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Digital music score platform PiaScore releases version 4.0, aims for 1M downloads

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.01.31

See the original article in Japanese PiaScore is a digital music score platform from Japan. Its first iPad app was released back in December of 2010, and an iPhone version followed in May of 2013. The total number of downloads grew rapidly, to date accumulating more than half million downloads. Version 4.0 of the app was recently released on January 24th. PiaScore has many remarkable features for musicians. Not only can a user view musical scores, but they can jot notes over them, or use gestures to turn pages (iPad only). They can download over 70,000 classical scores for free as well. The app is used by a wide range of people including professional musicians the world over, educators, or just anyone who enjoys music as a hobby. Its App Store is vert high, with 4.5 points out of 5.0 given by users in Japan, the US, the UK, and China. Some new features have been added in this most recent update, including the ability to import scores, or to organize scores using playlists or tags. The design has also been renewed, and in total the company has added over 100 improvements. By paying attention to their users’ needs, PiaScore…

See the original article in Japanese

PiaScore is a digital music score platform from Japan. Its first iPad app was released back in December of 2010, and an iPhone version followed in May of 2013. The total number of downloads grew rapidly, to date accumulating more than half million downloads. Version 4.0 of the app was recently released on January 24th.

PiaScore has many remarkable features for musicians. Not only can a user view musical scores, but they can jot notes over them, or use gestures to turn pages (iPad only). They can download over 70,000 classical scores for free as well.

The app is used by a wide range of people including professional musicians the world over, educators, or just anyone who enjoys music as a hobby. Its App Store is vert high, with 4.5 points out of 5.0 given by users in Japan, the US, the UK, and China.

Some new features have been added in this most recent update, including the ability to import scores, or to organize scores using playlists or tags. The design has also been renewed, and in total the company has added over 100 improvements. By paying attention to their users’ needs, PiaScore has managed to retain its position as one of the most useful apps in the music field.

You might think that only professional musicians would make frequent use of such an app. But the monthly active rate of its users overall is fairly high at 20%. The CEO of Plus-Add (the company the makes PiaScore) Hiroyuki Koike played piano when he was young, and his personal experience and understanding has contributed to his winning the support of many music lovers. He tells us:

Many of people in music are not very familiar with the iPad or smartphones. So instead of making an advanced app with the latest technologies, I tried to keep the app very simple, something that would be easy to use even for beginners. I implemented user-friendly guides, and I tried to craft the design carefully people could use it easily.

While the startup got supports from external entities and advisors, when its comes to product and business development, nearly everything has been conducted by Koike up until now. Tablet devices are expected to continue to be used in music. So he thinks there is still a lot of room for this product to grow.

The startup aims to reach 1 million downloads in the near future.

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Pirate3D to bring its Buccaneer 3D Printer to Japan

Rick Martin 2014.01.30

We have written about a number of fun Japan-based 3D printing projects. In a country like this one known for creative product design, 3D fabrication already off to a promising start. But in order for this space to thrive on a large scale, printers need to be accessible and affordable. We’ve previously written about a number of shared workspaces, including CUBE and FabCafe, which are helping in this regard. We’re also pleased to see more printers going on sale here in Japan, including the Buccaneer 3D printer, whose parent company, Singapore-based Pirate3D, has just signed a distribution deal for Japan with Keienu Trading Company. Its printers are set to go on sale in the country in late May or early June. It’s a little surprising to me to see that Pirate3D really didn’t waste any time moving in on the Japan market, seeing as how they are still just in the pre-order phase elsewhere. So I asked the company’s management engineer Evgeny Lazarenko why Japan represented such an important market for them. He explained: Japan is arguably the most developed consumer market in Asia in terms of purchasing power. […] The nation is quick to experiment with new products, and…

We have written about a number of fun Japan-based 3D printing projects. In a country like this one known for creative product design, 3D fabrication already off to a promising start. But in order for this space to thrive on a large scale, printers need to be accessible and affordable. We’ve previously written about a number of shared workspaces, including CUBE and FabCafe, which are helping in this regard.

We’re also pleased to see more printers going on sale here in Japan, including the Buccaneer 3D printer, whose parent company, Singapore-based Pirate3D, has just signed a distribution deal for Japan with Keienu Trading Company. Its printers are set to go on sale in the country in late May or early June.

It’s a little surprising to me to see that Pirate3D really didn’t waste any time moving in on the Japan market, seeing as how they are still just in the pre-order phase elsewhere. So I asked the company’s management engineer Evgeny Lazarenko why Japan represented such an important market for them. He explained:

Japan is arguably the most developed consumer market in Asia in terms of purchasing power. […] The nation is quick to experiment with new products, and 3D printing is all about experimentation. The ‘monozukuri’ philosophy is deeply ingrained into Japanese mentality. This nationwide maker spirit is exactly what Pirate3D is looking for. We believe that 3D printing market in Japan is going to explode very soon, and cultural element will be one of the major contributing factors to this.

He adds that because Japan cares about inspired product design, that the Buccaneer 3D printer will “resonate with tastes” in Japan.

For those not familiar with Pirate3D and its Buccaneer 3D printer, we should point out that the product is still pretty young, having launched a very successful Kickstarter campaign last summer that raised $1.4 million. The product itself focuses on ease-of-use, sporting a minimalist design without any buttons, just a light indicator. It can print continuously for over 200 hours, and can even function as a server through wireless connection with PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

While the they hesitate to make any sales projections, Evgeny says maybe they can move hundreds of units per month by September. A representative from their Japanese distributor, Keienu Trading, says that they have seen “explosive growth” in Japanese demand for 3D printers in the past year, and so far their distribution partners have all shown a “significant and promising” reaction to the Buccaneer 3D printer and its potential.

Check out the video above for an overview of the Buccaneer 3D. Pirate3D was backed by Red Dot Ventures and incubated by the Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES).

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Japanese mobile auction site for women wins at KDDI Demo Day [Photos]

Rick Martin 2014.01.27

Last week KDDI Mugen Labo held a demo day event for its fifth batch of incubated startups. Our readers may recall that we previewed this batch of five startups back in September, which included: Photo curation service Zukan Personal finance app Dr. Wallet Mobile auction app Smaoku (Smart Auction) Bike parking service PedalRest Streaming lecture service Aoi Zemi These five startups pitched their services on stage at the Hikarie event hall in Shibuya at the demo day event, showing the progress they’ve made over the past few months. In the end it was Smaoku that was awarded the top prize of the day, with CEO Daisaku Harada impressing the crowd in attendance with his mobile auction app for ladies. Our readers may recall that we interviewed them last October. Smaoku, while it is not a mobile flea market app, continues the recent Japanese trend of mobile C2C commerce services that we have seen over the past year. Other notable startups in this space include Mercari and Fril to name just a few. Smaoku, Harada has said, will leverage the game-like feeling of auctions in order to stand out from the crowd here in Japan. In his presentation, he explained that…

Last week KDDI Mugen Labo held a demo day event for its fifth batch of incubated startups. Our readers may recall that we previewed this batch of five startups back in September, which included:

Photo curation service Zukan
Personal finance app Dr. Wallet
Mobile auction app Smaoku (Smart Auction)
Bike parking service PedalRest
Streaming lecture service Aoi Zemi

These five startups pitched their services on stage at the Hikarie event hall in Shibuya at the demo day event, showing the progress they’ve made over the past few months. In the end it was Smaoku that was awarded the top prize of the day, with CEO Daisaku Harada impressing the crowd in attendance with his mobile auction app for ladies. Our readers may recall that we interviewed them last October.

Smaoku, while it is not a mobile flea market app, continues the recent Japanese trend of mobile C2C commerce services that we have seen over the past year. Other notable startups in this space include Mercari and Fril to name just a few. Smaoku, Harada has said, will leverage the game-like feeling of auctions in order to stand out from the crowd here in Japan.

In his presentation, he explained that the amount of money they have transacted on Smaoku has been growing exponentially over the past few months. As you can see in one of the graphics from Harada’s presentation (see all his slides below). Back in November they were just transacting in the tens of thousands of yen (hundreds of dollars). But that grew by about four times in December to amount to millions of yen, and in January it grew again by five times to be in the tens of millions. These numbers, while admittedly rather vague, are still pretty encouraging.

I was also a little curious about their upside-down hanger logo. Daisaku explained to me that it sort of reflects the experience they want their users to have, turning their frowns upside-down in a similar way. I thought that was kind of cute, certainly a memorable image anyway.

You can check out a few more photos from the event below. We should note that photo curation service Zukan.com won the ‘Audience Prize’ at the event. But we look forward to hearing more from all five of these young startups in the next year or so. So stay tuned!

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Japan’s Yesterscape improves its time-machine app, enables web upload of old memories

Rick Martin 2014.01.22

One of my favorite startups to write about last year was Kyoto-based Qooq Inc. As you may recall, this is the company that operates a so-called ‘time machine’ application, Yesterscape, which lets you view images of the past through your smartphone camera. So for example, you might take a picture of your parents in front of the Eiffel Tower in France this year, and then revisit it five years later and see the same picture through your camera thanks to this augmented reality app. While this process works great for images that you’ve taken on your smartphone, what about old images that you might have taken before you even had a smartphone? What about photos your parents or grandparents might have taken? How can we input those? Today Yesterscape has taken a step towards solving that problem, now providing a web interface that allows for the uploading of photos from your PC. The interface still needs some polishing, but I managed to upload a picture of my great-grandparents, and pin it in time and space as best I could using the Google Maps and Streetview interface. The latter was a bit tricky for me on a PC, determining the direction…

One of my favorite startups to write about last year was Kyoto-based Qooq Inc. As you may recall, this is the company that operates a so-called ‘time machine’ application, Yesterscape, which lets you view images of the past through your smartphone camera.

So for example, you might take a picture of your parents in front of the Eiffel Tower in France this year, and then revisit it five years later and see the same picture through your camera thanks to this augmented reality app.

While this process works great for images that you’ve taken on your smartphone, what about old images that you might have taken before you even had a smartphone? What about photos your parents or grandparents might have taken? How can we input those?

Today Yesterscape has taken a step towards solving that problem, now providing a web interface that allows for the uploading of photos from your PC. The interface still needs some polishing, but I managed to upload a picture of my great-grandparents, and pin it in time and space as best I could using the Google Maps and Streetview interface. The latter was a bit tricky for me on a PC, determining the direction and angle of the photo, data that you don’t need to worry about when adding photos with the smartphone app. You can see a sample upload interface in the screenshot below:

The new interface enables users to bridge both space and time to pin a photo, something they can’t do with the app, as founder Hide Nu explains:

I have heard some users say that they want to upload picture taken somewhere far away, perhaps from an old trip or from a past home. The new interface will allow users to upload their pictures via the web instead of actually going to the location. With this they can easily place their important photographs in time and space. To make Yesterscape a common architecture in augmented reality for photograph in the near future, we have to have a convenient tool to [handle] old media.

He also explains that for some companies or organizations that have many historical photos, they will offer a special account with a customized interface for free.

Interestingly, they have also added a function where users can import a Sekai Camera KMZ file to import their photos and data from that now defunct augmented reality application. Our readers may recall that Sekai Camera closed down last month, perhaps a service that consumers were not ready for when it launched five years back.

It may be possible that the world is still not yet ready for Yesterscape. My guess is that the app is not overwhelmed with users just yet. But now that smartphones have made (networked) photographers of just about everyone, maybe by the time the world is ready, Yesterscape will be prepared and can be waiting for them [1].

The idea of preserving our history is a notion that everyone should be enthusiastic about, and I hope that especially here in Japan, a place with such an incredibly rich history, that Yesterscape can find some support.

You can check out a brief intro to Yesterscape from the company’s CTO, Oscar Peredo, below.

With more compact and DSLR cameras getting wireless capabilities, I’d say that there’s lots of long term potential for an idea like this. ↩

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New Japanese subscription service delivers fresh roasted coffee to your door

Rick Martin 2014.01.17

It has been interesting to watch the development of many online subscription commerce services over the past few years. Depending on the product, some of these services have been successful while others have not. I suspect product has a lot to do with it. For example, I’ve subscribed to a number of products using Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program. And one thing I’ve noticed is that if I don’t select the right delivery frequency, some things can build up faster than I can use them. In a case like that, I’m disappointed to see them arrive on my doorstep. But products that have a limited lifespan which would be tailor-made to such subscription commerce. I’d love to have a basket of fruit delivered weekly to my door. Perishable items would not carry over into the next week, and you’d always be delighted to see a new basket arrive. Perhaps following the same logic, US-based Tonx has done well with its subscription roasted coffee service. According to the company, “The full flavor of coffee begins to reveal itself a few days after it’s roasted, and starts to wane after a couple weeks.” They deliver coffee to customers every other week, based…

It has been interesting to watch the development of many online subscription commerce services over the past few years. Depending on the product, some of these services have been successful while others have not. I suspect product has a lot to do with it.

For example, I’ve subscribed to a number of products using Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program. And one thing I’ve noticed is that if I don’t select the right delivery frequency, some things can build up faster than I can use them. In a case like that, I’m disappointed to see them arrive on my doorstep.

But products that have a limited lifespan which would be tailor-made to such subscription commerce. I’d love to have a basket of fruit delivered weekly to my door. Perishable items would not carry over into the next week, and you’d always be delighted to see a new basket arrive.

Perhaps following the same logic, US-based Tonx has done well with its subscription roasted coffee service. According to the company, “The full flavor of coffee begins to reveal itself a few days after it’s roasted, and starts to wane after a couple weeks.” They deliver coffee to customers every other week, based on that time frame.

Java for Japan

Regrettably Tonx does not yet deliver to Japan. But thankfully, the folks over at AQ just launched a site that will deliver your java fix twice monthly [1]. It’s called Kawakura, and you can sign up on their teaser page right now to be notified of when they officially start.

I asked AQ’s Chris Palmieri about why they thought something like this would work in Japan. He explained:

Kawakura started as a quest to get the most enjoyment possible from my morning ritual of making coffee. For me this meant always having great beans at home, an understanding of where they come from and how to get the most flavor from them.

A subscription model obviously solves the first part, the logistics of buying fresh beans every week, but we’re more excited by how Kawakura can facilitate a conversation between the roaster and the customer. Conversation is how we learn from each other, and how simple routines can become the favorite part of our day.

Don’t look now, but I think AQ just made being coffee-sipping hipster designers cool again [2].

I’m told they’ll start off with a small customer base and see what they learn. For now the company is still talking with local roasters, and learning as much as they can before they make their first shipment.

I’m not a big coffee drinker myself, but I’m glad to see someone take a shot at this here in Japan. All you caffeine-dependent Japanese startups out there are encouraged to share this link with your boss. That Red Bull will rot your teeth, I hear.

You may remember AQ from such projects as Hi and their AQ Lift program. ↩
Who am I gonna make fun of now? Maybe Saskatchewan. ↩

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Japan’s Tabelog hits 5M restaurant reviews, you’d need 13.5 years to read them all

Tabelog

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.01.16

The Japanese equivalent of Yelp, Tabelog, announced today that its total number of restaurant reviews have surpassed five million. To celebrate this huge milestone, the review site has launched a campaign where 50 couples will be invited to 50 restaurants, all of which have reviews exceeding 4.0. Of all the restaurants listed on the site, 760,000 to be specific, only 0.1% meet this criteria. Tabelog opened way back in March of 2005, and with 50 million monthly visitors it is now the go-to destination for many Japanese people looking for a great place to eat. According to the company, five million reviews add up to roughly 2.3 billion Japanese characters. To understand how impressive this number is, it would take about 13.5 years to read it all out loud, and it would take a daily newspaper 25.2 years to publish as much. The special landing page that Tablog has created for its campaign is convenient even if you’re not going to participate. It showcases 50 top-notch restaurants in Japan by region, information normally restricted to those with premium accounts. A few examples of restaurants that made the cut include: Saeki, a sushi restaurant in the Osaka area Yanagiya, an unagi…

The Japanese equivalent of Yelp, Tabelog, announced today that its total number of restaurant reviews have surpassed five million. To celebrate this huge milestone, the review site has launched a campaign where 50 couples will be invited to 50 restaurants, all of which have reviews exceeding 4.0. Of all the restaurants listed on the site, 760,000 to be specific, only 0.1% meet this criteria.

Tabelog opened way back in March of 2005, and with 50 million monthly visitors it is now the go-to destination for many Japanese people looking for a great place to eat. According to the company, five million reviews add up to roughly 2.3 billion Japanese characters. To understand how impressive this number is, it would take about 13.5 years to read it all out loud, and it would take a daily newspaper 25.2 years to publish as much.

The special landing page that Tablog has created for its campaign is convenient even if you’re not going to participate. It showcases 50 top-notch restaurants in Japan by region, information normally restricted to those with premium accounts. A few examples of restaurants that made the cut include:

Saeki, a sushi restaurant in the Osaka area
Yanagiya, an unagi restaurant in Gifu prefecture
Apicius, a French restaurant in Ginza

If you’d like to give it a browse, you can view the selected restaurants from your computer or from your smartphone.

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Office toilet woes solved: Japanese company’s amazing system checks if stall is free

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.01.15

Our readers may remember reading about TeamLab and its creative initiatives many times here on The Bridge, and even more of their past work can be found on their website. TeamLab does interior office designs as well, and recently we came across some interesting work they’ve completed. The project is called the Heaven’s Door, a witty name given to a system that lets office workers see the availability of office bathrooms. Who needs such a system? Well apparently TeamLab did, with its over 100 employees and only two toilets available at that time. Trips to the bathroom often resulted in long waits or even several visits, so some engineers decided to do something about it. Heaven’s Door requires that a device be installed for a view of the entire bathroom, and then a smaller device added for each stall. These smaller devices have sensors enabled, detecting whether a stall is occupied or vacant. Office workers can then install a dedicated Chrome extension, which gives you a real time update of the bathroom availability with a single click. Heaven’s Door was first shown to public at O’Reilly Japan’s Make: Japan Summit back in 2011. If anyone is interested in making their…

Our readers may remember reading about TeamLab and its creative initiatives many times here on The Bridge, and even more of their past work can be found on their website. TeamLab does interior office designs as well, and recently we came across some interesting work they’ve completed.

The project is called the Heaven’s Door, a witty name given to a system that lets office workers see the availability of office bathrooms. Who needs such a system? Well apparently TeamLab did, with its over 100 employees and only two toilets available at that time.

Trips to the bathroom often resulted in long waits or even several visits, so some engineers decided to do something about it.

Heaven’s Door requires that a device be installed for a view of the entire bathroom, and then a smaller device added for each stall. These smaller devices have sensors enabled, detecting whether a stall is occupied or vacant. Office workers can then install a dedicated Chrome extension, which gives you a real time update of the bathroom availability with a single click.

Heaven’s Door was first shown to public at O’Reilly Japan’s Make: Japan Summit back in 2011. If anyone is interested in making their employee’s bathroom life a little less worrisome, prototypes of Heaven’s Door devices are available for 2,000 yen and 3,000 yen (about $20 and $30) on this website.

Photo Credit: Anne Worner via Compfight cc

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How to search for the best places to eat in Japan

SCORE 1,101

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.01.13

If you’re looking for places to eat here in Japan, there more than a few options available to help you in your search. Tabelog, a Japanese restaurant review site (much like Yelp) is one, and its rival Gurunavi is another popular option. But over the years an abundance of alternatives have emerged to challenge these two leading services. I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at just a few. Retty is a popular mobile service, where you can get restaurant recommendations from your online friends. Readers may recall that we previously featured it leading up to the recent CNet Japan Awards. On mobile, you can also look to location-based apps like Tab that suggest nearby points of interest, including restaurants. Another interesting option is through customer relations platforms like Kanban Musume (roughly translates as ‘store representative girl’) which lets consumers communicate with store staff online. By becoming a regular at restaurants, people receive exclusive offers as a bonus. Although the name suggests female staff, Kanban Musume includes staff of both genders. Moving on to other services, a new website called ‘Kono-ko-ni-aitai’ (meaning ‘I want to see her’ ) recently launched. According to the site, male users can…

If you’re looking for places to eat here in Japan, there more than a few options available to help you in your search. Tabelog, a Japanese restaurant review site (much like Yelp) is one, and its rival Gurunavi is another popular option. But over the years an abundance of alternatives have emerged to challenge these two leading services. I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at just a few.

Retty is a popular mobile service, where you can get restaurant recommendations from your online friends. Readers may recall that we previously featured it leading up to the recent CNet Japan Awards. On mobile, you can also look to location-based apps like Tab that suggest nearby points of interest, including restaurants.

Another interesting option is through customer relations platforms like Kanban Musume (roughly translates as ‘store representative girl’) which lets consumers communicate with store staff online. By becoming a regular at restaurants, people receive exclusive offers as a bonus. Although the name suggests female staff, Kanban Musume includes staff of both genders.

Moving on to other services, a new website called ‘Kono-ko-ni-aitai’ (meaning ‘I want to see her’ ) recently launched. According to the site, male users can look through photos of female staff at various establishments to find where they’d like to go.

Now this could be for restaurants, hair/esthetic salons, or even night clubs. The site was only launched this past week, so there’s not much data registered at this point. If you want to promote your store, you can add up to three staff registrations for free.

Other ways to discovering new places to eat include websites like Meshitomo, Social Lunch or Coffee Meeting. These websites are built to provide working people or job-seeking students a chance to connect with each other through casual lunches or dinners. While the purposes of these websites are more social, they may also be an interesting way to discover new places to eat and drink.

With so much information out there, it’s good to have so many options to turn to besides just Google. If you’re hungry, these are just a few ways that you can find new and interesting discoveries. If you know of others, let us know in the comments!

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Chinese online flower shop forces men to choose their favorite girl

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.10

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

Based on our previous article, in Japanese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Explosive potential: Nitrous puts pre-configured development environments in the cloud

Rick Martin 2014.01.09

As someone who has been trying to learn programming over the past few years, one of the biggest issues that I continue to run into is getting my local development environment to function properly. For a beginner, an amazing amount of stamina is required to power through the inevitable command line errors that often come up when you’re getting started [1]. But while interviewing a well-known designer/developer recently, he suggested that I check out Nitrous.IO, a cloud-based development environment platform that he assured me would make the process much easier [2]. And sure enough, it did. After signing up, you can create a development environment, or ‘box’, for one of four languages/frameworks: Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, NodeJS, or Go — all with little more than a button click. From there you’re presented with the familiar green-on-black terminal interface, all ready to go from the comfort of your web browser, letting you focus on writing code rather than fumbling with environment configurations. I got in touch with Nitrous co-founder A.J. Solimine to find out more about how their product came about. While I find it a helpful tool for my own beginner-level learning, Nitrous was built to make software configuration easier not just…

As someone who has been trying to learn programming over the past few years, one of the biggest issues that I continue to run into is getting my local development environment to function properly. For a beginner, an amazing amount of stamina is required to power through the inevitable command line errors that often come up when you’re getting started [1]. But while interviewing a well-known designer/developer recently, he suggested that I check out Nitrous.IO, a cloud-based development environment platform that he assured me would make the process much easier [2].

And sure enough, it did.

After signing up, you can create a development environment, or ‘box’, for one of four languages/frameworks: Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, NodeJS, or Go — all with little more than a button click. From there you’re presented with the familiar green-on-black terminal interface, all ready to go from the comfort of your web browser, letting you focus on writing code rather than fumbling with environment configurations.

I got in touch with Nitrous co-founder A.J. Solimine to find out more about how their product came about. While I find it a helpful tool for my own beginner-level learning, Nitrous was built to make software configuration easier not just for novices, but for everyone.

A.J. explains:

We’ve set out to make development easier and more enjoyable by eliminating the complexities that come with setting up and configuring software. On Nitrous.IO, you just write code, you don’t really need to know about Linux, and Ruby, and Rails, or Postgres configuration flags.

A.J. and his team began working on Nitrous (initially named Action.io) back in the summer of 2013 from a small shop in Singapore. The other cofounders are Peter Kim and Arun Thampi, who both studied at the National University of Singapore. While working on web and mobile apps, Arun and A.J. ran into difficulties keeping their development environments up to date for their many projects. They looked into Quora’s published explanation of their EC2 development, in an effort to see if a cloud solution might be the answer.

They found there were many configuration tools out there, but most with a steep learning curve and none built specifically for development [3]. The alternative that they devised (see a screenshot of the browser interface below) is one that has attracted a lot of attention and admiration from the development community, and from investors as well.

Nitrous raised $1 million in seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and other investors back in late 2012, and I’m told that since they launched their public beta in June 2013 they’ve averaged a stunning 500 new registered users per day. And in December they announced a beta ‘Nitrous for Business’ program, targeting larger teams that need a way to simplify their development and collaboration.

nitrous-jekyll — A Nitrous ruby box in the browser

The business model is very smart as well, in my view, with a number of upgrade plans (announced just yesterday) that give you access to more CPU share and virtual memory, as well as things like premium support, no automatic shutdowns (free boxes are shutdown after a period of inactivity), and direct SSH access.

But even free users can earn additional resources through Nitrous’s referral plan [4]. A.J. tells me that this strategy has served them very well so far:

The referral strategy has been a strong catalyst for growth for us – we don’t spend any money on marketing or advertisements, so all of our growth thus far has been due to our users sharing Nitrous.IO with their friends.

With an office now in the US as well as Singapore, it will be interesting to see how Nitrous progresses over the next year or so. They have made some astounding strides in a very, very short amount of time, so I think there’s really a lot of potential here. Nitrous is hiring too, for anyone out there who would like to get involved.

Expect big things.

Nitrous's US team after a go-kart outing — Nitrous’s US team after a go-kart outing

I’m sure that many experienced programmers might assert that powering through such errors is an essential part of your learning, and understanding the development environment is important. And I think that’s very true. But with more and more people learning programming on their own these days, as opposed to in a classroom, a tool like this makes the learning process a little more accessible in my view. ↩
I’m referring to Sacha Greif, and my conversation with him is upcoming in a future article. He has written an informative post about running Meteor apps using Nitrous here. ↩
They also found some big companies centralized infrastructure in place for remote development, but that was usually the exception and not the norm. ↩
I’m going to shamelessly drop my own Nitrous referral link right here. ↩

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