THE BRIDGE

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This Japanese startup changes how people relate to music

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Akinori Fumihara, Founder/CEO See the original article in Japanese On January 13th, Japanese social music platform, Nana, held a collaborative music festival called Nana fes vol.1 featuring Joysound at Minami Aoyama in Tokyo. On that day around 120 users, mostly in their teens or twenties, got together for the event. It was broadcasted online by Twitcasting, and in total 10,000 users tuned in live during 4.5 hour event. For those not familiar with the service, Nana lets its users share and mix their audio with other users on its platform, all with voices and sounds recorded through smartphone microphones. More than 5000 songs are posted on Nana everyday, with the average time for a user to stay on the site amount to 230 minutes per month. The monthly number of plays has surpassed 3.5 million, which shows how actively people are using the app. We had a chance to hear from Akinori Fumihara, Nana’s founder and CEO, about this event idea: Since Nana’s launch, we have regularly organized offline meetups for our users. But as a music service provider, I have been wanting to hold a live music event for a long time. I set the concept as a culture…

nana代表の文原明臣氏

Akinori Fumihara, Founder/CEO

See the original article in Japanese

On January 13th, Japanese social music platform, Nana, held a collaborative music festival called Nana fes vol.1 featuring Joysound at Minami Aoyama in Tokyo. On that day around 120 users, mostly in their teens or twenties, got together for the event. It was broadcasted online by Twitcasting, and in total 10,000 users tuned in live during 4.5 hour event.

For those not familiar with the service, Nana lets its users share and mix their audio with other users on its platform, all with voices and sounds recorded through smartphone microphones. More than 5000 songs are posted on Nana everyday, with the average time for a user to stay on the site amount to 230 minutes per month. The monthly number of plays has surpassed 3.5 million, which shows how actively people are using the app.

nana fes

We had a chance to hear from Akinori Fumihara, Nana’s founder and CEO, about this event idea:

Since Nana’s launch, we have regularly organized offline meetups for our users. But as a music service provider, I have been wanting to hold a live music event for a long time. I set the concept as a culture festival for Nana users by Nana users.

I always wanted to help create “Sunday artists”, those who work during the week and then work on the music projects on weekends. The user experience at a live concert is different from singing on the app. And I always wanted to offer that kind of different opportunity, so this festival was my first attempt to do this.

Build confidence, relationships

One user in particular was especially fascinated with Nana, gradually gaining confidence in his singing by joining offline meetups. That led him to even sing at his company’s event, and now he is even thinking about doing street performances.

Fumihara wants to continue to be this kind of catalyst for singers and musicians:

Many people have musical talent, but I think many of them don’t think highly of their own skill. But if there is a place to show their works, they can get feedback about it. And by allowing users to post their work easily on Nana, it creates opportunities for real talent to be recognized.

Nana users are quite loyal to the service, many of them calling themselves ‘Nana-min’ (min means people in Japanese), or describing the collaborative process as ‘Nanaru’. Some Twitter users even list their Nana account link on their profiles, many of them create Twitter accounts just because of their activity on Nana. The two services are very complementary, in fact.

Fumihara thinks there are two main reasons for the site’s popularity, the first being that many users are teenagers, and often they don’t have friends with whom they can discuss their favorite music.

When I was a teenager, I didn’t have anyone close to talk about my favorite music with. Finding people to have a music session with was even harder. Nana users are very happy about collaborating with others, and once they collaborate, they get to know more about each other. They make a very strong bond over Nana.

I want users to see music as an activity that’s very easy to start. It should be easier to get involved with music without taking it too seriously.

Nana is currently available only for iOS, and an Android app is now under construction. Nana plans to continue holding music festivals too.

Combining online and offline, Nana wants to create a future where people can “sing with the world”.

nana

Fabbit: A new incubation center set to open in Kitakyushu City, Japan

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See the original article in Japanese An incubation center is set to open this spring in Kitakyushu City, in the south of Japan. The facility, when it opens, will be one of the biggest incubation centers in the country. It’s called Fabbit, and as you can probably imagine from its name, it is aimed at startups that digitally fabricate physical products 1. It aims to be a hub that will connect entrepreneurs and creators in a wide-range of fields like graphic design, illustration, video editing, and figure making. Its core concept is to provide a place to learn, meet, and create. The project is led by two companies, nomad inc. and Apamanshop Holdings. Digital Hollywood University will provide educational content, Tukuruba inc. is involved in designing the space, and ABBAlab offers support for digital fabrication and investors. It’s expected that Fabbit will play an important role in Kitakyushu City’s plan to promote developing startups. In addition to its collaborative workspace, Fabbit provides equipment and tools for 3D fabrication so that members can do their own work in the space. There’s also the ‘Fabbit library’ where people can find a variety of books on technologies and design. The facility also includes…

fabbit 内装イメージ

See the original article in Japanese

An incubation center is set to open this spring in Kitakyushu City, in the south of Japan. The facility, when it opens, will be one of the biggest incubation centers in the country.

It’s called Fabbit, and as you can probably imagine from its name, it is aimed at startups that digitally fabricate physical products 1. It aims to be a hub that will connect entrepreneurs and creators in a wide-range of fields like graphic design, illustration, video editing, and figure making. Its core concept is to provide a place to learn, meet, and create.

The project is led by two companies, nomad inc. and Apamanshop Holdings. Digital Hollywood University will provide educational content, Tukuruba inc. is involved in designing the space, and ABBAlab offers support for digital fabrication and investors.

It’s expected that Fabbit will play an important role in Kitakyushu City’s plan to promote developing startups.

fabbitに含まれるスペース

In addition to its collaborative workspace, Fabbit provides equipment and tools for 3D fabrication so that members can do their own work in the space. There’s also the ‘Fabbit library’ where people can find a variety of books on technologies and design. The facility also includes a large space for events and seminars, equipped with a screen, projector, and sound system.

Digital Hollywood Studio, a place where users, can learn web and app development, will have a presence in the facility as well.

The representative director of Nomad Inc and Tsukuruba Inc, Osamu Ogasawara, told us a little more about the project:

fabbit is sort of a re-creation of an event with Taizo Son held last Feburary in Kitakyushu city. The event was called fabit Summit, and at that time we discussed about Monodukuri (the culture of Japanese manufacturing) with Iwasa-san from Cerevo and Ishida-san from Campfire. […] That event gave me lots of opportunities to connect with people involved with local startups, people from facility provider Apamanshop, and representatives from the Kitakyushu city office.

So Fabbit is a place to meet, learn and create with local people who share a common interest. I’d like to build a place that brings people together by providing educational programs for digital fabrication, access to equipment like 3D printers, and a shared library that offers membership to users who brings their own books.

Tukuruba CEO Hiroki Murakami and CCO Masahiro Nakamura elaborated on the design of the space:

Nakamura: “When designing fabbit, I aimed to renovate the place by taking advantages of the existing frame and room layout. […] Kitakyushu city has a strong connection with modern Japanese culture, with places like its Manga Museum. And I expect the openness will do good to the incubation.”

Murakami: “People from wide-ranging fields like 3D design, figure making, graphic design, and illustration can meet up at fabbit. Members can share knowledge and with the help of educational content from Digital Hollywood, the place will have great value. It’d be exciting if fabbit could represent a sort of a futuristic school. Kitakyushu city has history as an industrial area, so it would be interesting if it can create a new industry.”

fabbit


  1. Editor’s note: It’s actually ‘fabbit’, but for readibility purposes, I chose to capitalize it. –RM ↩

Japanese investment firm Venture United forms $11 million startup fund

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See the original story in Japanese. Venture United, a Japanese startup investment company, announced today that it has formed a fund worth 1.2 million yen ($11 million). The fund’s investors include the country’s state-run SME Support, Fusion Communications (a telco owned by Rakuten), SBI Securities, ad agency Hakuhodo, and Digital Advertising Consortium. Venture United and its parent company United, the company best known for homescreen app CocoPPa, have already invested in many startups, including Lifenet Insurance, Enigmo, Unoh (acquired by Zynga back in 2010), and Nobot (acquired by Mediba, a KDDI company). We spoke with the company’s chief venture capitalist Satoshi Maruyama to find what entrepreneurs and service sectors they are planning to invest in. We expect to invest in entrepreneurs with a big vision, typically those who want to change the world or create a business that can work in the global market. As smartphone use has grown, broadband internet is available to us anywhere. So our communication might be more active. So the sectors where we will look for potential investees will be commerce, O2O (online-to-offline), and omni-channel retailing. Following this strategy, we invested in Whyteboard, the startup behind the mobile flea market app Listor last April. We…

ventureunited_logo

See the original story in Japanese.

Venture United, a Japanese startup investment company, announced today that it has formed a fund worth 1.2 million yen ($11 million). The fund’s investors include the country’s state-run SME Support, Fusion Communications (a telco owned by Rakuten), SBI Securities, ad agency Hakuhodo, and Digital Advertising Consortium.

Venture United and its parent company United, the company best known for homescreen app CocoPPa, have already invested in many startups, including Lifenet Insurance, Enigmo, Unoh (acquired by Zynga back in 2010), and Nobot (acquired by Mediba, a KDDI company).

We spoke with the company’s chief venture capitalist Satoshi Maruyama to find what entrepreneurs and service sectors they are planning to invest in.

Satoshi Maruyama
Satoshi Maruyama

We expect to invest in entrepreneurs with a big vision, typically those who want to change the world or create a business that can work in the global market.

As smartphone use has grown, broadband internet is available to us anywhere. So our communication might be more active. So the sectors where we will look for potential investees will be commerce, O2O (online-to-offline), and omni-channel retailing. Following this strategy, we invested in Whyteboard, the startup behind the mobile flea market app Listor last April. We also invested in U-Note, and we aim to help them invent a new form of media.

Check out this beautiful app from Japan to help you split your restaurant bill

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See the original article in Japanese In Japan people will often split the bill when they eat out with friends. But the default calculator app on your iPhone is a little over-complicated for this task, and it’s a little ugly too. But Kamakura-based design studio KSKT had made something better. Its app, appropriately named Split Bill, was made just for this purpose. And it’s beautiful. It is minimalist in its feature set, allowing the user to just add and divide a given amount of money. Its smart design uses color gradation in a manner that leaves a lasting impression. Split Bill is currently available for 100 yen ($0.99), in Japanese, English, German, Korean, and Chinese. KSKT has previously designed apps for many startups, many of which we have already covered here on The Bridge. The company designed for the iPhone app for e-commerce startup Base, the logo and iPhone app for photo book service Niiice, and the logo, website design, and branding for PocketConcierge. When I looked at Split Bill, I started wondering about what kind of benefit a design studio gets when it develops its own service or app, as opposed to designing one for a client. For example,…

Split Bill calculator for splitting the bill

See the original article in Japanese

In Japan people will often split the bill when they eat out with friends. But the default calculator app on your iPhone is a little over-complicated for this task, and it’s a little ugly too. But Kamakura-based design studio KSKT had made something better. Its app, appropriately named Split Bill, was made just for this purpose.

And it’s beautiful.

It is minimalist in its feature set, allowing the user to just add and divide a given amount of money. Its smart design uses color gradation in a manner that leaves a lasting impression.

Split Bill is currently available for 100 yen ($0.99), in Japanese, English, German, Korean, and Chinese.

KSKT has previously designed apps for many startups, many of which we have already covered here on The Bridge. The company designed for the iPhone app for e-commerce startup Base, the logo and iPhone app for photo book service Niiice, and the logo, website design, and branding for PocketConcierge.

When I looked at Split Bill, I started wondering about what kind of benefit a design studio gets when it develops its own service or app, as opposed to designing one for a client. For example, we recently reported on about design studio AQ who will soon launch a subscription coffee service. But they also do client work, and I assume these efforts developing their own products have an effect on their work for third parties as well.

When it comes to developing web-services or applications, your work is rarely complete upon launch. Updates, improvements and maintenance are typically needed after release. Perhaps when a design studio develops its own applications or web-services it can gain more insights on this post-launch phase of the product life-cycle.

If you are an entrepreneur looking to launch a web-service or an application, you might consider finding a designer (such as those mentioned above) that has actual experience operating web services. It will likely result in a better overall product.

Japanese language learning startup Lang-8 secures funding from CyberAgent Ventures

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Lang-8, which runs a language learning platform based on peer corrections, announced today that it has raised funding from CyberAgent Ventures. The exact details of the funding were not disclosed. Lang-8 has acquired over 730,000 users from 219 countries and regions around the world, with about 70% coming from outside Japan. According to the company’s CEO Yangyang Xi, they plan to use these funds to develop a new service, and add three more engineers to their current three-person team. Xi initially launched the language learning platform when he was attending Kyoto University. Seven years have passed since then up until this funding. He notes that he has received much assistance from other entrepreneurs: Many people gave me advice for fundraising, including, Kensuke Furukawa (Nanapi), Ryusuke Matsumoto (Community Factory), Kiyo Kobayashi (serial entrepreneur, ex-CEO of Nobot), and Taku Harada (Peatix). But since I was running a service with a small team, I wanted to keep doing it ourselves without fundraising. But we started to explore funding opportunities back last July, and got a good response. When I met with Koichiro Yoshida (Crowdworks), he told me to meet with all available VC firms around…

yangyanglang8

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup Lang-8, which runs a language learning platform based on peer corrections, announced today that it has raised funding from CyberAgent Ventures. The exact details of the funding were not disclosed.

Lang-8 has acquired over 730,000 users from 219 countries and regions around the world, with about 70% coming from outside Japan. According to the company’s CEO Yangyang Xi, they plan to use these funds to develop a new service, and add three more engineers to their current three-person team.

Xi initially launched the language learning platform when he was attending Kyoto University. Seven years have passed since then up until this funding. He notes that he has received much assistance from other entrepreneurs:

Many people gave me advice for fundraising, including, Kensuke Furukawa (Nanapi), Ryusuke Matsumoto (Community Factory), Kiyo Kobayashi (serial entrepreneur, ex-CEO of Nobot), and Taku Harada (Peatix). But since I was running a service with a small team, I wanted to keep doing it ourselves without fundraising. But we started to explore funding opportunities back last July, and got a good response. When I met with Koichiro Yoshida (Crowdworks), he told me to meet with all available VC firms around him and try to raise funds.

Takanori Yokoi (Increments) also gave me sound advice. I’ve been sticking to metrics and logic, but he told me I should speak with more courage and not sweat the small stuff.

Every time I talked with Xi, he tended to be a little nervous about doing something new, despite the fact that his service has great potential. If he kept going in this way, I think he wouldn’t be able to create a disruptive service. After this new fundraising, perhaps he will be more aggressive.

And while I can’t disclose too much at this time, he actually is preparing to launch a new service. We’ll take a further look at it when the time comes.

Animal Buzz: Japanese startup launches website for viral animal videos

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See the original article in Japanese On the Japanese edition of The Bridge, we recently reported about the launch of video-curation site Dropout. It follows the same sort of viral media strategy as Upworthy, a trend currently drawing attention in Japan as a new style of web media. And now Grood, the Japanese startup behind the voice crowdsourcing service Voip, has launched a viral media site called Animal Buzz, specializing in animal-related content. Yuuya Haraguchi, the CEO of Grood, said he decided to launch Animal Buzz since he thought the idea had much potential and possibilities to create positive business synergies in the future. He added: I think there are a few things very important concerning viral media. For example, if the title and the thumbnail image has enough impact to catch viewers’ attention, it has a better chance of being shared often as long as the content drives people to share and the topic is based on universal interests. Viral media is a field quite easy for many businesses to enter. In Japan, six viral media focused sites have been already released. I think that the number will grow even more. Narrowing the theme is important when it comes…

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See the original article in Japanese

On the Japanese edition of The Bridge, we recently reported about the launch of video-curation site Dropout. It follows the same sort of viral media strategy as Upworthy, a trend currently drawing attention in Japan as a new style of web media. And now Grood, the Japanese startup behind the voice crowdsourcing service Voip, has launched a viral media site called Animal Buzz, specializing in animal-related content.

Yuuya Haraguchi, the CEO of Grood, said he decided to launch Animal Buzz since he thought the idea had much potential and possibilities to create positive business synergies in the future. He added:

I think there are a few things very important concerning viral media. For example, if the title and the thumbnail image has enough impact to catch viewers’ attention, it has a better chance of being shared often as long as the content drives people to share and the topic is based on universal interests.

Viral media is a field quite easy for many businesses to enter. In Japan, six viral media focused sites have been already released. I think that the number will grow even more. Narrowing the theme is important when it comes to launching viral media on your own. After I conducted a survey, I decided to go for with animal-focused media based on three reasons: 1) animal-related content is very popular when it comes to video, 2) a lot of people share such content with others, and 3) this content is relaxing and fun.

Animal Buzz aims to achieve 10 million page views per month within a half year.

animal buzzの映像たち

School in your pocket: Japanese startup launches iPhone app for live lecture participation

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See the original article in Japanese Schoo is a Japan-based startup that operates an online learning platform called schoo WEB-campus. The startup recently launched a handy iOS app with which users can view live broadcasted lectures on their smartphones. It’s called ‘Schoo Namahoso’, meaning ‘Schoo Live’. The app aims to provide mobile users with the same experience they can get on the website. With the app, user can check the course schedule and participate anytime and from anywhere. Upon the release of this new app, we spoke to Kenshiro Mori, the representative director of Schoo, as well as their designer Yusuke Yagi. The growing market for mobile video According to Mori, there are three main reasons why they decided to release the app at this time. The first reason and perhaps most obvious one is that more and more people watch videos on the smartphones these days. The market for both smartphones and videos are fast-growing areas, as you can see with Hulu, Youtube, or Niconico, video consumption on smartphones isincreasing. Schoo, as a online school service that uses video, needs to catch up with that trend. Until the app was released, the website was the only way to watch…

See the original article in Japanese

schoo ios

Schoo is a Japan-based startup that operates an online learning platform called schoo WEB-campus. The startup recently launched a handy iOS app with which users can view live broadcasted lectures on their smartphones. It’s called ‘Schoo Namahoso’, meaning ‘Schoo Live’.

The app aims to provide mobile users with the same experience they can get on the website. With the app, user can check the course schedule and participate anytime and from anywhere.

Upon the release of this new app, we spoke to Kenshiro Mori, the representative director of Schoo, as well as their designer Yusuke Yagi.

左:森氏 右:八木氏

The growing market for mobile video

According to Mori, there are three main reasons why they decided to release the app at this time. The first reason and perhaps most obvious one is that more and more people watch videos on the smartphones these days.

The market for both smartphones and videos are fast-growing areas, as you can see with Hulu, Youtube, or Niconico, video consumption on smartphones isincreasing. Schoo, as a online school service that uses video, needs to catch up with that trend.

Until the app was released, the website was the only way to watch live broadcasts. But when the team looked at feedback from users, they found out some commuters even went so far as to get off the train on their way back home so that they could open their laptops and watch live broadcasts. There were also comments on social media where from people who had missed the live broadcasts because they couldn’t make it in time.

So Mori thought making Schoo more easily accessible even during these small pockets of time would make a big difference.

Schoo’s vision is to build a society where people can always keep learning. The app is essential to achieving that vision, Mori says.

We’d like to build a society where learning is something people always do easily, able to attend school anytime. Make ’school’ portable is an important step in this process.

Releasing this app was an idea we had talked about for a long time. And now that the market is mature, we thought it was the right time for this app.

Driving participation on mobile

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One of the main features of Schoo is that the users can actively participate in courses and actively interact with lecturers.

Even before the app was released, access from mobile browsers was possible. But the user experience was not as same as that on the website. Designer Yagi explains:

There was traffic from mobile browsers. But the rate of user participation was low. Users could watch content from browsers, but it was difficult to participate in the course. The app tries to resolve this problem.

Yagi says that because they’re working with video content, it was critical to ensure good sound quality. He had to make sure that sound never gets interrupted. There were a few challenges to overcome such as dealing with line speed and image resolution to achieve a more comfortable user experience.

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I thought perhaps it would be a bigger challenge for Schoo to keep users’ attention on mobile compared to on the website. But Mori had some thoughts on that:

We thought, if we want to keep users’ attention on a video for a long time, we need to drive interaction. And we put in much efforts to realize that on smartphones. Users are more likely to feel reluctant to participate in the chat from an iPhone. So instead, we implemented things like an “I got it!” button and “I am seated” button, things that are very easy to use.

In addition to the features mentioned above, other interesting additions to the app include:

  • "I want to attend this” button, with which users can register and manage courses they have an interest in.
  • Push notification to notify users before the course starts.
  • Notifications for users of newly added courses (more than 40 courses are added every month)

As for an Android version, they will consider having their engineers work on that. Also, Mori thinks that video content is especially compatible with tablet devices, and so he is planning to build a team to work on serving tablet users, adding that he’d like to develop “a special user experience on tablets, something different from smartphones.

Schoo will continue its challenge through experiments and improvements in 2014, with the aim of achieving membership of one million by the end of this year.

schoo ui

This Chinese company built $120M per year business delivering ducks necks to geeks

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In China, duck necks are a popular food. And if you’re looking to find some, you might try the nearest Hahajing restaurant, a chain with over 1600 outlets in China. It’s main menu is duck meat, and even if you can’t visit the restaurant in person, the company prides itself on very fast delivery time, with food usually being delivered within 30 minutes. Hahajing opened just four years ago, but its annual sales amount to 700 million yuan (or about $120 million). As a comparison, Japan’s highest-grossing pizza chain, Pizza-La, has 535 outlets, and the company took 20 years to achieve 57 billion yen ($560 million) in the total annual sales, and that’s including the sales from its restaurant business. When you compare these two, it’s easy to see why speed of Hanhanjing growth is so impressive. We should clarify that you aren’t likely to see many people eating duck necks when you visit China. The company says that their main demographic/target is (for lack of a better word) geeks, or those who prefer to stay at home or in their room during the weekend. If you’d like to learn more about Hahajing, you can check out their website and…

hahajing-mac_

In China, duck necks are a popular food. And if you’re looking to find some, you might try the nearest Hahajing restaurant, a chain with over 1600 outlets in China. It’s main menu is duck meat, and even if you can’t visit the restaurant in person, the company prides itself on very fast delivery time, with food usually being delivered within 30 minutes.

Hahajing opened just four years ago, but its annual sales amount to 700 million yuan (or about $120 million).

As a comparison, Japan’s highest-grossing pizza chain, Pizza-La, has 535 outlets, and the company took 20 years to achieve 57 billion yen ($560 million) in the total annual sales, and that’s including the sales from its restaurant business. When you compare these two, it’s easy to see why speed of Hanhanjing growth is so impressive.

hahajing
Hahajing restaurant (photo hd55.cn)

We should clarify that you aren’t likely to see many people eating duck necks when you visit China. The company says that their main demographic/target is (for lack of a better word) geeks, or those who prefer to stay at home or in their room during the weekend.

If you’d like to learn more about Hahajing, you can check out their website and order page for more details. Or if you think you might be a frequent customer, you can also check out their iOS and Android apps for duck necks on the go should you ever need them.

hahajing-xbxbxbb
WWDC just not the same with ducks necks, packaged in foreground. (from Weibo user @xbxbxbb)

Can this new Japanese app become the top online Otaku marketplace?

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See the original article in Japanese Tokyo-based startup 7-bites has launched a new service called A2mato, a C2C flea market app focused on goods relating to Japanese subculture. It’s a smartphone marketplace where individuals can buy and sell things like self-published works, cosplay costumes, gaming, manga, and pop idol goods. When the startup raised funds last June, the CEO told us about this plan, and now it has finally gone online. This ‘otaku’ market includes other things like dating simulations and other online games, vocaloid voice synthesizing, cosplay, figures, novels, electronic comic books, and even railway models. According to a study by Yano Research Institute, this otaku market is getting more customers in Japan beyond its core fan group. In 2011, the market size was valued at 892 billion yen ($8.5 billion). The CEO of Bushiroad, Takaaki Kidani, mentioned that the market for card gaming alone is almost 100 billion yen ($9.5 billion), big enough to get the attention of many businesses. Recently I had a chance to interview with 7bites CEO Shota Sawada about why he thinks there’s potential in this market. He explained there are two main reasons why he started A2mato: One reason is that there is…

A2mato logo

See the original article in Japanese

Tokyo-based startup 7-bites has launched a new service called A2mato, a C2C flea market app focused on goods relating to Japanese subculture. It’s a smartphone marketplace where individuals can buy and sell things like self-published works, cosplay costumes, gaming, manga, and pop idol goods. When the startup raised funds last June, the CEO told us about this plan, and now it has finally gone online.

This ‘otaku’ market includes other things like dating simulations and other online games, vocaloid voice synthesizing, cosplay, figures, novels, electronic comic books, and even railway models.

According to a study by Yano Research Institute, this otaku market is getting more customers in Japan beyond its core fan group. In 2011, the market size was valued at 892 billion yen ($8.5 billion). The CEO of Bushiroad, Takaaki Kidani, mentioned that the market for card gaming alone is almost 100 billion yen ($9.5 billion), big enough to get the attention of many businesses.

Recently I had a chance to interview with 7bites CEO Shota Sawada about why he thinks there’s potential in this market.

A2mato

He explained there are two main reasons why he started A2mato:

One reason is that there is a market. The other reason is that I wanted to support creators.

At Comiket (a large comic convention) visitors cannot get enough information on the groups that are participating, and they turn to other media like Twitter or websites to get information. Because information is not easily accessible, comic fans pay attention only to major groups or circles. So it is difficult to find new talented creators. With A2mato I’d like to make information on new talents more easily accessible and support long-tailed creators.

While mobile C2C marketplace and flea market apps attracts many consumers today, there was no flea market app focused only on subculture. So Sawada thought there would be potential to grow.

Today many of online marketplaces for self-published works charge users high service charges. For example, when a creator sells their work on websites like DLsite or Melonbooks, the company charges the creator 30 percent of the price as a service charge. But on A2mato, it’s only 5.25%.

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On A2mato, users can follow hashtags for each genre and see that content on their timeline. There is also a feature called ‘remart’, similar to Twitter’s retweet, and users can save their favorite items as well.

The UI was developed based on Sawada’s assumption that the many users with interest an in subculture might be Twitter users too.

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Just like other flea market apps, users can list their items on A2mato from their smartphone app. Payments can be made using credit cards, money transfer at convenience stores and banks, or with A2mato points.

Unlike most flea market apps, A2mato has a web version of its marketplace as well. This is because the company expected that linked web content will be important to bring traffic/users from Twitter.

A2mato is targeting a half million users and 500 million yen ($4.8 million) in monthly transactions. If you’d like to try out the app, it is available for the download here. Currently it’s in Japanese only.

a2mato

Big data startup Hapyrus rebrands as FlyData, raises $1.6M

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See the original story in Japanese. Silicon-valley based Hapyrus, a Japanese startup focused on developing big data solutions, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million from investors in Japan and the US, including 500startups. Coinciding with these funds, the startup will rebrand itself as FlyData and set up a local subsidiary in Japan. The company is led by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa, who previously worked with a number of prominent Japanese startups like Dennotai (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2000), Simplex Technology (TSE:4340), and Sirius Technology (also acquired by Yahoo Japan, 2010). They launched a new service called ‘FlyData for Amazon Redshift’ back in February, allowing automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data-warehouse service. The decision to rebrand reflects the company’s intention to focus on providing and developing its FlyData service. Fujikawa explained the rationale behind this change at a press briefing yesterday: We’ve been originally developing middleware solutions for Hadoop, but I was so surprised when I saw Amazon Redshift for the first time. I thought that no other options besides Hadoop could deliver big data solutions that work, but in fact Amazon Redshift can do it for about $1,000 an year –…

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From the left: Kei Hareyama (country manager), Koichi Fujikawa (founder/CEO), and Daniel Saito (vice president)

See the original story in Japanese.

Silicon-valley based Hapyrus, a Japanese startup focused on developing big data solutions, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million from investors in Japan and the US, including 500startups. Coinciding with these funds, the startup will rebrand itself as FlyData and set up a local subsidiary in Japan.

The company is led by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa, who previously worked with a number of prominent Japanese startups like Dennotai (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2000), Simplex Technology (TSE:4340), and Sirius Technology (also acquired by Yahoo Japan, 2010).

They launched a new service called ‘FlyData for Amazon Redshift’ back in February, allowing automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data-warehouse service. The decision to rebrand reflects the company’s intention to focus on providing and developing its FlyData service.

Fujikawa explained the rationale behind this change at a press briefing yesterday:

We’ve been originally developing middleware solutions for Hadoop, but I was so surprised when I saw Amazon Redshift for the first time. I thought that no other options besides Hadoop could deliver big data solutions that work, but in fact Amazon Redshift can do it for about $1,000 an year – extremely cheaper than conventional technology. When Amazon’s mentor team came to visit 500startups where we were residing, they gave us a complimentary account for Amazon Redshift. When we tried it, it yielded 10 to 100 times better performance than Hadoop. It was then that we were convinced that we could not win with Hadoop.

While an abundant of solutions for cloud data processing are available, many companies have difficulty in uploading their data, and for many, their data remains in an on-premises environment. We found that there will be a pressing need to solve this issue, which led us to focus on our FlyData business.

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But it wasn’t easy reaching this conclusion. Fujikawa’s co-founders left the company because of a gap in their ideas about business strategy. But he believed in the potential of his business and raised $925,000 from investors in Japan and the US last summer. He succeeded in hiring competent workers through Japanese social recruiting platform Wantedly.

For companies, since FlyData technology uploads your data from an on-premise RDBMS (rational database management system) to cloud-based data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, you need to install a FlyData component on your RDBMS server. The component for MySQL is available for now, and components for PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server will follow soon.

Since the 2013 launch, FlyData for Amazon RedShift has acquired more than 40 corporate users and has over 40% growth in sales every month. They’ve seen a striking increase in the growth here in Japan, across sectors like social gaming, ad tech, and digital marketing. Fujikawa noted that they have prominent clients like Brightroll, Upworthy, Datalot, Enish, and Tokyo Otaku Mode.

FlyData is also a qualified member of the Amazon Redshift Partners program, where we can find a number of their competitors, including Informatica, Talend, Attunity, and SnapLogic. Fujikawa explained a little more about their advantage over these competitors:

From my perspective, Informatica and Talend has many problems in supporting cloud platforms. And Attunity and SnapLogic have not yet made an impact in the Japanese market. In terms of a presence in Japan and the Asia Pacific region, I believe we have an advantage.

Furthermore, Amazon is good at cloud computing but is not as good with data located that’s located in a client’s on-premise environment. But we can handle it, so that we think we’re a good complementary service to Amazon. For the time being, we are currently providing the service for Amazon, which is leading this space, but partnering with other platforms like Google Big Query might be a potential option for us in the future.

Along with the launch of their subsidiary in Japan, a number of notable individuals have joined their management team. Their vice president of sales and international growth Daniel Saito co-founded Rimnet (one of Japan’s oldest internet providers, later acquired by PSINet) and was involved in launching MySQL K.K. Kei Hareyama was appointed as the country manager for the Japanese market, bringing over 12 years experience in the data analytics sector to the table.

In Japan, we’ve seen quite a few startups providing business centric services for global markets. On a related note, Treasure Data, another notable Japanese startup focused on big data solutions, also received angel investment worth $2.75 million back in 2012, with funds coming from several investors including Jerry Yang (Yahoo co-founder) and Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto (the inventor of the Ruby programming language).