A rather historical event took place at one of the biggest train stations in Japan Shibuya just a few weeks ago. The old Toyoko train line, which has a history of 78 years, closed down as part of a large scale urban renewal project. The train service was re-routed to the 5th floor underground lane. The switch-over construction at the station was done overnight in just four hours, leaving a large empty space right in middle of Tokyo. Uniqlo found the vacant 660-square-meter space convenient for a pop-up shop called UT Pop-up Tokyo. The Toyoko-line Shibuya terminal is now filled with more than 1,000 kinds of items and over 12,000 t-shirts. The shop opened on March 28th as a part of the Uniqlo pop-up shop World tour, led by well-known Japanese creative director Kashiwa Sato. The project is planned to launch in different cities around the world including (but not limited to) London, Paris, New York, and Singapore. Visitors can even shoot videos of themselves at the site using a new mobile app called UT Camera, which converts their original movie into a unique animation. The resulting content is displayed on a big screen at the pop-up store as well…
A rather historical event took place at one of the biggest train stations in Japan Shibuya just a few weeks ago. The old Toyoko train line, which has a history of 78 years, closed down as part of a large scale urban renewal project. The train service was re-routed to the 5th floor underground lane. The switch-over construction at the station was done overnight in just four hours, leaving a large empty space right in middle of Tokyo.
Uniqlo found the vacant 660-square-meter space convenient for a pop-up shop called UT Pop-up Tokyo. The Toyoko-line Shibuya terminal is now filled with more than 1,000 kinds of items and over 12,000 t-shirts. The shop opened on March 28th as a part of the Uniqlo pop-up shop World tour, led by well-known Japanese creative director Kashiwa Sato. The project is planned to launch in different cities around the world including (but not limited to) London, Paris, New York, and Singapore.
Visitors can even shoot videos of themselves at the site using a new mobile app called UT Camera, which converts their original movie into a unique animation. The resulting content is displayed on a big screen at the pop-up store as well as on a dedicated website.
The pop-up shop works for shoppers looking for fun t-shirts, but it also functions as a form of interactive entertainment. It will be open until April 7th, selling unique t-shirts in collaboration with Star Wars and other artists. This UT line of t-shirts has sold over 160 million worldwide.
We just received a short note from the folks over at Beijing-based GWC reminding us that the deadline for their G-Startup event is just around the corner on April 8. For those who would like to apply, you can do so here. What I find interesting about startup events in the Asia region is that even though Japanese startups are typically under-represented, they always seem do well, punching above their weight class so to speak. So if you are a Japan-based startup looking for an opportunity to show off your company outside the country, G-Startup is certainly an event worth exploring. Check out the details below! G-Startup Beijing Approaches Deadline on April 8th Pitch your startup to a panel of serial entrepreneurs, angel investors, and VCs, while gaining massive exposure through international media! Every year, G-Startup pits top startups and app developers against each other for the chance to win investment, distribution, incubation and exposure. In 2012, G-Startup attracted applicants from 30 countries overall. Participants can expect to gain significant exposure to new opportunities. Case in point, last year’s winner Beiz from Finland raised $1 million USD investment and increased their user-base by 1 million after the competition! This year’s…
We just received a short note from the folks over at Beijing-based GWC reminding us that the deadline for their G-Startup event is just around the corner on April 8. For those who would like to apply, you can do so here.
What I find interesting about startup events in the Asia region is that even though Japanese startups are typically under-represented, they always seem do well, punching above their weight class so to speak. So if you are a Japan-based startup looking for an opportunity to show off your company outside the country, G-Startup is certainly an event worth exploring.
Check out the details below!
G-Startup Beijing Approaches Deadline on April 8th
Pitch your startup to a panel of serial entrepreneurs, angel investors, and VCs, while gaining massive exposure through international media! Every year, G-Startup pits top startups and app developers against each other for the chance to win investment, distribution, incubation and exposure. In 2012, G-Startup attracted applicants from 30 countries overall.
Participants can expect to gain significant exposure to new opportunities. Case in point, last year’s winner Beiz from Finland raised $1 million USD investment and increased their user-base by 1 million after the competition!
This year’s event includes two tracks: the Startup Competition, and appAttack. The Startup Competition pitches startups against each other for investment, while appAttack finds the “Most Innovative App” and provides distribution avenues for the winner. Applications are accepted until April 8th.
G-Startup is a one stop for all your global startup needs:
Incubation
Partnerships
Networking and connections
Users and clients
Marketing/PR
Investment
Past competition partners have included: Innovation Works, ChinaAccelerator, PlugandPlay, InnoSpring and RocketSpace.
See this story in Japanese. South by South West (SXSW) in Austin, Texas is always a fun event for digital enthusiasts, and more than a few Japanese people and companies make the long haul to attend. The folks behind FabCafe, a community venue for designers and hardware manufacturing entrepreneurs in Tokyo, have a presence at SXSW this year, where they provided hot coffee and communicated their concept to other exhibitors and attendants. But they also have some good news to share, as Tokyo-based digital production company Loftwork, which owns FabCafe, has launched a portal site called Factory.org where people can share information on hardware startups, manufacturers, venues for gatherings, and events. The startup aims to share the information not only with the Japanese community but also with hardware communities around the world. In my own SXSW experience, Japanese startups have been always been proficient makers of hardware, even before the digital manufacturing industry became trendy. So I’m really glad to see a Japanese company trying to take the lead in the global movement in this way. There are more than a few websites that profile startups, most notably CrunchBase, AngelList, and Japan’s Creww.me come to mind. Here at SD Japan,…
Setting up FabCafe at SXSW 2013 (courtesy of Loftwork, reproduced with permission)
South by South West (SXSW) in Austin, Texas is always a fun event for digital enthusiasts, and more than a few Japanese people and companies make the long haul to attend. The folks behind FabCafe, a community venue for designers and hardware manufacturing entrepreneurs in Tokyo, have a presence at SXSW this year, where they provided hot coffee and communicated their concept to other exhibitors and attendants. But they also have some good news to share, as Tokyo-based digital production company Loftwork, which owns FabCafe, has launched a portal site called Factory.org where people can share information on hardware startups, manufacturers, venues for gatherings, and events.
The startup aims to share the information not only with the Japanese community but also with hardware communities around the world. In my own SXSW experience, Japanese startups have been always been proficient makers of hardware, even before the digital manufacturing industry became trendy. So I’m really glad to see a Japanese company trying to take the lead in the global movement in this way.
There are more than a few websites that profile startups, most notably CrunchBase, AngelList, and Japan’s Creww.me come to mind. Here at SD Japan, we’re also developing something like that, which you can find at data.startup-dating.com. But as far as I know, there hasn’t been any such database service specializing in manufacturing and hardware startups. These companies often crowdfund from sites like Kickstarter, Indiesgogo, or Campfire. And while those sites usually keep you up to date on the fundraising aspect, they lack deeper information like what the startups are doing now, or what products they might have developed in the past. It’s good to see Factory.org making an effort in this way. For Japanese startups out there, you can consider Factory to be a media hub to transmit your presence overseas.
Meanwhile, to mark FabCafe’s presence at SXSW2013 and its launch of Factory.org, Loftwork is now planning to hold something called a ‘Moon Speech Party‘ on the evening of March 11th (local time in Austin), where Japanese entrepreneurs can come together and make speeches to other SXSW-ers. Japanese watch maker Seiko is sponsoring this event, serving complimentary Japanese sake to everyone there. Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab is invited as a special guest. As I write this the event is fully booked, and that should mean great opportunities to connect with the global community.
On a related note, Korean startups are also planning to hold a party called Geeks from Gangnam at the same time, but a different venue in Austin.
Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) recently held its annual business plan presentation event for college and university students. It’s called Kigyouka Koshien, which literally means ‘entrepreneur championship.’ The event took place at an CyberAgent Ventures’ Startup Basecamp this past Thursday. NICT provides mentoring to students who have a passion for entrepreneurship. At the Thursday event, nine finalists from different regions came together in Tokyo, all hoping to walk away with the championship. Here’s a quick run down of what the participating teams are working on. Judges: Koki Sato (CEO, Septeni) Ryuichi Nishida (editor-in-chief, TechCrunch Japan) Tsuyoshi Hoshina (CTO, Nihon Unisys) Masahiko Honma (representative partner, Incubate Fund) Re-Ja ¶ Most of us wish we could spend more time with our parents, or perhaps we regret not seeing them as often as we’d like. Presented by students from Kansei Gakuin University and Kobe University, Re-ja is a mobile app that uses gamification to encourage people to talk more with parents. The app presents the same quiz questions to you and your parent, and if you both answer correctly, you will get a reward point that can be used to buy something for them. Moku Tomo ¶ Japan is…
Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) recently held its annual business plan presentation event for college and university students. It’s called Kigyouka Koshien, which literally means ‘entrepreneur championship.’ The event took place at an CyberAgent Ventures’ Startup Basecamp this past Thursday.
NICT provides mentoring to students who have a passion for entrepreneurship. At the Thursday event, nine finalists from different regions came together in Tokyo, all hoping to walk away with the championship. Here’s a quick run down of what the participating teams are working on.
Most of us wish we could spend more time with our parents, or perhaps we regret not seeing them as often as we’d like. Presented by students from Kansei Gakuin University and Kobe University, Re-ja is a mobile app that uses gamification to encourage people to talk more with parents. The app presents the same quiz questions to you and your parent, and if you both answer correctly, you will get a reward point that can be used to buy something for them.
Japan is said to have more than 20 million smokers. Moku Tomo is an app that lets them to find a smoking area nearby using a handy map. The business model is based on sponsorships from cigarette companies, from pharmaceutical companies selling nicotine patches, and from restaurants which have such smoking areas. The presenters, from Doshisha University in Kyoto, are now in talks with Japan Tobacco and British Tobacco.
Shingo Aida (of Aizu University in Fukushima) has developed an iOS app that acts as an alternative to seat posture measurement instruments. Such instruments are used to prevent those with mobility problems from developing posture issues or sores by ensuring the wheelchair is adjusted specifically for their body size and shape. An instrument of this kind helps people live better but is very costly. So Shingo has developed this app which is much cheaper. The target market is comprised of about 10,000 people in Japan and 80,000 more in the US.
When we hire a private teacher for our son or daughter, the biggest problem is usually that the quality of the lectures is very much dependent on who you hire. Tamiko Iwama (of Digital Hollywood University) wants to standardize the quality of the lectures by providing tutors with a web-based knowledge sharing platform. Learning materials and slides can be stored on the platform, and tutors can download them via the dashboard and customize their own lectures.
It’s often said that learning to reading code is like mastering a new language. But it’s not always easy since other people’s code could be written or structured far differently than what you might envision. And physical books for programming languages can be very costly and bulky. Code Library is a smartphone app that allow users to receive a lecture regardless of time and location. As part of its testing, Hamhei Horiuchi (of Tokyo’s University of Electrocommunications) has introduced a beta app called Code Library Lite, which will enable him to receive lots of feedback from programmers so he can refine the service.
A ‘Gakushoku’ is a cafeteria at a university which typically offers decent foods at affordable prices. For students who usually have little or no income, expenses for lunch at the cafeteria can account for most of their spending. That’s why this Chuo University team has come up with the idea of giving students a chance to win a complimentary meal. A QR code is printed on the back of a meal ticket, and a student can then scan it with his smartphone and watch ads while he waits for the meal. The team receives revenue from advertisers and pay a commission to cafeteria owners participating in the program.
The world’s Muslim community has huge market potential with a population of 1.6 billion people. A team from Yokohama National University hopes to found a sort of Craiglist for Muslims, in order to bridge Muslim communities around the world and here in Japan too. To refine the idea, the team has enlisted feedback from the folks at the Saudi Arabian Embassy and mosques in Tokyo. In partnership with Japanese travel agencies, C@ndy expects to provide information on travel packages for Muslim people, offer Japanese dishes made from Halal foods, and provide venues for praying during the trip.
Perler beads (or Hama beads) are a popular craft for children. But it’s difficult to build an original design on aa peg board. This team from Yonago National College of Technology hopes to produce a system that lets children create their own designs from their favorite pictures on an iPad. They plan to speak with Kawada Co., Ltd., a local distributor of Perler beads in Japan, to explore the monetization potential of this idea.
Elderly people in Japan (and in Okinawa, where this team originates) are eager to use digital devices to browse the web, but in many cases they can’t. In order to bridge this digital divide, the team has developed an app that lets elderly to browse news and updates from social media and blog on an iPad in a way that reflects the newspaper experience. Instead of searching a keyword to look for a specific topic, all you have to do is place your hand over an interesting story on your physical newspaper, just in front of the iPad camera. The app will detect which story you are interested in, and then collect updates from the blogsphere, showing them to you if they were a from a physical newspaper.
Pictured: The team from Okinawa National College of Technology presents ShinbuNet
Read our Japanese report on this event Our partner tech site beSuccess will hold the second edition of its beLAUNCH event in Seoul this May, one of the largest tech startup conferences in the Asia region. In association with Tokyo-based Skyland Ventures and Seoul-based startup VCNC, the media company had a local satellite event in Tokyo on Wednesday, where one finalist was chosen from six participating Japanese startups to pitch at the main event in Korea. Let’s rundown through the lineup and take a closer look to who’s going to Gangnam, Seoul this May. The participating judges for the pitching session were (in alphabetical order): Hyungseok Dino Ha, CEO, Memebox (Seoul) James Jung, CEO, beSuccess (Seoul) Jimmy Jihoon Rim, CEO, Kcube Ventures (Seoul) Kiyo Kobayashi, CEO, Nobot Inc., (Tokyo) Ryuichi Nishida, editor-in-chief, TechCrunch Japan (Tokyo) Tetsuro Oshita, managing director, Cyber Agent Ventures (Tokyo) Yasuhiko Yurimoto, president and CEO, Global Brain (Tokyo) Yoshiro Taneda, senior director of digital media, Fuji TV (Tokyo) Designclue (the 3rd prize winner) ¶ Prize: Wins a complimentary booth to exhibiting at the Seoul event When you order logo design in Japan, it will usually not be very cheap due to high labor costs in the country. It can also be very hard for most Japanese people to order design work from…
Our partner tech site beSuccess will hold the second edition of its beLAUNCH event in Seoul this May, one of the largest tech startup conferences in the Asia region. In association with Tokyo-based Skyland Ventures and Seoul-based startup VCNC, the media company had a local satellite event in Tokyo on Wednesday, where one finalist was chosen from six participating Japanese startups to pitch at the main event in Korea.
Let’s rundown through the lineup and take a closer look to who’s going to Gangnam, Seoul this May. The participating judges for the pitching session were (in alphabetical order):
Wins a complimentary booth to exhibiting at the Seoul event
When you order logo design in Japan, it will usually not be very cheap due to high labor costs in the country. It can also be very hard for most Japanese people to order design work from overseas because of the language barrier.
Designclue is a logo-focused crowdsourcing site which allows users to easily place orders from independent foreign designers. Readers may recall that we we featured them on this site last week. The website has multilingual interfaces to easily facilitate your orders. Users can receive many design proposals at affordable rates from registered designers in emerging markets.
Not long ago, the startup announced that it had fundraised 14.7 million yen (about $150,000) from two Japanese seed investors, Incubate Fund and East Ventures.
Comobaco allows you and your friends to create a pool of shared items both on the web and in real life. With this service, you can easily share things you own (such as books, DVDs, and game titles) with your office colleagues, your roommates, or any similar sort of group.
To use the service, someone at your location has to become the manager of a box, which will then be used to hold the exchanged items. If you put in things you don’t want to use any more, others will have a chance to take them without having to buy. The service’s founder hopes to change the concept of buying things for yourself only into buying things for the sake of the many people around you as well.
Job share is a community-based talent seeking site that helps companies find new employees who might enjoy working together. When you post a job opportunity on the service, your posting will be shared via social media through colleagues at your company. If someone sees it and would like to work at your company, you can then hire them if they’re a good fit. The startup aims to help companies create a workplace with a positive atmosphere by enlisting the help of existing employees in finding their new colleagues.
From the left: Conyac’s CEO Naoki Yamada (the 1st prize winner), Global Brain’s Yasuhiko Yurimoto (award presenter), and beSuccess’ James Jung (award presenter)
Prizes:
A complimentary booth for exhibiting at the Seoul event
Round-trip air tickets for two, Tokyo/Seoul
A chance to pitch at the main competition
Conyac is a crowdsourced translation service that gives users an interesting way to communicate with someone in a foreign language for affordable rates. When we spoke to them in a recent interview, they introduced the launch of a high-end service for business use, and told us about their first overseas expansion to San Francisco.
A complimentary booth for exhibiting at the Seoul event
Round-trip air tickets for two, Tokyo/Seoul
Finding the right book to buy at bookstore can often take a long time. One recent survey says that 39% of all bookstore purchases take more than an hour. Similarly when you buy a book on Amazon.com, you’ll rely on book reviews posted by other users — but some of them are not reliable or just not good enough to help you decide.
Booklap is a service that wants to help you find a book you will love to read. It has two ways of doing this. The first is based on your interests which are pulled from ‘social graphs’ such as your Facebook profile. The other way by presenting quotes from books that have impressed other users.
The startup is planning to introduce a smartphone app which will allow a user to easily post quotes by just shooting a picture. What differentiates this from Amazon.com is that book reviews are being posted with the real names of those who have written the review.
Their revenue model is expected to come from affiliate fees from online bookstores like Amazon.com, driving users to buy books on their site. Booklap raised 3 million yen (about $32,000) from Incubate Fund last July.
UI Scope allows software and hardware developers to crowdsource product testing tasks. A registered tester (called a ‘panel’ in the service) receives a camera from the startup so that it can record the testing process. When a developer (called ‘a client’) chooses someone from all registered testers and asks them to test the product, that person will take about 20 minutes to test it and report back with a video of the testing process. The developer pays 3,000 yen (about $32) for this testing, and the tester receives 500 yen. The testing results are reported online in the form of video, screenshots, and behavioral reports in text.
UI Scope was launched last August with the aim of creating a huge database of product testing by gathering such test results and case studies. It has raised 5 million yen (about $53,800) from Movida Japan, and has acquired 120 developers and 2500 testers during the last six months.
Three Korean startups also attended the meet-up, pitching their remarkable services to the Japanese crowd. Let’s have a look at what’s hot in this neighboring tech community.
BeNative aims to help students have a more organic language learning experience by providing them with content that imitates real-life situations with native speakers. By presenting video clips of a specific occasion in English or other languages, the service allows users to learn more natural ways to speak new languages. According to Alan Moonsoon Kim, the CEO of parent company Smatoos, they are currently providing English version and Chinese versions of the language learning site, as well as running news sites in English, Korean and Japanese. For more information, check out this feature over on Technode for more details.
Profeel.me is your digital business card, incorporating your social network accounts. It can be exchanged through text, messaging services, and social networks. Following the model of a real/physical business card, Korean-startup Venster has created an online business card that can be used as a virtual ID or calling card. The startup’s CEO HoSuk Jeong presented. beSuccess has further information if you’d like to learn more.
Profeel.me CEO HoSuk Jeong pitches to a Japanese crowd
Memebox is the Korean version of Birchbox, a subscription-based e-commerce service that periodically delivers a box of cosmetics to users. The startup’s CEO Hyungseok Dino Ha explains they have partnered with 185 brands worldwide, and have delivered 52,900 boxes to their customers since launching in February of 2012. Subscribers can sign up for the service using three different subscription options: one, two, or six months. So far there are over 5,000 total subscribers.
There are 31 people on the team with an expected revenue of $1.3 million in Q2 of 2013. The startup is from the first batch of graduates coming out of Seoul-based SparkLab’s incubation program.
The beLAUNCH 2013 main event is scheduled to take place at COEX, an exhibition center in Korea’s capital on May 1st and 2nd. If you’d like to join. please feel free to sign up.
From the left: Kcube Venture’s Jimmy Rim and VCNC’s Keisuke Kajitani with a collection of autographs.
At a recent FITC event in Tokyo I had a chance to hear renowed artist Shantell Martin speak about her artwork, as well as her connections to Japan, a place that has played a central role in her development. Her work is sometimes so simple that it resembles doodles that you might have done the margins of your school text book – but yet at the same time it sometimes has overwhelming detail and scale. Her tool is, more often than not, a simple pen – typically traveling black lines on white surfaces, sometimes big surfaces, sometimes small. Watching her draw, you initially say to yourself “Pftt, I could probably do that,” only to realize minutes later when a jagged edge becomes a cliff and then a sailboat pops up and then a face and then, well — and then you realize there’s far more to it, crossing over into the digital space and live performance art [1]. Another dimension For Shantell the act of creation is part of the work, part of the spectacle, a third dimension of time added to a 2D surface. It was when she realized that her live drawings were a type of performance art…
At a recent FITC event in Tokyo I had a chance to hear renowed artist Shantell Martin speak about her artwork, as well as her connections to Japan, a place that has played a central role in her development. Her work is sometimes so simple that it resembles doodles that you might have done the margins of your school text book – but yet at the same time it sometimes has overwhelming detail and scale.
Her tool is, more often than not, a simple pen – typically traveling black lines on white surfaces, sometimes big surfaces, sometimes small. Watching her draw, you initially say to yourself “Pftt, I could probably do that,” only to realize minutes later when a jagged edge becomes a cliff and then a sailboat pops up and then a face and then, well — and then you realize there’s far more to it, crossing over into the digital space and live performance art [1].
Another dimension
For Shantell the act of creation is part of the work, part of the spectacle, a third dimension of time added to a 2D surface. It was when she realized that her live drawings were a type of performance art that things really became interesting. Shantell began using projectors to cast her live drawings onto wall, a gradually unfolding improvizational digital performance, sometimes to complement an on-stage music act.
Projections are great as they can take a small idea and make it big, they give you that room to be interactive with and open up a space on screens and wall etc. I would like to move out of the square format though and work with more landscapes, balloons or unexpected spaces.
Shantell says that the years that she previously spent living in Japan really influenced her ideas about visual performance, as that’s something you see a lot here. She adds:
[Japan] gave me space to discover ‘ME’ and who I was in a way, I could be Shantell from London and that was enough. Growing up in London people constantly would ask about my ethnic background or where my parents where from, etc. It’s also hard at a young age to break away from the social mirrors that friends and family have for you, and by moving away completely to a new place I could build a new foundation. Another fundamental thing [was that] I became o.k with things being cute and found ways to integrate that into my work.
Some of the figures that emerge in her work indeed have a Japanese flavor, sort of XKCD meets LSD in some ways (pictured right). But what I think is most impressive about Shantell’s work is that over the years she has developed this style into something with patterns and method, turning what that initially looks quite random into what she describes as a language.
While Shantell prefers to keep her work as low tech as possible, she does make use of a number of digital tools in her work:
When drawing live on my computer I use the Wacom Intuos4 Medium size, I really like the size and model. [I] do wish the Bluetooth option was more reliable though, but for now I make sure that the USB cable is plugged in when performing. For software I’ve been using Sketchbook pro for a long time and more recently I’ve started to make sketching using tools created using open frame works by Zack Lieberman for a drawing and code workshop that we co-taught last year at the Eyeo festival.
If you’d like to get a better idea of Shantell’s work, a picture doesn’t quite suffice as it lacks the performance aspect that is so central to what she does. I encourage you to check out her Vimeo channel, where you can find a number of wonderful videos like the one I’ve included below.
I paid my way though university painting murals, so initially I actually did think that I could pull off something like this. But after watching her perform, that notion was quickly put to rest! ↩
Tokyo-based startup incubator Samurai Incubate is planning to launch another co-working space at Odaiba, Tokyo’s waterfront area. The group already has a venue for incubating startups at another location, but the new one will focus on gadget and hardware manufacturing startups. It is jointly organized with a local architectural firm. The new incubation venue will be called MONO, and will be launched in the end of this month. To commemorate the opening the incubator recently held an exhibition and conference event for startups called Samurai MONO Festival Vol. 1, featuring a number of notable people from the gadget and hardware manufacturing scene. Let’s have a look at some of the interesting ideas and startups who we met at the event [1]. The Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, Tokyo ¶ A team from this university showed us several interesting ideas including: Kansei Senkyoku – Mind Jukebox ¶ Kansei Senkyoku (literally ‘music selection by sense’) chooses a song that fits your current feeling by detecting your brain waves. It’s known that alpha brain waves emerge when you are stable before sleep, and the beta wave is usually seen when you are doing something that requires concentration. Accordingly, the app selects a song…
February 16th 2013, at Telecom Center in Aomi, Tokyo
Tokyo-based startup incubator Samurai Incubate is planning to launch another co-working space at Odaiba, Tokyo’s waterfront area. The group already has a venue for incubating startups at another location, but the new one will focus on gadget and hardware manufacturing startups. It is jointly organized with a local architectural firm.
The new incubation venue will be called MONO, and will be launched in the end of this month. To commemorate the opening the incubator recently held an exhibition and conference event for startups called Samurai MONO Festival Vol. 1, featuring a number of notable people from the gadget and hardware manufacturing scene.
Let’s have a look at some of the interesting ideas and startups who we met at the event [1].
The Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, Tokyo ¶
A team from this university showed us several interesting ideas including:
Kansei Senkyoku (literally ‘music selection by sense’) chooses a song that fits your current feeling by detecting your brain waves. It’s known that alpha brain waves emerge when you are stable before sleep, and the beta wave is usually seen when you are doing something that requires concentration. Accordingly, the app selects a song to play, and help you get a better sleep or do your work more efficiently.
This tablet app’s name is a combination of ‘recipe’ and ‘receipt’, and it helps you find a recipe for a meal the items you have just bought at the supermarket. By scanning the receipts for your groceries, the app will search for possible meals that can be cooked with these materials. You can then print out the recipe from Ricoh’s internet-enabled photocopiers. (The project is jointly conducted with Ricoh.)
Large glass projection film, often used for digital signage systems at convenience stores and other public places, is usually very costly. But by combining normal frosted-glass and a camera-enabled Android handset, the team has developed a very cheap interactive touch panel system that allows users to control a screen with flicking motions over top of the glass, as your fingers are detected by the camera of the Android handset on the other side of the glass. The coodinate data for the screen is stored in a Google Docs file, and the app will show you the next screen which corresponds to your finger motion.
Link, a user-generated, short novel posting site ¶
With this app users can create multiple parallel universes, based on someone else’s previous postings. This collective/collaborate writing results in a wide variety of novel endings, which sounds like a lot of fun. The app is expected to be available on iOS and Android soon.
This idea reminds me of the British-American film Sliding Doors, where the story alternates between two parallel universes.
Goeng, an iOS app that aims to help Japanese Facebook users communicate with foreigners ¶
Goeng helps Japanese Facebook users find friends from outside the country who share the same hobbies and interests, or like the same things. Once you and that friend get along well, you can obtain their national flag and add it to your collection. Through this sort of collection you can also earn badges.
Making a report and submitting it to your boss on a daily basis can often be way too much hassle. Gamba allows employees to post daily reports to their bosses in a very easy way. I assumed this app was targeting SMEs or startups, but the app’s creator says they have many big Japanese companies as their users as well.
The festival also had an elevator-pitch session, where entrepreneurs were requested to pitch with a handheld megaphone (see picture below). When all was said and done, the winners were:
3rd place:Shokunin-san, a job matching site for construction workers.
2nd place:Anipipo, a crowdfunding site for animation content. It’s launching soon but still waiting for Paypal to approve them as a merchant.
1st place:Craftstep, a how-to collection of handcraft matters, including things like Japanese paper foldings.
Tablet-focused web developer Social Agent pitches at Mono Festival
Note that not all the startups introduced above have received fundraising from Samurai Incubate. ↩
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
Meanwhile, to mark FabCafe’s presence at SXSW2013 and its launch of Factory.org, Loftwork is now planning to hold something called a ‘
Most of us wish we could spend more time with our parents, or perhaps we regret not seeing them as often as we’d like. Presented by students from Kansei Gakuin University and Kobe University, Re-ja is a mobile app that uses gamification to encourage people to talk more with parents. The app presents the same quiz questions to you and your parent, and if you both answer correctly, you will get a reward point that can be used to buy something for them.
Finding the right book to buy at bookstore can often take a long time. One recent survey says that 39% of all bookstore purchases take more than an hour. Similarly when you buy a book on Amazon.com, you’ll rely on book reviews posted by other users — but some of them are not reliable or just not good enough to help you decide.
