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Japanese travel startup Trippiece launches English version and a Singapore subsidiary

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based travel startup Trippiece announced today that it has launched an English version to assist international travelers visiting Japan. Since its launch back in 2011, it has been serving Japanese users. Now with the launch of this English version the company hopes to establish a global user base. Prior to launch, they established a subsidiary in Singapore, hiring Shuying Yao as overseas marketing manager. She will be committed to user engagement and marketing in Asian regions. They currently have no plan to serve languages other than English. Trippiece allows you to create a travel plan and gather others who are keen to join. There is a troublesome chicken/egg issue when you launch on a web service of this kind. That is, if there are no travel plans on the platform, you cannot invite more users. And without users, you cannot have travel plans. The company’s founder and CEO Ian Ishida has learned a lot about this issue, having experienced it when they launched the original Japanese version. He explained how they will try to avoid it this time around: To ensure the quality of the travel plans we provide, we will ask selected foreigners…

trippiece_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based travel startup Trippiece announced today that it has launched an English version to assist international travelers visiting Japan. Since its launch back in 2011, it has been serving Japanese users. Now with the launch of this English version the company hopes to establish a global user base.

Shuying-Yao
Singapore-based marketing manager Shuying Yao

Prior to launch, they established a subsidiary in Singapore, hiring Shuying Yao as overseas marketing manager. She will be committed to user engagement and marketing in Asian regions. They currently have no plan to serve languages other than English.

Trippiece allows you to create a travel plan and gather others who are keen to join. There is a troublesome chicken/egg issue when you launch on a web service of this kind. That is, if there are no travel plans on the platform, you cannot invite more users. And without users, you cannot have travel plans. The company’s founder and CEO Ian Ishida has learned a lot about this issue, having experienced it when they launched the original Japanese version. He explained how they will try to avoid it this time around:

To ensure the quality of the travel plans we provide, we will ask selected foreigners living in Japan to create their travel plans. If they can lead a tour, other foreign visitors will not need to worry about a language issue when taking that tour.

But if we depend only on our users’ efforts in having a solid collection of travel plans, we won’t be able to form a community of users. So we will make about 30 travel plans by the launch of the English edition. We’re not interested in how many international users we can acquire, but we aim to have 1,000 users traveling to Japan using our website six months from now.

In this space, we’ve also seen many competitors like Asoview, Voyagin, PlayLife, and Trip. Trippiece has a relatively long history, but how can they stand out from the others? Ishida explained:

Our uniqueness is that we create an opportunity for experience. A travel plan will be executed just once, in contrast with other services which usually sell their tours or plans multiple times. What we do is help users establish a social graph through travel, rather than just helping them travel.

Consequently, some of their users have voluntarily organized a club for diving lovers, for example. Others could find boyfriends and girlfriends through a tour they have attended.

In Japan, central and local governments have been committed to cultivating the so called MICE (meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibitions) market needs, with the aim of surpassing 20 million international travelers annually to Japan heading towards the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. With that in mind, Trippiece plans to acquire over 10,000 users who will use the website and visit Japan a year from now.

Japan’s Cookpad acquires Indonesia’s Dapur Masak

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Tokyo-based recipe sharing service Cookpad (TSE:2193) announced yesterday that it has acquired Indonesian [1] recipe site Dapur Masak, buying a 60% stake for US$600,000 from founder Soegianto Widjaja. Cookpad announced back in January that it had invested an undisclosed amount for a 40% share of Dapur Masak. Our readers may recall Cookpad also acquired US-based Allthecooks and Spain’s Mis Recetas back in December. via Venture Now Based in Singapore.  ↩

cookpad-dapur-masak_logos

Tokyo-based recipe sharing service Cookpad (TSE:2193) announced yesterday that it has acquired Indonesian [1] recipe site Dapur Masak, buying a 60% stake for US$600,000 from founder Soegianto Widjaja. Cookpad announced back in January that it had invested an undisclosed amount for a 40% share of Dapur Masak.

Our readers may recall Cookpad also acquired US-based Allthecooks and Spain’s Mis Recetas back in December.

via Venture Now


  1. Based in Singapore. 

Beatrobo raises $1.1M, has ambitions to replace the CD

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Beatrobo Inc. has announced today that it has raised $1.1 million from Lawson HMV Entertainment and Genuine Startups, in order to further develop and expand its PlugAir business [1]. Our regular readers are likely aware that Beatrobo, in addition to operating a really fun streaming music service, has developed its PlugAir technology that can be used to share and distribute digital content. It doesn’t have to be music, but it could also be used to share videos or ebooks, for example. This partnership with Lawson, who is very active in the entertainment and ticketing business, is an intriguing twist in Beatrobo’s progression. The startup’s CEO and founder Hiroshi Asaeda explained to us how that tie-up came about: They have connections to the entertainment business, and a channel for distribution, HMV Japan and their ten thousand stores. One of our focuses was to find a distribution channel because our product is physical. Our initial idea was to distribute it at concerts like merchandise, and when we were talking to [Lawson HMV Entertainment], they eventually said they’d invest in us. Asaeda elaborates that Beatrobo will, in fact, license their patent to Lawson so that they can manufacture the device. Obviously if the…

beatrobo-plugair02

Beatrobo Inc. has announced today that it has raised $1.1 million from Lawson HMV Entertainment and Genuine Startups, in order to further develop and expand its PlugAir business [1]. Our regular readers are likely aware that Beatrobo, in addition to operating a really fun streaming music service, has developed its PlugAir technology that can be used to share and distribute digital content. It doesn’t have to be music, but it could also be used to share videos or ebooks, for example.

This partnership with Lawson, who is very active in the entertainment and ticketing business, is an intriguing twist in Beatrobo’s progression. The startup’s CEO and founder Hiroshi Asaeda explained to us how that tie-up came about:

They have connections to the entertainment business, and a channel for distribution, HMV Japan and their ten thousand stores. One of our focuses was to find a distribution channel because our product is physical. Our initial idea was to distribute it at concerts like merchandise, and when we were talking to [Lawson HMV Entertainment], they eventually said they’d invest in us.

Asaeda elaborates that Beatrobo will, in fact, license their patent to Lawson so that they can manufacture the device. Obviously if the startup were to manufacture PlugAir devices on their own, they’d burn through their funding very, very quickly. So this arrangement brings assistance on the manufacturing side, and also assures reasonably widespread use of the app, which is required by anyone who uses a PlugAir device in order to pull content from the cloud.

A physical, digital key

As you can see in the video below, using PlugAir is almost the same sort of experience as using a USB key. But the technology doesn’t actually store content on the device. As I understand it, it instead receives soundwaves from your phone which are then turned into electric power, launching the device’s microcontroller to get its serial number [2]. They then send that data back to the phone using its microphone input, which unlocks access to cloud content.

I asked Asaeda about the challenge of making people understand that a smartphone’s headphone jack can be used in this way. He affirmed that this indeed an critical challenge:

That’s our goal for this whole year. Techy people will think if it is a gadget that goes in the earphone jack, then it’s a credit card reader. We need to change the whole idea of the earphone jack, and make people understand that you can get content from there. That’s why we started with entertainment. But some people have even asked about medical use, and storing patient or prescription information. It’s a key.

If you think about what Beatrobo has done here, they’ve quite elegantly made it possible for physical limitations to be applied to digital content. I emphasize the word possible here, because whether or not those limitations are actually applied is a decision that the content provider will make themselves. PlugAir could enable limitless copying to your friends’ smartphones, or it could be limited to, for example, giving your friends 90 second samples that expire in 24 hours. Sharing could even be incentivized, with musicians giving you a bonus track if you share samples with three friends.

Asaeda explained what they learned from working with Linkin Park using PlugAir over the past year:

What I noticed from Linkin Park that they didn’t really want the email addresses of fans, but a rather contact point where fans can buy or experience their content.

So if you think of PlugAir as a fan community device, (paying) members of a fan club could receive updated content over and over again in the future. I understand that push notifications will be on the way soon, which will enable fans to stay up to date with the latest content.

There’s a ton of potential in this idea, and Asaeda says flat out that his ultimate goal is to replace the CD:

We want to change music, we love it. Somebody needs to change the industry. Nobody is trying, so I’m going to do it.

The Linkin Park PlugAir
The Linkin Park PlugAir

beatrobo-plugair08

beatrobo-plugair04
Beatrobo will soon move to a new office. Asaeda nice enough to meet with me as he was packing up his old office.

  1. Lawson HMV Entertainment is one of the three main businesses of Lawson’s larger holding company, which of course, includes its convenience store business. Genuine Startup is a fund spun off from Movida Japan.  ↩

  2. There’s also a security chip onboard to prevent copying the device.  ↩

Boasting over 200K Facebook likes, cosplay photo sharing platform secures funding

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Ample, the Tokyo-based startup behind cosplay photo sharing platform of the same name, announced today that it has raised an undisclosed sum of funding from Japan’s online learning company Hitomedia and entrepreneur/investor Takafumi Horie. Since its launch back in October of 2012, the platform has acquired more than 40,000 photos and over 210,000 likes on Facebook, and has users from about 60 countries worldwide. The company plans to use these funds to strengthen its team so it can better serve its users, and develop additional features such as a personalized interface. For Hitomedia, this is the fourth tech startups investment in its history, following US-based social commerce platform Fancy, online English learning school Langrich, and mobile food recommendation app Teriyaki. via Venture Now

ample

Ample, the Tokyo-based startup behind cosplay photo sharing platform of the same name, announced today that it has raised an undisclosed sum of funding from Japan’s online learning company Hitomedia and entrepreneur/investor Takafumi Horie.

Since its launch back in October of 2012, the platform has acquired more than 40,000 photos and over 210,000 likes on Facebook, and has users from about 60 countries worldwide. The company plans to use these funds to strengthen its team so it can better serve its users, and develop additional features such as a personalized interface.

For Hitomedia, this is the fourth tech startups investment in its history, following US-based social commerce platform Fancy, online English learning school Langrich, and mobile food recommendation app Teriyaki.

via Venture Now

Uniqlo now selling t-shirts featuring Line characters

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If you’re starting to tire of seeing Line’s characters all over the place here in Japan, I have some bad news for you. Line is teaming up with fashion retailer Uniqlo to offer Line Character branded t-shirts as part of the new Uniqlo t-shirt (UT) line-up [1]. In my view, Uniqlo lends some much-needed credibility to Line’s characters, putting them alongside far more established brands like Hello Kitty and Disney. The shirts are on sale now for the very affordable price of 943 yen (or just over $9). Check out Uniqlo’s promo video for the new 2014 line-up below, including the new Line t-shirts about halfway through. (It’s an unlisted video, so if this embed suddenly stops working, you know why!) Via news.ameba.jp As far as I can tell, this is just for Uniqlo stores in Japan. I can’t find the Line t-shirts on the Uniqlo USA website.  ↩

uniqlo-line

If you’re starting to tire of seeing Line’s characters all over the place here in Japan, I have some bad news for you. Line is teaming up with fashion retailer Uniqlo to offer Line Character branded t-shirts as part of the new Uniqlo t-shirt (UT) line-up [1].

In my view, Uniqlo lends some much-needed credibility to Line’s characters, putting them alongside far more established brands like Hello Kitty and Disney. The shirts are on sale now for the very affordable price of 943 yen (or just over $9).

Check out Uniqlo’s promo video for the new 2014 line-up below, including the new Line t-shirts about halfway through. (It’s an unlisted video, so if this embed suddenly stops working, you know why!)

Via news.ameba.jp


  1. As far as I can tell, this is just for Uniqlo stores in Japan. I can’t find the Line t-shirts on the Uniqlo USA website.  ↩

Japanese e-commerce site Magaseek branches into kids fashions

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Japanese fashion commerce service Magaseek today unveiled a new Magaseek Kids service today. The company found that among a surveyed sample of their customers in their 30s and 40s, most had kids. And this new portal aims to serve that demographic by offering brands and fashions for kids of various ages, as well as an assortment of goods for mothers too. Magaseek is one of many successful fashion services that have done well serving the female demographic here in Japan. Via CNet Japan

magaseek-kids

Japanese fashion commerce service Magaseek today unveiled a new Magaseek Kids service today. The company found that among a surveyed sample of their customers in their 30s and 40s, most had kids. And this new portal aims to serve that demographic by offering brands and fashions for kids of various ages, as well as an assortment of goods for mothers too.

Magaseek is one of many successful fashion services that have done well serving the female demographic here in Japan.

Via CNet Japan

How different countries motivate local entrepreneurs [NES 2014 panel]

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This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e. Day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo included a panel about how governments in the Middle East and European regions motivate local entrepreneurs. Speakers included: David Heller, managing partner of Vertex Venture Capital Talmon Marco, CEO of Viber Peter Vesterbacka, Mighty Eagle at Rovio Entertainment Chris Wade, venture capital advisor of UK Trade and Investment Heller kicked off the panel describing how his company has evolved the local startup scene in Israel. Since its launch back in 1997, Vertex has invested in 108 companies, and over 30 went on to an exit. The most recent was Waze, a community-based, real-time traffic and navigation app, acquired by Google last year. He emphasized that one of the most interesting things about the Israeli startup ecosystem is the amount of VC investment per person is much higher than that of any other developed country. Marco then introduced himself by encouraging the audience to call Viber a Japanese company, since they were acquired by Japan’s Rakuten earlier this year. Despite the fact that they started business in…

emea-panel2-lead

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e.

Day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo included a panel about how governments in the Middle East and European regions motivate local entrepreneurs. Speakers included:

  • David Heller, managing partner of Vertex Venture Capital
  • Talmon Marco, CEO of Viber
  • Peter Vesterbacka, Mighty Eagle at Rovio Entertainment
  • Chris Wade, venture capital advisor of UK Trade and Investment

Heller kicked off the panel describing how his company has evolved the local startup scene in Israel. Since its launch back in 1997, Vertex has invested in 108 companies, and over 30 went on to an exit. The most recent was Waze, a community-based, real-time traffic and navigation app, acquired by Google last year. He emphasized that one of the most interesting things about the Israeli startup ecosystem is the amount of VC investment per person is much higher than that of any other developed country.

David Heller
David Heller

Marco then introduced himself by encouraging the audience to call Viber a Japanese company, since they were acquired by Japan’s Rakuten earlier this year. Despite the fact that they started business in Belarus and then moved on to London, they have an especially large user base in South East Asia, especially in Myanmar and the Philippines. His advice for Japanese entrepreneurs? You need to encourage your employees to respect individualism and think out of box.

Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka explained that his company initially started out as a gaming company, but is now focused on three Es: entertainment, education, and entrepreneurship. As part of these efforts, they have been involved in organizing Finland’s largest tech conference Slush [1]. He encouraged Japanese entrepreneurs in the audience to create global success stories, pointing out that Tokyo alone has a larger population than all of Finland. He says startups have to stand out and differentiate from others, and that his company respects the diversity of employees. After launching an office here in Tokyo, they hope to be more Japanese than Japanese people, he says.

UKTI’s Chris Wade explained that his organization has been helping to grow the local startup community in East London by eliminating obstacles for entrepreneurs who are launching a company, providing them with the necessary mentorship. He says the UK government has also deployed several measures to accelerate entrepreneurship, including tax incentives for seed investments and issuing an entrepreneur visa to helps startups more easily hire talented people from outside the country.

He noted that every entrepreneur has to fail fast and keep trying. That’s the must-have mindset not only for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but for people all over the world who are keen to launch a business.

Peter Vesterbacka, Chris Wade
Peter Vesterbacka, Chris Wade

  1. Update: We’re told the largest tech conference in Eurasia, in fact.  ↩

Japan’s Cookpad boasts 20M app downloads, 40M monthly users

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Cookpad, the operator of Japan’s leading recipe sharing website, announced today that downloads of its mobile apps (for iOS and Android) have surpassed 20 million. In addition, the service now boasts 40 million monthly users, of which six percent engage using smartphones. You can see the chart above for a more detailed breakdown of Cookpad user access across devices. Cookpad

cookpad
From Cookpad

Cookpad, the operator of Japan’s leading recipe sharing website, announced today that downloads of its mobile apps (for iOS and Android) have surpassed 20 million.

In addition, the service now boasts 40 million monthly users, of which six percent engage using smartphones. You can see the chart above for a more detailed breakdown of Cookpad user access across devices.

Cookpad

How do you promote innovation within a company? [NES 2014 Panel]

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This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e. The morning session on day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo opened with a panel on how companies can spur innovation, and it boasted an all-star panel of speakers: Matt Wilsey, entrepreneur and investor Akira Morikawa, CEO of Line Corporation Jerry Yang, Co-founder, AME Cloud Ventures Morikawa-san started off the panel with an introduction to Line (which we have covered extensively, a service that has now reached 400 million users. From his perspective, regardless of the scale of your organization, everyone can create a disruptive business. The problem is that every organization has nay-sayers when you come up with a new idea, and that is typically the biggest obstacle when trying to executing. Japanese people tend to follow a plan, and avoid changing it once it’s in place. So at his company, they make no detailed plan for the long term, and that helps their employees stay ready for unexpected changes based on user responses. He emphasized that it is not their management but rather their users who should decide if a new…

internal-innovation-panel

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e.

The morning session on day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo opened with a panel on how companies can spur innovation, and it boasted an all-star panel of speakers:

  • Matt Wilsey, entrepreneur and investor
  • Akira Morikawa, CEO of Line Corporation
  • Jerry Yang, Co-founder, AME Cloud Ventures

Morikawa-san started off the panel with an introduction to Line (which we have covered extensively, a service that has now reached 400 million users. From his perspective, regardless of the scale of your organization, everyone can create a disruptive business. The problem is that every organization has nay-sayers when you come up with a new idea, and that is typically the biggest obstacle when trying to executing.

morikawa-internal-innovation
Line CEO Akira Morikawa

Japanese people tend to follow a plan, and avoid changing it once it’s in place. So at his company, they make no detailed plan for the long term, and that helps their employees stay ready for unexpected changes based on user responses. He emphasized that it is not their management but rather their users who should decide if a new idea is good or bad.

Jerry Yang is best known as the founder of search giant Yahoo, but he’s currently working as an investor in Silicon Valley. His company, AME Cloud Ventures, has invested in over 50 startups, many of which are running data-driven businesses. He’s expecting huge potential in this sector since a big data methodology will enable any industry to rethink and rebuild things in our world. His strategy is based on an assumption/prediction about what will happen in the near future, and from there he decides what kind of startups to invest in.

Jerry Yang
Jerry Yang

In a response to the moderator’s [1] question about how to promote an entrepreneurial mindset at a company, Jerry explained there has to be a sense of urgency. Startups have obviously have it, but established companies also require it in order to make something new happen from the inside.

Matt noted that we can’t force anyone to be innovative. All we can do is create an environment that is friendly to innovation. Innovations typically happen in a place you’d never expect. And one of the biggest failures for companies when they have no time to create an environment or a culture that permits employees to try and fail.

Matt Wilsey
Matt Wilsey

  1. The panel was moderated by Takeshi Natsuno, a professor at Keio University.  ↩

Ben Silbermann talks about using Pinterest to showcase the best of Japan

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This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e. Ben Silbermann, the CEO and founder of Pinterest, appeared at the New Economy Summit for the second year in a row (see his comments from last year here). He noted that this was his third trip to Tokyo, which surprised me, because the company – in which Rakuten has invested – recently rolled out a localized version of its service. He noted that among Pinterest’s billions of pins and millions of collections, that there are a number of people now using their service in interesting ways in Japan Food creator and blogger Masaki Higuchi gets inspiration from Pinterest, and that helps him be creative in his work. Paris Wakana collects ideas for outfit, uses it to plan ideas for travel. Rakuten using Rakuten recipes to share. Silbermann said that each time he comes to Japan, he’s amazed at the culture of art, food, architecture and more. He hopes that people here can continue to use his service to introduce all these cultural elements to the world. Welcoming women During the panel discussion, Ben was asked…

paris-wakana
Japanese Pinner Paris Wakana

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e.

Ben Silbermann, the CEO and founder of Pinterest, appeared at the New Economy Summit for the second year in a row (see his comments from last year here). He noted that this was his third trip to Tokyo, which surprised me, because the company – in which Rakuten has invested – recently rolled out a localized version of its service.

He noted that among Pinterest’s billions of pins and millions of collections, that there are a number of people now using their service in interesting ways in Japan

  • Food creator and blogger Masaki Higuchi gets inspiration from Pinterest, and that helps him be creative in his work.
  • Paris Wakana collects ideas for outfit, uses it to plan ideas for travel.
  • Rakuten using Rakuten recipes to share.

Silbermann said that each time he comes to Japan, he’s amazed at the culture of art, food, architecture and more. He hopes that people here can continue to use his service to introduce all these cultural elements to the world.

Welcoming women

During the panel discussion, Ben was asked how many executives at his company are women, given how popular Pinterest is among females. He answered:

Many of our senior positions are women. Across the board there are many strong women, and that needs to trickle down the organization. Many women are underrepresented in tech fields. We try to create an environment where gender is a non issue, and that takes some work.

He added that since half of the world are women, they want to create a friendly environment that would welcome anyone from that talent pool.

Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann
Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann