Japanese mobile marketing reserach company Livigen recently conducted a survey about video streaming and sharing services. The company used its own survey app Sumamoni (available on both Android and iOS) to collect responses from 500 participants [1]. When asked about which video sharing service they know of, almost all respondents – 96% to be precise – knew of YouTube. NicoNico Douga was the second most widely known at about 68%, with Twitcasting and Vine following at at 23% and 10% respectively. Twitcasting is a Japanese live-streaming app that we have covered in the past. Launched early in 2010, it now has almost four million users. Although Youtube was well known among the respondents as a whole, some services were found to be more popular in certain age groups. For example, Niconico Douga the service most known by people in their 20s, whereas Twitcasting and Vine were the most acknowledged among young teenage kids. Livigen’s survey also asked respondents to say what they found fun and interesting about these services. Some teens who prefer Twitcasting said things like: “People I became friends with on Twitter come to see me on Twitcasting” “It’s easier to use than Niconico Douga, and its a…
Vine is surprisingly popular with young people in Japan
Japanese mobile marketing reserach company Livigen recently conducted a survey about video streaming and sharing services. The company used its own survey app Sumamoni (available on both Android and iOS) to collect responses from 500 participants [1].
When asked about which video sharing service they know of, almost all respondents – 96% to be precise – knew of YouTube. NicoNico Douga was the second most widely known at about 68%, with Twitcasting and Vine following at at 23% and 10% respectively.
Twitcasting is a Japanese live-streaming app that we have covered in the past. Launched early in 2010, it now has almost four million users.
Although Youtube was well known among the respondents as a whole, some services were found to be more popular in certain age groups. For example, Niconico Douga the service most known by people in their 20s, whereas Twitcasting and Vine were the most acknowledged among young teenage kids.
Livigen’s survey also asked respondents to say what they found fun and interesting about these services. Some teens who prefer Twitcasting said things like:
“People I became friends with on Twitter come to see me on Twitcasting”
“It’s easier to use than Niconico Douga, and its a good way to kill time”
“All it takes is a mobile phone to broadcast.”
Meanwhile a teenage user on Vine said she loves that a six-second video can be easily made into a story, and another teenager responded that she enjoys to connect with people outside of Japan.
But as with most user-generated content services, most people access these products as viewers and do not actually post videos themselves. Out of all 500 respondents, only 0.8% had posted video on Vine, 4.6% on Twitcasting (pictured below), and even Youtube was relatively low at 18%.
Admittedly this is a small sample size, it’s a good indication that it might be a while longer before people in Japan to get used to casually sharing their videos.
Recently we spoke to the folks behind Tokyo-based survey solution Creative Survey, an online survey tool that emphasizes great design as its differentiator. That design-centric approach is similar to that of Barcelona-based Typeform, whose David Okuniev we spoke recently with about their progress to date and upcoming expansion plans. David tells me that their first Typeform first came into being four years ago as a sort of accident. He and a partner were running a design/development agency, and were asked to create a form that would sit in a gallery space, displayed on three iMac computers. Of course, in a setting like that, just any old design wouldn’t be enough. So they set out to build something that had an appropriately smart design. The initial version of TypeForm was created with the movie War Games in mind. 80s movie buffs will remember the back and forth Q&A-style conversation between the computer and Matthew Broderick’s character, as seen in the clip below: David explains that the simplicity of this interaction was inspiring: We thought, let’s forget everything we know about forms and do it the best we can. Along the way we realized it was more human and that we would…
Recently we spoke to the folks behind Tokyo-based survey solution Creative Survey, an online survey tool that emphasizes great design as its differentiator. That design-centric approach is similar to that of Barcelona-based Typeform, whose David Okuniev we spoke recently with about their progress to date and upcoming expansion plans.
David tells me that their first Typeform first came into being four years ago as a sort of accident. He and a partner were running a design/development agency, and were asked to create a form that would sit in a gallery space, displayed on three iMac computers. Of course, in a setting like that, just any old design wouldn’t be enough. So they set out to build something that had an appropriately smart design.
The initial version of TypeForm was created with the movie War Games in mind. 80s movie buffs will remember the back and forth Q&A-style conversation between the computer and Matthew Broderick’s character, as seen in the clip below:
David explains that the simplicity of this interaction was inspiring:
We thought, let’s forget everything we know about forms and do it the best we can. Along the way we realized it was more human and that we would increase conversions, and we can even put in images and video.
While early prototypes of the service was done in Flash, the company quickly moved to HTML5. After they raised funding, they continued to work to make work well on mobile, with responsive design and bigger buttons, presenting one question at a time. They launched their beta release last February, with a 1.0 release coming later this month. So far Typeform has over 40,000 users, with 8000 signed up in the month of December. They’re seeing good results so far, and are looking forward to making a push once their out of beta. Currently the team is comprised of 14 members, but they’re looking to make it 30 by the end of 2014.
Does Typeform have any plans for Japan? David tells me that they already have 1500 signups from here, even though the platform is not yet localized. Typeform does, however, allow you to select Japanese as the language for your form, with Japanese options available as form responses [1].
I understand that in addition to German, Japanese will likely be one of the first two fully localized languages for Typeform. The company is keen to speak with and get to know people here in Japan, and welcome anyone who might want to get involved in their efforts.
As far as monetizing their product, they have a number of tiered pricing offerings, including a free plan, and pro features available for those willing to pay a little more.
You can view some examples that Japanese users have created here and here. I’ll refrain from providing the actual links because I don’t want these users getting bombarded with unwanted responses. ↩
Tokyo-based internet company Allied Architects (TSE:6081) announced today that it has launched a social media marketing service using Facebook in Vietnam. For the company, this is its second international expansion following Taiwan back in 2012. In Vietnam, Facebook has surpassed the country’s local social network Zing Me in total users [1], and accounting for 22% of the country’s population as of last month [2]. The marketing platform is called Monipla, and it has been adopted by more than 500 companies in Japan and over 50 companies in Taiwan. As the first use case for the service in Vietnam, the company launched a Facebook promotion for the convenience store chain Ministop Vietnam, where users can get rewards by liking the chain’s fan page during the Vietnamese new year’s celebration. In this space, we’ve already seen more than a few players, including Kolor (by Interest Marketing), Crocos (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2012), Fantastics (by Gaiax), Smapo (acquired by Rakuten back in 2012), Shoprier (by Recruit), and Moratame (by Do House) in Japan. According to WeAreSocial. ↩ According to Cereja Technology. ↩
Tokyo-based internet company Allied Architects (TSE:6081) announced today that it has launched a social media marketing service using Facebook in Vietnam. For the company, this is its second international expansion following Taiwan back in 2012.
In Vietnam, Facebook has surpassed the country’s local social network Zing Me in total users [1], and accounting for 22% of the country’s population as of last month [2].
The marketing platform is called Monipla, and it has been adopted by more than 500 companies in Japan and over 50 companies in Taiwan. As the first use case for the service in Vietnam, the company launched a Facebook promotion for the convenience store chain Ministop Vietnam, where users can get rewards by liking the chain’s fan page during the Vietnamese new year’s celebration.
See the original story in Japanese. I visited Luxembourg back in June to attend the international startup showcase, ICT Spring 2013. The tiny country of Luxembourg is gradually becoming an emerging hub in the European startup community, and its government is trying to support this by organizing international conferences like ICT Spring. Unlike other startup communities where we can meet a variety of startups at different stages of development, Luxembourg seems to be more of a place for mature startups to grow further. 40% of Europe’s GDP lies within 500km of Luxembourg, making it a very convenient place to do business from. Many people working here actually reside in neighboring countries like Germany and France, and they commute to their offices in Luxembourg across the border every day. Why don’t startups use Luxembourg instead of London, Paris, or Berlin as a marketing hub for their European operations? During my visit at that time, I learned a lot about the country’s schemes and entities that supporting startups. And I’d like to review some of those here. P&T Luxembourg P&T Luxembourg is a 100% state-run company and administrates post and telecommunication business in the country. According to the company’s director Jean-Marie Spaus…
I visited Luxembourg back in June to attend the international startup showcase, ICT Spring 2013. The tiny country of Luxembourg is gradually becoming an emerging hub in the European startup community, and its government is trying to support this by organizing international conferences like ICT Spring.
Unlike other startup communities where we can meet a variety of startups at different stages of development, Luxembourg seems to be more of a place for mature startups to grow further.
40% of Europe’s GDP lies within 500km of Luxembourg, making it a very convenient place to do business from. Many people working here actually reside in neighboring countries like Germany and France, and they commute to their offices in Luxembourg across the border every day. Why don’t startups use Luxembourg instead of London, Paris, or Berlin as a marketing hub for their European operations?
During my visit at that time, I learned a lot about the country’s schemes and entities that supporting startups. And I’d like to review some of those here.
P&T Luxembourg
P&T Luxembourg is a 100% state-run company and administrates post and telecommunication business in the country. According to the company’s director Jean-Marie Spaus and international business development head Micaël Weber, the country has a great geographical advantage to host servers for European customers, since it’s located in the heart of the region and thus can reduce data latency. This has encouraged many gaming companies like Nexon and Kabam to set their European headquarters in the country.
Micaël Weber, International business development manager at P&T Luxembourg
The company is now working on deploying fiber-to-the-home to all households in the country according to the government’s strategy, with plans to roll out fiber-optic internet services up to 100Mbps by 2015, and 1Gbps by 2020.
Chamber of Commerce welcomes the world’s startups
Romain Fouarge, the senior advisor at Luxembourg Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade, talks about their startup invitation policy
Kirchberg is the country’s only business district. It’s close to Fidel Airport, and a big street runs through the district, home to the European Union’s office, governmental offices, and many business centers. The Japanese delegation I was part of visited the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, a very fashionable building in the area. But it seems a little small for the number of officials, and an adjacent annex building was under construction.
For a tiny country like Luxembourg, since every local governmental organization has privilege to work like a ministry, their chamber of commerce can play an important role in inviting companies from around the world. They say that if you set up a company in Luxembourg, you or your employees will not always need to live in the country to apply for tax incentives. Their government is very small, which means when you are registering a company or applying for a startup program, you can complete all required documentation in a shorter period.
English is usually spoken business occasions in the country, but it’s not the official language. So when you submit a request to the government, you will be required to complete a form in German, French, or Luxemburgisch. However the ‘Luxembourg for Business’ office (a business promotion agency) in your country can help you with translation to complete the form, so language barriers will not cause much trouble.
From the view of the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce buildingConference room at Chamber of Commerce
Data4: More than just infrastructure
Data4 headquarters in Bettembourg
Data4 is a data center company based in the suburban city of Bettembourg, a 30-minute drive from the central area of Luxembourg city. They have data center facilities at four locations in Luxembourg, two in France, and one in the UK, Italy, and Switzerland. The company was previously known as SecureIT, but rebranded since its business now extends beyond just the security business.
In association with consulting firm Ernst & Young and the Luxembourg government, they formed an incubation initiative called Europe4Startups. It lets participating startups receive a number of perks, including complimentary cloud storage subscription. If you’d like to apply for it, you can do so here.
Data4 Chairman Gary Kneips explains about their company and incubation program
A potential hub for startups?
Gare Centrale du Luxembourg
It seems like entrepreneurs and their co-workers in Luxembourg aren’t so wrapped up in their jobs that they can’t afford to enjoy everyday life. They manage to sustain their startups, without having to sacrifice their happiness. I envy that the location of their workplace, hang-outs, and homes were conveniently located in a tiny area.
Let me give you an example. During the visit, I visited the office of Nexon Europe, which is just across the street from Luxembourg Central Station (Gare Centrale du Luxembourg). It’s a walkable distance to the city’s busiest dining and entertainment district, Place d’Armes. HotCity, the country’s public Wi-Fi service, is available on almost every street corner, so you don’t have any expensive international roaming services. From that district, you can reach forest areas in less than a ten-minute walk. And compared to other European cities, Luxembourg is pretty safe.
For many of our readers, Luxembourg is still less familiar than most other European countries when it comes to business. But the recent announcements that Japanese startups like Chatwork and Skeed have set up their European offices there indicates that things are changing. If you plan to expand your business in the region, Luxumbourg is certainly worth considering as an options.
For all the assistance I received in arranging appointments during the trip, I wish to thank the following people:
Yuriko Matsuno, Luxembourg for Business (Tokyo), Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy and Foreign Trade
Ryoko Nagakubo, Luxembourg for Business (Tokyo), Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy and Foreign Trade
Michel is an online text mining analysis service that collects information from blogs, online reviews and social media to find internet trends. Plus Alpha Consulting, the Japanese company behind the site, recently put together a report that shows the most popular TV commercials in Japan by analysing tweets from the past year. It’s always fun to watch award-winning TV commercials, as they often gives some insight into the type of humor and creativity that works well in certain cultures. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at few of the best television commercials from Japan in 2013. The most popular TV commercial from last year was by Nissin for its Cup Noodle product. The company has always been super creative and funny with its Cup Noodle commercials. But in the latest version, they make fun of happy people on Facebook who feel the need to share every single happy moment they experience with friends. The shark in the video represents these happy people, and the guy fighting the shark screams out, “I’ll only press ”Like” when I really like something!” SoftBank won the number two spot with it’s unique commercials. The company is recently running a commercial that…
Michel is an online text mining analysis service that collects information from blogs, online reviews and social media to find internet trends. Plus Alpha Consulting, the Japanese company behind the site, recently put together a report that shows the most popular TV commercials in Japan by analysing tweets from the past year.
It’s always fun to watch award-winning TV commercials, as they often gives some insight into the type of humor and creativity that works well in certain cultures. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at few of the best television commercials from Japan in 2013.
The most popular TV commercial from last year was by Nissin for its Cup Noodle product. The company has always been super creative and funny with its Cup Noodle commercials. But in the latest version, they make fun of happy people on Facebook who feel the need to share every single happy moment they experience with friends. The shark in the video represents these happy people, and the guy fighting the shark screams out, “I’ll only press ”Like” when I really like something!”
SoftBank won the number two spot with it’s unique commercials. The company is recently running a commercial that mimics the popular TV series Hanzawa Naoki, with it’s long running ‘Oto-san’ series (‘father’ in Japanese). A Japanese shibainu dog plays the part of the father in the SoftBank family. Interestingly, this father role was suppose to be played by a huge actor but at the last minute he couldn’t make it and they substituted in a dog. It’s funny how hits are made!
‘Loto 7’ nabbed the number three spot, with their commercial for a popular lottery here in Japan, where the prize is 400 million yen. In the commecial, two popular Japanese actors play the parts of a boss and his subordinate. The boss feigns disinterest in the lottery, asking “Can you buy your dreams with money?” But in the end it turns out that his employee catches him buying a ticket.
It’s interesting to note that all three major mobile phone carriers – Docomo, au, and Softbank – made top ten commercials list.
Michel also announced its list of well-received brands, with Softbank ranking number one, a construction company Daiwa House second, and Toyota third.
This year in 2014, Michel plans to release a monthly report of popular TV commercials based on this kind of Twitter analysis. They plans to provide an analytics service for TV commecials to advertising agencies and promoters as well.
As you may have read recently, Google has acquired seven robotics startups from the world, as the company looks ahead to new business opportunities. One of these startups is Tokyo-based Shaft, which won the DARPA robotics challenge trials back in December. Japan is an advanced country in this space, so I’d like to highlight a few of the important players in this sector. Read on to learn more! 1. Kiluck Kiluck has developed Rapiro, a humanoid robot compatible with the popular Raspberry Pi computer kit. The company succeeded in raising over $75,000 on Kickstarter last year, compared to its original target of $20,000. In partnership with fellow startups TeamLab and Yukai Engineering, they have developed the famous Necomimi device, a wearable pair of cat-ears that moves in accordance with your brainwave activity. 2. Extrun Since it launched back in 2009, Extrun has been in the system integration business. But they recently started developing a mobile camera called Ilbo, a device which keeps watch inside your home while you’re out. You will be able to control the device using an iOS app, and view what’s happening in your room through your mobile in real time. It will transmit a real-time image,…
Skeletonics
As you may have read recently, Google has acquired seven robotics startups from the world, as the company looks ahead to new business opportunities. One of these startups is Tokyo-based Shaft, which won the DARPA robotics challenge trials back in December. Japan is an advanced country in this space, so I’d like to highlight a few of the important players in this sector. Read on to learn more!
Kiluck has developed Rapiro, a humanoid robot compatible with the popular Raspberry Pi computer kit. The company succeeded in raising over $75,000 on Kickstarter last year, compared to its original target of $20,000. In partnership with fellow startups TeamLab and Yukai Engineering, they have developed the famous Necomimi device, a wearable pair of cat-ears that moves in accordance with your brainwave activity.
Since it launched back in 2009, Extrun has been in the system integration business. But they recently started developing a mobile camera called Ilbo, a device which keeps watch inside your home while you’re out. You will be able to control the device using an iOS app, and view what’s happening in your room through your mobile in real time. It will transmit a real-time image, but in the future they also plan to roll out additional features like remote controls for air conditioners and lights. They expected to introduce the product this spring for about $100.
Liferobotics is a company that develops commercial products based on technologies from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, or AIST. They’re developing robotic arm products that can be used in various manufacturing industries, or in assisting seniors or those with physically disabilities.
Orylab is a hardware manufacturing company backed by Waseda University’s startup incubator. For people with mobility issues, their robot OriHime can be used as a sort of avatar, allowing you to watch and listen to what’s happening in a remote location. You can talk with remote individuals using a live video chat as well. It can carried anywhere as a sort of stand-in on your behalf.
In this way, you could go on picnic with your family virtually, or even attend a lecture virtually with your classmates.
Mujin was founded by robotics scientist Rosen Diankov and grew out of the University of Tokyo. His team has developed OpenRAVE, a motion planning software for real-world robotics applications, as well as Mujin Controller, software that allows you simulate various robotic motion patterns and optimize performance before you move to full-scale operation. The company raised 75 million yen (about $75,000) from the university’s venture fund in a series A funding back in 2012.
Yukai Engineering was founded back in 2007 (and incorporated in 2011) by Teamlab’s co-founder Shunsuke Aoki. The startup is known to have introduced many interesting hardware devices like computing kit Konashi and smart baby camera Paby, and even helping Japanese smart glass startup Telepathy create their prototypes as well. Our readers may recall we interviewed Aoki back in November.
Doog was grew out of Tsukuba University, and has introduced a wheeled mobile robot (WMR) for purposes like advertising or baggage assistance. Some of their robots can follow you around wherever you go. The company wants to help people evolve their business and life further using robotics technology.
Asratec was launched by Mitou [1] super-creator Wataru Yoshizaki back in 2009. He has been developing a humanoid robot called V-sido. The robot’s primary advantage is that it’s easy to control, even for non-technicians. For most types of humanoid robots, if you make an arm movement, it is likely to fall down if you don’t keep other body parts balanced. This robot’s software calculates how much he needs to stoop or stretch other body parts to maintain balance, so all you need to do is focus on the arm movement. A Softbank executive is leading the company as their president, and several news sources say the Japanese telco plans to launch artificial intelligence and humanoid robotics projects through them.
Skeletonics was created by several Japanese college students who came together to win a robotics contest back in 2008. Their robot moves in sync with the user’s arms and legs, and works and looks like an armored suit, like that in the popular Japanese animation series Ghost in the Shell. It doesn’t use an electric motor-based servo-mechanism but rather mechanical linkage to reduce the robot’s weight as well as possible chances of technical difficulties. As the team recently won the top prize at the ‘Todai to Texas’ Demo Day, they are expected to exhibit their robots at SXSW 2014 taking place in Austin this coming March.
Mitou is a bi-annual software engineering promotion program run by a governmental IT promotional agency in Japan. In 2009, Yoshizaki’s humanoid project was chosen as one of 18 innovative projects out of 124 applicants. ↩
CTO of Xibao, Alex Farfurnik, on the right (photo cred) China’s top e-commerce site, Taobao, accounts for a whopping 80% share of the nation’s e-commerce market. But even with so many sellers setting up a shop on Taobao, most of them don’t adequately understand how to sell products on the platform. That’s where Xibao comes in. Xibao’s system helps optimize ads and use Taobao’s ad platform more effectively. According to co-founder, Alex Farfurnik, the company offers three plans at a monthly fixed rate. Pricing starts at 0–100 yuan ($0–17) for a freemium plan, 1000 yuan ($170) for a standard plan, and 15,000 yuan ($2500) for a VIP plan. 17 months have passed since the launch of its ad optimization platform, Super Driver, And the total customers subscribing to paid plans has surpassed 40,000. Advertisement fees paid by Taobao through Xibao have surpassed $150 million. At first, Xibao was launched as a service for small businesses. But the business grew because of a partnership with Taobao, and Xibao began offering the service to major companies as well. XiBao now has partnerships with internet giants like Tencent, Qihoo, JD.com, and Baidu. Generally, sellers place ads on Taobao to lead customers to their…
CTO of Xibao, Alex Farfurnik, on the right (photo cred)
China’s top e-commerce site, Taobao, accounts for a whopping 80% share of the nation’s e-commerce market. But even with so many sellers setting up a shop on Taobao, most of them don’t adequately understand how to sell products on the platform. That’s where Xibao comes in.
Xibao’s system helps optimize ads and use Taobao’s ad platform more effectively. According to co-founder, Alex Farfurnik, the company offers three plans at a monthly fixed rate. Pricing starts at 0–100 yuan ($0–17) for a freemium plan, 1000 yuan ($170) for a standard plan, and 15,000 yuan ($2500) for a VIP plan. 17 months have passed since the launch of its ad optimization platform, Super Driver, And the total customers subscribing to paid plans has surpassed 40,000. Advertisement fees paid by Taobao through Xibao have surpassed $150 million.
November 11th is widely referred to as ‘E-commerce Day’ on the Chinese internet. This year the sales on Tmall.com, the online retailer spun off from Taobao, reached 35.019 billion yuan ($5.6 billion) for the day. The above picture is from a monitoring room at Tmall.com.
At first, Xibao was launched as a service for small businesses. But the business grew because of a partnership with Taobao, and Xibao began offering the service to major companies as well. XiBao now has partnerships with internet giants like Tencent, Qihoo, JD.com, and Baidu.
Generally, sellers place ads on Taobao to lead customers to their shops. But it turns out that this is not necessarily cost-effective. For example, there was a case when a Tmall seller placed ads on Qihoo, leading viewers to Tmall from there. With this strategy, the cost performance of the ad was 50 times higher than ads placed directly on Tmall. Xibao looks at all the indicators including transactions and advertising ROI to manage the best ad space.
In the upcoming year, Xibao aims to release two apps and acquire 100,000 freemium accounts.
On November 11th, Xibao staff was working overnight at TechTemple. Every year on this day, all the staff work non-stop.
Dudu Noy is the CMO at Ginger Software. Ginger’s Grammar Checker and Sentence Rephraser are available as desktop software, browser add-ons and Android mobile keyboard. Readers of our Japanese site may recall that we featured the company’s Japan launch back in April. I predict that 2014 will be remembered as the year that CaaS, or “Cognition-as-a-Service” platforms came of age. Cognition is historically a complex biological trait including skills such as decision making, problem solving, learning, reasoning, working memory and not least language, skills that today the computer sciences are chipping away at from various angles. With each major evolutionary step in computing we have seen over the last 30 years, from mainframes to PCs, the internet, cloud and SaaS, and now ubiquitous smart mobile, the new realm has not so much replaced but augmented what was there before. In the same way the promise of CaaS is to allow apps and services to function more intelligently and intuitively, allowing you to converse with them, ask questions, give commands and complete tasks more efficiently and conveniently. Apple’s Siri is one of the most famous cognition-based services in general use today. And now Google’s recent innovations to its search product for…
Dudu Noy is the CMO at Ginger Software. Ginger’s Grammar Checker and Sentence Rephraser are available as desktop software, browser add-ons and Android mobile keyboard. Readers of our Japanese site may recall that we featured the company’s Japan launch back in April.
Ginger CMO Dudu Noy
I predict that 2014 will be remembered as the year that CaaS, or “Cognition-as-a-Service” platforms came of age. Cognition is historically a complex biological trait including skills such as decision making, problem solving, learning, reasoning, working memory and not least language, skills that today the computer sciences are chipping away at from various angles.
With each major evolutionary step in computing we have seen over the last 30 years, from mainframes to PCs, the internet, cloud and SaaS, and now ubiquitous smart mobile, the new realm has not so much replaced but augmented what was there before.
In the same way the promise of CaaS is to allow apps and services to function more intelligently and intuitively, allowing you to converse with them, ask questions, give commands and complete tasks more efficiently and conveniently.
Apple’s Siri is one of the most famous cognition-based services in general use today. And now Google’s recent innovations to its search product for mobile, incorporating more contextual conversation for queries, pits it against Siri in the cognition-augmented search arena. In both cases, the technology itself is in the cloud, even though the device is in the user’s hand. Their main functions only work when there is an internet connection [1].
The reason is that the two necessary tricks to make sense of a user’s speech input – speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) – require cloud-based servers performing intensive processing of proprietary algorithms that is beyond the capabilities of handheld technology.
When it comes to NLP it is the sheer diversity of languages that makes it such a challenge. Old school NLP solutions were based on rigid rules that map inputs to a big list of known inputs. But the list can never be long enough, and the hard rules can never cover all the edge cases. So the experience of talking to a supposedly “smart assistant” always left the user frustrated.
You need more powerful, agile technologies that can figure out that in a sentence such as: “Yuko wants to eat an apple.”
Yuko is something that can have wants, and can eat things, and that apples are things that can be eaten. The technology needs to be able to do this for the vast majority of sentences the app is likely to encounter. This is incredibly hard, but here at Ginger and a few other places, we are doing it.
It is not just Apple and Google who are eyeing this space. IBM is now also a player with Watson, recently announcing that the same supercomputer-strength software that conquered the quiz show “Jeopardy!”, will be available to app developers through an API and software toolkit. This will allow cognitive apps that leverage cognition to be hosted in the cloud on Watson. This would obviously be a great thing for IBM’s cloud hosting service as well.
This “platform model” in tech business is nothing new of course. In recent years IBM did this with its Websphere application server technology, which went from an internal project to a software community of thousands of developers. Salesforce.com did this with its Force cloud-app development platform, as did Amazon with Amazon Web Services.
But what is different with CaaS platforms is that cognitive powers will be baked in to the operating system, and all the apps that are developed on that platform. That will bring intelligence to a mass public in a wide variety of as yet unimagined contexts.
At Ginger we have not opened up our technology as a platform via an API yet, but we are providing the benefits of its cognitive powers to a mass user base globally. Our technology uses statistical algorithms in conjunction with natural language processing, referencing a vast database of trillions of English sentences that have been scoured from the web. This allows us to work out what the users of our applications are trying to communicate, be it in Microsoft Office apps, Gmail, Facebook or wherever, and correct their mistakes and suggest improvements to their expressions.
One thing is for sure – this is a really interesting space to work, and it will be fun to see where computer based cognition will go in 2014.
As an exception, Siri can be used to control some local apps. ↩
We previously featured Japanese cosmetics review portal @Cosme earlier this year. Many Japanese women trying to decide between cosmetic products turn to the site for reviews from their peers. The @Cosme website opened back in December of 1999, and on Christmas day this year the company announced that the total number of reviews on the site have exceeded 11 million. The beauty products review portal covers 230,000 items across 26,000 different brands. The total number of monthly visitors has surpassed 8.4 million. Ever since its launch, the site has strictly kept to its transparency policy, avoiding positioning itself too close to consumers or cosmetics manufacturers. To keep the website reliable, iStyle, the company behind the portal, monitors every review posted on the site 24/7, 365 days a year. Even though the site is almost 15 years old, it has remained up to date with the changing interests of Japanese women. Its ‘Best Cosme Taisho‘ (roughly translated as ‘Best Cosmetics Awards’) is trusted by many female magazines who publish about cosmetics. We’re also seeing more and more videos in the beauty content category. In particular, tutorial videos about how to put on make-up are especially popular. There are dedicated video websites…
We previously featured Japanese cosmetics review portal @Cosme earlier this year. Many Japanese women trying to decide between cosmetic products turn to the site for reviews from their peers. The @Cosme website opened back in December of 1999, and on Christmas day this year the company announced that the total number of reviews on the site have exceeded 11 million.
The beauty products review portal covers 230,000 items across 26,000 different brands. The total number of monthly visitors has surpassed 8.4 million.
Ever since its launch, the site has strictly kept to its transparency policy, avoiding positioning itself too close to consumers or cosmetics manufacturers. To keep the website reliable, iStyle, the company behind the portal, monitors every review posted on the site 24/7, 365 days a year.
Even though the site is almost 15 years old, it has remained up to date with the changing interests of Japanese women. Its ‘Best Cosme Taisho‘ (roughly translated as ‘Best Cosmetics Awards’) is trusted by many female magazines who publish about cosmetics.
We’re also seeing more and more videos in the beauty content category. In particular, tutorial videos about how to put on make-up are especially popular. There are dedicated video websites like ‘God Make‘ (‘Make’ is a short for make-up in Japan), ‘Minna-no-make’, and @Cosme’s Kawaii Channel. On Kawaii Channel, users can find tutorials for various occasions, different facial parts, or natural looking or more fancy make-up.
@Cosme has successfully become the most common destination for many beauty related topics for women. It will be interesting to see where the site goes from here.
We recently featured Cameron Beccario’s Tokyo Wind Map, a visualization created from publicly available weather data. This sort of presentation is made through ‘Open Government’ initiatives that encourage developers to create services that serve civic needs. In response to global open data initiatives like data.gov, data.gov.uk, and PublicData.eu, the Japanese government recently launched a test version of its own public data site, Data.go.jp. The government hopes to catch up with the US and European countries in developing uses for such data by the end of FY2015. The site provides data with the aim of giving all businesses and citizens access to demographical, geographical, and spacial statistics, as well as disaster prevention advisories, guidelines for governmental procurements, and white paper announcements. The portal is currently being operated on a trial basis, but the government expects to improve it based on feedback from users, with the official launch coming in FY2014. The official version may allow you to access the data via APIs. In the Asian region, such initiatives have already started in nations like Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Korea.
We recently featured Cameron Beccario’s Tokyo Wind Map, a visualization created from publicly available weather data. This sort of presentation is made through ‘Open Government’ initiatives that encourage developers to create services that serve civic needs.
In response to global open data initiatives like data.gov, data.gov.uk, and PublicData.eu, the Japanese government recently launched a test version of its own public data site, Data.go.jp. The government hopes to catch up with the US and European countries in developing uses for such data by the end of FY2015.
The site provides data with the aim of giving all businesses and citizens access to demographical, geographical, and spacial statistics, as well as disaster prevention advisories, guidelines for governmental procurements, and white paper announcements.
The portal is currently being operated on a trial basis, but the government expects to improve it based on feedback from users, with the official launch coming in FY2014. The official version may allow you to access the data via APIs. In the Asian region, such initiatives have already started in nations like Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Korea.
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
The Bridge
