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Circuit board design tool ‘Quadcept’ wins Innovation Weekend Grand Finale in Tokyo

Masaru Ikeda 2013.12.13

Innovation Weekend is a monthly showcase and meet-up event organized by Tokyo-based startup incubator Sunbridge Global Ventures. Every December there is a big one, where the monthly winners from the year compete in a pitch session. This year, Osaka-based startup Quadcept won the finale with its printed circuit board design solutions. Quadcept – Top prize winner Typical factories in the electronics manufacturing industry have to purchase a tool for designing printed circuit boards, usually provided in the form of packaged software, with costs of up to $80,000 for the initial fee and as much as $10,000 for annual fees per user license. But many factories don’t have the budget to distribute that kind of package to all their employees. And collectively, that problem can slow the entire industry. Quadcept looked to the cloud for a solution. Pricing depends on how many licenses you need in your company, with payment possible on a yearly or monthly basis, requiring no initial fee. Quadcept proposes that you only pay for the licenses you need, when you need them, and not waste money on idle seat licenses. The startup wants to be aggressive in helping device makers by sponsoring events like Maker Faire and…

Innovation Weekend is a monthly showcase and meet-up event organized by Tokyo-based startup incubator Sunbridge Global Ventures. Every December there is a big one, where the monthly winners from the year compete in a pitch session. This year, Osaka-based startup Quadcept won the finale with its printed circuit board design solutions.

Quadcept – Top prize winner

Typical factories in the electronics manufacturing industry have to purchase a tool for designing printed circuit boards, usually provided in the form of packaged software, with costs of up to $80,000 for the initial fee and as much as $10,000 for annual fees per user license. But many factories don’t have the budget to distribute that kind of package to all their employees. And collectively, that problem can slow the entire industry.

Quadcept looked to the cloud for a solution. Pricing depends on how many licenses you need in your company, with payment possible on a yearly or monthly basis, requiring no initial fee. Quadcept proposes that you only pay for the licenses you need, when you need them, and not waste money on idle seat licenses. The startup wants to be aggressive in helping device makers by sponsoring events like Maker Faire and Gugen. They expects to start global business expansion next year.

quadcept-at-innovation-weekend-grand-finale-2013 — Quadcept

More than a dozen startups from Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand pitched their apps and services to a crowd from in Tokyo. Here is a quick rundown on some of the new faces.

VisasQ

VisasQ is a platform for consulting that takes advantage of relationships in your social graph, letting users get advice from experts. The company’s founder, Eiko Hashiba, is very experienced, including time working as an investment banker. The concept is inspired by Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG for short), a company providing consultation and advice from over 250,000 subject matter experts worldwide. Hashiba aims to provide such ‘spot consulting’ services for as little as 1% of the price of conventional services. Their team includes engineers from notable Japanese groupware solution Rakumo.

Pathee

When you want to hang out at a karaoke bar in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, you might first turn to Google Search or Google Maps, inputting keywords like ‘karaoke’ and ‘Shibuya’. But that typically yields irrelevant information like a list of shops you don’t really care about.

But Tokyo-based startup Tritrue has developed a ‘spatial search engine’ called Pathee, which provides more relevant information by narrowing results to buildings within a five-minute walk from where you are, and to certain trending topics as well. So for example, when you arrive at a train/subway station near an event venue, you check how to get there by just entering the name of the event, with no need for the address. The startup is based at Samurai Incubate’s startup space, Startup Island.

pathee-at-innovation-weekend-grand-finale-2013 — Pathee

ClickonCake

ClickonCake delivers birthday cakes to any part of Japan, based on orders collected from their website. The company’s founder is Shintaro Naganuma, whose family business is a confectionery based in northern Japan. To make the business more profitable, he rolled out a delivery service specializing in birthday cakes. It currently earns 8 million yen ($80,000) in revenue every month.

Typical cake buyers will purchase a cake for someone on or near their birthday. And with this in mind, Naganuma’s team is planning to establish distribution centers all across the Tokyo metropolitan area. He has also invented a frozen type of cake that can be preserved at these centers. In this way, they can give users the option of same-day delivery cakes with unique designs. That would certainly pose stiff competition to conventional cake shops around town.

clickoncake-at-innovationweekend2013 — ClickonCake

Waygoapp

Waygooapp is a mobile translation application that uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology. For western visitors who come to Asia, one of biggest obstacles is typically reading Chinese characters, since signs and menus usually aren’t in English. And checking them on mobile is hard too, if you haven’t mastered the input method.

But with this app, all you need is to place your phone’s camera over it and let the app figure it out. You will see then English subtitles overlaid on the image. The app is currently available only for Chinese-to-English translation on iOS, but an Android version and Japanese-to-English version will follow soon.

waygo-at-innovation-weekend-grand-finale-2013 — Waygoapp

Other guests from the overseas

singapore-panel-at-innovation-weekend-grand-finale-2013 — At a panel on Singapore’s startup ecosystem. From the left: Yuji Horiguchi (IMJ Fenox), Kenny Lew (Entreport Asia), Vinnie Lauria (Golden Gate Ventures), and Ikuo Hiraishi (Sunbridge Global Ventures)

yusuke-and-tak-at-innovation-weekend-grand-finale-2013 — At a panel on how to launch a global startup. From the left: Yusuke Takahashi (AppSocially) and Tak Harada (Peatix)

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This Japanese startup wants to open source its DNA amplifier

Rick Martin 2013.12.04

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013 At Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto, we saw a few new startups pitching at the Launchpad event. One of the most notable was the very last to come on stage, as Shingo Hisakawa, the founder of hardware startup Tori Ningen [1], pitched a DNA amplifier device. This amplification step is a sort of prerequisite, I understand, for many biological experiments. Shingo posited the problem that DNA sampler devices typically cost $4000 to $10000. But his company wants to reduce that by 1/10, and then offer it open source. The details of how the device actually works were relatively complex (and I won’t venture to summarize it based on a simultaneous translation). But the results of a test sample, after they are processed, can be viewed in a Chrome browser, so it doesn’t require any special software. The hardware itself can be viewed below, and at the end of the video above. In my view, this was the most passionate pitch, the founder proclaiming that ’the internet is part of our own DNA, and we should use it to leave a legacy behind. They have already has started selling…

This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto 2013

At Infinity Ventures Summit Kyoto, we saw a few new startups pitching at the Launchpad event. One of the most notable was the very last to come on stage, as Shingo Hisakawa, the founder of hardware startup Tori Ningen [1], pitched a DNA amplifier device. This amplification step is a sort of prerequisite, I understand, for many biological experiments.

Shingo posited the problem that DNA sampler devices typically cost $4000 to $10000. But his company wants to reduce that by 1/10, and then offer it open source. The details of how the device actually works were relatively complex (and I won’t venture to summarize it based on a simultaneous translation). But the results of a test sample, after they are processed, can be viewed in a Chrome browser, so it doesn’t require any special software. The hardware itself can be viewed below, and at the end of the video above.

In my view, this was the most passionate pitch, the founder proclaiming that ’the internet is part of our own DNA, and we should use it to leave a legacy behind.

They have already has started selling domestically here in Japan, but they want to bring it overseas as well. In fact, they are already selling in Malaysia, and hope to open a factory in China.

Update: I previously referred to the device as a DNA sampler, which is incorrect.

He used to make aircraft, hence the name ‘Tori Ningen’, or ‘bird person’. He says the company is comprised of himself, his wife, and his cat. ↩

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Tokyo Entrepreneurs United: Upcoming event aims to bring them all together

Rick Martin 2013.11.14

We get a chance to attend quite a few technology and startup related events here in Tokyo. This week TechCrunch Tokyo was the big one, and we were pleased to see many of the country’s upcoming startups in attendance. But on the horizon later this month is an evening that aspires to bring together some diverse entrepreneurial initiatives and communities. The folks from Mobile Monday are spearheading what looks to be a fun networking event dubbed Tokyo Startups United, taking place on the night of Wednesday, November 27. It comes on the heels of Startup Weekend and will be ‘the’ after-party following Global Entrepreneurship Week. Judging by the partnering groups, it looks like it’s going to be a diverse crowd, and we’re delighted to be able to come along as a media partner for such a worthwhile event. It’s especially interesting for us because I think some of the challenges facing the Japanese startup community could be remedied by more cultural cross-pollination [1]. For all the details, and advance registration, do check out the DoorKeeper announcement, or jump on over to the Facebook event page. If you have a fun startup that you’d like to tell us about, do get…

We get a chance to attend quite a few technology and startup related events here in Tokyo. This week TechCrunch Tokyo was the big one, and we were pleased to see many of the country’s upcoming startups in attendance. But on the horizon later this month is an evening that aspires to bring together some diverse entrepreneurial initiatives and communities.

The folks from Mobile Monday are spearheading what looks to be a fun networking event dubbed Tokyo Startups United, taking place on the night of Wednesday, November 27. It comes on the heels of Startup Weekend and will be ‘the’ after-party following Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Judging by the partnering groups, it looks like it’s going to be a diverse crowd, and we’re delighted to be able to come along as a media partner for such a worthwhile event. It’s especially interesting for us because I think some of the challenges facing the Japanese startup community could be remedied by more cultural cross-pollination [1].

For all the details, and advance registration, do check out the DoorKeeper announcement, or jump on over to the Facebook event page.

If you have a fun startup that you’d like to tell us about, do get in touch with us as we’d love to see you there.

See our recent piece on unfortunate Japanese startup names, as well as @randomwire’s awesome piece on why Japanese web design is so different, of which we published a Japanese translation today. ↩

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Telepathy CEO discusses the future of wearable technology at TechCrunch Tokyo

Rick Martin 2013.11.12

At the first session of TechCrunch Tokyo, Telepathy’s CEO Takahito Iguchi took to the stage along with Kevin Landis, from chief investment manager from Firsthand Capital Management. Our readers will recall that FCM (NASDAQ:SVVC) invested $5 million in Telepathy back in August. Moderator Ken Nishimura got right to the point, asking about Google Glass, the product to which Telepathy’s glasses are often compared. Iguchi explained: Google Glass is not in the Japanese market yet, so it’s hard to compare. But our device is focused on communication. For humans, communication is a vast activity. And smartphones are a big part of that. […] Similar to Google glass, power consumption is key. In order to have full time communications up, that’s a big area of our development [1]. Iguchi disclaimed that his PR team has put some limitations on how much he can say about his product, but with regards to its user interface he says that he wants to minimize it as much as possible. “It’s a big paradigm shift that we have here,” he added. It should be forgotten and not so visible, he noted. Nishimura followed up by asking if this would involved the use of gestures, and Iguchi…

At the first session of TechCrunch Tokyo, Telepathy’s CEO Takahito Iguchi took to the stage along with Kevin Landis, from chief investment manager from Firsthand Capital Management. Our readers will recall that FCM (NASDAQ:SVVC) invested $5 million in Telepathy back in August.

Moderator Ken Nishimura got right to the point, asking about Google Glass, the product to which Telepathy’s glasses are often compared. Iguchi explained:

Google Glass is not in the Japanese market yet, so it’s hard to compare. But our device is focused on communication. For humans, communication is a vast activity. And smartphones are a big part of that. […] Similar to Google glass, power consumption is key. In order to have full time communications up, that’s a big area of our development [1].

Iguchi disclaimed that his PR team has put some limitations on how much he can say about his product, but with regards to its user interface he says that he wants to minimize it as much as possible. “It’s a big paradigm shift that we have here,” he added.

It should be forgotten and not so visible, he noted. Nishimura followed up by asking if this would involved the use of gestures, and Iguchi froze for a moment in what might be a telling ‘non-response’ response.

Kevin further emphasized this point be drawing a comparison to other wearable technologies already on the market:

We think Fitbit and Jawbone will do quite well, and will maybe will have successful IPOs. They have big markets they’re going after, but they have just one use case: people’s desire to monitor and improve their fitness. […] But that’s just one use case. With smartphones, the products sits between users when you talk to another person. But telepathy takes the product out from between people. If it is done just right, it will feel like the product disappears. and to me that’s true elegance.

takehito-iguchi-kevin-landis — Takehito Iguchi right, Kevin Landis left

One of the most interesting moments of the talk came when Iguchi was asked whether or not he could really bring this product to market, in a way that makes it cheaper than Google Glass. He couldn’t say anything about the price or exact release date, but he did speak a little bit to the challenge of creating such a device, as well as why they are taking on that challenge:

This is not easy, but we are doing it because it’s not easy. That may sound a little strange, but if it is something that anyone can do then it is not worthwhile or challenging – it’s not innovation. We are happy to try it.

Iguchi also talked a little bit about how his team is spread across both Silicon Valley and Tokyo. Members in Silicon Valley are strong in software, user interface and core application development. And his team in Tokyo is focused on the core hardware development.

He added that when his product does come to market, it will likely be in the US market to start with.

The team still obviously has a lot of work to, perhaps symbolically illustrated by the fact that he was wearing his glasses hung around his neck, rather than on his head.

Note that Iguchi’s quotes are taken from a live translation on-site. He spoke in Japanese for this talk. ↩

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Viibar wins OnLab demo day with crowdsourced video production solution

Open Network Lab

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.27

See the original story in Japanese. All photos courtesy of Open Network Lab. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program. The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program. Viibar (The Best Team Award winner) Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills. The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos. Locarise (The Special Award winner)…

See the original story in Japanese. All photos courtesy of Open Network Lab.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program.

The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program.

Viibar (The Best Team Award winner)

Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills.

The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos.

Locarise (The Special Award winner)

Locarise is an analytics solution for retail stores. By placing small sensors inside and around your store, the system can collect metrics such as how many people passed in front of the store and how many customers you have served.

The system’s web-based dashboard shows you these metrics, as well as other things like visit duration, and retention rate. For a business owner monitoring many store locations, you can easily stay up to date on real-time target rates for KPIs at many stores in a single interface.

Shakring

Regardless of location, culture, or language, this mobile app lets you to ask or tell other users what you’re looking at. By scanning barcodes, it also helps you find details about what you have in your hand.

When the app’s creator, Hyongchol, Kim visited a drug store here in Japan, he saw a young Indian confused about cold medicine he should buy. Since he couldn’t read Japanese characters, he hesitated to buy the medicine despite the fact that Kim told him which one it was. This experience motivated Kim to create the app, which he is preparing for iOS and Android platforms.

Style With

Style With is an e-commerce site for men, helping them coordinate their outfits. Users’ preferences are classified according to the ’taste graph’ concept, and you will receive about five different outfit proposals of outfits every month that you might like. The platform can monetize by letting a user buy any item from the outfits proposed. It targets male users may not be very bold in their fashion but want to purchase clothes that will turn some heads.

Ednity

Ednity is a vertical social network for school classes. By putting teachers, students, and their parents in a sort of loop, it will help them build a collaborative education environment. The platform gives you a dashboard to manage notifications from school and your homework, and also provides a virtual white board for hand-drawn content that can be shared between teachers and their children.

Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the upcoming batch of its incubation program starting next January. The application deadline is November 8th. The incubator’s parent company, Digital Garage, will also launch a co-working space in San Francisco pretty soon, where their incubated startups will be able to establish a base.

To commemorate the launch of the facility, the company plans to host Global Pitch 2013 on November 4th, and New Context Conference 2013 in San Francisco on November 5th and 6th. That’s just before digital agency Btrax’s SF Japan Night event at Pivotal Labs on November 7th.

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Two young Japanese entrepreneurs discuss their recent buyouts

Takeshi Hirano 2013.10.15

See the original story in Japanese. This is a part of our coverage of B Dash Camp Osaka 2013. Two Japanese startups that have experienced an strong growth in the last several months are Coach United, the startup behind private lesson portal Cyta.jp, and Bracket, which operates instant e-commerce platform STORES.jp. On day two of B Dash Camp Osaka last week, we had a chance to hear from Coach United CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu and Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto. Also on the panel were Rakuten executive officer Takeshi Homma, and KDDI general manager Shigeki Matsuno. This year Ariyasu sold his startup to Japanese recipe site Cookpad, and Mitsumoto sold his startup to leading Japanese fashion commerce company Start Today. Moderator Hiroyuki Watanabe started the sessions with asking about their recent exits. When did you start preparing for buyouts? Ariyasu explained: When we launched our company back in 2007, I had no idea about funding or M&As. We couldn’t help but enjoy developing our product at that time. Two or three years later, we finally could make our business profitable, and had a chance to receive offers from some people [1]. The company kept using bank loans but were exploring funding opportunities…

bracket-fril — Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto and Coach United CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu

See the original story in Japanese.

This is a part of our coverage of B Dash Camp Osaka 2013.

Two Japanese startups that have experienced an strong growth in the last several months are Coach United, the startup behind private lesson portal Cyta.jp, and Bracket, which operates instant e-commerce platform STORES.jp. On day two of B Dash Camp Osaka last week, we had a chance to hear from Coach United CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu and Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto. Also on the panel were Rakuten executive officer Takeshi Homma, and KDDI general manager Shigeki Matsuno.

This year Ariyasu sold his startup to Japanese recipe site Cookpad, and Mitsumoto sold his startup to leading Japanese fashion commerce company Start Today. Moderator Hiroyuki Watanabe started the sessions with asking about their recent exits.

When did you start preparing for buyouts?

Ariyasu explained:

When we launched our company back in 2007, I had no idea about funding or M&As. We couldn’t help but enjoy developing our product at that time. Two or three years later, we finally could make our business profitable, and had a chance to receive offers from some people ^[1].

The company kept using bank loans but were exploring funding opportunities for the next stretch.

Bracket is not an old company but has been running a number of businesses for about five years. In contrast to his past businesses, Mitsumoto was aggressively exploring funding opportunities to boost their e-commerce platform. He attributes this to the many competitors in that space ^[2].

What’s the most impressed in the entire session was the following interaction between the pair.

Ariyasu asked Mitsumoto,

If Base (Bracket’s main competitor) wasn’t around, would you still sell your startup to Startup Today?

Mitsumoto answered, saying:

Without them, we probably might have not achieved the revenue we have.

Why not aim for an IPO?

Since these two startups were rapidly growing but self-funded, their founders could probably consider IPOs as possible options. But they emphasized a good match with the companies that acquired them.

Ariyasu explains:

I’m not really a person who drives after an IPO. It’s all up to you to determine whether an IPO and an M&A is a better choice for you. … I actually got an offer from Murakami (Livesense CEO) but I think it was not so aggressive. I’m close with him, and we have been fishing together. The reason why we partnered with Cookpad was I thought the both companies have something common in their corporate culture.

In a explanation about how Bracket’s Mitsumoto decided to sell his startup, he unveiled it was finally decided over the phone with Start Today’s CEO Yusaku Maezawa, which surprised the audience.

bdash-camp-buyout-mitsumoto — Bracket CEO Yusuke Mitsumoto

The decision was surprisingly smooth. I’ve been in touch with Maezawa for almost three years since he sent us an inquiry via our website. … I’ve handled four different businesses in the past, and I finally managed to find success in my fifth. The recent announcement that Yahoo Japan made of making its e-commerce platform free this year will be a big turning point in the Japanese e-commerce industry, where more players will make more bold decisions to defeat competitors.

Buyer’s perspective, seller’s perspective

KDDI’s Matsuno was involved in Mediba’s ^[3] acquisitions of startups such as Nobot and Scaleout. In a response to moderator Watanabe’s question about criteria around M&As, he says:

You probably need the perspectives of both a buyer and a seller. When your company is acquired by 100%, you will totally lose your ownership. In an extreme case, you might lose your position as the CEO. When you think of a company that you could sell your business to, you will need to build a good relationship of mutual trust (not to be asked to step down).

Rakuten’s Homma concluded the session with saying that:

Both for a seller and a buyer, the more experience you have, the better you can understand how you should proceed.

We previously featured Ariyasu and Cyta in this article.↩
Our readers may recall that we visited the Bracket office just last month, and had a chance to speak more with Mitsumoto about Stores.jp.)↩
Mediba is a mobile advertising-focused subsidiary of KDDI.↩

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Before Japan’s startup elite, Nintendo president talks innovation and the search for something new

SCORE 1,048

Rick Martin 2013.10.08

This is a part of our coverage of B Dash Camp Osaka 2013. The highlight of day one at B Dash Camp in Osaka was the final session featuring Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. It’s unusual for him to join an open event like this, so this was a bit of a treat, especially following the social gaming session that took place earlier in the afternoon. Iwata started out with some slides to remind us that Nintendo started out as a card game company way back in 1889. He outlined how the company transitioned to TV games and then to consoles as a game platform. Nintendo is an old company, but always one that wants to make something new, he emphasized. When we talk about Nintendo we cannot ignore (former president) Hiroshi Yamauchi who just recently passed away. He always said that if you have failure, you don’t need to be too concerned. You always have good things and bad, and this reflects the history of Nintendo [1]. Iwata, as you might expect with so many folks from the mobile industry in attendance, really focused on his company’s longevity, innovation, and legacy of surprising the world with something entirely new. If…

nintendo-satoru-iwata-bdash — Nintendo president Satoru Iwata

This is a part of our coverage of B Dash Camp Osaka 2013.

The highlight of day one at B Dash Camp in Osaka was the final session featuring Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. It’s unusual for him to join an open event like this, so this was a bit of a treat, especially following the social gaming session that took place earlier in the afternoon.

Iwata started out with some slides to remind us that Nintendo started out as a card game company way back in 1889. He outlined how the company transitioned to TV games and then to consoles as a game platform. Nintendo is an old company, but always one that wants to make something new, he emphasized.

When we talk about Nintendo we cannot ignore (former president) Hiroshi Yamauchi who just recently passed away. He always said that if you have failure, you don’t need to be too concerned. You always have good things and bad, and this reflects the history of Nintendo [1].

Iwata, as you might expect with so many folks from the mobile industry in attendance, really focused on his company’s longevity, innovation, and legacy of surprising the world with something entirely new.

If you do the same thing as others, it will wear you out. Nintendo is not good at competing so we always have to challenge [the status quo] by making something new, rather than competing in an existing market.

nintendo-satoru-iwata-3 — Iwata left, Nobuo Sayama right

While fans are screaming out for the company to go the way of Sega and and produce games for our mobile devices, Nintendo has been a stubborn holdout. That was, of course, the elephant in the room during Iwata’s talk, with the final question of the Q&A session predictably asking if Nintendo would ever shake from its stance of refusing to produce games for hardware other than its own. Iwata’s response to that was predictably curt:

No one knows the future, but I don’t think that’s going to happen with Nintendo.

As our readers may recall from a few weeks back, I myself have been dreaming that someday soon Nintendo might make a Hail Mary pass by producing a DS Phone. From Iwata’s comments, that does not look to be a likely scenario – although he did leave the door open a crack to the possibility.

I confess, I’ve all but given up hope for the salvation of Nintendo. But at the same time, hearing Iwata describe his company as one that looks for something entirely new – well, that claim appeals to the nostalgic gamer in me, the one that has been three times captivated by the company’s innovations [2]. I’d love to think that the company could pull off a home run again, but the skeptic in me thinks Nintendo is no longer capable of such things.

And yet, Iwata still kept talking.

And it did not sound ridiculous:

It’s often called the ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’, looking for something that no one else is working on. When we created the DS, people said it was strange to have a dual display, and people said elderly people don’t play games. But they did. Opening the first door is when things are most interesting.

He went on to speak of the challenge they faced in pushing Pokemon abroad:

Will America accept cute monsters? No, they said. Some people even recommended to make Pikachu more muscular. If we followed their advice Pokemon would never have been the success that it was. Brain Training software (Brain Age) became a hit in Japan, and I proposed that we sell it globally. And even as I said that as the president, no one listened.

But actually, Brain Training did better in Europe than anywhere else, and Iwata rolled out a handy chart to show as much.

He went on to praise his company, explaining how motivated Nintendo staffers are. “It’s easy for our employees to see the benefits of the work they do”, he explained, “and when employees are excited, well, that’s the best possible state for a company.”

It’s all too easy to bash Nintendo for its stubbornness in the face of the smartphone revolution. I’ve done it, and I’ll probably continue to do it. But I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t also rooting for the company to pull off that last second miracle that turns the gaming industry on its head.

The giant is now the underdog, and I’m really not sure why, but I’m still rooting for them to do well.

Do note that quotes in this article are taken from live translation during the event, and that Iwata’s talk was in Japanese. So it’s possible that quotes may not be entirely accurate or verbatim, but I think they are generally solid. ↩
When I say three times, I’m referring to the Nintendo Entertainment System, Gameboy, and the Nintendo DS. I didn’t buy a Wii, so I missed that train. ↩

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Couples app Pairy wins top prize at Docomo Innovation Village demo day

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.30

See the original story in Japanese. Docomo Innovation Village, the incubation initiative of Japan’s NTT Docomo, hosted a demo day event on Thursday, showcasing startups graduating from the first batch of its incubation program. The event invited a number of guest speakers and judges including Docomo president Kaoru Kato, 500 Startups’ partner George Kellerman, and Skype co-founder/Atomico partner Niklas Zennström. Presenters were the six startups that qualified for the first batch back in April. It has been interesting to see how they have evolved over the past several months. Based on the qualification by the telco’s employees and the initiative’s mentors, grand prize and the ‘best stretch’ awards were presented to two out of the participating six startups. The award winner will receive a trip to Silicon Valley including a visit to 500 startups’ incubation office. Grand prize winner: Pairy ¶ Pitched by Toshimasa Takahashi, Pairy is a mobile app for couples that lets them to look back on the events they shared together. According to a survey, more than 40% of all couples in Japan look history back to see what they have talked about as far as a month back on social media. But it’s not easy to…

See the original story in Japanese.

Docomo Innovation Village, the incubation initiative of Japan’s NTT Docomo, hosted a demo day event on Thursday, showcasing startups graduating from the first batch of its incubation program. The event invited a number of guest speakers and judges including Docomo president Kaoru Kato, 500 Startups’ partner George Kellerman, and Skype co-founder/Atomico partner Niklas Zennström.

Presenters were the six startups that qualified for the first batch back in April. It has been interesting to see how they have evolved over the past several months.

Based on the qualification by the telco’s employees and the initiative’s mentors, grand prize and the ‘best stretch’ awards were presented to two out of the participating six startups. The award winner will receive a trip to Silicon Valley including a visit to 500 startups’ incubation office.

Grand prize winner: Pairy ¶

Pitched by Toshimasa Takahashi, Pairy is a mobile app for couples that lets them to look back on the events they shared together. According to a survey, more than 40% of all couples in Japan look history back to see what they have talked about as far as a month back on social media. But it’s not easy to retrieve your interactions from all the messages you’ve exchanged with other people. Pairy is designed specifically for interactions within couples, with the intention of eliminating this searching process.

To date the startup has acquired 120,000 users, which rose by 156% three months ago when it joined the incubation program. The service’s main userbase is people in their 20s. It has 6 million monthly pageviews and there are 50,000 ‘date spots’ registered.

Their users are growing by 120% a month without any massive promotional activities, and they expect it to reach one million and become the top apps of its kind by October of 2014. The startup is planning to monetize by adding three functions: photobook creation, premium service, and advertising. It’s now looking to raise 60 million yen ($600,000) from potential investors, with plans to launch another app for couples to use after they get married.

“Best stretch” award winner: Coromo ¶

Presented by Hokuto Inoue, Coromo allows you to change your smartphone homescreen to suit any occasion: work, leisure, or home — all using a NFC card. If you install the app, you can create your own home screen with HTML5 as well.

The startup recognizes that a home screen is something that you see more than any other apps or screen. It is planning to partner with conferences or venues and provide them with this solution that can show event updates to their attendees. According to Inoue, it has been decided that this year’s Tokyo Motor Show will provide updates to their attendees using the platform. When you leave the event venue, you will be sent to the platform’s e-commerce site, the Coromo Store, in the app. This helps user retention and B2C-based monetization. Even if smartphones are replaced by wearable devices in the future, there will be still potential in the business since the concept of homescreens will remain.

DecoAlbum and Drawchat ¶

DecoAlbum is a mobile app that allows users to decorate and share photos. Readers may recall that we interviewed them back in May. To date the app has 2 million users, almost double what it was before joining the incubation program. 70% of users are from outside Japan, although Japan and Thailand represent the biggest userbases.

The company recently unveiled a mobile app called Drawchat, which lets users to exchange hand-drawn images using Facebook’s messaging feature. They plan to keep introducing apps using Facebook APIs, and they hope to reach 10 million downloads by 2014.

FunPicty ¶

FunPicty is a set of funny photo apps, available for both iOS and Android. Most funny photo decoration apps are usually short-lived. For developers, it’s tough to see how to prolong the life of such apps. So the startup put a bunch of these apps together in a single app, thus creating a platform where users can share funny apps.

To date it has seen 5 million downloads and acquired 300,000 monthly active users. The company expects this will reach 1 million users by 2014. The service was pitched by Kou Honna, of Soda.

Kumitasu ¶

Kumitasu is an app for people with a food allergy, helping you buy allergy-free ingredients from e-commerce sites by specifying what allergen ingredients are contained in a food product. The idea was pitched by Mayu Ishikawa of Willmore.

In Japan, 14.2% of households have children with a food allergy, and at schools many children have to be served with allergy-free meals at lunch. So now it has become an unavoidable issue for the entire community. The startup received help from 30 housewives and developed a database with ingredients for more than 40,000 food products available on the Japanese market. Users can easily find a cookie product, for example, which contains no egg.

The company expects to generate annual sales of 1.5 billion yen ($15 million) in the next three years through subscription-based business models and affiliates traffic to partner e-commerce sites like Lotte, D Shopping, Mogumogu, and Radish-boya. The startup is also planning to sell allergy-focused ingredient data to food distributors, and hopes to introduce a mobile app by the end of this year. Their upcoming features recipes for allergy-free meals, premium services that helps users find allergy-free menu at restaurants, and additional features for diabetics and others with dietary-restrictions

The startup just launched their service but is exploring a series A funding with hopes to acquire 500,000 users in a year and 3 million users in three years.

Nanovel ¶

Nanovel was developed by Takashi Asami, who previously worked as a film producer. In the past, he established a project to gather story ideas for the theme “Can a 10-minute story impress people?” Building on this, his colleague subsequently made a film titled La Maison en Petits Cubes (The House of Small Cubes) and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2009.

Inspired by the concept, Asami developed a platform where people can subscribe to novels comprised of less than 2,000 Japanese characters. These short novels are written by 50 professionals, including high profile script writers and copywriters, and users can read up to 16 different novels a month for free. Their user retention rate a remarkably high as 68.5%.

We will be keeping our eyes on how these startups can evolve the local startup scene by speaking with them as often as we can. Docomo Innovation Ventures is now inviting applicants for the second batch of the incubation program here.

news

Calligraphy goes high tech in Japan: Draw in the air, laser burn to wood

Rick Martin 2013.09.27

If you’re even remotely interested in the up-and-coming field of 3D printing and digital fabrication, chances are you’ve probably already seen some of the work done at FabCafe Tokyo. Operated by the folks at Loftworks, FabCafe hosts various community workshops, including a really fun one back on Valentine’s Day where participants could print 3D representations of their heads in chocolate. You may also recall this clever laser-etched 360-degree book we featured earlier in the year. And this week the cafe played host to an Air Shoudou event, where attendees could try doing traditional Japanese calligraphy in the air with their hands, and the characters would be shown on a big screen using a system equipped with a Kinect camera. As the user leans forward to write (as pictured below), the camera measures the distance between the hip and the hand. The bigger the distance, the stronger the weight of your brushstroke. So where does the fabrication come in? The system actually records the character you draw as well, and it can then be printed in various forms. The folks at FabCafe made the activity into a fun competition, posting the characters on a wall and then voting on a winner….

If you’re even remotely interested in the up-and-coming field of 3D printing and digital fabrication, chances are you’ve probably already seen some of the work done at FabCafe Tokyo.

Operated by the folks at Loftworks, FabCafe hosts various community workshops, including a really fun one back on Valentine’s Day where participants could print 3D representations of their heads in chocolate. You may also recall this clever laser-etched 360-degree book we featured earlier in the year.

And this week the cafe played host to an Air Shoudou event, where attendees could try doing traditional Japanese calligraphy in the air with their hands, and the characters would be shown on a big screen using a system equipped with a Kinect camera. As the user leans forward to write (as pictured below), the camera measures the distance between the hip and the hand. The bigger the distance, the stronger the weight of your brushstroke.

So where does the fabrication come in? The system actually records the character you draw as well, and it can then be printed in various forms. The folks at FabCafe made the activity into a fun competition, posting the characters on a wall and then voting on a winner. And then in true FabCafe fashion, they printed prizes for the winners, including one on a sake bottle using a laser etching system they have on site. I had mine printed on a masu box (see right) [1].

This is one of those really great creative projects that beautifully illustrates how Japan can fuse tradition and technology to do something entirely new and wonderful. We look forward to lots more fun stuff like this from FabCafe (see their 3D Snap & Touch workshops for starters), and we hope if you’re in the neighborhood that you check them out as well.

It’s missing a few strokes as the 60-second time limit ran out before I could finish. It was still lots of fun! ↩

news

KDDI Mugen Labo unveils 5 new incubated startups

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.27

KDDI Mugen Labo is the incubation arm of Japan’s second largest telco, KDDI. It recently unveiled five startups that qualified to participate in the fifth batch of its incubation program. They will receive mentoring in residency at the incubator as well as free rental of smartphone or tablet devices. Here’s a quick rundown of the startups and what they will be working on. Zukan.com Zukan.com is a consumer-generated photo curation site that aims to create a variety of encyclopedias. The platform was developed by two engineers from Kyushu University’s graduate school. One example of how it works is a curated picture book that introduces 2,700 species of fish shown in 34,000 pictures. Dr. Wallet Some of our readers may recall that we recently featured this personal finance data entry solution that simply scans your receipts. Dr. Wallet does not use OCR (optical character recognition) but instead depends on human-powered data entry to ensure accuracy, sorting and classifying your purchases as well. With this human element, the company can achieve data entry accuracy of up to 99.98%, likely enough to ease users’ concerns of erroneous input. The startup is backed by Incubate Fund. SmaOku SmaOku, a Japanese portmanteau of ‘Smart’ and…

KDDI Mugen Labo is the incubation arm of Japan’s second largest telco, KDDI. It recently unveiled five startups that qualified to participate in the fifth batch of its incubation program. They will receive mentoring in residency at the incubator as well as free rental of smartphone or tablet devices.

Here’s a quick rundown of the startups and what they will be working on.

Zukan.com

Zukan.com is a consumer-generated photo curation site that aims to create a variety of encyclopedias. The platform was developed by two engineers from Kyushu University’s graduate school. One example of how it works is a curated picture book that introduces 2,700 species of fish shown in 34,000 pictures.

Dr. Wallet

Some of our readers may recall that we recently featured this personal finance data entry solution that simply scans your receipts. Dr. Wallet does not use OCR (optical character recognition) but instead depends on human-powered data entry to ensure accuracy, sorting and classifying your purchases as well. With this human element, the company can achieve data entry accuracy of up to 99.98%, likely enough to ease users’ concerns of erroneous input. The startup is backed by Incubate Fund.

SmaOku

SmaOku, a Japanese portmanteau of ‘Smart’ and ‘Auction’, is a mobile auction app focused on second-hand clothes for females. Users can create their own store in as little as three minutes using a smartphone. The service was developed by Tokyo-based startup Zawatt, which has been developing notable web services like WishScope and Ohaco. CEO Daisaku Harada believes conventional auction sites don’t fit with user behaviors in the smartphone era, and so he is aspiring to develop a more simple auction platform.

PEDALRest

PEDALRest is a finalist from a recent Startup Weekend Tokyo event. In Tokyo, illegal bicycle parking near railway stations is a big problem for many local governments. But from the commuter’s point of view, it can be hard to find a parking space. This service connects you with landlords who have idle spaces, allowing you to easily find a space for your bicycle. It makes our communities a marginally easier place to live in, and it eliminates the danger of costly parking fines.

Aoi Zemi

Aoi Zemi (‘zemi’ here means ‘seminar’), is a live-streamed online lecture service for junior high students. Their focus is to provide informative live programming as well as opportunities to interact with other users by sharing something they’re calling ‘timelines’. Live-streaming is available for free, but you will be charged for watching recorded lecture programs.

This 5th batch of the incubator program will start very shortly, and we can expect to see the results of their efforts at their presentation event three months from now.

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Grand prize winner: Pairy ¶

“Best stretch” award winner: Coromo ¶

DecoAlbum and Drawchat ¶

FunPicty ¶

Kumitasu ¶

Nanovel ¶

Calligraphy goes high tech in Japan: Draw in the air, laser burn to wood

KDDI Mugen Labo unveils 5 new incubated startups

Zukan.com

Dr. Wallet

SmaOku

PEDALRest

Aoi Zemi

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Grand prize winner: Pairy ¶

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