THE BRIDGE

iOS

Japan’s Creema launches iOS app, gives users instant access to handmade items sellers

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Creema, the startup behind a C2C marketplace for handmade items, announced 7 November that it has introduced an iOS app for the service. The company fundraised 100 million yen ($1 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund in June and has developed the app using the funds with the aim to improve accessibility for their mobile users. Since its launch in 2010, Creema has listed over 650,000 handmade items and acquired over two million monthly visitors. Their monthly transaction volume is seeing good growth and has doubled in comparison with five months ago when they partnered with Japanese telco KDDI coinciding, with the aforementioned funding. In differentiation with other C2C marketplaces like Mercari and Fril, Creema is focused on handmade items, allowing users to interact with creators and order their custom-made items as well as listed items. While this version of the app allows buyers to browse and purchase items only, a new version, which is scheduled to go live mid-November, will support the function that enables sellers to submit their items to the marketplace. In this space Taiwan-born handmade marketplace Pinkoi, which is backed by Japan’s Infinity Venture Partners, has been expanding into Japanese where they have adopted the “Mobile First” strategy. Pinkoi has released its localized Android and iOS apps for Japanese users, so the…

creema_iosapp_screenshots

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Creema, the startup behind a C2C marketplace for handmade items, announced 7 November that it has introduced an iOS app for the service. The company fundraised 100 million yen ($1 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund in June and has developed the app using the funds with the aim to improve accessibility for their mobile users.

Since its launch in 2010, Creema has listed over 650,000 handmade items and acquired over two million monthly visitors. Their monthly transaction volume is seeing good growth and has doubled in comparison with five months ago when they partnered with Japanese telco KDDI coinciding, with the aforementioned funding. In differentiation with other C2C marketplaces like Mercari and Fril, Creema is focused on handmade items, allowing users to interact with creators and order their custom-made items as well as listed items.

While this version of the app allows buyers to browse and purchase items only, a new version, which is scheduled to go live mid-November, will support the function that enables sellers to submit their items to the marketplace.

In this space Taiwan-born handmade marketplace Pinkoi, which is backed by Japan’s Infinity Venture Partners, has been expanding into Japanese where they have adopted the “Mobile First” strategy. Pinkoi has released its localized Android and iOS apps for Japanese users, so the launch of Creema’s mobile app at this time means that the Japanese company is ready for a battle with the Taiwanese competitor.

Japanese hardware prototyping platform PocketDuino launches on Indiegogo

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See the original story in Japanese. PocketDuino is an Android-compatible circuit board based on the Arduino prototyping platform. The product was developed by Japanese engineers and recently launched an Indiegogo campaign. What’s unique about this circuit board is the ease with which you can connect external sensor devices. For example, if you have a library to control an alcohol sensor, you can have the board obtain data from the sensor by writing as little as three-line of Java code. With PocketDuino, developers can easily add external sensors to integrate with Android handsets. The PocketDuino team wants to enable software developers to create apps linked with such sensor devices without requiring too much knowledge about hardware architecture. Similar to the Arduino, you can use a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux PC to load your code to the PocketDuino circuit board. Or you can load code from an Android handset using the Arduino development environment Codebender. The team wants to fill the gap between software and hardware with this product, enabling more people to launch their hardware products and startups. They plan to launch a business in the US if PocketDuino can successfully close this campaign, and they hope to invent more hardware…

pocketduino5

See the original story in Japanese.

PocketDuino is an Android-compatible circuit board based on the Arduino prototyping platform. The product was developed by Japanese engineers and recently launched an Indiegogo campaign.

What’s unique about this circuit board is the ease with which you can connect external sensor devices. For example, if you have a library to control an alcohol sensor, you can have the board obtain data from the sensor by writing as little as three-line of Java code.

With PocketDuino, developers can easily add external sensors to integrate with Android handsets. The PocketDuino team wants to enable software developers to create apps linked with such sensor devices without requiring too much knowledge about hardware architecture.

pocketduino2

Similar to the Arduino, you can use a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux PC to load your code to the PocketDuino circuit board. Or you can load code from an Android handset using the Arduino development environment Codebender.

pocketduino3

The team wants to fill the gap between software and hardware with this product, enabling more people to launch their hardware products and startups. They plan to launch a business in the US if PocketDuino can successfully close this campaign, and they hope to invent more hardware products addressing various problems.

The campaign will run until the end of June. You can receive e-mail updates about further product development if you invest $1 in the project. If you invest $39, you can get a PocketDuino unit, and for $55 you can get a PocketDuino with an alcohol sensor. Early bird discounts are also available.

Yahoo Japan’s public transit app surpasses 10M downloads

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Yesterday Yahoo Japan announced that its Yahoo Transit application, which tells you directions and transit times for walking, trains, buses, and planes, has surpassed the 10 million downloads milestone as of May 18th. The app was initially released for iOS way back in 2008, and for Android back in 2011. It consistently ranks among the top tier of apps in iOS’s navigation category and Google Play’s transportation category in Japan. Via Venture Now

yahoo-transit

Yesterday Yahoo Japan announced that its Yahoo Transit application, which tells you directions and transit times for walking, trains, buses, and planes, has surpassed the 10 million downloads milestone as of May 18th.

The app was initially released for iOS way back in 2008, and for Android back in 2011. It consistently ranks among the top tier of apps in iOS’s navigation category and Google Play’s transportation category in Japan.

Via Venture Now

Japanese homescreen customization app breaks through 25M downloads, enjoys international success

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United Inc, the Japanese maker of smartphone customization app Cocoppa, announced today that their flagship app has surpassed 25 million downloads, as of May 16. Cocoppa is a standout Japan success story in that it has quite successfully won fans in overseas markets, with 84% of their users from outside Japan. The service originally started back in July of 2012, averaging just over a million new downloads a month. As for user engagement, Cocoppa has seen 600,000 screen icons contributed to its platform, as well as 130,000 wallpapers. As you can see in the chart below, Cocoppa’s user base skews towards iOS. The Android version of the app has only been around for about a year (launched in May 2013), so expect this to be a more balanced distribution quite soon. Recently Cocoppa was challenged on its home turf by mobile giant Line, which launched its own homescreen customization app, Line Deco. That application is doing respectably well in major Asian markets, so this could be an interesting battle to watch in the coming months.

cocoppa

United Inc, the Japanese maker of smartphone customization app Cocoppa, announced today that their flagship app has surpassed 25 million downloads, as of May 16.

Cocoppa is a standout Japan success story in that it has quite successfully won fans in overseas markets, with 84% of their users from outside Japan. The service originally started back in July of 2012, averaging just over a million new downloads a month. As for user engagement, Cocoppa has seen 600,000 screen icons contributed to its platform, as well as 130,000 wallpapers.

As you can see in the chart below, Cocoppa’s user base skews towards iOS. The Android version of the app has only been around for about a year (launched in May 2013), so expect this to be a more balanced distribution quite soon.

Recently Cocoppa was challenged on its home turf by mobile giant Line, which launched its own homescreen customization app, Line Deco. That application is doing respectably well in major Asian markets, so this could be an interesting battle to watch in the coming months.

cocoppa

Japanese startup launches social quiz app ‘BrainWars’

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Translimit recently launched a social quiz app called BrainWars. The new app is available for iOS in both English and Japanese. BrainWars pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. Our readers may recall that we mentioned this app when the company secured funding from Genuine Startup and Skyland Ventures back in March. Since then, their team has been largely devoted to improving the app’s interface. So today we’d like to focus a little more on the functions that were added as part of their improvement efforts. BrainWars lets you compete against other players online, but you can compete even when that person is offline since the system virtually reproduces them as your competitor based on their past records. They call this their ‘ghost’ function. In this way, you can encourage your friends to play against you or others by sharing just a link via Facebook, Twitter, or Line. The company is planning to first invite serial entrepreneurs as their users and then market the app by having new users to play against such notable people. Making the grade…

brainwars_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup Translimit recently launched a social quiz app called BrainWars. The new app is available for iOS in both English and Japanese.

BrainWars pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. Our readers may recall that we mentioned this app when the company secured funding from Genuine Startup and Skyland Ventures back in March. Since then, their team has been largely devoted to improving the app’s interface. So today we’d like to focus a little more on the functions that were added as part of their improvement efforts.

iphone_and_battle

BrainWars lets you compete against other players online, but you can compete even when that person is offline since the system virtually reproduces them as your competitor based on their past records. They call this their ‘ghost’ function.

In this way, you can encourage your friends to play against you or others by sharing just a link via Facebook, Twitter, or Line. The company is planning to first invite serial entrepreneurs as their users and then market the app by having new users to play against such notable people.

Making the grade

They initially planned to deploy a very simple grading system, assigning a level like beginner or professional, where a user’s grade increases as he or she improves. But at the time of launch, they decided on a more elaborate system with 25 grades, starting first with a chicken, then a turtle.

You can choose three out of 12 quiz game categories (like FlickMaster, DoubtColor, and High and Low) in determining what kind of questions you expect to see in the match. If you don’t choose categories, the system will choose them automatically. If you intentionally choose the categories, you will need to consume a coin, which requires an actual purchase.

Every user has several ‘heart’ points when starting out, but one ‘heart’ point will be consumed every time you play a match. This stamina-based purchase model is, of course, common in many mobile games these days.

The company also plans to advertise using the aforementioned ‘ghost’ player function. Major brands can market themselves by encouraging consumers to playing against their characters in the app. Considering the categories, you may assume demographics are broad ranging, but we understand that the app can show ads according to age or gender, which lets brands easily target a certain user base.

The company appears to have a much improved user interface at launch. The quality of animated graphics and sound effects should allow the app to attain the same kind of popularity as many game titles. Let’s wait and see how it does!

Leading Japanese news app Gunosy launches in the US. But is it ready?

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A couple of weeks ago Japanese mobile news startup Gunosy launched an English version of their app for the UK. Now today the company has announced that it has released its iOS app in the US as well, with an Android version to follow at the end of the month. The company says that it is targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide. And while I’m usually encouraged to see Japanese companies venturing abroad, there are three reasons I can think of why this app – in its current form – will fail spectacularly. No ‘readability’ view – I’ve written about why I think so before. Gunosy does not provide news articles in a stripped-down, Readability-style view. Most Western news apps, in contrast, do. Check out the view of the same article below, first on Gunosy, then on Pocket. Which would you prefer to read on mobile? Late mover advantage squandered – As a startup, if you enter a market late as Gunosy is now doing, you benefit from seeing what competitors have done, and you have a chance to do it better. Gunosy, for some reason, seems to think it has a chance against the…

gunosy2

A couple of weeks ago Japanese mobile news startup Gunosy launched an English version of their app for the UK. Now today the company has announced that it has released its iOS app in the US as well, with an Android version to follow at the end of the month.

The company says that it is targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide. And while I’m usually encouraged to see Japanese companies venturing abroad, there are three reasons I can think of why this app – in its current form – will fail spectacularly.

  1. No ‘readability’ view – I’ve written about why I think so before. Gunosy does not provide news articles in a stripped-down, Readability-style view. Most Western news apps, in contrast, do. Check out the view of the same article below, first on Gunosy, then on Pocket. Which would you prefer to read on mobile?

    gunosy

  2. Late mover advantage squandered – As a startup, if you enter a market late as Gunosy is now doing, you benefit from seeing what competitors have done, and you have a chance to do it better. Gunosy, for some reason, seems to think it has a chance against the competition without bothering to do anything. In my view, their app does not in any way compare with even the 2012 version of Flipboard (for example), let alone the current one.
  3. Doesn’t serve the user first – Just for kicks, I tried to send an article from Gunosy to Pocket. It worked, but the link that Gunosy lets users share not actually the article link, but a Gunosy link of this format: https://gunosy.today/r/gEqFt. At first I thought it might be just a link shortener, but it’s not, as you can see below. It’s pure Gunosy promotion with a download link and the top, and below too if you scroll down. Warning, this mess may induce flashbacks to the Hootsuite toolbar.

    gunosy-page

So where is Gunosy’s proposed value add? I confess, I have no idea. Perhaps KDDI knows? I can think of 12 million reasons why they should know!

Gunosy’s push notifications/reminders at different times during the day might be touted as a differentiator, but it’s not really a big selling point.

I think if the company hopes to do well beyond Japan, they’ll need to make some serious user-focused iterations on this app first.

In Japan, a mobile app that lets travelers get help from interpreters

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Many Japanese companies have launched services that aim to better serve travelers coming to Japan. Of course, one of the biggest obstacles for such travelers is probably the language barrier. And today we’d like to tell you about a new service that aims to address the problem using smartphones. Tokyo-based company Demo recently unveiled a video chat app called Lacu which helps travelers find crowdsourced interpreters and helps them communicate with locals who cannot speak your language. The app is currently available for iOS (there’s an app for travelers and for interpreters), but they may develop an Android version too if all goes well. Using the app, you can easily find a crowdsourced interpreter to help you communicate using the video chat feature. Every interpreter can establish a price for their service ranging from 20 yen to 100 yen per minute, and volunteer interpreters can even do it for free. 40% of the fee goes to the interpreter, and 30% will be collected by both the company and the App Store. Demo has previously worked with web services like usability analytics tool Ghostrec from Sweden and a content management system from Serbia, bringing them to Japanese and Asian markets. During…

lacu_featuredimage

Many Japanese companies have launched services that aim to better serve travelers coming to Japan. Of course, one of the biggest obstacles for such travelers is probably the language barrier. And today we’d like to tell you about a new service that aims to address the problem using smartphones.

Tokyo-based company Demo recently unveiled a video chat app called Lacu which helps travelers find crowdsourced interpreters and helps them communicate with locals who cannot speak your language. The app is currently available for iOS (there’s an app for travelers and for interpreters), but they may develop an Android version too if all goes well.

Using the app, you can easily find a crowdsourced interpreter to help you communicate using the video chat feature. Every interpreter can establish a price for their service ranging from 20 yen to 100 yen per minute, and volunteer interpreters can even do it for free. 40% of the fee goes to the interpreter, and 30% will be collected by both the company and the App Store.

Demo has previously worked with web services like usability analytics tool Ghostrec from Sweden and a content management system from Serbia, bringing them to Japanese and Asian markets. During the localization process, the company invited engineers to their office in Tokyo, but the visitors had trouble communicating with locals, especially on weekends. As a result of this experience, Demo started developing their app.

We’ve seen similar services in the past, such as Babelverse or SmileCall. Babelverse is a low-cost but convenient simultaneous service for conferences, but it is less fitting for casual dialogues between people. SmileCall helps you communicate with a receptionist at public venues such as hotels, but it’s provided at a venue owner’s expense, so you couldn’t really bring it with you sightseeing.

Demo started acquiring interpreters prior to the app’s launch and has already seen more than 500 downloads and 300 sign-ups from interpreters. The company’s president and CEO Yoshiyasu Tsunoda told us they are ready to accept over 100,000 users requesting interpretations.

Japanese startup Wantedly tackles contact management with new iPhone app

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I often hear people complain that there is a lack of good contact manager apps available of smartphones. I personally have experimented with a few, most recently Contact Sync for Gmail – which is good, but doesn’t quite cut it for me. So I was delighted to hear recently from the folks at Tokyo-based startup Wantedly that they were working on a contacts management app for iPhone [1]. That app, appropriately dubbed Contact, has just gone public today in the Japanese App Store, so I’m happy to tell you a little about it after having a chance to test it pre-release. When you initially fire up the Contact app, you’ll be asked to authorize access to your mobile’s contacts, and after that your Facebook contacts as well. Note that by authorizing Facebook, you also get a chance to view Wantedly contacts as well (since the Wantedly job platform connects with Facebook), marked with a big blue ‘W’ in the app. Contacts can also be added manually to the app if you wish. Once your contacts have all been added, you can get down to organizing them into handy groups. Like any contact app, groups could be based around anything. But…

contact-by-wantedly

I often hear people complain that there is a lack of good contact manager apps available of smartphones. I personally have experimented with a few, most recently Contact Sync for Gmail – which is good, but doesn’t quite cut it for me. So I was delighted to hear recently from the folks at Tokyo-based startup Wantedly that they were working on a contacts management app for iPhone [1]. That app, appropriately dubbed Contact, has just gone public today in the Japanese App Store, so I’m happy to tell you a little about it after having a chance to test it pre-release.

When you initially fire up the Contact app, you’ll be asked to authorize access to your mobile’s contacts, and after that your Facebook contacts as well. Note that by authorizing Facebook, you also get a chance to view Wantedly contacts as well (since the Wantedly job platform connects with Facebook), marked with a big blue ‘W’ in the app. Contacts can also be added manually to the app if you wish.

Once your contacts have all been added, you can get down to organizing them into handy groups. Like any contact app, groups could be based around anything. But the most important group, labeled with a phone icon, are the people you call on a regular basis. So once you have this group created, you can call out in a flash from within the contacts app.

wantedly-contact

Beyond the phone group, you might organize a group for work (see my The Bridge group above), doing so using simple drag-and-drop, with various icons assigned to each group. If you add someone by mistake, just drag them out of the group and into a trash can that conveniently appears. Wantedly has built in a clever marketing device into its group label icons, letting users earn as many as 120 new icons by sharing about the app on Facebook and Twitter.

Check out the video demo below for a closer look at how the app works:

I was a little curious to hear why Wantedly was branching out to do a contacts app, given that the business of the Wantedly platform is helping people find fitting jobs by leveraging their social graph. During a recent visit to Wantedly HQ, the company’s CEO Akiko Naka explained to me:

Most people recognize Wantedly as a job searching site. But many people are starting to use it as their profile. Not only people who are searching for jobs, but for people who are working. So our team started to think we should start building something for everyone, not just people who are searching for jobs. Organizing your contacts is one of the biggest problems people have. There are many contacts grouping apps, but not of them are that cool, perhaps lacking in design or user interface. I thought we could do it better.

Wantedly CEO Akiko Naka
Wantedly CEO Akiko Naka

And personally, I think they have done it better, because the app looks pretty incredible. Perhaps the only feature additions I would request are data sync or export (perhaps to Dropbox), and maybe a batch delete/move contact option to manipulate multiple contacts, instead of having to drag and drop contacts one-by-one.

Given that the app is only available in Japanese right now [2], I had to ask Akiko the obvious question of whether or not they plan to publish an English version – to which she replied with a very short “Yup.”

Wantedly is a service that I’ve been expecting to launch in overseas markets at just about any moment now. They already have an English interface, so I’m looking forward to seeing them branch out when that day comes. But Akiko noted that if a contacts app like theirs is to succeed in a certain region, it helps if they are a trusted and recognized name in that region:

In Japan people know Wantedly pretty widely, so they aren’t scared to connect your contacts with it. In the US, maybe, then there might be a bit of a hurdle. Maybe Southeast Asia first.

If you have access to the Japanese App Store, I encourage you to give Contact a try. I’ve tried a lot of contact management apps in the past, and this has turned out to be one of my favorites.


  1. See our previous interview with Wantedly CEO Akiko Naka.  ↩

  2. But if you can download it from the App Store, I think there’s no reason you can’t use it even if you don’t speak Japanese. The app is very simple, with very little text.  ↩

Japan’s Photo Money app brings a visual approach to personal finance

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We have witnessed a number of personal finance apps from Japanese developers over the past few years. Most notably, both Zaim and ReceReco have both taken an ease-of-input approach by implementing OCR technology into their apps for quick scanning of receipts. But today I’d like to look at a new personal finance app that takes a more visual approach to monitoring your personal spending. It’s called Photo Money. Currently available on iOS in both Japanese and English, the application lets you take a picture of whatever you’ve bought, and add the price using a large calculator-style input. Note that you can input in just about any currency, so users all around the world can try out Photo Money if they wish. The result of logging your purchases in this way is a reverse-chronological gallery of your expenditures, which is a great visual overview of your spending. The app also differs from other finance apps in that it presents only a weekly view. While this could be merely because of the space constraints of the photo gallery view, the developer states that it’s because one week gives you shorter iterations of time to improve your spending habits. So if you aren’t…

photomoney

We have witnessed a number of personal finance apps from Japanese developers over the past few years. Most notably, both Zaim and ReceReco have both taken an ease-of-input approach by implementing OCR technology into their apps for quick scanning of receipts. But today I’d like to look at a new personal finance app that takes a more visual approach to monitoring your personal spending. It’s called Photo Money.

Currently available on iOS in both Japanese and English, the application lets you take a picture of whatever you’ve bought, and add the price using a large calculator-style input. Note that you can input in just about any currency, so users all around the world can try out Photo Money if they wish. The result of logging your purchases in this way is a reverse-chronological gallery of your expenditures, which is a great visual overview of your spending.

The app also differs from other finance apps in that it presents only a weekly view. While this could be merely because of the space constraints of the photo gallery view, the developer states that it’s because one week gives you shorter iterations of time to improve your spending habits. So if you aren’t happy with your spending this week, you can try to do better starting next Monday!

Developed by RandyApps [1], Photo Money is ad supported, although I think many users would welcome a paid, ad-free version too. Photo Money is currently not ranked very high on the App Store, but I think if it was reclassified to be included in the less croweded ‘finance’ category (it looks to be classified as a photo app for the time being), it could gain significant visibility as applications like Zaim and ReceReco have.

photo-money-2


  1. I’ve reached out to the Japanese developer, who may be based in Japan, or possibly Australia. I’m not certain.  ↩

Japan’s weirdest tower defense game now has 9M downloads, and a few weird commercials

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Kyoto-based mobile game publisher Ponos has announced that its popular tower defense title Battle Cats has surpassed 9 million downloads as of May 3rd. At the same time, the company is announcing that its repertoire of smartphone apps have now seen over 33 million downloads in total. That total surprises me, because while the company has a lot of games, Battle Cats is the only one that has ever really gotten my attention. While it has been a while since we’ve looked in on this title (the English version was retired last year, much to our despair), the most recent million downloads have come in 110 days, quicker than the previous million, which required 137 days. Ponos has recently started airing a series of commercials here in Japan for Battle Cats starring singer Sachiko Kobayashi. They’re pretty strange little promos, which is perhaps fitting, given how strange the game actually is. They ran from April 28th until May 4th, and likely were a big help in giving the game a push in the past few weeks. I’m still a big fan of this game, and if you don’t mind venturing into a Japanese-language title, I encourage you to check it…

battle-cats-9m

Kyoto-based mobile game publisher Ponos has announced that its popular tower defense title Battle Cats has surpassed 9 million downloads as of May 3rd.

At the same time, the company is announcing that its repertoire of smartphone apps have now seen over 33 million downloads in total. That total surprises me, because while the company has a lot of games, Battle Cats is the only one that has ever really gotten my attention.

While it has been a while since we’ve looked in on this title (the English version was retired last year, much to our despair), the most recent million downloads have come in 110 days, quicker than the previous million, which required 137 days.

Ponos has recently started airing a series of commercials here in Japan for Battle Cats starring singer Sachiko Kobayashi. They’re pretty strange little promos, which is perhaps fitting, given how strange the game actually is. They ran from April 28th until May 4th, and likely were a big help in giving the game a push in the past few weeks.

I’m still a big fan of this game, and if you don’t mind venturing into a Japanese-language title, I encourage you to check it out.

Via Gamebiz.jp