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Line’s Sonic Dash S still has many obstacles to overcome

SCORE 1,113

Rick Martin 2014.04.23

Line released its mobile game Sonic Dash S, developed by Sega, back in late January. The title was made available in a number of Asian countries, but it hadn’t performed very well until a recent 1.1 update gave it a boost in most of its app markets. Still, this is perhaps the most famous IP that Line has featured in a game to date, and I’d expected it to perform far better. I hadn’t given the game a serious look until recently, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts here. Sonic Dash is, as has been pointed out before, more or less a Temple Run clone, requiring you to swipe up/down/left/right to avoid enemies and treacherous obstacles. You can gather and use items you collect, as well as use supporting characters (or Chaos [1]). With the exception of a number of surprising app crashes, I found the gameplay pretty straightforward, with much of the Line integration that we have from the company’s other mobile games. You can get rewards by sharing information to your friends on Line, and even borrow Chao characters from them if you wish. The problem for me is that only one of my 162 Line…

Line released its mobile game Sonic Dash S, developed by Sega, back in late January. The title was made available in a number of Asian countries, but it hadn’t performed very well until a recent 1.1 update gave it a boost in most of its app markets. Still, this is perhaps the most famous IP that Line has featured in a game to date, and I’d expected it to perform far better.

I hadn’t given the game a serious look until recently, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts here. Sonic Dash is, as has been pointed out before, more or less a Temple Run clone, requiring you to swipe up/down/left/right to avoid enemies and treacherous obstacles. You can gather and use items you collect, as well as use supporting characters (or Chaos [1]).

With the exception of a number of surprising app crashes, I found the gameplay pretty straightforward, with much of the Line integration that we have from the company’s other mobile games. You can get rewards by sharing information to your friends on Line, and even borrow Chao characters from them if you wish. The problem for me is that only one of my 162 Line friends is actually playing Sonic Dash – not a good number in comparison to other Line games I’ve played.

With the new 1.1 update a number of changes have been made to the game, with stages shortened and a new character, Blaze (pictured below), added to the list of playable characters [2]. A new beach course has been added to the game as well.

If you’d like to give Line Sonic Dash S a try, you can get it as a free download for iOS or Android. Let us know in the comments if you find it a tad crashy as well!

By ‘Chaos’ I don’t mean the word ‘chaos’ but rather plural of the word ‘Chao’. ↩
You need to spend rings to upgrade to Blaze of course, so it will take a little while before you can unlock her. ↩

news

Young entrepreneur develops an app to support Muslims living in Japan

Masaru Ikeda 2014.04.22

See the original article, written in Japanese With Tokyo chosen as host for the 2020 Olympics, the city is likely to get more and more attention from tourists. Of course among the many tourists expected to come to Japan, many will be Muslim. Tokyo International Airport recently opened a prayer room for Muslims, but there are other issues to work on. One such issue is food. For example, when I spend time with Muslim friends in Tokyo, it can be difficult to find alcohol-free soy sauce and menus which don’t contain pork. But one entrepreneur has stepped up to try to solve this problem. Fukuoka-based Kyushu Lab has launched an Android app called HalalMinds. It enables users to scan the bar code of any product to identify if it is halal, or permissable for Muslims to eat. The app also has a Qibla Compass feature, which lets Muslims to determine the right direction for performing prayers. Japan already has a Muslim population of about 150,000, and about the same number live in South Korea too. Nearly 1.2 million Muslims visit Japan every year either for sightseeing or for business. Kyushu Lab wants to help serve this demographic as potential users…

See the original article, written in Japanese

With Tokyo chosen as host for the 2020 Olympics, the city is likely to get more and more attention from tourists. Of course among the many tourists expected to come to Japan, many will be Muslim. Tokyo International Airport recently opened a prayer room for Muslims, but there are other issues to work on. One such issue is food. For example, when I spend time with Muslim friends in Tokyo, it can be difficult to find alcohol-free soy sauce and menus which don’t contain pork. But one entrepreneur has stepped up to try to solve this problem.

Fukuoka-based Kyushu Lab has launched an Android app called HalalMinds. It enables users to scan the bar code of any product to identify if it is halal, or permissable for Muslims to eat. The app also has a Qibla Compass feature, which lets Muslims to determine the right direction for performing prayers.

Japan already has a Muslim population of about 150,000, and about the same number live in South Korea too. Nearly 1.2 million Muslims visit Japan every year either for sightseeing or for business. Kyushu Lab wants to help serve this demographic as potential users or HamalMinds.

The app was developed by Indonesian student Agung Pambudi, a member of Kyushu Lab who has lived in Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Finland. Along with his doctoral studies in Kyushu University, he put a lot of effort into developing this app. He explained:

As a Muslim, we need to live our everyday lives with halal food and drink. But it is hard to find such products in Japan because some processed foods contain pork or alcohol. Also, we even recognize meat not processed in a permissible way as non-Halal. We developed HalalMinds with the aim to of bringing it to not only Japanese users, but to users around the world.

Considering the overall size of Muslim population, even here in Japan, I think there is much potential to monetize such an app. I recall a team of university students who designed an app called C@ndy, a sort of Craiglist for Muslims.

Singapore-based startup Bitsmedia launched an app called Muslim Pro which lets you find halal restaurants and read the Koran. That app achieved 4 million downloads in March 2014.

HalalMinds released its Android app early this month, and an iOS version will follow at the end of this month.

news

Freemium payments platform ‘Spike’ launches open beta in Japan

Takeshi Hirano 2014.04.20

See the original article written in Japanese Tokyo-based Metaps has launched on online payment platform called Spike, releasing it in open beta here in Japan. Spike is a web-based payment solution, and business users can start using it just by embedding a unique URL on their own website. Where it differs from similar services is in its business model. Payment systems typically charge user fees, like a starting fee or a transaction fee. But Spike is instead using a freemium model. Currently they have a free plan and a business premium plan. For the free plan, there is no initial fee, monthly fee, or commission. Subscribers on this plan can transact up to 1 million yen ($10,000) per month. For the business premium plan, the monthly fee is 3000 yen ($30), with no commission charged until you transact more than 10 million yen ($10,000). Beyond that there’s a 2.5% commission and 30 yen ($0.03) charged per transaction. For this open beta version, only the free plan is available. There are plans to provide an API for business premium subscribers later. I spoke to the CEO of Metaps, Katsuaki Sato, to learn more about this launch. My understanding is that you…

See the original article written in Japanese

Tokyo-based Metaps has launched on online payment platform called Spike, releasing it in open beta here in Japan. Spike is a web-based payment solution, and business users can start using it just by embedding a unique URL on their own website. Where it differs from similar services is in its business model.

Payment systems typically charge user fees, like a starting fee or a transaction fee. But Spike is instead using a freemium model. Currently they have a free plan and a business premium plan. For the free plan, there is no initial fee, monthly fee, or commission. Subscribers on this plan can transact up to 1 million yen ($10,000) per month.

For the business premium plan, the monthly fee is 3000 yen ($30), with no commission charged until you transact more than 10 million yen ($10,000). Beyond that there’s a 2.5% commission and 30 yen ($0.03) charged per transaction. For this open beta version, only the free plan is available. There are plans to provide an API for business premium subscribers later.

I spoke to the CEO of Metaps, Katsuaki Sato, to learn more about this launch.

My understanding is that you are trying to innovate upon the existing business model in this field, sort of like PayPal did, rather than targeting developers by offering APIs like Stripe or Braintree. Is that correct?

Sato: Our target is those who want to use a payment solution but don’t know how to code. I am not really looking at PayPal, but our target customers could include people who have already tried out PayPal or think it’s is a bit too complicated to use.

Your announcement says that you will offer the starter plan completely free. Does this mean there will be no limit on the amount of the transactions in the future?

Sato: As we expand the service, we plan to raise the maximum transaction amount, and ultimately get rid of that limit. What I am trying to do is recreate a real-life economy using an internet payment solution.

That’s very ambitious. You have different target demographics for the two plans, individual freelancers and small businesses. How will you set the boundary between these two?

Sato: I don’t have any specific boundary between them, but I think of businesses who transact tens of millions yen (tens of thousands dollars) monthly, seed or early-stage startups, as middle-sized. We do plan to provide additional value like APIs for business-premium subscribers.

I see. When will you start offering the business-premium plan?

Sato: We plan to start running a pilot program in May of 2014 and launch it officially this summer.

Thank you very much.

In Japan, there are smartphone payments services like Square and Coiney, and payment solutions that focus on providing APIs, like WebPay. So competition in this area is becoming fierce. Spike’s vision of having no fees for starters has drawn a lot of attention. If it really works out, I think many businesses will use it.

Metaps core business is its Android monetization platform. Founded in 2007, the company now has in eight offices around the world. According to Sato, the number of game developer clients is now a few thousand, and the total number of downloaded Android apps that implement the SDK is between 1.2 and 1.3 billion. Sato also mentioned that 20 to 30 percent of the company’s sales are from the Japanese market, with the rest from China and the East Asian market.

news

Why Japan’s mobile news startups are scared to disrupt

Rick Martin 2014.04.18

This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this: Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile. While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1]. But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the…

This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this:

Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile.

While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1].

But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the side of caution by showing the original webpage content in their app, as is, without any effort to ensure that it’s readable on mobile [2]. They have purposefully chosen to not disrupt or challenge current content models.

Let’s look at a few examples from some of Japan’s leading news apps. Here’s Gunosy:

Gunosy does what most Japanese news apps do. They serve up the original web page when the title is clicked, whether its very readable or not. Other Japanese apps that do this are Presso, Romly, Vingow, Mynd, and Kamelio [3]. These news apps are primarily aggregators or curation tools. I wouldn’t go so far as to call any of them ‘news readers’, because technically, you’re just being directed to a traditional reading experience on the source site.

SmartNews’s approach is an interesting one, maybe the only one that is even a little daring. They are one of the few companies to present a readability mode, boasting offline caching as a feature for Japanese users who might be beyond internet signal on the subway. When you tap to read an article on SmartNews, you are flashed an option to read in ‘SmartMode’. This is SmartNews’s more readable view, but it’s presented as something the user must choose to view deliberately. What’s more, when you press back, the app sneakily presents the original source page (see this below). This is a clever way of giving both the publisher and the user what they want, and I’m sure it took them a while to figure out this compromise.

Line News is also mildly daring, showing longer excerpts relating to one story, collected from various sources. Tapping on any of those sources brings you to the original source, however (see lower left), including ads and undesirable cruft (lower right).

Overall I think it is pretty clear that the relationship that exists between content publishers and news apps that tiptoe around their requirements/expectations is not good for innovation in the content space. Publishers cling to old monetization models instead of searching for new ones, and Japanese readers are denied the kind of beautified reading experience that the rest of the world enjoys [4].

And that’s a shame.

[Photo]

For more on this, see ‘Is Flipboard Legal?’ (2010), and ‘Could loading a feed into an RSS reader be grounds for legal action?’ (2010). Of course now even Apple has a ‘Reader’ function for Safari and Mobile Safari that strips away ads and gives you a simplified, readable version. ↩
Mobile-friendly news sites are far more common in Japan than in other countries, so if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that. the original page view on mobile is typically not so bad. ↩
Kamelio does some interesting things with timelines which I think are admirable, but they still opt to show the original source in this way. ↩
Unless they use something like Pocket, of course, which many do. ↩

news

Line’s Creators Market opens for registration, accepting sticker submissions

Rick Martin 2014.04.17

Line has just opened up its Creators Market (at creator.line.me), allowing users to register and submit stickers for review as of today. If Line approves your submission, then they will go on sale in May. According to the company’s announcement, users in Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand will be able to purchase at that time, with plans for more regions to come in the future. A set of 40 stickers will sell for 100 yen (or about a dollar), of which 50% goes to the creator. Line is already making a fortune from stickers, as we have pointed out before, and this new initiative will boost that revenue stream even more, and spur more user engagement, Line

Line has just opened up its Creators Market (at creator.line.me), allowing users to register and submit stickers for review as of today. If Line approves your submission, then they will go on sale in May. According to the company’s announcement, users in Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand will be able to purchase at that time, with plans for more regions to come in the future.

A set of 40 stickers will sell for 100 yen (or about a dollar), of which 50% goes to the creator. Line is already making a fortune from stickers, as we have pointed out before, and this new initiative will boost that revenue stream even more, and spur more user engagement,

Line

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GungHo’s Princess Punt Sweets passes 8M downloads in Japan, still no English version

Rick Martin 2014.04.16

Japanese gaming powerhouse GungHo Online Entertainment, the maker of the hit mobile game Puzzle & Dragons, announced this week that Princess Punt Sweets – its second most popular smartphone game – has has surpassed eight million downloads in Japan. The only other region where this title is available is in Korea, having launched back in July of 2013 (iOS and Android). I’m surprised that GungHo has not expanded this game to English regions [1], because I think it really has the kind of cute appeal that has helped so many other Japanese apps succeed in overseas markets in the past year or two. It might be an easier sell to overseas markets than Puzzle & Dragons, I think. If you’d like to try out the Japanese version, you can get it as a free download for iOS and Android. GungHo, CNet Japan Note, I’m not counting the game’s prequel, which GungHo has published in English. ↩

Japanese gaming powerhouse GungHo Online Entertainment, the maker of the hit mobile game Puzzle & Dragons, announced this week that Princess Punt Sweets – its second most popular smartphone game – has has surpassed eight million downloads in Japan.

The only other region where this title is available is in Korea, having launched back in July of 2013 (iOS and Android). I’m surprised that GungHo has not expanded this game to English regions [1], because I think it really has the kind of cute appeal that has helped so many other Japanese apps succeed in overseas markets in the past year or two.

It might be an easier sell to overseas markets than Puzzle & Dragons, I think.

If you’d like to try out the Japanese version, you can get it as a free download for iOS and Android.

GungHo, CNet Japan

Note, I’m not counting the game’s prequel, which GungHo has published in English. ↩

news

Mynd: Japan’s latest news app is one of its prettiest

Rick Martin 2014.04.16

This week we witnessed yet another entrant into Japan’s mobile news app space. It’s called Mynd, and it comes from Tokyo-based TomyK, led by Tomihisa Kamada. The app has a very beautiful UI with a number of slick translucent elements (pictured below). It also supports a wide range of external services, including Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Pocket, and Hatena. Users can opt to read news at any time, or have a summary delivered to them every morning (like Gunosy does, for example). The single article view defaults to the source’s own web view rather than stripped down text view [1], which is a mistake in my view – but this appears to be common practice among news apps in Japan. It’s interesting to see more and more new apps emerging in this space to challenge the likes of Gunosy and SmartNews. I hope to bring you a closer look at this sector in the near future, so stay tuned for that. For now, if you’d like to give Mynd a try, it’s available as a free download for iOS and Android. Think Instapaper, Readability, or even SmartNews’s ‘Smartmode’. ↩

This week we witnessed yet another entrant into Japan’s mobile news app space. It’s called Mynd, and it comes from Tokyo-based TomyK, led by Tomihisa Kamada.

The app has a very beautiful UI with a number of slick translucent elements (pictured below). It also supports a wide range of external services, including Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Pocket, and Hatena. Users can opt to read news at any time, or have a summary delivered to them every morning (like Gunosy does, for example). The single article view defaults to the source’s own web view rather than stripped down text view [1], which is a mistake in my view – but this appears to be common practice among news apps in Japan.

It’s interesting to see more and more new apps emerging in this space to challenge the likes of Gunosy and SmartNews. I hope to bring you a closer look at this sector in the near future, so stay tuned for that.

For now, if you’d like to give Mynd a try, it’s available as a free download for iOS and Android.

Think Instapaper, Readability, or even SmartNews’s ‘Smartmode’. ↩

news

Line rolls out ‘Sticons’, first on Android

Rick Martin 2014.04.15

With its new 4.2.0 Android update today, Japanese messaging app Line rolled out something that it’s calling ‘Sticons’. The company says that these can be used like emoticons inline in text messages, and also as the sort of larger stickers that current users of the service are already familiar with. You can read more about this new feature over on the Line blog.

With its new 4.2.0 Android update today, Japanese messaging app Line rolled out something that it’s calling ‘Sticons’. The company says that these can be used like emoticons inline in text messages, and also as the sort of larger stickers that current users of the service are already familiar with.

You can read more about this new feature over on the Line blog.

news

Popular Korean app ‘Noon Date’ launches in Japan

SCORE 1,098

Rick Martin 2014.04.14

The Korean dating app ‘Noon Date’, which has over 700,000 downloads in its home country thus far, is now launching in the Japanese market through a partnership with Tokyo-based Waku+. It will be called OhiruDate, and it requires Facebook authorization for a more reliable identity verification. OhiruDate delivers two profile cards to you each day at noon, and if you and that person mutually like each other, you can become friends and chat. The idea is similar to MatchAlarm (backed by CyberAgent Ventures), which recommends a new person every morning at 8am. Ohirudate is available for iOS and Google Play.

The Korean dating app ‘Noon Date’, which has over 700,000 downloads in its home country thus far, is now launching in the Japanese market through a partnership with Tokyo-based Waku+. It will be called OhiruDate, and it requires Facebook authorization for a more reliable identity verification.

OhiruDate delivers two profile cards to you each day at noon, and if you and that person mutually like each other, you can become friends and chat. The idea is similar to MatchAlarm (backed by CyberAgent Ventures), which recommends a new person every morning at 8am.

Ohirudate is available for iOS and Google Play.

news

Japanese food app Teriyaki partners with Matcha, available in 6 languages for international visitors

Masaru Ikeda 2014.04.14

Our readers may recall Teriyaki, the restaurant recommendation app launched by Japanese internet tycoon Takafumi Horie last year. The service has tied up with Matcha, a multilingual information portal for international visitors to Japan, and will start listing high-profile restaurants (selected by foodies) in Japanese [1], English, Korean, and Chinese (simplified and traditional). Matcha was launched back in February, and the company is expecting to surpass one million page views by the end of this month. Teriyaki recently received major investment from Japanese online learning platform developer Hitomedia. via ValuePress And also in grammatically simplified Japanese for non-native Japanese speakers. ↩

Our readers may recall Teriyaki, the restaurant recommendation app launched by Japanese internet tycoon Takafumi Horie last year. The service has tied up with Matcha, a multilingual information portal for international visitors to Japan, and will start listing high-profile restaurants (selected by foodies) in Japanese ^[1], English, Korean, and Chinese (simplified and traditional).

Matcha was launched back in February, and the company is expecting to surpass one million page views by the end of this month. Teriyaki recently received major investment from Japanese online learning platform developer Hitomedia.

via ValuePress

And also in grammatically simplified Japanese for non-native Japanese speakers. ↩

Mobile

Line’s Sonic Dash S still has many obstacles to overcome

Young entrepreneur develops an app to support Muslims living in Japan

Freemium payments platform ‘Spike’ launches open beta in Japan

Why Japan’s mobile news startups are scared to disrupt

Line’s Creators Market opens for registration, accepting sticker submissions

GungHo’s Princess Punt Sweets passes 8M downloads in Japan, still no English version

Mynd: Japan’s latest news app is one of its prettiest

Line rolls out ‘Sticons’, first on Android

Popular Korean app ‘Noon Date’ launches in Japan

Japanese food app Teriyaki partners with Matcha, available in 6 languages for international visitors

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