible amount of great photo applications that have been produced here. It’s not unlikely that many more fun apps will be created at this Japan version of Photo Hack Day, so if you are a developer that would like to participate, you can check out the Photo Hack Day site for more information on how to do that. Aviary’s previous Photo Hack Day took place at Facebook’s San Francisco headquarters, with over 300 developers and designers producing 63 mobile apps. The Japan event will take place at Mixi headquarters in Tokyo, with 300,000 yen as the first place award (about $3,000, out of $15,000 total in prizes). There are a number of API sponsors on board, with API demos taking place on the morning…

A few months back we wrote about New York-based Aviary, which at the time was making an effort to establish itself in Japan. And now this month, an upcoming event will be a big part of that effort, as Aviary’s recently announced hackathon, Photo Hack Day, is set to take place on the weekend of February 22/23.

As we have noted previously, Japan is perhaps the most enthusiastic mobile photography nation, and we have covered an incredible amount of great photo applications that have been produced here. It’s not unlikely that many more fun apps will be created at this Japan version of Photo Hack Day, so if you are a developer that would like to participate, you can check out the Photo Hack Day site for more information on how to do that.

Aviary’s previous Photo Hack Day took place at Facebook’s San Francisco headquarters, with over 300 developers and designers producing 63 mobile apps. The Japan event will take place at Mixi headquarters in Tokyo, with 300,000 yen as the first place award (about $3,000, out of $15,000 total in prizes).

There are a number of API sponsors on board, with API demos taking place on the morning of the 22nd before the actual hacking kicks off at 11:30am [1]. So if you’re a developer or designer who would like to get involved in what looks to be very interesting, and very focused hackathon, do drop over to the website for more information, or register here on Peatix.

Our readers may recall that Aviary recently launched the first international edition of its photo editor in Japan back in November. We briefly spoke with their CEO Tobais Peggs at that time, who gives a brief intro to his service in the video below.

I should also note that I’ve agreed to volunteer at the event as one of the judges in an effort to help out. So if you’re in attendance, do come say hello! ↩

news

Facebook unlikely to dethrone Line in Japan anytime soon

Rick Martin 2014.02.10

With over 340 million registered users around the world, Line’s success as a mobile platform is difficult to ignore. Over 9.2 billion messages are sent daily, and thanks to games and stickers Line brought in 12.2 billion yen in the last quarter [1]. Line’s home market of Japan is an interesting one to examine, given that 50 million of its registered users are based there [2]. As far back as a year ago, we declared here that ‘Line is the Japanese Facebook’, a comparison referring primarily to its dominance rather than any similarity in features. But how does the social internet landscape look in Japan in 2014? Let’s take a look at a couple of recent surveys that shed some light on this. Japanese market research site Fast-Ask recently polled a group of 680 people (ranging from teenages to those in their 40s) and asked them a barrage of questions. The most interesting question perhaps was (roughly translated) “Out of Facebook, Twitter, and Line, which would present the most trouble if it were suddenly taken away from you?” Almost half of respondents (49.0%) chose Line as their most essential service, with the rest of the respondents split between Twitter, Facebook,…

With over 340 million registered users around the world, Line’s success as a mobile platform is difficult to ignore. Over 9.2 billion messages are sent daily, and thanks to games and stickers Line brought in 12.2 billion yen in the last quarter [1].

Line’s home market of Japan is an interesting one to examine, given that 50 million of its registered users are based there [2]. As far back as a year ago, we declared here that ‘Line is the Japanese Facebook’, a comparison referring primarily to its dominance rather than any similarity in features. But how does the social internet landscape look in Japan in 2014? Let’s take a look at a couple of recent surveys that shed some light on this.

Japanese market research site Fast-Ask recently polled a group of 680 people (ranging from teenages to those in their 40s) and asked them a barrage of questions. The most interesting question perhaps was (roughly translated) “Out of Facebook, Twitter, and Line, which would present the most trouble if it were suddenly taken away from you?” Almost half of respondents (49.0%) chose Line as their most essential service, with the rest of the respondents split between Twitter, Facebook, and “I don’t know.”

Similarly, when asked “Which service on average do you use most?”, 40.4% of respondents said it was Line, with Twitter and Facebook polling at 32.6% and 23.5% respectively.

One of the reasons that Line has done so well is that it has managed to attract female users as well as male. The cute characters have helped its popularity in Thailand and Taiwan especially, where the service has 22 million and 17 million registered users respectively. A number of other ‘kawaii’ Japanese apps , including CocoPPa and Snapeee have won some attention in those regions as well, where made-in-Japan cuteness appears to be popular.

Here in Japan, Line is especially popular with the ladies, as another recent survey of over 2000 young mothers showed (average age 31.4 years old). In this poll, participants were asked which internet service they use at least once a week. Overwhelmingly, 70.4% say they use line at that frequency, up more than 20% on the previous year’s survey (see chart below).

In comparison, both Facebook and Twitter were also more popular than previous years in this survey, but their growth was not nearly as sharp as Line’s over the past year. If Facebook gets its mobile act together, it could make some further progress in Japan. But I think that if anyone is going to dethrone Line in its home market, it would have to be a service born on mobile. And that isn’t Facebook [3].

This according to Line, as of January 23, 2014. ↩
As of January 23, there are 22 million in Thailand, 17 million in each of Taiwan and Indonesia, 16 million in India, and 15 million in Spain. ↩
Facebook had about 21 million users in Japan when we last checked in. ↩

news

How Puzzle & Dragons connects with Japan’s commuters

Rick Martin 2014.02.06

People often look at GungHo Online Entertainment’s hit game Puzzle & Dragons and wonder why it’s such a strong mobile title. I’ve already written much about exactly why I like it personally, but there are some other reasons that I think have really contributed to its success here in Japan. I started thinking about this recently when I saw someone complaining about Dungeon Keeper on Twitter, and how it kicks you out of the game when you lose a connection [1]. Lots of games require persistent connections, and that’s certainly fine provided your day doesn’t take you through a maze of underground subway tunnels like many of us who live in urban centers such as Tokyo. But it really got me thinking about Puzzle & Dragons, and how and where I have been playing it over the past year or so. What’s remarkable about the game is not just that it doesn’t require a persistent connection, but that it only really requires a sporadic connection. During my own subway commute here in Tokyo, there are certain blind spots on my route where I usually can’t get a network connection. And because I’ve traveled that route so often, I can usually…

People often look at GungHo Online Entertainment’s hit game Puzzle & Dragons and wonder why it’s such a strong mobile title. I’ve already written much about exactly why I like it personally, but there are some other reasons that I think have really contributed to its success here in Japan.

I started thinking about this recently when I saw someone complaining about Dungeon Keeper on Twitter, and how it kicks you out of the game when you lose a connection [1]. Lots of games require persistent connections, and that’s certainly fine provided your day doesn’t take you through a maze of underground subway tunnels like many of us who live in urban centers such as Tokyo.

But it really got me thinking about Puzzle & Dragons, and how and where I have been playing it over the past year or so. What’s remarkable about the game is not just that it doesn’t require a persistent connection, but that it only really requires a sporadic connection.

During my own subway commute here in Tokyo, there are certain blind spots on my route where I usually can’t get a network connection. And because I’ve traveled that route so often, I can usually anticipate when I’ll lose my connection and when I’ll get it back [2]. P&D will always handle these drops like a champ. The actual dungeons (or rounds/levels) don’t need a connection at connection at all. So if you suddenly go offline, you won’t even realize it until you finish the level and the data tries to sync. So in reality, the game only really needs a connection during times when it phones home to sync data, such as:

The initial start screen
Entering or exiting a dungeon
Powering up or evolving a monster

If you happen to run into network issues during those times, you’ll typically see a ‘Connecting’ message, followed by either a ‘retry’ option or an error message (see below).

So very often I’ll find myself beginning a dungeon before going through a long underground stretch that has no signal, just so that I have something to do during that blacked out period. You’ve no doubt done something similar at some point, perhaps downloading all your podcasts or syncing an RSS reader before a flight.

The end result for P&D is a pretty frustration-free gaming experience, far removed from the likes of Dungeon Keeper mentioned above. And of course, a game that does not need a persistent connection is not unique to by any means, but I think the lesson to be learned here is that you want to make a game that’s a mainstream hit in the Japan market (or for a similar urban population with developed public transport), you need to make sure it doesn’t frustrate users when they suddenly lose a connection.

Thumbs up, but no more than necessary

I probably don’t need to point out that in addition to handling sporadic connections really well, P&D is a really easy game to play with one hand – again, a great advantage for Japan’s legions of train commuters who stand hanging one-armed from a strap during rush hours. You only really need your thumb to play, and since all the puzzle movement is in the lower half of the screen, you never find yourself reaching uncomfortably to the top half during gameplay (see lower left). No fingers necessary!

When Apple rolled out Control Center with iOS 7, it did lead to some unexpected problems for P&D players however (and probably many other games too). If you’ve played the game for any length of time, you’ll notice that sometimes when you try to bring an orb up from the very bottom row, you will sometimes inadvertently launch Command Center. It’s a huge annoyance (see lower right), and as much as I love the convenience of Command Center, I’m sure the folks at GungHo we’re not too pleased when it came out.

But overall, Puzzle & Dragons is still a pretty amazing little mobile game, one that I regularly see people playing during their commute – provided that I don’t have my head down playing it myself.

puzzle-dragons-thumb — Command Center sometimes gets in the way :(

I have not confirmed whether the game actually does this or not, but given that it came from Richard Gaywood, a super smart dude from TUAW (where I once briefly blogged), I’m taking this as a certainty. ↩
Usually my network ‘blind spot’ is between Omotesando and Futakotamagawa. Coverage has improved much over the years, thankfully. I should also point out that this is also a great game if you’re annoyed by the tunnels on the bullet train! ↩

news

Mechika Boola: Mobile video editing app from Japan makes boring clips beautiful

SCORE 1,702

Rick Martin 2014.02.04

I previously wrote about Honda’s RoadMovies, a very clever little app that lets you compose short 24-second montage videos by stringing together smaller bite-size clips. I confess, I rarely get excited about mobile video apps, and I’ve yet to bother much with platforms like Vine or any others. But I do like the RoadMovies creation process. It’s one of the few mobile video services that I think offers real value, for me at least. So I was pleased when I heard about Mechika Boola, a new app released just last week on iOS and Android that offers a very similar video composition process – but with a number of notable differences. The first oddity is the name, which I thought sounded a little familiar for some reason, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Kazuhiro Naya, the CEO of Glue-th Inc [1], the company that makes the app, explained it to me: The name comes from the Cinderella story (link). It is a magic spell to turn a miserable girl into a beautiful princess. Each shot recorded by this app may not be so beautiful. But the 15-second-movie edited by this app is always beautiful. This app is to…

I previously wrote about Honda’s RoadMovies, a very clever little app that lets you compose short 24-second montage videos by stringing together smaller bite-size clips. I confess, I rarely get excited about mobile video apps, and I’ve yet to bother much with platforms like Vine or any others. But I do like the RoadMovies creation process. It’s one of the few mobile video services that I think offers real value, for me at least.

So I was pleased when I heard about Mechika Boola, a new app released just last week on iOS and Android that offers a very similar video composition process – but with a number of notable differences. The first oddity is the name, which I thought sounded a little familiar for some reason, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Kazuhiro Naya, the CEO of Glue-th Inc [1], the company that makes the app, explained it to me:

The name comes from the Cinderella story (link). It is a magic spell to turn a miserable girl into a beautiful princess. Each shot recorded by this app may not be so beautiful. But the 15-second-movie edited by this app is always beautiful. This app is to turn your ordinary life into an extraordinary one, like Cinderella magic!

Like RoadMovies, you assemble short video clips to make longer compositions. In this case you stitch together six two-second clips to make a 15 second movie. The advantage over RoadMovies here is clear, with drag-and-drop clip re-arrangement possible if you need it, an action that resembles the icon rearrangement in iOS.

There’s also a handy feature that lets you customize the fade-to-black end title screen with a short text-based message. This improves on a big annoyance that I experienced with RoadMovies, which just tacks on the date automatically to movies.

You can also add visual filters and music as you can in RoadMovies, but here the selection of music is wider with 50 original songs to choose from and plans to add 10 to 20 more every month. I confess, I still like the high quality of the music available in RoadMovies, so I don’t really see that as an area where Honda’s app is lacking. But the variety in Mechika Boola is good to see.

Where Mechika Boola really stands out, however, is in its use of stamps/stickers. Stickers have been primarily a mobile photo trend to date, so it’s really interesting to see them used for video in a manner that does not suck. Because each ‘sub-clip’ is just two seconds long, you have a clearly pre-defined time period that your sticker will be on screen, so you don’t have to bother with start and end points for when your sticker is visible in the video. Stickers can be resized and repositioned too, but the delete sticker ‘x’ button is not always the easiest to execute (or at least, me and my fat fingers had difficulty with it).

There are more than 200 stickers currently available to use in the app, giving you lots of fun options to play with.

I’m told that the company will be focusing on user growth for its first two years, but one aspect of their business model will eventually be to sell premium stickers and music. Given the success that Line has seen with that model, and the fact that consumers in Japan are accustomed to such purchases, this makes a lot of sense.

So far my own experience with Mechika Boola has been largely positive, but given that it’s such a young app, there are still a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out in my view. There are a lot of default settings that are set to favor the company instead of the user. For example, Facebook sharing is on by default, ‘share to public timeline’ is on by default [2], and ‘save video in high quality’ is turned off by default. Overall the experience shows a disregard for first-time users that is very unsettling to me. But once you figure out where the hazards lie, you can easily navigate around them. Thankfully, when speaking to Kazu about my own concerns, he was pretty considerate and noted that they’re actively listening to user feedback in these early days.

A surprisingly quick start

For an app that has been online for such a short time, I was really surprised to see how active the platform was. Some of the users on Mechika Boola have over 6000 followers, and that really puzzled me. How did they get so many users so fast? Kazu attributes the apps fast growth to a partnership his company has with Asahi Broadcasting Corporation to feature their app in a weekly late-night television show called Gya Movie Sharing. The show will broadcast until the end of March, and so far it has really given the app a boost, says Kazu:

It has dramatically helped Mechika Boola grow so fast and the daily downloaded number is more than 15,000 and the number has been increasing day by day. […] More than 2,000 videos have been daily created and the number has been increasing day by day.

Those are impressive figures, but it remains to be seen whether the app can sustain its growth beyond the span of this television feature and eventually make a profit for the company. The limited video app offerings on both iOS and Android will likely ensure that it remains at least somewhat visible in the ‘Photo & Video’ category on iOS and in the ‘Media & Video’ category on Google Play. But we’ll have to wait and see how it fares.

Glue-th is currently a ten-person team, and I understand they will be looking to raise funds this April. If you’d like to try their app out for yourself, you can pick up Mechika Boola for free over on the App Store or on Google Play.

Another odd alphabet-soupy Japanese company name. ↩
I was startled and disappointed to see my own video shared to the public timeline when that was not my intention. ↩

news

DeNA’s Manga Box sees 2M downloads in just over a month

SCORE 1,348

Rick Martin 2014.02.03

Back in December, Japan’s DeNA launched its comic book app Manga Box. Since then it has fared remarkably well on both iOS and Android with over 2 million downloads as of January 7th. In Japan in particular, Manga Box has ranked high in the Books category on iOS (currently third), and is the top Comics app on Google Play. But it still has room to grow beyond its home market, and considering that most of the manga are available in both Japanese and English, it should be a must-have for English-speaking comics fans. I’ve been using the app for a few weeks and I found that it had a surprising use as a language learning too. For example, I can try reading an issue in Japanese (a language I’m studying), and then I can switch the app to English to clarify any difficult parts that I may not have understood. Similarly, I think Japanese students of English could do the same by first reading in English. The app takes the form of a weekly digital magazine, with about 20 episodes of various comics included. It’s a pretty simple application to use with granular push notifications that let you select which…

Back in December, Japan’s DeNA launched its comic book app Manga Box. Since then it has fared remarkably well on both iOS and Android with over 2 million downloads as of January 7th. In Japan in particular, Manga Box has ranked high in the Books category on iOS (currently third), and is the top Comics app on Google Play. But it still has room to grow beyond its home market, and considering that most of the manga are available in both Japanese and English, it should be a must-have for English-speaking comics fans.

I’ve been using the app for a few weeks and I found that it had a surprising use as a language learning too. For example, I can try reading an issue in Japanese (a language I’m studying), and then I can switch the app to English to clarify any difficult parts that I may not have understood. Similarly, I think Japanese students of English could do the same by first reading in English.

The app takes the form of a weekly digital magazine, with about 20 episodes of various comics included. It’s a pretty simple application to use with granular push notifications that let you select which new issues you want to be notified about. You’ll be told when there are new comics you like, but for those you don’t like, the app won’t bother you.

I confess, I’ve never been a big manga fan but I’ve been enjoying Manga Box so far. I’m especially glad to see DeNA take a global approach to releasing its app, perhaps aware the enthusiastic market for Japanese manga abroad. When Line Manga launched in April of last year, it was for the Japanese market only, and to my knowledge the company hasn’t expanded to other languages since then. But on the other hand, Line Manga is Japan’s top grossing iOS app in the Books category, and the top grossing Comics category app on Google Play. So from a business point of view, maybe Line doesn’t need to expand Line Manga just yet.

So how will DeNA monetize its Manga Box app? I’m told that the company’s model is to sell stand-alone books, both digital and printed. So a user could buy the first volume of a title after all its episodes have been published. For the time being, users can also gain access to new episodes though social sharing via Twitter for example.

It’s good to see more companies involved in the promotion of Japanese culture online. Companies like Tokyo Otaku Mode, for example, have shown that the West has an appetite for anime and manga, so it is encouraging to see a service like Manga Box that helps fans around the world consume it.

If you’d like to download Manga Box, you can get it for free on iOS of Google Play.

news

Pirate3D to bring its Buccaneer 3D Printer to Japan

Rick Martin 2014.01.30

We have written about a number of fun Japan-based 3D printing projects. In a country like this one known for creative product design, 3D fabrication already off to a promising start. But in order for this space to thrive on a large scale, printers need to be accessible and affordable. We’ve previously written about a number of shared workspaces, including CUBE and FabCafe, which are helping in this regard. We’re also pleased to see more printers going on sale here in Japan, including the Buccaneer 3D printer, whose parent company, Singapore-based Pirate3D, has just signed a distribution deal for Japan with Keienu Trading Company. Its printers are set to go on sale in the country in late May or early June. It’s a little surprising to me to see that Pirate3D really didn’t waste any time moving in on the Japan market, seeing as how they are still just in the pre-order phase elsewhere. So I asked the company’s management engineer Evgeny Lazarenko why Japan represented such an important market for them. He explained: Japan is arguably the most developed consumer market in Asia in terms of purchasing power. […] The nation is quick to experiment with new products, and…

We have written about a number of fun Japan-based 3D printing projects. In a country like this one known for creative product design, 3D fabrication already off to a promising start. But in order for this space to thrive on a large scale, printers need to be accessible and affordable. We’ve previously written about a number of shared workspaces, including CUBE and FabCafe, which are helping in this regard.

We’re also pleased to see more printers going on sale here in Japan, including the Buccaneer 3D printer, whose parent company, Singapore-based Pirate3D, has just signed a distribution deal for Japan with Keienu Trading Company. Its printers are set to go on sale in the country in late May or early June.

It’s a little surprising to me to see that Pirate3D really didn’t waste any time moving in on the Japan market, seeing as how they are still just in the pre-order phase elsewhere. So I asked the company’s management engineer Evgeny Lazarenko why Japan represented such an important market for them. He explained:

Japan is arguably the most developed consumer market in Asia in terms of purchasing power. […] The nation is quick to experiment with new products, and 3D printing is all about experimentation. The ‘monozukuri’ philosophy is deeply ingrained into Japanese mentality. This nationwide maker spirit is exactly what Pirate3D is looking for. We believe that 3D printing market in Japan is going to explode very soon, and cultural element will be one of the major contributing factors to this.

He adds that because Japan cares about inspired product design, that the Buccaneer 3D printer will “resonate with tastes” in Japan.

For those not familiar with Pirate3D and its Buccaneer 3D printer, we should point out that the product is still pretty young, having launched a very successful Kickstarter campaign last summer that raised $1.4 million. The product itself focuses on ease-of-use, sporting a minimalist design without any buttons, just a light indicator. It can print continuously for over 200 hours, and can even function as a server through wireless connection with PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

While the they hesitate to make any sales projections, Evgeny says maybe they can move hundreds of units per month by September. A representative from their Japanese distributor, Keienu Trading, says that they have seen “explosive growth” in Japanese demand for 3D printers in the past year, and so far their distribution partners have all shown a “significant and promising” reaction to the Buccaneer 3D printer and its potential.

Check out the video above for an overview of the Buccaneer 3D. Pirate3D was backed by Red Dot Ventures and incubated by the Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES).

news

Hello Kitty dungeon featured in latest Puzzle & Dragons collaboration

Rick Martin 2014.01.28

GungHo Online Entertainment has teamed up with Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty, to launch yet another cross-game collaboration. The promotion will bring Hello Kitty characters into GungHo’s hit mobile game, Puzzle and Dragons, while P&D themed decorations will be available for players of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty World. For P&D players it represents a chance to collect rare Hello Kitty themed monsters for your team. Anyone who has tried the collaboration dungeon will no doubt have been rewarded with a few of the crappier cards. But there are some quality cards to be found, especially if you try the Hello Kitty Rare Egg Machine (pictured above, center), a special themed ‘gacha’ machine 1. Some of the more rare and powerful monsters available are pictured below. Overall I think the collaboration will be a good one for Sanrio, promoting their game to the millions of P&D players in Japan and around the world. Conversely, I don’t think there will be much value for GungHo by promoting Puzzle & Dragons inside Hello Kitty World. The latter is a pretty unremarkable game unless you’re a major Kitty-phile, and it won’t bring GungHo any great amount of new users. But the Hello Kitty IP…

GungHo Online Entertainment has teamed up with Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty, to launch yet another cross-game collaboration. The promotion will bring Hello Kitty characters into GungHo’s hit mobile game, Puzzle and Dragons, while P&D themed decorations will be available for players of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty World.

For P&D players it represents a chance to collect rare Hello Kitty themed monsters for your team. Anyone who has tried the collaboration dungeon will no doubt have been rewarded with a few of the crappier cards. But there are some quality cards to be found, especially if you try the Hello Kitty Rare Egg Machine (pictured above, center), a special themed ‘gacha’ machine 1. Some of the more rare and powerful monsters available are pictured below.

Overall I think the collaboration will be a good one for Sanrio, promoting their game to the millions of P&D players in Japan and around the world.

Conversely, I don’t think there will be much value for GungHo by promoting Puzzle & Dragons inside Hello Kitty World. The latter is a pretty unremarkable game unless you’re a major Kitty-phile, and it won’t bring GungHo any great amount of new users. But the Hello Kitty IP is an asset to have in its game, and that’s the primary goal here, I expect.

You can check out more of the Hello Kitty monsters available in this collaboration over on the Puzzle & Dragons database.

I got a Cinnamoroll. ↩

news

Japanese mobile auction site for women wins at KDDI Demo Day [Photos]

Rick Martin 2014.01.27

Last week KDDI Mugen Labo held a demo day event for its fifth batch of incubated startups. Our readers may recall that we previewed this batch of five startups back in September, which included: Photo curation service Zukan Personal finance app Dr. Wallet Mobile auction app Smaoku (Smart Auction) Bike parking service PedalRest Streaming lecture service Aoi Zemi These five startups pitched their services on stage at the Hikarie event hall in Shibuya at the demo day event, showing the progress they’ve made over the past few months. In the end it was Smaoku that was awarded the top prize of the day, with CEO Daisaku Harada impressing the crowd in attendance with his mobile auction app for ladies. Our readers may recall that we interviewed them last October. Smaoku, while it is not a mobile flea market app, continues the recent Japanese trend of mobile C2C commerce services that we have seen over the past year. Other notable startups in this space include Mercari and Fril to name just a few. Smaoku, Harada has said, will leverage the game-like feeling of auctions in order to stand out from the crowd here in Japan. In his presentation, he explained that…

Last week KDDI Mugen Labo held a demo day event for its fifth batch of incubated startups. Our readers may recall that we previewed this batch of five startups back in September, which included:

Photo curation service Zukan
Personal finance app Dr. Wallet
Mobile auction app Smaoku (Smart Auction)
Bike parking service PedalRest
Streaming lecture service Aoi Zemi

These five startups pitched their services on stage at the Hikarie event hall in Shibuya at the demo day event, showing the progress they’ve made over the past few months. In the end it was Smaoku that was awarded the top prize of the day, with CEO Daisaku Harada impressing the crowd in attendance with his mobile auction app for ladies. Our readers may recall that we interviewed them last October.

Smaoku, while it is not a mobile flea market app, continues the recent Japanese trend of mobile C2C commerce services that we have seen over the past year. Other notable startups in this space include Mercari and Fril to name just a few. Smaoku, Harada has said, will leverage the game-like feeling of auctions in order to stand out from the crowd here in Japan.

In his presentation, he explained that the amount of money they have transacted on Smaoku has been growing exponentially over the past few months. As you can see in one of the graphics from Harada’s presentation (see all his slides below). Back in November they were just transacting in the tens of thousands of yen (hundreds of dollars). But that grew by about four times in December to amount to millions of yen, and in January it grew again by five times to be in the tens of millions. These numbers, while admittedly rather vague, are still pretty encouraging.

I was also a little curious about their upside-down hanger logo. Daisaku explained to me that it sort of reflects the experience they want their users to have, turning their frowns upside-down in a similar way. I thought that was kind of cute, certainly a memorable image anyway.

You can check out a few more photos from the event below. We should note that photo curation service Zukan.com won the ‘Audience Prize’ at the event. But we look forward to hearing more from all five of these young startups in the next year or so. So stay tuned!

news

Couples app Between is now Japan’s top social networking app [Video]

Between
VCNC

SCORE 1,260

Rick Martin 2014.01.24

Kei Kajitani is the Japan general manager of Korea-based VCNC, heading up the company’s efforts to promote their couples app Between here in Japan. After the app’s recent 2.0 release back in December, it appears to have picked up some steam in a number of markets around the world, including Japan where it is has ranked as the top social networking iOS app since Wednesday. He tells me that since that update they have acquired more than 600,000 new downloads in the span of less than a month. Between was given a featured banner position in the App Store in 94 countries, giving it a great boost in global visibility. The app surpassed 5 million users last month, with the majority – or about 60% – coming from its home market of Korea, and about 10% in Japan and 10% in China. Kei adds: [In addition to increased] exposure, our active rate increased significantly due to product improvement. Our average user now stays for 17 minutes per day, where it used to be 10 minutes per day last year around this time. During Christmas time Between was decorated with a festive Christmas theme (see center image below) and that resulted…

Kei Kajitani is the Japan general manager of Korea-based VCNC, heading up the company’s efforts to promote their couples app Between here in Japan. After the app’s recent 2.0 release back in December, it appears to have picked up some steam in a number of markets around the world, including Japan where it is has ranked as the top social networking iOS app since Wednesday.

He tells me that since that update they have acquired more than 600,000 new downloads in the span of less than a month. Between was given a featured banner position in the App Store in 94 countries, giving it a great boost in global visibility.

The app surpassed 5 million users last month, with the majority – or about 60% – coming from its home market of Korea, and about 10% in Japan and 10% in China. Kei adds:

[In addition to increased] exposure, our active rate increased significantly due to product improvement. Our average user now stays for 17 minutes per day, where it used to be 10 minutes per day last year around this time.

During Christmas time Between was decorated with a festive Christmas theme (see center image below) and that resulted in many users sharing screenshots of their homescreen, thus letting friends know about the app as well.

In addition to competing with general messaging apps like Line in Japan, Between faces some local competition from Pairy, a Japanese couples app developed by Timers, a startup backed by NTT Docomo Ventures. That company raised 100 million yen (almost $1 million) from a number of Japanese investment firms, including NTT Docomo Ventures.

While VCNC’s user base is still very heavily skewed towards South Korea, the company will continue its overseas push, having raised $2.8 million last January for just that purpose.

The company has a new demo video for their app as well which you can check out below.

news

Japan’s Yesterscape improves its time-machine app, enables web upload of old memories

Rick Martin 2014.01.22

One of my favorite startups to write about last year was Kyoto-based Qooq Inc. As you may recall, this is the company that operates a so-called ‘time machine’ application, Yesterscape, which lets you view images of the past through your smartphone camera. So for example, you might take a picture of your parents in front of the Eiffel Tower in France this year, and then revisit it five years later and see the same picture through your camera thanks to this augmented reality app. While this process works great for images that you’ve taken on your smartphone, what about old images that you might have taken before you even had a smartphone? What about photos your parents or grandparents might have taken? How can we input those? Today Yesterscape has taken a step towards solving that problem, now providing a web interface that allows for the uploading of photos from your PC. The interface still needs some polishing, but I managed to upload a picture of my great-grandparents, and pin it in time and space as best I could using the Google Maps and Streetview interface. The latter was a bit tricky for me on a PC, determining the direction…

One of my favorite startups to write about last year was Kyoto-based Qooq Inc. As you may recall, this is the company that operates a so-called ‘time machine’ application, Yesterscape, which lets you view images of the past through your smartphone camera.

So for example, you might take a picture of your parents in front of the Eiffel Tower in France this year, and then revisit it five years later and see the same picture through your camera thanks to this augmented reality app.

While this process works great for images that you’ve taken on your smartphone, what about old images that you might have taken before you even had a smartphone? What about photos your parents or grandparents might have taken? How can we input those?

Today Yesterscape has taken a step towards solving that problem, now providing a web interface that allows for the uploading of photos from your PC. The interface still needs some polishing, but I managed to upload a picture of my great-grandparents, and pin it in time and space as best I could using the Google Maps and Streetview interface. The latter was a bit tricky for me on a PC, determining the direction and angle of the photo, data that you don’t need to worry about when adding photos with the smartphone app. You can see a sample upload interface in the screenshot below:

The new interface enables users to bridge both space and time to pin a photo, something they can’t do with the app, as founder Hide Nu explains:

I have heard some users say that they want to upload picture taken somewhere far away, perhaps from an old trip or from a past home. The new interface will allow users to upload their pictures via the web instead of actually going to the location. With this they can easily place their important photographs in time and space. To make Yesterscape a common architecture in augmented reality for photograph in the near future, we have to have a convenient tool to [handle] old media.

He also explains that for some companies or organizations that have many historical photos, they will offer a special account with a customized interface for free.

Interestingly, they have also added a function where users can import a Sekai Camera KMZ file to import their photos and data from that now defunct augmented reality application. Our readers may recall that Sekai Camera closed down last month, perhaps a service that consumers were not ready for when it launched five years back.

It may be possible that the world is still not yet ready for Yesterscape. My guess is that the app is not overwhelmed with users just yet. But now that smartphones have made (networked) photographers of just about everyone, maybe by the time the world is ready, Yesterscape will be prepared and can be waiting for them [1].

The idea of preserving our history is a notion that everyone should be enthusiastic about, and I hope that especially here in Japan, a place with such an incredibly rich history, that Yesterscape can find some support.

You can check out a brief intro to Yesterscape from the company’s CTO, Oscar Peredo, below.

With more compact and DSLR cameras getting wireless capabilities, I’d say that there’s lots of long term potential for an idea like this. ↩

Rick Martin

Articles

Aviary to host its Photo Hack Day in Tokyo, registration now open

Facebook unlikely to dethrone Line in Japan anytime soon

How Puzzle & Dragons connects with Japan’s commuters

Thumbs up, but no more than necessary

Mechika Boola: Mobile video editing app from Japan makes boring clips beautiful

A surprisingly quick start

DeNA’s Manga Box sees 2M downloads in just over a month

Pirate3D to bring its Buccaneer 3D Printer to Japan

Hello Kitty dungeon featured in latest Puzzle & Dragons collaboration

Japanese mobile auction site for women wins at KDDI Demo Day [Photos]

Couples app Between is now Japan’s top social networking app [Video]

Japan’s Yesterscape improves its time-machine app, enables web upload of old memories

Recent Articles

Trends

Rick Martin

Articles

Related news

Related news

Thumbs up, but no more than necessary

Related news

A surprisingly quick start

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Recent Articles

Trends