I’ve made no secret that I’m a big fan of Ponos’s ‘Battle Cats’. It’s a ridiculously fun tower defense game with an incredible sense of humor. After its initial release back in mid-November 2012, the title managed to hit 2 million downloads in just under three months, which is impressive as the game isn’t riding on any of the major mobile game platforms. While it started off sort of slow, Gamebiz.jp reports that the last million came in a recent 15-day span, making for a good growth spurt. The iOS game has ranked high in Japan (see chart below), and it has performed respectably well in some Asian countries too. For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, I’ve made a quick video overview (see above) of what the game is about. For a free-to-play title, Battle Cats offers up a pretty deep game play experience and I’m still enjoying it months after initially discovering it. Let us know what you think of the game in the comments, or if you have a tip or just want to share a friend code (which helps a lot in this game), feel free to do so.
I’ve made no secret that I’m a big fan of Ponos’s ‘Battle Cats’. It’s a ridiculously fun tower defense game with an incredible sense of humor.
After its initial release back in mid-November 2012, the title managed to hit 2 million downloads in just under three months, which is impressive as the game isn’t riding on any of the major mobile game platforms. While it started off sort of slow, Gamebiz.jp reports that the last million came in a recent 15-day span, making for a good growth spurt. The iOS game has ranked high in Japan (see chart below), and it has performed respectably well in some Asian countries too.
For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, I’ve made a quick video overview (see above) of what the game is about. For a free-to-play title, Battle Cats offers up a pretty deep game play experience and I’m still enjoying it months after initially discovering it.
Let us know what you think of the game in the comments, or if you have a tip or just want to share a friend code (which helps a lot in this game), feel free to do so.
Gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) has just announced a new $10 million fund targeting high quality game developers. As many of you may know, the first recipient of this fund, San Francisco-based MunkyFun, was announced in December. But today GREE is disclosing more details about the size of the fund, as well as their criteria for investment. I spoke with Jim Ying, who is the VP of publishing and partners and GREE International, and he pointed out that even though the company has a high quality internal studio system, they wanted to figure out a way to work with more standout external developers: We’re hopeful that we can hit the next blockbuster, and for our fund, that’s what we’re banking on. We’re not going to be looking at the long tail of developers, but rather the focus is on talent and developers with the potential to make a top 25 game. What’s in store for developers? ¶ With each investment planned to be of $1 million or more, GREE explains that this fund will provide more than just money. In addition the company plans to share access to its teams and tools with frequent calls and on-site visits, most directly with…
Gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) has just announced a new $10 million fund targeting high quality game developers. As many of you may know, the first recipient of this fund, San Francisco-based MunkyFun, was announced in December. But today GREE is disclosing more details about the size of the fund, as well as their criteria for investment.
I spoke with Jim Ying, who is the VP of publishing and partners and GREE International, and he pointed out that even though the company has a high quality internal studio system, they wanted to figure out a way to work with more standout external developers:
We’re hopeful that we can hit the next blockbuster, and for our fund, that’s what we’re banking on. We’re not going to be looking at the long tail of developers, but rather the focus is on talent and developers with the potential to make a top 25 game.
With each investment planned to be of $1 million or more, GREE explains that this fund will provide more than just money. In addition the company plans to share access to its teams and tools with frequent calls and on-site visits, most directly with the San Fransisco team initially. There will also be a portion of this fund set aside for marketing as well, which Jim explains could be the biggest impediment for game developers looking for the next big hit in the US market in particular:
In western markets that’s the biggest challenge, I’d say. Developers can build a great game but if they can’t expose it to players eyeballs there’s not going to be the support and the revenue generation that the game deserves.
While GREE relies heavily on expensive advertising methods like television in its home market of Japan, Jim points out that the US and most Western markets have not yet matured to that level. So far most of the advertising in the US is still on a CPI basis, and in terms of marketing dollars for this fund, that’s what the company is referring to.
GREE has already made some inroads in South America with tie-ups with Brazil-based Vostu and Columbia’s Brainz. And this new fund focuses attention towards the region too, considering applicants not just from North America, but from South America. Jim adds, “There’s really a lot of creative talent down there. We want to make sure we capture the really talented developers.”
Moving forward in 2013, GREE is pinning high hopes on developers MunkyFun as well as Vancouver based IUGO. So it will be interesting to watch if they — along with any other partners GREE brings on board — can deliver the hit game that they are hoping for this year. Stay tuned!
I’m really enjoying all the fun photo applications coming out of Japan recently, and one in particular caught my eye, as it has been Japan’s top ranked iOS photo app for about a week now. It’s called Transform Camera (or in Japanese ‘Henshin Camera‘) and it essentially provides a digital version of those head-in-hole tourist photo stands that you often see while traveling. It provides about 150 disguises to choose from in total, and more are expected to be coming soon. So far the photo frames include a pirate costume (ala Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Caribbean), a French maid outfit, a wide selection of kimono and traditional dress, and even a pair of crossed light sabers just waiting for two pairs of hands to pose with them. Applying the frames is dead simple, as the app comes with some facial recognition tries to position the frame over the person’s face. Once you’ve taken your photo, you can save it to your camera roll, or then share it to your favorite social network. Interestingly, eje Inc — the company behind Transform Camera — says it might add location-specific frames in the future. I imagine how this would work is…
I’m really enjoying all the fun photo applications coming out of Japan recently, and one in particular caught my eye, as it has been Japan’s top ranked iOS photo app for about a week now. It’s called Transform Camera (or in Japanese ‘Henshin Camera‘) and it essentially provides a digital version of those head-in-hole tourist photo stands that you often see while traveling. It provides about 150 disguises to choose from in total, and more are expected to be coming soon.
So far the photo frames include a pirate costume (ala Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Caribbean), a French maid outfit, a wide selection of kimono and traditional dress, and even a pair of crossed light sabers just waiting for two pairs of hands to pose with them. Applying the frames is dead simple, as the app comes with some facial recognition tries to position the frame over the person’s face.
Once you’ve taken your photo, you can save it to your camera roll, or then share it to your favorite social network.
Interestingly, eje Inc — the company behind Transform Camera — says it might add location-specific frames in the future. I imagine how this would work is that once you visit a certain area or landmark, then a specific photo decoration would be unlocked. This feature could be a great addition, especially if eje Inc develops a deep repertoire of available frames, corresponding to major landmarks around the world. But we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with.
You can download Transform Camera over on the App Store. While all the descriptive text is in Japanese, the app’s interface is mostly in English and really simple to use.
I’m a Google Chrome user, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon due. But I’m always eager to see the alternatives that are available out there, and Osaka-based Fenrir Inc. is always an interesting company to watch with its unusual Sleipnir browser. Recently the company has been toying with a tabbed interface, and the latest iteration of its browser for Mac, Sleipnir 4, continues that experiment. The menu bar is slimmed down, with thumbnail previews of your tabs giving you a visual representation of the pages you’re on. Sleipnir 4 saves space by moving the text preview of the tab to a mouseover pop-out (see below), which allowed the designers to shrink the height of the toolbar to a mere 52 pixels. This gives a little bit of breathing room to the address bar, which has stepped into the shadows in a subtle grey display in the top right. To input an address, you can simply click it and edit, or press ⌥⌘ L [1]. This is not new to Sleipnir 4.0, as the quasi-hidden address bar feature was present in Sleipnir 3.5 as well. But the company’s marketing materials look to be spotlighting the address bar this time…
I’m a Google Chrome user, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon due. But I’m always eager to see the alternatives that are available out there, and Osaka-based Fenrir Inc. is always an interesting company to watch with its unusual Sleipnir browser.
Recently the company has been toying with a tabbed interface, and the latest iteration of its browser for Mac, Sleipnir 4, continues that experiment. The menu bar is slimmed down, with thumbnail previews of your tabs giving you a visual representation of the pages you’re on. Sleipnir 4 saves space by moving the text preview of the tab to a mouseover pop-out (see below), which allowed the designers to shrink the height of the toolbar to a mere 52 pixels.
This gives a little bit of breathing room to the address bar, which has stepped into the shadows in a subtle grey display in the top right. To input an address, you can simply click it and edit, or press ⌥⌘ L [1]. This is not new to Sleipnir 4.0, as the quasi-hidden address bar feature was present in Sleipnir 3.5 as well. But the company’s marketing materials look to be spotlighting the address bar this time around.
Sleipnir’s Browser tabs and address bar
And perhaps most interestingly, the browser supports a swipe gesture to navigate between tabs. For the most part, the gesture works well, although I did trip up on occasion and stumble into the browsers tiled interface, which is an alternative view that I’m not really a fan of [2]. There are other gestures available in the preferences, but they’re a little over-complicated in my opinion.
Just below the address bar is Sleipnir’s search bar, where there are some fun features to be found as well. I was pleased to find that I can add my own favorite search engines in addition to the defaults, just by adding a typical search URL string with ‘%@’ replacing the query. So this means you can use things like DuckDuckGo, YouTube, IMDB, or any search you like. Each one can then be triggered by a keyword shortcut, which is pretty handy. There’s also integration with Fenrir’s Pass service, which is useful too.
If you’d like to try it the new Sleipnir 4 for yourself, you can get it over at SleipnirBrowser.com. Try it out and let us know what you think.
You can find a full list of keyboard shortcuts here. ↩
Feel free to try it out for yourself, but I found it the tile interface a little bit confusing, without any obvious uses. ↩
When I first heard of Japan-based startup Tokyo Otaku Mode it was little more than a Facebook page sharing content about Japanese Otaku subculture. But as far as Facebook pages go, there wasn’t really anything little about it. At that time I think they had about half a million fans, and since then they have gone on to crack through ten million. Yes, you read that correctly. Ten. Million. To put that in perspective, that actually makes them bigger than both Elvis (7M fans) and Jesus (5.1M). In the last year alone, they saw new fans coming on board at an average rate of 600,000 per month. The content on Tokyo Otaku Mode is primarily curated. That doesn’t simply mean curation in the normal sense of tumblr-esque web clippings brought together in recycled stream of web regurgitation. The startup gets in touch with right holders not just to obtain permission to share content, but also to offer its services to help Japanese content creators reach global audiences. According to co-founder Nao Kodaka, many of those rights holders say that the Japanese market is not growing, and now they want to pursue audiences abroad. So far, Tokyo Otaku Mode has established…
When I first heard of Japan-based startup Tokyo Otaku Mode it was little more than a Facebook page sharing content about Japanese Otaku subculture. But as far as Facebook pages go, there wasn’t really anything little about it. At that time I think they had about half a million fans, and since then they have gone on to crack through ten million.
Yes, you read that correctly. Ten. Million.
To put that in perspective, that actually makes them bigger than both Elvis (7M fans) and Jesus (5.1M). In the last year alone, they saw new fans coming on board at an average rate of 600,000 per month.
The content on Tokyo Otaku Mode is primarily curated. That doesn’t simply mean curation in the normal sense of tumblr-esque web clippings brought together in recycled stream of web regurgitation. The startup gets in touch with right holders not just to obtain permission to share content, but also to offer its services to help Japanese content creators reach global audiences. According to co-founder Nao Kodaka, many of those rights holders say that the Japanese market is not growing, and now they want to pursue audiences abroad. So far, Tokyo Otaku Mode has established healthy relationships with those groups and individuals, and as a result, can publish high quality content regularly.
The thing that most astounds me about Tokyo Otaku Mode is that the company has managed to build such a community around Japanese culture with only a ten man team. I can’t help but contrast with this the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s own Cool Japan efforts, which is in a way are trying to do the very same thing – but obviously with not as much success.
Community first
Tokyo Otaku Mode began back in 2011. That wasn’t long after the earthquake, and Nao tells me that they wanted to try to do something that could help Japan. Facebook was just catching on in the country at that time [1]. And while there were more than a few fan groups and sites focused on anime, manga, and Japanese culture, Nao says that there weren’t really and Japanese individuals or media reaching out to the world on their own. He succinctly explains:
All we have is our content. Our uniqueness, and our content.
For a young company just starting out, Facebook was certainly a logical place to build up a fan base. It’s free, and there are no server costs.
Nao describes how his team experimented with different methods of Facebook posting, trying different numbers of photos to see if some worked better than others. He points out that fans eventually began tagging themselves in photos, which meant that their friends were also seeing Otaku Mode content too. In the end, it looks to have resulted in a perfect storm of viral content that still hasn’t let up (see fan growth in the chart on the right).
Tokyo Otaku Mode has previously received backing from a number of investors. I recently got in touch with one of them, Craig Mod, who explained to me what it was about Tokyo Otaku Mode that made him want to get behind them as an angel investor [2]. He describers them as a team of “total hustlers” and sharp marketers, bold enough to turn social media on its head:
[T]he fact that they saw an opportunity to leverage Facebook — and Facebook alone — as a platform to launch a publishing-like company was, to me, a first. Instead of spending tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars building complicated software for their company, they spent five minutes and used Facebook Pages as their home base on the internet. Obvious in hindsight but very avant garde even just a year ago.
Mo’ Money, Mo’ mobile
But you can’t make money directly on a Facebook fan page. So Otaku Mode was still faced with the problem that plagues so many in the content industry. How do you convert eyeballs into dollars? The strategy that the company has taken, and one which mentors have advised, is to drive Facebook traffic to its new website at OtakuMode.com, which just recently emerged from its private beta to become fully open to the public.
Nao explains explains that they hope to drive enough traffic to the site so that they could eventually advertise and convert those eyes into dollars.
The company has also dipped its toes in the mobile space as well, publishing its Otaku Camera application for iOS and Android, which turns your photos into manga style art. It isn’t the most original idea in the world, as Manga Camera did pretty much the exact same thing. But Otaku Camera is, in my opinion, far better executed. So far it has over 500,000 downloads, which is not a bad start. I’m told that in the future the application could sell special frames, in collaboration with certain rights holders.
UGC content: Momoiro Reku’s Hatsune Miku cosplay on Tokyo Otaku Mode
The site also now serves as an outlet for content creators as well, with a dedicated UGC section which features some really amazing stuff. There’s also a verification process, by which the best of the best content creators earn a sort of Twitter-style verified badge, provided that they meet a number of stringent criteria. They can upload content on their own, and leverage Otaku Mode’s platform to reach audiences overseas who they may not otherwise be able to reach.
The website also recently added a news section, where articles about the latest happenings in the world of manga and anime are posted. The company also foresees the possibility of branching into e-commerce as a possible monetization method. Nao says, “Picture Esty, but for Otaku.”
This young company will certainly be one to watch in the coming year, just to see if its good fortune can extend beyond its Facebook success. I’m not going to make any predictions, but if I were a betting man, I certainly wouldn’t wager against them.
In fact, Facebook’s role in post-earthquake communication highlighted the social network in the eyes of many in Japan. ↩
Craig previously wrote his impressions of the company for Contents Magazine in a wonderful article entitled “Our New Shrines“. Like almost everything Craig Mod writes or creates, I can’t recommend it enough. ↩
They say innovation is dead in Japan. Or at least that’s the prevailing narrative in Western media recently. Yes, many of the big companies synonymous with technology in Japan have been lagging behind. But the big picture is more than that, and we hope to show you that big picture one little piece at a time. Are who are we? We’re Sd Global, an English-language online news website born out of the Japanese site Startup Dating. As a team of writers living and exploring Japan, we hope to discover new developments and untold stories in Japan’s digital space and put them on display here. It could be college kids bootstrapping the next great mobile app, a Japanese multinational making waves overseas, or a high-tech vending machine – if it’s a game changer in the world of technology, then it’s in our sights. And we’ll do our best to bring you our own insights. Sd is an ambitious project, one that I’m personally very excited to join as a writer and editor. The Japanese tech sphere is ever-changing, and I’m eager to learn more about it from my colleagues, an all-star cast who have all been prominent voices in the community…
They say innovation is dead in Japan. Or at least that’s the prevailing narrative in Western media recently. Yes, many of the big companies synonymous with technology in Japan have been lagging behind. But the big picture is more than that, and we hope to show you that big picture one little piece at a time.
Are who are we? We’re Sd Global, an English-language online news website born out of the Japanese site Startup Dating. As a team of writers living and exploring Japan, we hope to discover new developments and untold stories in Japan’s digital space and put them on display here. It could be college kids bootstrapping the next great mobile app, a Japanese multinational making waves overseas, or a high-tech vending machine – if it’s a game changer in the world of technology, then it’s in our sights. And we’ll do our best to bring you our own insights.
Sd is an ambitious project, one that I’m personally very excited to join as a writer and editor. The Japanese tech sphere is ever-changing, and I’m eager to learn more about it from my colleagues, an all-star cast who have all been prominent voices in the community for some time now.
We always welcome feedback from you, the reader. So send us your story tips, suggestions, or criticisms anytime.
