THE BRIDGE

translation

Chinese online flower shop forces men to choose their favorite girl

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Based on our previous article, in Japanese China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site. The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive. But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date. So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even…

roseonly

Based on our previous article, in Japanese

China is very good at finding business opportunities among the year’s many holidays. Valentine’s Day on February 14th, and Qixi Festival (often referred to as China’s Valentine’s Day), are both good examples of this. But China has one romantic service that you can use at any time of year, including Valentine’s Day. It’s online flower store RoseOnly, which we previously featured on our Japanese site.

The online service began in January of 2013, selling roses for 1000 yuan (about $170), a price point that seems to be targeting the upper class. After a user places an order and enters the recipient’s information, a nice-looking guy delivers the roses in a BMW. Very impressive.

But there is one very unique part of this service that stands out. When a male user signs up on the site, he has to register with his national identification card and he cannot specify more than one woman as a recipient – nor can he change the recipient at a later date.

So if a man has a relationship with more than one woman, he cannot use the service for both. He would have to make a choice. Even after a user breaks up with his girlfriend, he cannot send RoseOnly roses to a new girlfriend. In a way, that makes them extra special for anyone who receives them.

On Chinese Valentine’s Day, the sales on RoseOnly reached 11 million yuan ($1.8 million). Approximately 11,000 men sent roses using the service. And this success led the company to raise $10 million from Tencent in its series B round, and they opened their first brick-and-mortar stores in September.

The company says that it plans to launch a new service for men to send chocolates to women. I am sure that they are targeting for February 14th with this initiative. For more information, you can check out the RoseOnly promo video below.

Japan’s Adways partners with Korean growth hacking startup 5Rocks

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese internet company Adways (TSE:2849) announced on Thursday that it has invested an undisclosed sum in and partnered with Korean startup 5Rocks. The latter develops growth hacking solutions for mobile apps, and launched services for Japanese app developers last year. Our readers may recall that 5Rocks raised 230 million yen (approximately $2.3 million) from Japanese VC Global Brain. It was reported last month that 5Rocks had sold its restaurant booking app Poing to fellow Korean startup Trust Us so it could focus more on its growth hacking tool business. Adways has developed a performance analytics solution for mobile apps called PartyTrack, and they plan to integrate their suite with 5Rocks’ solution, aiming to provide more efficient mobile ad marketing services for clients. Another Japanese startup, Sirok, also introduced a growth hacking tool called Growth Point last month. A series of such service launches indicates this sector will likely be a trending space this year.

partytrack

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese internet company Adways (TSE:2849) announced on Thursday that it has invested an undisclosed sum in and partnered with Korean startup 5Rocks. The latter develops growth hacking solutions for mobile apps, and launched services for Japanese app developers last year.

Our readers may recall that 5Rocks raised 230 million yen (approximately $2.3 million) from Japanese VC Global Brain.

It was reported last month that 5Rocks had sold its restaurant booking app Poing to fellow Korean startup Trust Us so it could focus more on its growth hacking tool business.

Adways has developed a performance analytics solution for mobile apps called PartyTrack, and they plan to integrate their suite with 5Rocks’ solution, aiming to provide more efficient mobile ad marketing services for clients.

Another Japanese startup, Sirok, also introduced a growth hacking tool called Growth Point last month. A series of such service launches indicates this sector will likely be a trending space this year.

Next-gen Japanese wheelchair startup, Whill, closes seed funding with a total of $1,750,000

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See the original article in Japanese Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Earlier this week the startup unveiled that it has raised funds from Vegas Tech Fund, 500Startups, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and individual angel investors back on November 6th. The total amount of funding raised in this round is $750,000, completing the company’s seed funding of $1.75 million in total. Vegas Tech Fund, also involved in this most recent funding, includes Zappos’ Tony Hsieh as a partner CEO. Coinciding with the announcement, Whill has renewed its company website and has began online pre-orders. According to the CEO Satoshi Sugie, the company has already sold out the 50 available machines by pre-order, and there are over 100 users waiting to buy. They first plan to market the products in the US and are aiming to for a Japan release in late 2014. Sugie said that he wants to use the funding raised this time not only for Whill’s development but also to add some human resources, such as persons who can perform maintenance on the machine. He thinks it is very important to attain a high level of customer satisfaction. The company is also looking…

WHILL

See the original article in Japanese

Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Earlier this week the startup unveiled that it has raised funds from Vegas Tech Fund, 500Startups, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and individual angel investors back on November 6th.

The total amount of funding raised in this round is $750,000, completing the company’s seed funding of $1.75 million in total. Vegas Tech Fund, also involved in this most recent funding, includes Zappos’ Tony Hsieh as a partner CEO. Coinciding with the announcement, Whill has renewed its company website and has began online pre-orders.

According to the CEO Satoshi Sugie, the company has already sold out the 50 available machines by pre-order, and there are over 100 users waiting to buy. They first plan to market the products in the US and are aiming to for a Japan release in late 2014.

Sugie said that he wants to use the funding raised this time not only for Whill’s development but also to add some human resources, such as persons who can perform maintenance on the machine. He thinks it is very important to attain a high level of customer satisfaction.

The company is also looking for business development persons and field engineers. Anyone keen to get involved should consider getting in touch. Sugie is currently exhibiting at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas.

Seeing more and more Japanese startups trying to break into overseas markets is very encouraging for the other startups in Japan. We will also keep an eye on Whill to see how they progress.

Inside Luxembourg’s startup scene

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See the original story in Japanese. I visited Luxembourg back in June to attend the international startup showcase, ICT Spring 2013. The tiny country of Luxembourg is gradually becoming an emerging hub in the European startup community, and its government is trying to support this by organizing international conferences like ICT Spring. Unlike other startup communities where we can meet a variety of startups at different stages of development, Luxembourg seems to be more of a place for mature startups to grow further. 40% of Europe’s GDP lies within 500km of Luxembourg, making it a very convenient place to do business from. Many people working here actually reside in neighboring countries like Germany and France, and they commute to their offices in Luxembourg across the border every day. Why don’t startups use Luxembourg instead of London, Paris, or Berlin as a marketing hub for their European operations? During my visit at that time, I learned a lot about the country’s schemes and entities that supporting startups. And I’d like to review some of those here. P&T Luxembourg P&T Luxembourg is a 100% state-run company and administrates post and telecommunication business in the country. According to the company’s director Jean-Marie Spaus…

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View from the hotel I was visiting

See the original story in Japanese.

I visited Luxembourg back in June to attend the international startup showcase, ICT Spring 2013. The tiny country of Luxembourg is gradually becoming an emerging hub in the European startup community, and its government is trying to support this by organizing international conferences like ICT Spring.

Unlike other startup communities where we can meet a variety of startups at different stages of development, Luxembourg seems to be more of a place for mature startups to grow further.

40% of Europe’s GDP lies within 500km of Luxembourg, making it a very convenient place to do business from. Many people working here actually reside in neighboring countries like Germany and France, and they commute to their offices in Luxembourg across the border every day. Why don’t startups use Luxembourg instead of London, Paris, or Berlin as a marketing hub for their European operations?

During my visit at that time, I learned a lot about the country’s schemes and entities that supporting startups. And I’d like to review some of those here.

P&T Luxembourg

pandtluxembourg

P&T Luxembourg is a 100% state-run company and administrates post and telecommunication business in the country. According to the company’s director Jean-Marie Spaus and international business development head Micaël Weber, the country has a great geographical advantage to host servers for European customers, since it’s located in the heart of the region and thus can reduce data latency. This has encouraged many gaming companies like Nexon and Kabam to set their European headquarters in the country.

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Micaël Weber, International business development manager at P&T Luxembourg

The company is now working on deploying fiber-to-the-home to all households in the country according to the government’s strategy, with plans to roll out fiber-optic internet services up to 100Mbps by 2015, and 1Gbps by 2020.

Chamber of Commerce welcomes the world’s startups

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Romain Fouarge, the senior advisor at Luxembourg Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade, talks about their startup invitation policy

Kirchberg is the country’s only business district. It’s close to Fidel Airport, and a big street runs through the district, home to the European Union’s office, governmental offices, and many business centers. The Japanese delegation I was part of visited the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, a very fashionable building in the area. But it seems a little small for the number of officials, and an adjacent annex building was under construction.

For a tiny country like Luxembourg, since every local governmental organization has privilege to work like a ministry, their chamber of commerce can play an important role in inviting companies from around the world. They say that if you set up a company in Luxembourg, you or your employees will not always need to live in the country to apply for tax incentives. Their government is very small, which means when you are registering a company or applying for a startup program, you can complete all required documentation in a shorter period.

English is usually spoken business occasions in the country, but it’s not the official language. So when you submit a request to the government, you will be required to complete a form in German, French, or Luxemburgisch. However the ‘Luxembourg for Business’ office (a business promotion agency) in your country can help you with translation to complete the form, so language barriers will not cause much trouble.

From the view of Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce building
From the view of the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce building
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Conference room at Chamber of Commerce

Data4: More than just infrastructure

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Data4 headquarters in Bettembourg

Data4 is a data center company based in the suburban city of Bettembourg, a 30-minute drive from the central area of Luxembourg city. They have data center facilities at four locations in Luxembourg, two in France, and one in the UK, Italy, and Switzerland. The company was previously known as SecureIT, but rebranded since its business now extends beyond just the security business.

In association with consulting firm Ernst & Young and the Luxembourg government, they formed an incubation initiative called Europe4Startups. It lets participating startups receive a number of perks, including complimentary cloud storage subscription. If you’d like to apply for it, you can do so here.

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Data4 Chairman Gary Kneips explains about their company and incubation program

A potential hub for startups?

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Gare Centrale du Luxembourg

It seems like entrepreneurs and their co-workers in Luxembourg aren’t so wrapped up in their jobs that they can’t afford to enjoy everyday life. They manage to sustain their startups, without having to sacrifice their happiness. I envy that the location of their workplace, hang-outs, and homes were conveniently located in a tiny area.

Let me give you an example. During the visit, I visited the office of Nexon Europe, which is just across the street from Luxembourg Central Station (Gare Centrale du Luxembourg). It’s a walkable distance to the city’s busiest dining and entertainment district, Place d’Armes. HotCity, the country’s public Wi-Fi service, is available on almost every street corner, so you don’t have any expensive international roaming services. From that district, you can reach forest areas in less than a ten-minute walk. And compared to other European cities, Luxembourg is pretty safe.

For many of our readers, Luxembourg is still less familiar than most other European countries when it comes to business. But the recent announcements that Japanese startups like Chatwork and Skeed have set up their European offices there indicates that things are changing. If you plan to expand your business in the region, Luxumbourg is certainly worth considering as an options.

For all the assistance I received in arranging appointments during the trip, I wish to thank the following people:

  • Yuriko Matsuno, Luxembourg for Business (Tokyo), Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy and Foreign Trade
  • Ryoko Nagakubo, Luxembourg for Business (Tokyo), Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy and Foreign Trade
  • Yasuyo Koga, Lux2Japan

Inside Beijing’s startup scene: TechTemple nutures up-and-coming Chinese startups

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Beijing Skyline See the original article in Japanese from last month Among the eight startups who pitched at a recent event at Beijing’s Tech Temple, the following four startups provide all provide really interesting mobile solutions. Considering Xiaomi’s recent growth, and I came away with the impression that it could be Chinese startups like these that step to the fore on the the world stage. Appbyme AppByMe Appbyme is a cloud platform for the development smartphone apps, targeting beginner developers. In the US, there are similar services like as Invision and Flinto that help users prototype smartphone apps. Not just with prototyping, Appbyme helps users until they complete developing an app and even monetizing from that. In China, many people operate Bulletin Board Sites (BBSs) using content management systems like Discuz, PHPwind and WordPress. Those BBS already have regular users, and if their operators produce an app, then naturally that app can pick up quite a few users as well. And with Appbyme, such users can create an app simply by choosing a template. Many features such as push-notification, location-based gaming, social media sharing, or group-buying can be easily added to the app. Before founding Appbyme, CEO Zhao Jian worked…

beijing-skyline
Beijing Skyline

See the original article in Japanese from last month

Among the eight startups who pitched at a recent event at Beijing’s Tech Temple, the following four startups provide all provide really interesting mobile solutions. Considering Xiaomi’s recent growth, and I came away with the impression that it could be Chinese startups like these that step to the fore on the the world stage.

Appbyme

appbyme_screenshot
AppByMe

Appbyme is a cloud platform for the development smartphone apps, targeting beginner developers. In the US, there are similar services like as Invision and Flinto that help users prototype smartphone apps. Not just with prototyping, Appbyme helps users until they complete developing an app and even monetizing from that.

In China, many people operate Bulletin Board Sites (BBSs) using content management systems like Discuz, PHPwind and WordPress. Those BBS already have regular users, and if their operators produce an app, then naturally that app can pick up quite a few users as well. And with Appbyme, such users can create an app simply by choosing a template. Many features such as push-notification, location-based gaming, social media sharing, or group-buying can be easily added to the app.

Zhao Jian, CEO of AppByMe

Before founding Appbyme, CEO Zhao Jian worked as the technical officer of Yicha, a mobile search engine in China. He feels that it is getting more difficult to search for content as more services assume the form of a mobile apps. His vision is to make a better structure for content search on mobiles.

In this field, there are competitors already out there in China like AppCan and Zhuixin. But when it comes to the number of users and apps, Appbyme stands out. To date, 5400 webmasters are registered on Appbyme, and more than 50,000 apps have been released. The business model is based on a revenue share with developers and advertisers, charging bigger developers for a subscription.

The BBS community in China is very active, especially in cities. According to Zhao, local portal sites are popular, and they have their own business potential, the kind you cannot see for sites in larger, central cities. Appbyme hopes to take advantage of such local opportunities.

The company also plans to make the English, Japanese, and Korean versions so that it can expand overseas.

SayHi!

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Sumatomo

SayHi is a worldwide dating app with daily active amounting to about 650,000. It has many users in Middle Eastern countries and in Asia as well. Even though the app is developed in China, the service is not being provided there.

On SayHi, users can find other users nearby through GPS and then chat with them. But you need points to chat other members. For example, when a male user wants to chat with a popular female user, he has to pay one point for an hour. If you become a VIP member for a 6000 yen monthly fee, you can chat as much as you want.

According to Shi Yan, the CEO of Easyroid, the company has apps on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile. He says that 29% of their sales comes from Japanese market.

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Shi Yan pitches SayHi

In China, there are other popular messenger apps with similar features, including Momo and iAround. Globally, Badoo and Skout are doing well. SayHi plans to add more entertainment and game features in the app in order to differentiate from competitors.

vWorld

vWorld’s CEO Gao Song once worked as the chief officer of Shangshuixuan Studio, the game department of Kingsoft (HKG:3888). Gao says that the number of smartphone users in China amounts to 354 million, and most are either students or white-collar workers. There are some common characteristics among them:

  • Since they literally grew up with games, they care much about the quality of games.
  • They are used to sharing content on social media.
  • They are keenly competitive.

vWorld is a game app where users compete to conquer actual places. It’s a bit different from Foursquare, where users become the mayor of a location by accumulating check-in points. On vWorld, one can become the leader of a location if they win a game against other users.

The company wants to create a user experience where once users conquer various locations in a city that they would actually be motivated to move on to a different city. The app uses GPS to find the actual location using Autonavi’s API.

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vWorld CEO, Gao Song

App Annie

App Annie is an analytics platform that tracks downloads of mobile apps, and it’s a service we frequently reference here at The Bridge. You can easily get statistical information about iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Mac apps, giving you a good idea of which apps are popular in which market, popular and which ones are earning revenue.

App Annie has its headquarters in Beijing, but according to CEO Bertrand Schmitt, the company has 130 staff spanning across six cities. In September of 2013, the company raised $15 million in its series C round from Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital Partners, Greycroft Partners and Infinity Venture Partners.

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App Annie CEO Bertrant Schmitt

Bertrant shared his insights into the recent trend of mobile apps in the world. For instance, while the iOS AppStore has been growing in China, Google Play has seen remarkable growth in the other BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia and India). When it comes to the revenue, the big money comes mostly from advanced countries, with Android doing especially well are in the US and Japan. For the Japanese market, sales on Android and iOS are relatively well balanced [1].

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App Annie Index

For app developers, if you don’t know how your apps are selling in certain markets, you cannot develop a strategy for your development and design. But by using the market data available on App Annie and by utilizing other growth hacking tools, developers can determine how to make a successful app much more efficiently than before.

App Annie publishes infographic overviews of some of their statistics.In this way, the site can attract future customers, offering more detailed data to user who pay for premium accounts. Many news media who struggle with monetization can learn much from this business model.


We will look at more Chinese startups in our next article, and examine some of the major internet trends among companies in China.

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Tech Temple

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Many people in the Beijng startup community get together at this party. The entrepreneurs and investors I often meet in Beijing were all there. Even though it was soon after the facility opened, the place seemed to be quite well known in Beijing already.

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The corner of the reception and the cafe. The coffee was incredible.

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TechTemple is on the first and the second floor of the Tianhai Business Building in Beixinqiao, Beijing.


  1. According to figures from September of 2013.  ↩

Xibao: Helping China’s online merchants advertise better

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CTO of Xibao, Alex Farfurnik, on the right (photo cred) China’s top e-commerce site, Taobao, accounts for a whopping 80% share of the nation’s e-commerce market. But even with so many sellers setting up a shop on Taobao, most of them don’t adequately understand how to sell products on the platform. That’s where Xibao comes in. Xibao’s system helps optimize ads and use Taobao’s ad platform more effectively. According to co-founder, Alex Farfurnik, the company offers three plans at a monthly fixed rate. Pricing starts at 0–100 yuan ($0–17) for a freemium plan, 1000 yuan ($170) for a standard plan, and 15,000 yuan ($2500) for a VIP plan. 17 months have passed since the launch of its ad optimization platform, Super Driver, And the total customers subscribing to paid plans has surpassed 40,000. Advertisement fees paid by Taobao through Xibao have surpassed $150 million. At first, Xibao was launched as a service for small businesses. But the business grew because of a partnership with Taobao, and Xibao began offering the service to major companies as well. XiBao now has partnerships with internet giants like Tencent, Qihoo, JD.com, and Baidu. Generally, sellers place ads on Taobao to lead customers to their…

xibao
CTO of Xibao, Alex Farfurnik, on the right (photo cred)

China’s top e-commerce site, Taobao, accounts for a whopping 80% share of the nation’s e-commerce market. But even with so many sellers setting up a shop on Taobao, most of them don’t adequately understand how to sell products on the platform. That’s where Xibao comes in.

Xibao’s system helps optimize ads and use Taobao’s ad platform more effectively. According to co-founder, Alex Farfurnik, the company offers three plans at a monthly fixed rate. Pricing starts at 0–100 yuan ($0–17) for a freemium plan, 1000 yuan ($170) for a standard plan, and 15,000 yuan ($2500) for a VIP plan. 17 months have passed since the launch of its ad optimization platform, Super Driver, And the total customers subscribing to paid plans has surpassed 40,000. Advertisement fees paid by Taobao through Xibao have surpassed $150 million.

November 11th is widely referred to as ‘E-commerce Day’ on the Chinese internet. This year the sales on Tmall.com, the online retailer spun off from Taobao, reached 35.019 billion yuan ($5.6 billion) for the day. The above picture is from a monitoring room at Tmall.com.

At first, Xibao was launched as a service for small businesses. But the business grew because of a partnership with Taobao, and Xibao began offering the service to major companies as well. XiBao now has partnerships with internet giants like Tencent, Qihoo, JD.com, and Baidu.

Generally, sellers place ads on Taobao to lead customers to their shops. But it turns out that this is not necessarily cost-effective. For example, there was a case when a Tmall seller placed ads on Qihoo, leading viewers to Tmall from there. With this strategy, the cost performance of the ad was 50 times higher than ads placed directly on Tmall. Xibao looks at all the indicators including transactions and advertising ROI to manage the best ad space.

In the upcoming year, Xibao aims to release two apps and acquire 100,000 freemium accounts.

On November 11th, Xibao staff was working overnight at TechTemple. Every year on this day, all the staff work non-stop.

Japanese mobile flea market startup Mercari adds former Mixi CFO to board

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See the original article in Japanese To win in a competitive market, building strong management is necessary for a company. An increasingly competitive market in Japan is the flea market app space. Mercari, one of the leading players in this field, announced this past month that Fumiaki Koizumi, the former CFO of Mixi, would join as a board member. Koiziumi previously worked for Daiwa Securities SMBC and took charge of the IPOs for Mixi and DeNA. After he left Mixi, he has been supporting startups, and his recent addition to the board of directors at Trippiece drew some attention as well. At Mercari, he is currently not in a specific managerial position. But he might assume a title later on. Coinciding with this announcement, Mercari also released some interesting figures. The company says that the total number of items listed on their app has surpassed 1 million since the app went live in July 2013. They say that 10,000 items are added to the app everyday. As this market gets more competitive, what kind of strategy does Mercari have? We spoke to Shintaro Yamada, the CEO of Mercari, and Fumiaki Koizumi about this. The Bridge: First of all, I’d like…

See the original article in Japanese

To win in a competitive market, building strong management is necessary for a company. An increasingly competitive market in Japan is the flea market app space.

mercari_1 mercari_2

Mercari, one of the leading players in this field, announced this past month that Fumiaki Koizumi, the former CFO of Mixi, would join as a board member. Koiziumi previously worked for Daiwa Securities SMBC and took charge of the IPOs for Mixi and DeNA. After he left Mixi, he has been supporting startups, and his recent addition to the board of directors at Trippiece drew some attention as well.

At Mercari, he is currently not in a specific managerial position. But he might assume a title later on. Coinciding with this announcement, Mercari also released some interesting figures. The company says that the total number of items listed on their app has surpassed 1 million since the app went live in July 2013. They say that 10,000 items are added to the app everyday.

As this market gets more competitive, what kind of strategy does Mercari have? We spoke to Shintaro Yamada, the CEO of Mercari, and Fumiaki Koizumi about this.

The Bridge: First of all, I’d like to know how Koizumi-san will get involved in the management of the company.

Yamada: As we expand the business, building strong management is key. The company’s advisor, Atsushi Ishikawa (former vice-president of Unoh Inc., CSO of Wonderplanet Inc.) was the first hire of CyberAgent and understands very well what kind of problems a startup goes through as it expands. He points out these possible problems in advance. I invited Koizumi-san as CFO, but I expect him to be active in the overall business, and in PR, aggressive PR. We had been focusing on development, and couldn’t spare much resources for PR so far.

The Bridge: Koizumi-san recently joined Trippiece as well, right?

Yamada: We encourage double work, and I invested in Smartnews myself. So, we don’t have any problem with that.

Photo 2013-12-13 10 47 56

The Bridge: What do you think of the flea market app space?

Koizumi: Since resources in our society are limited, I was interested in C2C transactions as a solution. And now that this trend moving forward, I’d like to be a part of it.

The Bridge: What strategy do you have for PR and marketing? Will you put advertisements in magazines and such mass media?

Koizumi: We don’t have a plan to put large resources into advertisement.

The Bridge: Japan’s C2C market won’t grow without significant effort. We previously featured classifieds site Jmty.jp and looked at their challenges. What do you think is the key to succeeding in the C2C market?

Yamada: I was talking about this with my friends who have management experience. What makes Mercari different from others is that we really care about the product. For example, we carefully look at points where users drop out from the purchasing process, and try to improve it.

Koizumi: Our customer support is simple, but we think that a good user experience is very important.


Whenever I speak with Yamada, I’m always impressed with his passion to make a perfect product. Considering that the most of the members of Mercari have been engineers, bringing new perspective to make the product more sophisticated must be important. A user-friendly interface and a solid app is inevitable for consumer service.

The competition among flea market apps will be fierce in 2014. It reminds me of the past competition in the group buying market. Stay tuned to see who can win out in this space.

To reduce wasted food, this app gives your leftovers to friends

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See the original article in Japanese The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) [1] is one of the world’s largest conservation NGOs, operating globally in over 100 nations. The local office in Japan, WWF Japan, has recently launched a unique iPhone app called Zan Panda. It lets users share their leftover food with friends or with other people around them. With this app, WWF Japan intends to draw attention to the effects that individual dietary habits have on the environment, and how we should be more eco-friendly. The app was developed in cooperation with Asatsu-dk and Kayac. Check out the video below to get a better idea of the concept. I am not sure how many of us are willing to eat other’s leftovers. But speaking for myself, I would have checked this app quite often if I had it when I was in college or when I started working as a freelancer, times when I was struggling to make ends meet. To give you some perspective, the amount of annual food waste in Japan is allegedly more than twice as the amount of the food aid provided worldwide. Also working on this issue is a non-profit organization called Second…

zanpanda

See the original article in Japanese

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) [1] is one of the world’s largest conservation NGOs, operating globally in over 100 nations. The local office in Japan, WWF Japan, has recently launched a unique iPhone app called Zan Panda. It lets users share their leftover food with friends or with other people around them.

With this app, WWF Japan intends to draw attention to the effects that individual dietary habits have on the environment, and how we should be more eco-friendly. The app was developed in cooperation with Asatsu-dk and Kayac. Check out the video below to get a better idea of the concept.

I am not sure how many of us are willing to eat other’s leftovers. But speaking for myself, I would have checked this app quite often if I had it when I was in college or when I started working as a freelancer, times when I was struggling to make ends meet.

To give you some perspective, the amount of annual food waste in Japan is allegedly more than twice as the amount of the food aid provided worldwide. Also working on this issue is a non-profit organization called Second Harvest Japan which distributes food to those who can’t afford to buy it.

The overall process of food production and consumption requires large amounts of natural resources. So to promote effective use of resources and conservation, reducing food loss and waste is very important. That’s why WWF Japan launched this project. The Zan Panda app doesn’t actually resolve the issue, but hopefully it can raise some awareness.

Earlier this year, an iPad app named WWF together, developed by WWF and AKQA won a 2013 Apple Design Award. Perhaps in the future, we will see more apps like this that bring social messages to users.

Zan Panda is currently available on iOS from the Japanese app store if you’d like to give it a try.

ZANPANDA


  1. Formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund.  ↩

Chinese tech news site 36kr focuses on the little guys

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Here’s some fun trivia: 36 is the atomic number of Krypton, the home planet of Superman. And making a reference to that factoid in its name, is the Chinese-language tech site 36kr. It was initially launched by ChengCheng Liu (pictured below) and his friends at Peking University in 2012. Currently its editorial department has around fifty staff, and about 30 articles are released everyday. Five or six of those are typically startup-related articles. The site has approximately 20 million page views a month, with readers residing mostly in China or Chinese-speaking regions. And while other Chinese’s tech blogs cover overseas topics or news from big Chinese corporations like Tencent and Sina, 36Kr focuses on Chinese startups. The company has been organizing startup events every two months in many cities in China, the US and Hong Kong. On November 10th, an event in Hangzhou attracted 1400 participants, with about one in three of them being entrepreneurs. This past year the tech blog has covered more than 800 startups in total. In addition to publishing news articles, it has also been developing a startup database. The number of the registered startup projects is 15,000 to date, and it keeps adding about 50…

36krdb
36kr’s database

Here’s some fun trivia: 36 is the atomic number of Krypton, the home planet of Superman. And making a reference to that factoid in its name, is the Chinese-language tech site 36kr.

It was initially launched by ChengCheng Liu (pictured below) and his friends at Peking University in 2012. Currently its editorial department has around fifty staff, and about 30 articles are released everyday. Five or six of those are typically startup-related articles. The site has approximately 20 million page views a month, with readers residing mostly in China or Chinese-speaking regions. And while other Chinese’s tech blogs cover overseas topics or news from big Chinese corporations like Tencent and Sina, 36Kr focuses on Chinese startups.

ccliu_snapshot

The company has been organizing startup events every two months in many cities in China, the US and Hong Kong. On November 10th, an event in Hangzhou attracted 1400 participants, with about one in three of them being entrepreneurs.

This past year the tech blog has covered more than 800 startups in total. In addition to publishing news articles, it has also been developing a startup database. The number of the registered startup projects is 15,000 to date, and it keeps adding about 50 projects everyday.

He was a student at Peking University when he launched the site. Even without developing the database, the company has broke even thanks to its news site and events.

But he is taking a bit of a risk by putting resources into database development, with 20 of their 50 staffers tied up in that project. Liu explained:

What we aim to do with this database is not just to provide information on which startup fundraises from which VC. We aim to collect information about which investors are behind the VC, and eventually I hope it develops into a sort of LinkedIn for the startup community. […] By doing this, we will be able to predict the action of investors and entrepreneurs before fundraising occurs.

36kr tracks not only investment, but also which startups investors are interested in. Liu’s aim in developing the database is to build startup culture, rather than to profit from it. He plans to create a one-stop service that offers entrepreneurs access to important information, products, and a network – all the necessary things to launch a startup.

In a way, the concept is similar to Creww Marketplace or e27’s Bundles.

36kr has an entrepreneur knowledge exchange event coming up this week in Shenzhen, and you can learn more about that here.

Goyoo: Building a business on the popularity of internet cafes in China

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In China, you can find lots of internet cafes in just about any city. Even after broadband or mobile devices have been widely adopted, internet cafes still attract many people. One of the reasons behind this popularity is that students can enjoy games a little more freely without parents around to nag them. Well over 100,000 internet cafes exist in the country, and out of those, around 30,000 are i8 cafes, using a system developed by Goyoo. That means, there’s an i8 for every 10,000 people in China. Just as a comparison, Korea is famous for having many internet cafes, and there’s an internet cafe for every 2500 people. According to the CEO, Jerry Wang, Goyoo’s system consists of launcher software on the PCs, games, and routers and servers to to support their distribution system. The company operates an advertising network, AdPro, which serves advertisements to the monitors of the PCs in these cafes. That’s the main source of revenue for the company. The maximum impressions achieved in a single day is 150 million, and that came just after four months after the launch of AdPro. The difference between AdPro and the other existing ad networks is that it can…

jerrywang_snapshot
CEO Jerry Wang

In China, you can find lots of internet cafes in just about any city. Even after broadband or mobile devices have been widely adopted, internet cafes still attract many people. One of the reasons behind this popularity is that students can enjoy games a little more freely without parents around to nag them. Well over 100,000 internet cafes exist in the country, and out of those, around 30,000 are i8 cafes, using a system developed by Goyoo. That means, there’s an i8 for every 10,000 people in China. Just as a comparison, Korea is famous for having many internet cafes, and there’s an internet cafe for every 2500 people.

According to the CEO, Jerry Wang, Goyoo’s system consists of launcher software on the PCs, games, and routers and servers to to support their distribution system. The company operates an advertising network, AdPro, which serves advertisements to the monitors of the PCs in these cafes. That’s the main source of revenue for the company. The maximum impressions achieved in a single day is 150 million, and that came just after four months after the launch of AdPro.

The difference between AdPro and the other existing ad networks is that it can pick up very detailed user attributes. It can identify which site each user views because of the identification card required by law in China for people to internet cafes. So advertisers can control the advertisements they serve to each user. It is also possible to track users’ movement across different websites.

Goyoo is also the world-biggest partner DSP (demand-side platform) for Baidu, covering about 25 million users.

The company plans to launch a new service, LeWifi, which will be distributed to other internet cafes (besides i8) and fast-food restaurants for free. The router of LeWifi can be controlled completely in the cloud, just like Cisco’s Meraki. The company plans to share revenue with outlets based on the amount of traffic to the router. They expect to reach $30 million in annual sales and 100 million daily users in 2014. LeWifi routers will be set up in as many as 200,000 outlets all over in China.

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