This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese. Japan’s MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) Soracom, which offers mobile data communication over its platform, announced today that it has fundraised about 600 million yen (about $5.8 million) from Pavilion Capital, the private equity fund of Singapore’s state-backed Temasek Holdings. Coinciding with this funding, the company announced that it will set up a local subsidiary called Soracom International in Singapore. In partnership with Mitsui & Co., which participated in the previous $22 million series B funding round, Soracom is ready now to boost its global expansion efforts. The Internet of Things(IoT)-focused MVNO will start this thrust from the Asian market. See also: Japan’s Soracom launches cellular network service for Internet of Things developers Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited b “Tex” Pomeroy
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.
Japan’s MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) Soracom, which offers mobile data communication over its platform, announced today that it has fundraised about 600 million yen (about $5.8 million) from Pavilion Capital, the private equity fund of Singapore’s state-backed Temasek Holdings.
Coinciding with this funding, the company announced that it will set up a local subsidiary called Soracom International in Singapore. In partnership with Mitsui & Co., which participated in the previous $22 million series B funding round, Soracom is ready now to boost its global expansion efforts. The Internet of Things(IoT)-focused MVNO will start this thrust from the Asian market.
This guest post is authored by Mark Bivens. Mark is a Silicon Valley native and former entrepreneur, having started three companies before “turning to the dark side of VC.” He is a venture capitalist that travels between Paris and Tokyo (aka the RudeVC). You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here. This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on Silicon Valley for aspiring innovation ecosystems. In part 1 of this series, I provided a very succinct recap of the Silicon Valley narrative. For a more in-depth review, A History of Silicon Valley by Piero Scaruffi and Arun Rao might well be the most comprehensive, and Robert Cringely’s Accidental Empires focuses on the pc industry empire-building during the pre-web era. Understanding the Silicon Valley story is important for those who are striving to replicate the Silicon Valley model in their own communities, such as what various government entities from Europe to Asia aspire to do. Witnessing these government efforts ebb and flow over the years, I submit that two fundamental questions should be addressed: Should governments even try to copy Silicon Valley? What is the secret…
This guest post is authored by Mark Bivens. Mark is a Silicon Valley native and former entrepreneur, having started three companies before “turning to the dark side of VC.” He is a venture capitalist that travels between Paris and Tokyo (aka the RudeVC). You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here.
At Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View, entrepreneurs and nomad workers look always busy. (Photo by Masaru Ikeda)
In part 1 of this series, I provided a very succinct recap of the Silicon Valley narrative. For a more in-depth review, A History of Silicon Valley by Piero Scaruffi and Arun Rao might well be the most comprehensive, and Robert Cringely’s Accidental Empires focuses on the pc industry empire-building during the pre-web era. Understanding the Silicon Valley story is important for those who are striving to replicate the Silicon Valley model in their own communities, such as what various government entities from Europe to Asia aspire to do.
Witnessing these government efforts ebb and flow over the years, I submit that two fundamental questions should be addressed:
Should governments even try to copy Silicon Valley?
What is the secret sauce that makes Silicon Valley such a bastion of entrepreneurship and innovation?
Regarding the first question, my opinion is that the answer should generally be no. Silicon Valley today encompasses such a unique confluence of factors — some planned, most serendipitous, and many even difficult to identify — that government attempts to create a replica of Silicon Valley in their home market will inevitably end in futility.
For the Silicon Valley model is one that has evolved over decades. No government in an open market economy has demonstrated an ability to cultivate a 30-year project. Furthermore, Silicon Valley is not the result of a centrally-planned state endeavor. The government, more specifically the State of California, created an environment that fostered the emergence of Silicon Valley, in large part by trying to do no evil. But it was predominantly the private sector and an abundance of rugged individuals that built the foundation for today’s Silicon Valley.
An experienced European VC that I respect a lot reminded me of The Netherlands’ misplaced ambition to replicate Silicon Valley in 1997:
In 1997 the Dutch Government thought of stimulating IT entrepreneurship by setting up a Government supported VC fund called Twinning. All those hype days….. Anyway, like so many other initiatives of governments also this idea ended in a mass failure. In my opinion there is no way of just copying the Silicon valley concept. That is a unique situation, the environment, the infrastructure, the knowledge, experience, but also the heritage, the long experience and history. No way of copying it in 5 years. No way of copying it anyway!
My intention by citing The Netherlands here is not to single them out. On the contrary, The Netherlands learned its lesson and I would submit that today represents a role model for promoting export-driven entrepreneurship and innovation (more on that in a future piece).
None of this wisdom has prevented numerous regions from trying. Silicon Alley, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Roundabout, Silicon Gulf, Silicon Welly, Silicon Beach, Silicon Border, Silicon Desert, Silicon Glen, etc. and those are just the ones beginning with the word Silicon, the list is actually quite ridiculous.
Yet the areas with the most success in creating clusters of innovation have been those that do it on their own terms and play to their own unique strengths, where the government facilitates an environment that doesn’t penalize failure, and then gets out of the way.
New York City has emerged as the world’s second largest market of VC-backed digital media startups thanks largely to the area’s fashion and media sectors (and ironically, the Silicon Alley term has fallen out of fashion). Mayor-emeritus Bloomberg’s policies ushered in a vibrant ecosystem of lifestyle and design.
Los Angeles is now gaining status as fertile ground for gaming startups, its proximity to the Hollywood film studios undoubtedly playing a key role.
Israel boasts the highest concentration of high-tech firms per capita in the world, often companies developing cutting-edge communications and security technologies for export worldwide.
I submit that governments should not seek to copy Silicon Valley, but rather should take inspiration from the factors that rendered Silicon Valley a success. In the third and final post of this series on Silicon Valley, we’ll look at the most relevant ingredients of the region’s secret sauce which might inspire Japan in its goal to spur innovation.
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese. Midokura Holdings Ltd., the company offering a software network virtualization technology, announced today that it has fundraised $20 million in a series B round. This round was led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ for Short) with participation from Simplex and Allen Miner. Simplex provides major Japanese banks with dealing systems while Allen Miner is chairman of Japanese VC firm Sunbridge Global Ventures who is also formerly Oracle Japan CEO. With the funding this time, the company has raised $44 million in total to date. Midokura has not disclosed any financial details including valuation, shareholdings ratio and payment date upon fundraising. But the company claims that they will enhance development of Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) and new product line-ups as well as empowering their management and development teams. Since its launch back in 2010, the company’s been led by Tatsuya Kato, chairman of the board and co-founder, who is a veteran entrepreneur also renowned for having served Japanese investment fund Globis as COO. Prior to launching Midokura, he was involved in managing notable Japanese IT companies such as Cybird (TSE:4823) and CSK Holdings (TSE:9737). Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland,…
The Midokura team comprises 60 employees across six countries around the world
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.
Midokura Holdings Ltd., the company offering a software network virtualization technology, announced today that it has fundraised $20 million in a series B round. This round was led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ for Short) with participation from Simplex and Allen Miner. Simplex provides major Japanese banks with dealing systems while Allen Miner is chairman of Japanese VC firm Sunbridge Global Ventures who is also formerly Oracle Japan CEO. With the funding this time, the company has raised $44 million in total to date.
Midokura has not disclosed any financial details including valuation, shareholdings ratio and payment date upon fundraising. But the company claims that they will enhance development of Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) and new product line-ups as well as empowering their management and development teams.
Since its launch back in 2010, the company’s been led by Tatsuya Kato, chairman of the board and co-founder, who is a veteran entrepreneur also renowned for having served Japanese investment fund Globis as COO. Prior to launching Midokura, he was involved in managing notable Japanese IT companies such as Cybird (TSE:4823) and CSK Holdings (TSE:9737).
Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, Midokura runs its business operations at six different locations worldwide, though substantial headquarter operations is found in Tokyo. According to Kato who is based out of Tokyo, their system development team is based out of Barcelona, Spain while the San Francisco team is in charge of marketing operations.
The company has been developing MEM, a software network virtualization technology which replaces hardware network devices with a series of software, enabling service providers to reduce installation and maintenance costs for network environment.
Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
This guest post is authored by Mark Bivens. Mark is a Silicon Valley native and former entrepreneur, having started three companies before “turning to the dark side of VC.” He is a venture capitalist that travels between Paris and Tokyo (aka the RudeVC). You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on Silicon Valley for aspiring innovation ecosystems. Spot quiz: What region is formerly known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight ? Here’s a hint: it’s not Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts, nor is it Berlin, East London, and especially not Saclay, France. A swathe of apple orchards and orange groves spanning Santa Clara County in Northern California is what gave Silicon Valley this original nickname. In 1953, transistor inventor William Shockley left Bell Labs, moved to Mountain View, California and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with the belief that silicon would be a better material than the conventional germanium for making transistors. Shockley was a brilliant engineer but proved a terrible manager, so in 1957 eight of his best engineers (including a character by the name of Gordon Moore)…
This guest post is authored by Mark Bivens. Mark is a Silicon Valley native and former entrepreneur, having started three companies before “turning to the dark side of VC.” He is a venture capitalist that travels between Paris and Tokyo (aka the RudeVC). You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here.
Spot quiz: What region is formerly known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight ?
Here’s a hint: it’s not Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts, nor is it Berlin, East London, and especially not Saclay, France.
A swathe of apple orchards and orange groves spanning Santa Clara County in Northern California is what gave Silicon Valley this original nickname. In 1953, transistor inventor William Shockley left Bell Labs, moved to Mountain View, California and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with the belief that silicon would be a better material than the conventional germanium for making transistors. Shockley was a brilliant engineer but proved a terrible manager, so in 1957 eight of his best engineers (including a character by the name of Gordon Moore) quit and went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor.
This is of course only one little excerpt of a fascinating story, but it seems timely to review the history of the creation of Silicon Valley as various governments from Europe to Asia periodically attempt to replicate Silicon Valley in their local geographies.
I’m a Silicon Valley native. My first residence when I entered the world almost four decades ago was in Tiburon, an island just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Besides a brief stint in Tokyo, I spent much of my childhood growing up in Los Altos, a sleepy residential town smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. I attended the same high school as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Cupertino, albeit almost two decades later.
We knew our region as Silicon Valley (not “The Valley”, as people that never lived there sometimes call it). However, as kids, we didn’t necessarily realize that we were a part of something so unique. The high-tech boom of the 80’s was in full swing, though it was about designing microprocessors rather than designing mobile apps.
HP, VisiCorp, and Varian were like the Google, Facebook, and Box of the era. Entrepreneurship was a natural reflex, not something to be forcibly learned. I recall my first entrepreneurial experience at the age of 15 which began with a paper route and, encouraged by a more industrious neighborhood kid, evolved into locking up town-wide distribution for the local newspapers and subsequently hiring junior high kids for pennies to perform the actual delivery. The San Jose Mercury News was the big brand, but the lower-quality Peninsula Times Tribune proved a nice complement with its fatter margins.
Maybe it was due to the omnipresent earthquake risk (I recall the menacing San Andreas fault line ran right down our street), but the prevalent vibe was the cycle of creating, enterprising, destroying, and rebuilding. Of course there were the folkloric stories of tinkerers in garages launching tech companies. Less often reported were the far more numerous incidents of lifestyle entrepreneurs creating small businesses: dry cleaners, pizzerias, and ice cream parlours. And just as Fairchild Semiconductor later gave way to Intel, the ice cream parlours were disrupted by frozen yogurt shops. It’s no coincidence that of the three aforementioned Silicon Valley corporate titans of the 80’s, only one name is recognizable today – HP – and it’s not exactly a poster-child for the visionary companies list nowadays.
So amidst the variety of well-intentioned innovation initiatives (most recently Japan’s plan for Tokyo as the Fintech capital of Asia), I submit that it’s worthwhile to study how Silicon Valley came to be what it is today. Some lessons may be relevant for Japan, others less so. In the spirit of constructive brainstorming, in part two of this series I’ll expound on the confluence of factors which transformed the Valley of Heart’s Delight.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo- / Taipei-based ST Booking (previously known as Hakodate Ventures), the startup offering an education services marketplace under the same name, announced today that it has fundraised $200,000 in a seed round from several investors including Singapore-based Beenext and Tokyo-based IF Angel. ST Booking was founded in September 2015 by Shota James Morikawa, a former associate at East Ventures as well as a former director at Japanese startup Hyper8. In addition to Morikawa as CEO, Tiffany Wu, vice president at Taiwanese angel/seed fund Pinehurst Advisors, and Mark Hsu, co-founder of Pinehurst, joined the company as founding members. ST Booking is a matching platform for connecting Southeast Asian students wishing to study abroad to Japanese educational institutions. Tying up with 60 language schools or business colleges in Japan, and more than 1,100 agencies in Taiwan, Thailand or Vietnam, ST Booking approaches with both B2B via agencies and B2C by directly acquiring students. The recent Japanese government effort to attract 300,000 international students a year by 2020 is having a positive impact on the service. It monetizes with a “results reward” model; educational institutions will be charged 15 to 25% commission of the school fees. In…
Tokyo- / Taipei-based ST Booking (previously known as Hakodate Ventures), the startup offering an education services marketplace under the same name, announced today that it has fundraised $200,000 in a seed round from several investors including Singapore-based Beenext and Tokyo-based IF Angel.
ST Booking was founded in September 2015 by Shota James Morikawa, a former associate at East Ventures as well as a former director at Japanese startup Hyper8. In addition to Morikawa as CEO, Tiffany Wu, vice president at Taiwanese angel/seed fund Pinehurst Advisors, and Mark Hsu, co-founder of Pinehurst, joined the company as founding members.
Shota James Morikawa delivered his pitch at B Dash Camp 2016 Spring in Fukuoka in March 2016. (Image credit: ST Booking)
ST Booking is a matching platform for connecting Southeast Asian students wishing to study abroad to Japanese educational institutions. Tying up with 60 language schools or business colleges in Japan, and more than 1,100 agencies in Taiwan, Thailand or Vietnam, ST Booking approaches with both B2B via agencies and B2C by directly acquiring students.
The recent Japanese government effort to attract 300,000 international students a year by 2020 is having a positive impact on the service. It monetizes with a “results reward” model; educational institutions will be charged 15 to 25% commission of the school fees. In the future, it aims to develop a CRM to optimize sponsorship relations with companies for employment after graduation or the study abroad processes.
Mark Hsu, one of the aforementioned founding members, is known as an investor in startups but also has been running a business called Envision Recruit, helping educational institutions market their services in Taiwan and other countries. His vast network and deep experience in this sector will be greatly beneficial to operating the ST Booking business. Furthermore, thanks to the Vietnamese educational ministry’s decision adding Japanese as the first foreign language to learn at elementary schools, the local rush to study Japanese is on a rise. While Singapore-incorporated ST Booking has offices in Tokyo and Taiwan, their team members appear to be busy traveling around the entire Southeast Asian region for sales and marketing.
ST Booking aims to use the fund to launch new services, increase brand awareness and enhance network building with more agencies in the region.
The ST Booking team members discuss with each other at an office in Vietnam. CEO Morikawa sits in the middle while co-founder Hsu stands on the left. Image credit: ST Booking
See the original story in Japanese. Various instant e-commerce platforms or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) trading platforms, which an individual can readily make use of, have been started up in recent years. This active situation can be recognized from the growth of players in this field such as Mercari, Base, and Store.jp. As trading of “things” occurs, logistics become necessary. Others seem to be growing with this flow as well. Tokyo-based OpenLogi, which provides an outsourced logistics platform, announced on Tuesday that it has fundraised 210 million yen (about $1.9 million) from IMJ Investment Partners (IMJ-IP), SMBC Venture Capital and Infinity Ventures LLP. Coinciding with the funding, partner of IMJ-IP Hiroshi Oka has been appointed as an outside director. This fund will be spent for enhancing human resources. According to OpenLogi CEO Hidetsugu Ito, the firm plans to increase the number of members up to about 25 from the current 15 (including 9 engineers). Concurrently it promotes business development overseas such as in Southeast Asia, also in cooperation with IMJ-IP. I covered OpenLogi for the first time just a year ago. Please check out the previous article about their “optimization of warehouses and logistics business.” Ito explains that the firm has been…
Various instant e-commerce platforms or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) trading platforms, which an individual can readily make use of, have been started up in recent years. This active situation can be recognized from the growth of players in this field such as Mercari, Base, and Store.jp.
As trading of “things” occurs, logistics become necessary. Others seem to be growing with this flow as well.
Tokyo-based OpenLogi, which provides an outsourced logistics platform, announced on Tuesday that it has fundraised 210 million yen (about $1.9 million) from IMJ Investment Partners (IMJ-IP), SMBC Venture Capital and Infinity Ventures LLP. Coinciding with the funding, partner of IMJ-IP Hiroshi Oka has been appointed as an outside director.
This fund will be spent for enhancing human resources. According to OpenLogi CEO Hidetsugu Ito, the firm plans to increase the number of members up to about 25 from the current 15 (including 9 engineers). Concurrently it promotes business development overseas such as in Southeast Asia, also in cooperation with IMJ-IP.
I covered OpenLogi for the first time just a year ago. Please check out the previous article about their “optimization of warehouses and logistics business.”
OpenLogi CEO Hidetsugu Ito (Image credit: OpenLogi)
Ito explains that the firm has been focusing in particular on the optimization of its warehouse control system for a year. Since many of the contracted warehouses are located in the Tokorozawa area (suburban Tokyo), the firm moved its office to Ikebukuro (transit hub to the Tokorozawa are) and sometimes has a meeting with the developer team even at a warehouse.
Over the past year, the firm has tackled “improvement of efficiency of warehouse work.”
To ship and stock goods in warehouses via OpenLogi, users only have to ask transportation companies to carry them after member registration on the website. As a result, some of the users send out goods without care.
Ito explains:
For example, when a user sends three goods of A, B, and C, he / she inputs information about the goods to OpenLogi’s system in advance, but sometimes differences between the arrived goods and the inputted contents can be seen. Although we had handled these cases through confirmation with chat tools so far, we have enabled warehouse operators to communicate directly with users only by receiving photos taken with iPad.
As reported previously, each warehouse has a unique work method or style. To optimize all of them by considering it as one large warehouse virtually, standardization of warehouse work is needed.
Ito mentioned the difficulties in standardization:
The standardization of warehouse work was not easy. For example, one warehouse operator requires photos of goods, while another requires clothes to be folded. We classified requests from warehouse operators into patterns, and we advanced standardization in the system side.
Image credit: OpenLogi
The firm contracts with several warehouse bases as of now, acquiring one company each month. As for the charging system, conventional uniform charge was tuned to be variable according to the number of shipment or work quantity.
Most of players, intending to bring forth a new business phase by making conventional business move online, generally starts from optimization of the business practices or operation in that field by leveraging technologies, as seen in laundry or printing industry. OpenLogi seems to have completed that phase as well, and is entering to the expansion phase. We will continue to follow their future growth.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Creema, the Japanese startup behind C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace for handmade items under the same name, announced that it fundraised about 1.1 billion yen (about $10 million) in the latest round led by Globis Capital Partners (GCP). For Creema, this is the fourth round following the previous 100 million yen funding from KDDI Open Innovation Fund (KOIF for short, jointly operated by leading Japanese telco KDDI and VC firm Global Brain) back in June 2014. In addition to GCP, participating investors in the latest round were KDDI, Global Brain and SMBC Venture Partners, in addition to Creema founder/CEO Kotaro Marubayashi himself. Launched back in 2010, the Creema marketplace lists more than 2.4 million handmade items from over 60,000 registered creators. While the handmade C2C market in Japan grew by 250% YoY in transaction volume, Creema revealed that they had seen a 450% growth from last year. Currently the Japanese handmade market is fiercely competitive as it has in operation more than 40 marketplaces within. However apparently most deals are being aggregated into the top 4 marketplaces: Minne (backed by GMO), Tetote (backed by GMO), Iichi (backed by Hakuhodo group and Taiwan’s handmade C2C marketplace…
L to R: Tomohiro Ebata (Director, Head of Business Development and Investment, KDDI), Keisuke Tatsuoka (Global Brain), Kotaro Maruyabayashi (CEO, Creema), Akihiro Higashi (Principal, Globis Capital Partners), Minoru Konno (Partner & COO, Globis Capital Partners)
Tokyo-based Creema, the Japanese startup behind C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace for handmade items under the same name, announced that it fundraised about 1.1 billion yen (about $10 million) in the latest round led by Globis Capital Partners (GCP). For Creema, this is the fourth round following the previous 100 million yen funding from KDDI Open Innovation Fund (KOIF for short, jointly operated by leading Japanese telco KDDI and VC firm Global Brain) back in June 2014. In addition to GCP, participating investors in the latest round were KDDI, Global Brain and SMBC Venture Partners, in addition to Creema founder/CEO Kotaro Marubayashi himself.
Launched back in 2010, the Creema marketplace lists more than 2.4 million handmade items from over 60,000 registered creators. While the handmade C2C market in Japan grew by 250% YoY in transaction volume, Creema revealed that they had seen a 450% growth from last year.
Currently the Japanese handmade market is fiercely competitive as it has in operation more than 40 marketplaces within. However apparently most deals are being aggregated into the top 4 marketplaces: Minne (backed by GMO), Tetote (backed by GMO), Iichi (backed by Hakuhodo group and Taiwan’s handmade C2C marketplace Pinkoi) and the amply-funded Creema.
Creema will use the funds to strengthen system development as well as marketing efforts for service recognition. They had been dependent for such recognition upon word of mouth among users, now expecting to hit 10 billion yen (about $92 million) in gross merchandise volume for 2016 (this number is coincidentally matched with that of competitor Minne).
Creema’s mobile app
According to Marubayashi, the average market price for each deal at Creema is over twice that at other marketplaces since users therein tend to trade handmade items with elaborate designs crafted by professionals. Recently Creema started dealing with food products where bakers and pâtissière sell their original breads or cakes while farmers sell handmade salad dressings and juices.
The consolidated annual merchandise volume from the two major C2C marketplaces of Japan, Yahoo Auction and Mercari, is to near the 1 trillion yen (or about $9.2 billion) mark by this yearend. Given that handmade item deals are included in these stats, we can see that the handmade item marketplaces still have a great potential for further growth.
See the original story in Japanese. Popcorn is a beauty salon-booking app for last-minute deals. The app offers discount deals up to 70% off for beauty salons for hair styling, nail art and care as well as eyelash extensions, in addition to relaxation and aesthetic salons, focused on allowing users to book a same-day or last-minute appointment for deals at salons in Tokyo’s busiest shopping districts such as Shibuya, Harajuku, Ebisu and Ginza. Since its launch back in February of 2015, the service is about to cover 1,000 salons, seeing an approximate 30% MoM growth in the number of bookings since late 2015. Coubic, the company behind Popcorn, announced today that the app supports a multilingual interface to better serve international visitors to Japan, ever on the increase. Available for Android via Google Play or for desktop in English, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Korean, not to mention Japanese. According to Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), more than 20 million tourists are expected to visit Japan this year, especially those from the East Asia region like China, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which accounts for 70% of all visitors, are increasing at more than 30% every year. Due to the…
Popcorn is a beauty salon-booking app for last-minute deals. The app offers discount deals up to 70% off for beauty salons for hair styling, nail art and care as well as eyelash extensions, in addition to relaxation and aesthetic salons, focused on allowing users to book a same-day or last-minute appointment for deals at salons in Tokyo’s busiest shopping districts such as Shibuya, Harajuku, Ebisu and Ginza. Since its launch back in February of 2015, the service is about to cover 1,000 salons, seeing an approximate 30% MoM growth in the number of bookings since late 2015.
Coubic, the company behind Popcorn, announced today that the app supports a multilingual interface to better serve international visitors to Japan, ever on the increase. Available for Android via Google Play or for desktop in English, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Korean, not to mention Japanese.
According to Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), more than 20 million tourists are expected to visit Japan this year, especially those from the East Asia region like China, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which accounts for 70% of all visitors, are increasing at more than 30% every year. Due to the increase of individual tourists and repeating visitors, their consumption is expanding from buying products to experiencing services.
Among many tourist attractions, more foreign visitors are choosing to try beauty salons in Japan because of a high interest in their health and Japanese beauty. When a massage salon in Ginza used the app, for example, the monthly number of foreign customers increased sevenfold from a year ago. After this year’s beginning, the salon says not only Asian but also European customers are increasing. With the launch of the multilingual interface at this time, it will attract foreign visitors with the convenience of enabling online booking and in-advance credit card payments.
The Popcorn app initially supported booking a same-day appointment only, but then added a next-day appointment in response to user needs. By offering a special limited menu, many beauty salons participating in the app use have succeeded in gaining repeat customers while more than half the customers delivered to salons by the app are repeat customers. It appears that users are tired in making phone calls to make an appointment, like those using the app to find a new salon and book an appointment.
Coubic CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka elaborated:
Some male and female users have used our app about 30 to 40 times in three months. It was so surprising that some users recognized the convenience of online booking and use our app very frequently. We thought some users may feel resistance against credit card prepayments but many of them appear to accept that in return for receiving a limited menu for Popcorn users.
Providing users with rewards from salons in Tokyo plus selected areas in Fukuoka so far, the company will expand to other cities in Japan shortly, planning to curate salons in cities outside Japan as well. Leveraging the Coubic appointment management platform, the company intends to expand their business to other retailing industries beyond beauty salons.
Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Zawatt, the Japanese startup behind an online auction site for brand name items called Smaoku, unveiled today its international interface which enables foreign consumers to purchase authentic second-hand items from Japan. The new interface is available in English and traditional Chinese, aiming to serve buyers in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore (though simplified Chinese is used in Singapore). With the new interface for buyers, sellers in Japan can easily submit their items to foreign buyers in the same manner with they have been doing for buyers in Japan. In addition to eliminating language barriers by machine translation and a Q&A template for interactions between sellers and buyers, generation of documents for export customs declaration, international forwarding service and credit card payments (VISA and MasterCard accepted) are available. Buyers can easily accept inquiries and purchase requests as well as shipping their items to the aforementioned regions. If sellers in Japan want to sell their items internationally, all they have to do is just toggle the ‘International Sales’ switch in their ‘MyShop’ menu in the mobile app. In international deals, a buyer is to bear remittance and shipping charges while 10% brokerage commission…
Tokyo-based Zawatt, the Japanese startup behind an online auction site for brand name items called Smaoku, unveiled today its international interface which enables foreign consumers to purchase authentic second-hand items from Japan. The new interface is available in English and traditional Chinese, aiming to serve buyers in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore (though simplified Chinese is used in Singapore).
Chinese-speaking buyers can easily communicate with Japanese-speaking sellers using a Q&A template on Smaoku.
With the new interface for buyers, sellers in Japan can easily submit their items to foreign buyers in the same manner with they have been doing for buyers in Japan. In addition to eliminating language barriers by machine translation and a Q&A template for interactions between sellers and buyers, generation of documents for export customs declaration, international forwarding service and credit card payments (VISA and MasterCard accepted) are available. Buyers can easily accept inquiries and purchase requests as well as shipping their items to the aforementioned regions.
If sellers in Japan want to sell their items internationally, all they have to do is just toggle the ‘International Sales’ switch in their ‘MyShop’ menu in the mobile app. In international deals, a buyer is to bear remittance and shipping charges while 10% brokerage commission will be charged to a seller when his/her deal is made (5.4% discount rate applied for ‘official shop’ sellers) for domestic deals.
Zawatt fundraised about $2 million last June to focus more on international transactions just released at this time. Despite their having SIG Asia Investments from China invest through this round, it may feel slightly awkward that the aforementioned service area doesn’t include mainland China in the cross-border transaction surge.
According to Zawatt CEO Daisaku Harada, the company is still considering expanding into the mainland market because of high tariffs on luxury brand items, the need to locate servers within China (due to Great Firewall, narrow bandwidth as to overseas connections and ICP license requirement), different online promotional methods (since Facebook is unavailable in China), and different payment methods (people prefer to use UnionPay or Alipay rather than Western credit card brands). Seeing the response in the aforementioned four markets, he says that they will aim to start serving the Chinese market within the year.
I often see many events focused on cross-border e-commerce rather than ‘ordinary’ e-commerce across mainland China. Many cross-border e-commerce platforms deal with daily necessities or expendable supplies from outside China. The second-hand marketplace for brand items can be made because of the existence of Japanese consumers who carefully handle these items on the provision side. This particular segment of second-hand brand items can help Smaoku gain a competitive advantage over giants like Alibaba.
See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s ABBALab, a startup incubator focusing on IoT (Internet of Things) or IoE (Internet of Everything) business, last week announced the establishment of ABBALab IoE 1st Investment Limited Liability Partnership as its new fund. The fund was formed with about 1.5 billion yen (about $14 million) in committed capital from investors including Mistletoe, Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020, Sojitz, Sakura Internet and angel investors. The redemption period of the fund is ten years. Its investment target is not only hardware but also general products or services in IoT / IoE field, while covering wide investment stages from the prototyping stage or a pre-seed round to a series A round phase. Also follow-on investment will be considered according to the situation. In ABBALab, CEO Osamu Ogasahara’s personal assets had been invested in IoT startups so far, with the investment targets being disclosed as well. No New Folk Studio (smart footwear) … See this article Exiii (personalized myoelectric hand) … See these articles Vinclu (smartphone accessory / hologram AI) … See these articles Symax (health condition analyzer inside toilet) … See these articles Fove (eye-tracking Virtual Reality headset) … See these articles Up Perfoma (footballer’s…
Japan’s ABBALab, a startup incubator focusing on IoT (Internet of Things) or IoE (Internet of Everything) business, last week announced the establishment of ABBALab IoE 1st Investment Limited Liability Partnership as its new fund.
The fund was formed with about 1.5 billion yen (about $14 million) in committed capital from investors including Mistletoe, Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020, Sojitz, Sakura Internet and angel investors. The redemption period of the fund is ten years.
Its investment target is not only hardware but also general products or services in IoT / IoE field, while covering wide investment stages from the prototyping stage or a pre-seed round to a series A round phase. Also follow-on investment will be considered according to the situation.
In ABBALab, CEO Osamu Ogasahara’s personal assets had been invested in IoT startups so far, with the investment targets being disclosed as well.
Upon fund establishment, I had an interview with CEO Ogasahara (all question in boldface asked by the writer, and answered by Ogasahara).
First of all, would you explain your activities so far? You had invested your personal assets in ABBALab.
During the past two years, I started ABBALab with Taizo (Son, CEO of Misletoe) as a profit-making corporation, and been involved with investment for prototyping or communication activities. Meanwhile, I have participated in starting up DMM.make AKIBA, IoT Platform of Sakura Internet or Japan Region of OpenFog. Those are all to set a ground from which new startups will be born.
The investment targets steadily increased. Was that within your expectation?
Actually, I could not have met any startups with impact other than my investment targets during the first year. While receiving a few requests for investment examination in one month, I might possibly not have been able to notice promising startups to invest in during prototyping phase with just my senses.
You had run an acceleration program once in ABBALab. Would you tell me the unsuccessful points of the program?
We formed a fellowship system to have businesspersons participate in the activities as mentors, but the cost effectiveness was bad because it was hard for them to work within the startups’ timeframe.
There was also a system to build teams anew by gathering failed startups. Could you provide actual examples?
There was no case where separated individual members had united into one. However, we found a case in which a team manufactured a concept model of a product in combination with a close team, of course with charges though.
How much do you evaluate that in score?
A 70. Although each startup is responsible for its own business, I think I myself could do more in terms of speed or number of matters as an accelerator.
Let’s move on to the topic about the new fund. The return on personal asset-sized investment may be a kind of community creation for example, which means just support. However, fund establishment will produce a financial business aspect. Could I ask you the reason why you formed the fund this time?
For example, it may be not so bad as a portfolio to continue investing a few million yen into 10 to 20 startups per year under the current style. However, even if only ABBALab was given excellent investment targets, there is no guarantee that a better environment would be formed in ten, twenty or fifty years later.
To deal with this, I noticed the need to change the system on the assumption of follow-on such as prototyping, seed and series A. Moreover, it is difficult to run ABBALab in such a style only with personal assets.
I see.
By only increasing the number of shareholders and raising money from them, I think our degree of freedom will be limited as a result, because we just have unlisted startups’ shares in the prototype phase (in most cases), for which valuation is difficult.
So you thought that simply forming fund is easier to understand than fundraising and investing as a corporation.
As for our result of investment activities, we had shown a not-too-bad performance for introduction to investors, where some of the invested startups had succeeded in fundraising during their next round, so that I came to consider raising money by forming a fund as ABBALab, not capital increase.
Is there any change with establishment of the fund?
What the good thing is, simply an increase of the amount and the possibility of follow-on, or possibility of collaboration or additional investment by LPs. By having more concerned people with the fund between us, we can contribute to the resource secure for startups through requests for assistance or mentoring that we have not been able to handle.
One point which will widely change is, when considering follow-on of tens of millions in scale, we have to share that with an advisory board in advance, because we invest the fund received from LPs, not personal assets.
What do LPs (limited partners) expect in addition to investment return?
Foxconn (managing Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020) had already invested in Fove, and Sojitz started supporting a deal with Symax. Also, Sakura Internet is working to adopt Tsumug’s products in home IoT business with Apaman Shop (Japanese rental housing broker).
Takeshi Hirano
The Bridge
Regarding the first question, my opinion is that the answer should generally be no. Silicon Valley today encompasses such a unique confluence of factors — some planned, most serendipitous, and many even difficult to identify — that government attempts to create a replica of Silicon Valley in their home market will inevitably end in futility.
Masaru Ikeda
Yukari Mitsuhashi
According to Zawatt CEO Daisaku Harada, the company is still considering expanding into the mainland market because of high tariffs on luxury brand items, the need to locate servers within China (due to Great Firewall, narrow bandwidth as to overseas connections and 
