news

Japan brings brilliant colored designs to boring paper receipts

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.09.13

If you go into a Japanese convenience store, you might notice a little box by the register where customers can trash their unwanted receipts. Since the usual purchase is relatively small, many people don’t bother to keep the receipts. But this could change, thanks to a creative little idea called the Design Receipt Project. This project focuses on transforming receipts into a new communication tool. The initiative was started by Hiroaki Sato, and over 16 designers joined in to put their designs on the back of receipts. One of the many talented designers on board is includes Issei Kitagawa, the lead designer at Graph, a design and branding company. The colorful receipt paper can be purchased over on the DRP official website, starting at 2,310 yen. In the digital age, receipts are one of the few physical things we all still come in contact with. But yet no one pays attention to the empty white space on the back. At least, not until now. Thanks to the Design Receipt Project, we may see this previously empty space suddenly being used in new and creative ways! image via. Roomie

If you go into a Japanese convenience store, you might notice a little box by the register where customers can trash their unwanted receipts. Since the usual purchase is relatively small, many people don’t bother to keep the receipts. But this could change, thanks to a creative little idea called the Design Receipt Project.

This project focuses on transforming receipts into a new communication tool. The initiative was started by Hiroaki Sato, and over 16 designers joined in to put their designs on the back of receipts. One of the many talented designers on board is includes Issei Kitagawa, the lead designer at Graph, a design and branding company. The colorful receipt paper can be purchased over on the DRP official website, starting at 2,310 yen.

In the digital age, receipts are one of the few physical things we all still come in contact with. But yet no one pays attention to the empty white space on the back. At least, not until now.

Thanks to the Design Receipt Project, we may see this previously empty space suddenly being used in new and creative ways!

image via. Roomie

news

Now with 200M game downloads, Line Corporation adds MapleStory title

Rick Martin 2013.09.12

Line Corporation made some headlines earlier today when it announced that its games lineup had surpassed 200 million downloads [1]. There are more than 230 million registered users for its Line chat platform, and many of them are spending time with the company’s many casual game titles to date. What’s most interesting to me about Line’s gaming success so far is that it has all been with relatively unremarkable IP. Its biggest game to date in terms of downloads has been Line Pop with over 32 million, followed by Line Bubble with 25 million. But I’m expecting even bigger figures when Sonic Dash comes to Line this fall. Nexon’s Maple Story celebrated its tenth anniversary this year In addition to announcing its lofty downloads milestone, the company also rolled out Line MapleStory Village today. This is a farm/town-building game from the successful Maple Story franchise by Nexon, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. Line MapleStory Village is currently available in Japanese, English, and traditional Chinese, and is available worldwide with the exceptions of China and South Korea. This game should fare well around the Asia region even without those big markets [2]. If you’d like to give it a…

Line Corporation made some headlines earlier today when it announced that its games lineup had surpassed 200 million downloads [1]. There are more than 230 million registered users for its Line chat platform, and many of them are spending time with the company’s many casual game titles to date.

What’s most interesting to me about Line’s gaming success so far is that it has all been with relatively unremarkable IP. Its biggest game to date in terms of downloads has been Line Pop with over 32 million, followed by Line Bubble with 25 million. But I’m expecting even bigger figures when Sonic Dash comes to Line this fall.

Nexon’s Maple Story celebrated its tenth anniversary this year

In addition to announcing its lofty downloads milestone, the company also rolled out Line MapleStory Village today. This is a farm/town-building game from the successful Maple Story franchise by Nexon, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year.

Line MapleStory Village is currently available in Japanese, English, and traditional Chinese, and is available worldwide with the exceptions of China and South Korea. This game should fare well around the Asia region even without those big markets [2].

If you’d like to give it a try, you can get it now as a free download for iOS and Android. Check out the trailer below for a preview.

For more information on the growth of Line and its vast repertoire of games, please check out our interactive Line Timeline which chronicles its growth from its launch back in 2011.

The milestone was reached on September 6th, according to the company. ↩
And even though it is a stupid farm/town-building game… ↩

news

Japanese romantic simulation chat app adds more characters, hits 1M downloads

Rick Martin 2013.09.12

A few weeks back we told you about an unusual chat app from Japan called Henshin Kudasai. Roughly translated as ‘Please text me back’, the interesting thing about this application is that it doesn’t actually require any second person for you to engage in a flirty chat. It’s a romantic texting simulation game. When we last checked in, the app had 500,000 downloads just after its launch. And now, according to the folks at over at Growing App Henshin Kudasai has surpassed a million downloads since then. Last week, there were six new virtual characters added for users to chat with, bringing the total to 32. That seems to have given the game a boost because in the past week the game has been gaining momentum, becoming the top simulation game in the iOS app store, and breaking into the top 20 free apps overall (see chart below). For Android, it has also fared pretty well, peaking at the third position among all free apps on Google Play in Japan back on August 26th. The game was created by Japanese internet company Basic, and if you’d like to give it a try, it’s available as a free download on iOS…

A few weeks back we told you about an unusual chat app from Japan called Henshin Kudasai. Roughly translated as ‘Please text me back’, the interesting thing about this application is that it doesn’t actually require any second person for you to engage in a flirty chat. It’s a romantic texting simulation game.

When we last checked in, the app had 500,000 downloads just after its launch. And now, according to the folks at over at Growing App Henshin Kudasai has surpassed a million downloads since then.

Last week, there were six new virtual characters added for users to chat with, bringing the total to 32. That seems to have given the game a boost because in the past week the game has been gaining momentum, becoming the top simulation game in the iOS app store, and breaking into the top 20 free apps overall (see chart below).

For Android, it has also fared pretty well, peaking at the third position among all free apps on Google Play in Japan back on August 26th.

The game was created by Japanese internet company Basic, and if you’d like to give it a try, it’s available as a free download on iOS and Android.

henshin-kudasai-app-annie — Henshin Kudasai rankings on iOS, via App Annie

news

Learning platform iKnow helps Japanese people study up for Ad-tech Tokyo

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.09.12

We recently wrote about a new education app called Chojimaku which uses subtitled movies to teach English. Another well-established learning platform from Japan is iKnow, which has 1.2 million registered users. It was recently announced that the service has added new content to its platform, a very specific course that lets attendees prepare for Ad:tech Tokyo, taking place next week. Studying English is one of the top priorities for many Japanese people, especially working professionals. The new content is titled ‘Mastering English for the marketing and advertisement industry in a week’. By making the reason for learning very clear, it motivates learners and to better prepare for a specific event or occasion. You need to sign up for the service to use the content, but it is provided for free. There are over 100 marketing-related words available to learn, and lessons to enhance your listening ability for this topic. Studying English is one of the top priorities for many Japanese people, especially working professionals. So it is only natural that in the Japanese market, there have always been services in this field, including Rarejob which recently got funded. What differentiates iKnow from other services is that its courses are based…

We recently wrote about a new education app called Chojimaku which uses subtitled movies to teach English. Another well-established learning platform from Japan is iKnow, which has 1.2 million registered users. It was recently announced that the service has added new content to its platform, a very specific course that lets attendees prepare for Ad:tech Tokyo, taking place next week.

Studying English is one of the top priorities for many Japanese people, especially working professionals.

The new content is titled ‘Mastering English for the marketing and advertisement industry in a week’. By making the reason for learning very clear, it motivates learners and to better prepare for a specific event or occasion. You need to sign up for the service to use the content, but it is provided for free.

There are over 100 marketing-related words available to learn, and lessons to enhance your listening ability for this topic.

Studying English is one of the top priorities for many Japanese people, especially working professionals. So it is only natural that in the Japanese market, there have always been services in this field, including Rarejob which recently got funded. What differentiates iKnow from other services is that its courses are based on a spaced-repetition system with a strong focus on obtaining more vocabulary.

The company behind iKnow is Cerego, founded way back in the year 2000. The company provides online language learning services to consumers as well as enterprises inside and outside of Japan. There are over 100 companies that have deployed the learning platform, including Softbank group with its 20,000+ employees.

To see how iKnow works, you can check out the video below.

news

Brave Frontier: Alim’s first mobile game is a strong debut [Video]

Rick Martin 2013.09.11

Back in July we reported about a new Japanese mobile gaming studio called Alim, which was jointly established by Fuji Startup Ventures, Gumi Ventures, and B Dash Ventures. Its first mobile game, Brave Frontier, was generally well when it launched, even briefly becoming Japan’s top overall app back on August 8th [1]. Brave Frontier is a sort of card battle RPG, very reminiscent of Puzzle & Dragons in some ways, but without the puzzles. Like most games in this genre you have a party of characters that you can evolve and enhance, and you can also add one friend character to your team each time you venture into battle. Characters correspond to elements/colors, with some more effective against enemies in a rock/paper/scissors fashion (like Puzzle & Dragons and others). I was curious to see that my colleague Junya Mori was into the game, and I had him give me a quick demo of the game (see video below). He points out that the story is not especially great and the loading times can be slow, but that the graphics are really fun at times and gameplay is solid – certainly a great first effort for the folks at Alim. Brave…

Back in July we reported about a new Japanese mobile gaming studio called Alim, which was jointly established by Fuji Startup Ventures, Gumi Ventures, and B Dash Ventures. Its first mobile game, Brave Frontier, was generally well when it launched, even briefly becoming Japan’s top overall app back on August 8th [1].

Brave Frontier is a sort of card battle RPG, very reminiscent of Puzzle & Dragons in some ways, but without the puzzles. Like most games in this genre you have a party of characters that you can evolve and enhance, and you can also add one friend character to your team each time you venture into battle. Characters correspond to elements/colors, with some more effective against enemies in a rock/paper/scissors fashion (like Puzzle & Dragons and others).

I was curious to see that my colleague Junya Mori was into the game, and I had him give me a quick demo of the game (see video below). He points out that the story is not especially great and the loading times can be slow, but that the graphics are really fun at times and gameplay is solid – certainly a great first effort for the folks at Alim.

Brave Frontier is still only available in Japanese, but I hope that one day they expand language support to cover other markets abroad. These Japanese mobile RPG titles are pretty cool, and I hope western markets warm up to as they gradually move beyond the domestic market.

There’s so much cross-over and cross-pollination in this card battle and RPG genres these days in Japan, and sometimes it makes games a little boring — but on the other hand, it means that developers are standing on each others shoulders and building on what seems to work in the industry. And that’s good to see.

The game launched at the same time that the new studio was announced. Note that it’s only available in the Japanese market. ↩

news

New Japanese 3D Printing Marketplace Officially Debuts

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.09.11

A new 3D printing marketplace recently made its debut in Japan. It’s called Rinkak, which roughly means ‘outline of objects’ in Japanese. Anyone with 3D data can open shops on the platform and sell products from their designs, which is sort of similar to Shapeways. Rinkak has been operating in beta for three months, and has now opened up to the public. There are many materials available on the site including plastic, pottery, and metal. Designers can set a price for their products based on the manufacturing fee, and Rinkak takes a 30% cut from sales. Manufacturing and shipping will be handled by partner companies of Kabuku, the company behind the new 3D platform. On Rinkak, designers can publish 3D data under a Creative Commons license. This allows for other creators to modify parts of the design to produce remixed products. Currently, there are only around 40 products available (some by the same designer) on Rinkak. But there is no shortage of amazing designs, as you can see below. The products are only available to purchase in Japan right now, so overseas buyers will have to wait. LovelyHeart paper cup holder for ¥2,434. Polygon espresso cup, ¥5274. Shop card stand,…

A new 3D printing marketplace recently made its debut in Japan. It’s called Rinkak, which roughly means ‘outline of objects’ in Japanese. Anyone with 3D data can open shops on the platform and sell products from their designs, which is sort of similar to Shapeways. Rinkak has been operating in beta for three months, and has now opened up to the public.

There are many materials available on the site including plastic, pottery, and metal. Designers can set a price for their products based on the manufacturing fee, and Rinkak takes a 30% cut from sales. Manufacturing and shipping will be handled by partner companies of Kabuku, the company behind the new 3D platform.

On Rinkak, designers can publish 3D data under a Creative Commons license. This allows for other creators to modify parts of the design to produce remixed products.

Currently, there are only around 40 products available (some by the same designer) on Rinkak. But there is no shortage of amazing designs, as you can see below. The products are only available to purchase in Japan right now, so overseas buyers will have to wait.

LovelyHeart paper cup holder for ¥2,434.

Polygon espresso cup, ¥5274.

Shop card stand, ¥5,000.

Stratum vase, ¥27,954.

BigA paper cup holder, ¥1,317.

news

Translation startup Conyac partners with World Jumper, introduces new API

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.10

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…

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.

news

Japan’s top education app teaches English with ‘Super Subtitles’

Rick Martin 2013.09.10

We’ve written about a number of services in the past that help Japanese people study English. For example, language learning startup Rarejob raised $3.3 million this year to help continue its efforts in providing English lessons over Skype. Choujimaku is a popular English learning software, published by Source Next Corporation in Japan. It helps students learn English by watching movies, referring to English and Japanese subtitles as they go (hence the name, which translates as ‘Super Subtitles’). Back in 2011 the company moved into the app space with its Choujimaku movie app for iOS. And thanks to a new promotional campaign, the app is now number one in the education category in the Japanese App Store. Movies are currently priced at ¥1200 (or about $12), which is a promotional discount from the regular ¥1800. But like much online media in Japan, the movies are still painfully overpriced in my view, even with the added value of bilingual subtitles and the useful dictionary. That’s about the same price as an evening at the cinema, or two months worth of Hulu Plus (which in Japan includes subtitled movies and TV). But nevertheless, it might hit a sweet spot for busy folks who…

We’ve written about a number of services in the past that help Japanese people study English. For example, language learning startup Rarejob raised $3.3 million this year to help continue its efforts in providing English lessons over Skype.

Choujimaku is a popular English learning software, published by Source Next Corporation in Japan. It helps students learn English by watching movies, referring to English and Japanese subtitles as they go (hence the name, which translates as ‘Super Subtitles’). Back in 2011 the company moved into the app space with its Choujimaku movie app for iOS. And thanks to a new promotional campaign, the app is now number one in the education category in the Japanese App Store.

Movies are currently priced at ¥1200 (or about $12), which is a promotional discount from the regular ¥1800. But like much online media in Japan, the movies are still painfully overpriced in my view, even with the added value of bilingual subtitles and the useful dictionary. That’s about the same price as an evening at the cinema, or two months worth of Hulu Plus (which in Japan includes subtitled movies and TV).

But nevertheless, it might hit a sweet spot for busy folks who don’t have time to mess around with organizing their own study through movies. The controls are pretty handy with the ability to toggle either language off or on. There’s also a dictionary function that lets users dig deeper and find out the meaning of individual words.

If you’d like to check it out, you can pick it up over on the App Store as a free download. There’s a sample movie if you’d like to try it out before moving on to the 200+ in-app movie purchases available.

news

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

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.09

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…

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.

news

Hot new mobile game from Okinawa rides an early wave

Rick Martin 2013.09.09

Thanks to the folks over on Gamebiz for pointing out that a new made-in-Japan mobile game, Ancient Surfer, has surpassed 100,000 downloads in its first four days. The title launched last week (on September 5th) for both iOS and Android, and since then has done fairly well in its home market of Japan (currently third in the iOS sports category), as well as other big markets like the UK, Brazil, and Thailand. The title features dead-simple two-button controls for turning, a button each for right and left, and with the Unity game engine the graphics are very impressive. The iOS version is plagued by a really irritating ad in the upper right, however, perhaps enough to keep me from coming back to the game. I’d consider paying to remove it, but I saw no such option readily available. Ancient Surfer comes from SummerTime Studio based in Okinawa. We don’t often have the pleasure of featuring companies from that part of Japan, so it’s certainly great to see a game like this one do well. According to Gamebiz, we can expect to see another new title from the studio in the coming weeks. If you’d like to give Ancient Surfer a…

Thanks to the folks over on Gamebiz for pointing out that a new made-in-Japan mobile game, Ancient Surfer, has surpassed 100,000 downloads in its first four days. The title launched last week (on September 5th) for both iOS and Android, and since then has done fairly well in its home market of Japan (currently third in the iOS sports category), as well as other big markets like the UK, Brazil, and Thailand.

The title features dead-simple two-button controls for turning, a button each for right and left, and with the Unity game engine the graphics are very impressive. The iOS version is plagued by a really irritating ad in the upper right, however, perhaps enough to keep me from coming back to the game. I’d consider paying to remove it, but I saw no such option readily available.

Ancient Surfer comes from SummerTime Studio based in Okinawa. We don’t often have the pleasure of featuring companies from that part of Japan, so it’s certainly great to see a game like this one do well. According to Gamebiz, we can expect to see another new title from the studio in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to give Ancient Surfer a try yourself, feel free to pick it up from the App Store or from Google Play. Or check out our demo video above.

Interview / News

Japan brings brilliant colored designs to boring paper receipts

Now with 200M game downloads, Line Corporation adds MapleStory title

Japanese romantic simulation chat app adds more characters, hits 1M downloads

Learning platform iKnow helps Japanese people study up for Ad-tech Tokyo

Brave Frontier: Alim’s first mobile game is a strong debut [Video]

New Japanese 3D Printing Marketplace Officially Debuts

Translation startup Conyac partners with World Jumper, introduces new API

Japan’s top education app teaches English with ‘Super Subtitles’

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

Hot new mobile game from Okinawa rides an early wave

Recent Articles

Trends

Interview / News

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Related news

Recent Articles

Trends