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Big data startup Hapyrus rebrands as FlyData, raises $1.6M

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.10

See the original story in Japanese. Silicon-valley based Hapyrus, a Japanese startup focused on developing big data solutions, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million from investors in Japan and the US, including 500startups. Coinciding with these funds, the startup will rebrand itself as FlyData and set up a local subsidiary in Japan. The company is led by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa, who previously worked with a number of prominent Japanese startups like Dennotai (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2000), Simplex Technology (TSE:4340), and Sirius Technology (also acquired by Yahoo Japan, 2010). They launched a new service called ‘FlyData for Amazon Redshift’ back in February, allowing automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data-warehouse service. The decision to rebrand reflects the company’s intention to focus on providing and developing its FlyData service. Fujikawa explained the rationale behind this change at a press briefing yesterday: We’ve been originally developing middleware solutions for Hadoop, but I was so surprised when I saw Amazon Redshift for the first time. I thought that no other options besides Hadoop could deliver big data solutions that work, but in fact Amazon Redshift can do it for about $1,000 an year –…

hareyama-fujikawa-saito — From the left: Kei Hareyama (country manager), Koichi Fujikawa (founder/CEO), and Daniel Saito (vice president)

See the original story in Japanese.

Silicon-valley based Hapyrus, a Japanese startup focused on developing big data solutions, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million from investors in Japan and the US, including 500startups. Coinciding with these funds, the startup will rebrand itself as FlyData and set up a local subsidiary in Japan.

The company is led by Japanese entrepreneur Koichi Fujikawa, who previously worked with a number of prominent Japanese startups like Dennotai (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2000), Simplex Technology (TSE:4340), and Sirius Technology (also acquired by Yahoo Japan, 2010).

They launched a new service called ‘FlyData for Amazon Redshift’ back in February, allowing automatic uploading and migration of data to Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s data-warehouse service. The decision to rebrand reflects the company’s intention to focus on providing and developing its FlyData service.

Fujikawa explained the rationale behind this change at a press briefing yesterday:

We’ve been originally developing middleware solutions for Hadoop, but I was so surprised when I saw Amazon Redshift for the first time. I thought that no other options besides Hadoop could deliver big data solutions that work, but in fact Amazon Redshift can do it for about $1,000 an year – extremely cheaper than conventional technology. When Amazon’s mentor team came to visit 500startups where we were residing, they gave us a complimentary account for Amazon Redshift. When we tried it, it yielded 10 to 100 times better performance than Hadoop. It was then that we were convinced that we could not win with Hadoop.

While an abundant of solutions for cloud data processing are available, many companies have difficulty in uploading their data, and for many, their data remains in an on-premises environment. We found that there will be a pressing need to solve this issue, which led us to focus on our FlyData business.

But it wasn’t easy reaching this conclusion. Fujikawa’s co-founders left the company because of a gap in their ideas about business strategy. But he believed in the potential of his business and raised $925,000 from investors in Japan and the US last summer. He succeeded in hiring competent workers through Japanese social recruiting platform Wantedly.

For companies, since FlyData technology uploads your data from an on-premise RDBMS (rational database management system) to cloud-based data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, you need to install a FlyData component on your RDBMS server. The component for MySQL is available for now, and components for PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server will follow soon.

Since the 2013 launch, FlyData for Amazon RedShift has acquired more than 40 corporate users and has over 40% growth in sales every month. They’ve seen a striking increase in the growth here in Japan, across sectors like social gaming, ad tech, and digital marketing. Fujikawa noted that they have prominent clients like Brightroll, Upworthy, Datalot, Enish, and Tokyo Otaku Mode.

FlyData is also a qualified member of the Amazon Redshift Partners program, where we can find a number of their competitors, including Informatica, Talend, Attunity, and SnapLogic. Fujikawa explained a little more about their advantage over these competitors:

From my perspective, Informatica and Talend has many problems in supporting cloud platforms. And Attunity and SnapLogic have not yet made an impact in the Japanese market. In terms of a presence in Japan and the Asia Pacific region, I believe we have an advantage.

Furthermore, Amazon is good at cloud computing but is not as good with data located that’s located in a client’s on-premise environment. But we can handle it, so that we think we’re a good complementary service to Amazon. For the time being, we are currently providing the service for Amazon, which is leading this space, but partnering with other platforms like Google Big Query might be a potential option for us in the future.

Along with the launch of their subsidiary in Japan, a number of notable individuals have joined their management team. Their vice president of sales and international growth Daniel Saito co-founded Rimnet (one of Japan’s oldest internet providers, later acquired by PSINet) and was involved in launching MySQL K.K. Kei Hareyama was appointed as the country manager for the Japanese market, bringing over 12 years experience in the data analytics sector to the table.

In Japan, we’ve seen quite a few startups providing business centric services for global markets. On a related note, Treasure Data, another notable Japanese startup focused on big data solutions, also received angel investment worth $2.75 million back in 2012, with funds coming from several investors including Jerry Yang (Yahoo co-founder) and Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto (the inventor of the Ruby programming language).

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Next-gen Japanese wheelchair startup, Whill, closes seed funding with a total of $1,750,000

Takeshi Hirano 2014.01.09

See the original article in Japanese Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Earlier this week the startup unveiled that it has raised funds from Vegas Tech Fund, 500Startups, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and individual angel investors back on November 6th. The total amount of funding raised in this round is $750,000, completing the company’s seed funding of $1.75 million in total. Vegas Tech Fund, also involved in this most recent funding, includes Zappos’ Tony Hsieh as a partner CEO. Coinciding with the announcement, Whill has renewed its company website and has began online pre-orders. According to the CEO Satoshi Sugie, the company has already sold out the 50 available machines by pre-order, and there are over 100 users waiting to buy. They first plan to market the products in the US and are aiming to for a Japan release in late 2014. Sugie said that he wants to use the funding raised this time not only for Whill’s development but also to add some human resources, such as persons who can perform maintenance on the machine. He thinks it is very important to attain a high level of customer satisfaction. The company is also looking…

See the original article in Japanese

Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Earlier this week the startup unveiled that it has raised funds from Vegas Tech Fund, 500Startups, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and individual angel investors back on November 6th.

The total amount of funding raised in this round is $750,000, completing the company’s seed funding of $1.75 million in total. Vegas Tech Fund, also involved in this most recent funding, includes Zappos’ Tony Hsieh as a partner CEO. Coinciding with the announcement, Whill has renewed its company website and has began online pre-orders.

According to the CEO Satoshi Sugie, the company has already sold out the 50 available machines by pre-order, and there are over 100 users waiting to buy. They first plan to market the products in the US and are aiming to for a Japan release in late 2014.

Sugie said that he wants to use the funding raised this time not only for Whill’s development but also to add some human resources, such as persons who can perform maintenance on the machine. He thinks it is very important to attain a high level of customer satisfaction.

The company is also looking for business development persons and field engineers. Anyone keen to get involved should consider getting in touch. Sugie is currently exhibiting at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas.

Seeing more and more Japanese startups trying to break into overseas markets is very encouraging for the other startups in Japan. We will also keep an eye on Whill to see how they progress.

news

Typeform: The prettiest survey tool on the web is about to emerge from beta

Rick Martin 2014.01.09

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. ↩

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Japanese social marketing company Allied Architects expands to Vietnam

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.08

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.

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. ↩

news

Inside Luxembourg’s startup scene

Luxembourg

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.08

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…

clausen-landscape — View from the hotel I was visiting

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 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 Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce building — From the view of the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce building

chambercommerce_conferenceroom — Conference room at Chamber of Commerce

Data4: More than just infrastructure

data4-building — 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.

garykneip-presenting — Data4 Chairman Gary Kneips explains about their company and incubation program

A potential hub for startups?

gare-centrale — 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
Yasuyo Koga, Lux2Japan

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Inside Beijing’s startup scene: TechTemple nutures up-and-coming Chinese startups

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.07

Beijing Skyline See the original article in Japanese from last month Among the eight startups who pitched at a recent event at Beijing’s Tech Temple, the following four startups provide all provide really interesting mobile solutions. Considering Xiaomi’s recent growth, and I came away with the impression that it could be Chinese startups like these that step to the fore on the the world stage. Appbyme AppByMe Appbyme is a cloud platform for the development smartphone apps, targeting beginner developers. In the US, there are similar services like as Invision and Flinto that help users prototype smartphone apps. Not just with prototyping, Appbyme helps users until they complete developing an app and even monetizing from that. In China, many people operate Bulletin Board Sites (BBSs) using content management systems like Discuz, PHPwind and WordPress. Those BBS already have regular users, and if their operators produce an app, then naturally that app can pick up quite a few users as well. And with Appbyme, such users can create an app simply by choosing a template. Many features such as push-notification, location-based gaming, social media sharing, or group-buying can be easily added to the app. Before founding Appbyme, CEO Zhao Jian worked…

See the original article in Japanese from last month

Among the eight startups who pitched at a recent event at Beijing’s Tech Temple, the following four startups provide all provide really interesting mobile solutions. Considering Xiaomi’s recent growth, and I came away with the impression that it could be Chinese startups like these that step to the fore on the the world stage.

Appbyme

Appbyme is a cloud platform for the development smartphone apps, targeting beginner developers. In the US, there are similar services like as Invision and Flinto that help users prototype smartphone apps. Not just with prototyping, Appbyme helps users until they complete developing an app and even monetizing from that.

In China, many people operate Bulletin Board Sites (BBSs) using content management systems like Discuz, PHPwind and WordPress. Those BBS already have regular users, and if their operators produce an app, then naturally that app can pick up quite a few users as well. And with Appbyme, such users can create an app simply by choosing a template. Many features such as push-notification, location-based gaming, social media sharing, or group-buying can be easily added to the app.

Before founding Appbyme, CEO Zhao Jian worked as the technical officer of Yicha, a mobile search engine in China. He feels that it is getting more difficult to search for content as more services assume the form of a mobile apps. His vision is to make a better structure for content search on mobiles.

In this field, there are competitors already out there in China like AppCan and Zhuixin. But when it comes to the number of users and apps, Appbyme stands out. To date, 5400 webmasters are registered on Appbyme, and more than 50,000 apps have been released. The business model is based on a revenue share with developers and advertisers, charging bigger developers for a subscription.

The BBS community in China is very active, especially in cities. According to Zhao, local portal sites are popular, and they have their own business potential, the kind you cannot see for sites in larger, central cities. Appbyme hopes to take advantage of such local opportunities.

The company also plans to make the English, Japanese, and Korean versions so that it can expand overseas.

SayHi!

SayHi is a worldwide dating app with daily active amounting to about 650,000. It has many users in Middle Eastern countries and in Asia as well. Even though the app is developed in China, the service is not being provided there.

On SayHi, users can find other users nearby through GPS and then chat with them. But you need points to chat other members. For example, when a male user wants to chat with a popular female user, he has to pay one point for an hour. If you become a VIP member for a 6000 yen monthly fee, you can chat as much as you want.

According to Shi Yan, the CEO of Easyroid, the company has apps on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile. He says that 29% of their sales comes from Japanese market.

Shi Yan pitches SayHi

In China, there are other popular messenger apps with similar features, including Momo and iAround. Globally, Badoo and Skout are doing well. SayHi plans to add more entertainment and game features in the app in order to differentiate from competitors.

vWorld

vWorld’s CEO Gao Song once worked as the chief officer of Shangshuixuan Studio, the game department of Kingsoft (HKG:3888). Gao says that the number of smartphone users in China amounts to 354 million, and most are either students or white-collar workers. There are some common characteristics among them:

Since they literally grew up with games, they care much about the quality of games.
They are used to sharing content on social media.
They are keenly competitive.

vWorld is a game app where users compete to conquer actual places. It’s a bit different from Foursquare, where users become the mayor of a location by accumulating check-in points. On vWorld, one can become the leader of a location if they win a game against other users.

The company wants to create a user experience where once users conquer various locations in a city that they would actually be motivated to move on to a different city. The app uses GPS to find the actual location using Autonavi’s API.

vWorld CEO, Gao Song

App Annie

App Annie is an analytics platform that tracks downloads of mobile apps, and it’s a service we frequently reference here at The Bridge. You can easily get statistical information about iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Mac apps, giving you a good idea of which apps are popular in which market, popular and which ones are earning revenue.

App Annie has its headquarters in Beijing, but according to CEO Bertrand Schmitt, the company has 130 staff spanning across six cities. In September of 2013, the company raised $15 million in its series C round from Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital Partners, Greycroft Partners and Infinity Venture Partners.

App Annie CEO Bertrant Schmitt

Bertrant shared his insights into the recent trend of mobile apps in the world. For instance, while the iOS AppStore has been growing in China, Google Play has seen remarkable growth in the other BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia and India). When it comes to the revenue, the big money comes mostly from advanced countries, with Android doing especially well are in the US and Japan. For the Japanese market, sales on Android and iOS are relatively well balanced [1].

For app developers, if you don’t know how your apps are selling in certain markets, you cannot develop a strategy for your development and design. But by using the market data available on App Annie and by utilizing other growth hacking tools, developers can determine how to make a successful app much more efficiently than before.

App Annie publishes infographic overviews of some of their statistics.In this way, the site can attract future customers, offering more detailed data to user who pay for premium accounts. Many news media who struggle with monetization can learn much from this business model.

We will look at more Chinese startups in our next article, and examine some of the major internet trends among companies in China.

Many people in the Beijng startup community get together at this party. The entrepreneurs and investors I often meet in Beijing were all there. Even though it was soon after the facility opened, the place seemed to be quite well known in Beijing already.

The corner of the reception and the cafe. The coffee was incredible.

TechTemple is on the first and the second floor of the Tianhai Business Building in Beixinqiao, Beijing.

According to figures from September of 2013. ↩

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Level up your to-do list with this fun app from Japan

LvUP
to do

SCORE 1,206

Rick Martin 2014.01.07

I’ve experimented with a number of to-do apps over the years, with perhaps my favorite ones to date being Task Paper and Quadranto [1]. But I was curious to hear about LvUp recently, a made-in-Japan to-do list app that recently got some love on a popular Japanese television show. The app is deceptively simple, with just a list of tasks on the main screen, and radio buttons you can push when you’ve completed them. At that point you’re congratulated by a fun ‘level-up’ sound and awarded some points for a job well done. But if you dig a little bit under the surface, LvUP has even more features. Tap on a task and you’ll find lots of meta-data under the hood, including points for tasks, an optional date field, and alerts if you want them. There’s also an option for repeating tasks, with even further sub-options for daily, weekly, monthly, or a specified number of days. On the main screen in the bottom right, you’ll also find a chart icon. Tap on that and it brings you to a pretty graph of your completed tasks over time. LvUP was initially released back in 2012, and it is currently the fourth…

I’ve experimented with a number of to-do apps over the years, with perhaps my favorite ones to date being Task Paper and Quadranto [1]. But I was curious to hear about LvUp recently, a made-in-Japan to-do list app that recently got some love on a popular Japanese television show.

The app is deceptively simple, with just a list of tasks on the main screen, and radio buttons you can push when you’ve completed them. At that point you’re congratulated by a fun ‘level-up’ sound and awarded some points for a job well done.

But if you dig a little bit under the surface, LvUP has even more features.

Tap on a task and you’ll find lots of meta-data under the hood, including points for tasks, an optional date field, and alerts if you want them. There’s also an option for repeating tasks, with even further sub-options for daily, weekly, monthly, or a specified number of days.

On the main screen in the bottom right, you’ll also find a chart icon. Tap on that and it brings you to a pretty graph of your completed tasks over time.

LvUP was initially released back in 2012, and it is currently the fourth ranked iOS app in Japan’s ‘health and fitness’ category after its recent TV appearance. If you’d like to give it a try, you can pick it up for 100 yen (or $0.99) over on the App Store.

I love Quadranto, but I’m a little discouraged that syncing has been botched in the iOS version. Nevertheless, I still use it on my Mac. ↩

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Xibao: Helping China’s online merchants advertise better

Masaru Ikeda 2014.01.06

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…

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.*

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ActShare: A mobile photo app based around everyday actions

Rick Martin 2014.01.06

ActShare is an interesting photo sharing app that breaks photos into action-based categories. So where many vertical photo apps focus narrowly on things like eating or traveling, ActShare encourages you to share a wider range of actions, such as drink, buy, listen, read, or make. When browsing content in the app, you can follow all the actions of a certain user, or you can follow more granularly by action. You can also sort by ‘recent’, ‘popular’ or ‘nearby’. The app was developed by Tokyo based Cougar Inc. Couger Inc. [1], a four person team led by founder and CEO Atsushi Ishii. He explained a little more to me about why they wanted to make this app: One day I realized that most of the posts on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are related to actions. So ActShare has some common act categories, and the concept is to be an “ActLog”. This means next generation of the Blog. I want to have an app with a simple user interface. I really think anybody can use this app. This is a nice idea, although it would be great down the road if other forms of content could be shared besides photos. For example,…

ActShare is an interesting photo sharing app that breaks photos into action-based categories. So where many vertical photo apps focus narrowly on things like eating or traveling, ActShare encourages you to share a wider range of actions, such as drink, buy, listen, read, or make. When browsing content in the app, you can follow all the actions of a certain user, or you can follow more granularly by action. You can also sort by ‘recent’, ‘popular’ or ‘nearby’.

The app was developed by Tokyo based ~~Cougar Inc.~~ Couger Inc. [1], a four person team led by founder and CEO Atsushi Ishii. He explained a little more to me about why they wanted to make this app:

One day I realized that most of the posts on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are related to actions. So ActShare has some common act categories, and the concept is to be an “ActLog”. This means next generation of the Blog. I want to have an app with a simple user interface. I really think anybody can use this app.

This is a nice idea, although it would be great down the road if other forms of content could be shared besides photos. For example, an Amazon link to go with the ‘buy’ action, or even regular hyperlinks to connect followers to something you’ve read. Atsushi noted that this is something they would like to add in the future, and that would certainly be good to see.

There have been apps that have tried to do this sort of thing before. My colleague pointed me towards Impala, an app that uses image recognition technology to categorize images.

I think the app in its current form is a good start, but they might benefit by looking at the input method of some existing diary or logging apps, such as Day One or Notabli. The ability to search external content from within the app, perhaps using DuckDuckGo as Writing Kit does, might be a fun possibility to explore as well.

The app just launched last month, so there’s still lots of time to make improvements based on early feedback. But it’s a promising first step, and it will be interesting to see how the app evolves as it picks up more users.

If you’d like to try it out, you can get it for free over on the App Store.

Couger informs us that a previous version of this article mistakenly correctly spelled the company’s name ‘Couger’ as ‘Cougar’. We have gone back and unfixed our non-mistake. ↩

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Japanese mobile flea market startup Mercari adds former Mixi CFO to board

Mercari

Takeshi Hirano 2014.01.05

See the original article in Japanese To win in a competitive market, building strong management is necessary for a company. An increasingly competitive market in Japan is the flea market app space. Mercari, one of the leading players in this field, announced this past month that Fumiaki Koizumi, the former CFO of Mixi, would join as a board member. Koiziumi previously worked for Daiwa Securities SMBC and took charge of the IPOs for Mixi and DeNA. After he left Mixi, he has been supporting startups, and his recent addition to the board of directors at Trippiece drew some attention as well. At Mercari, he is currently not in a specific managerial position. But he might assume a title later on. Coinciding with this announcement, Mercari also released some interesting figures. The company says that the total number of items listed on their app has surpassed 1 million since the app went live in July 2013. They say that 10,000 items are added to the app everyday. As this market gets more competitive, what kind of strategy does Mercari have? We spoke to Shintaro Yamada, the CEO of Mercari, and Fumiaki Koizumi about this. The Bridge: First of all, I’d like…

See the original article in Japanese

To win in a competitive market, building strong management is necessary for a company. An increasingly competitive market in Japan is the flea market app space.

Mercari, one of the leading players in this field, announced this past month that Fumiaki Koizumi, the former CFO of Mixi, would join as a board member. Koiziumi previously worked for Daiwa Securities SMBC and took charge of the IPOs for Mixi and DeNA. After he left Mixi, he has been supporting startups, and his recent addition to the board of directors at Trippiece drew some attention as well.

At Mercari, he is currently not in a specific managerial position. But he might assume a title later on. Coinciding with this announcement, Mercari also released some interesting figures. The company says that the total number of items listed on their app has surpassed 1 million since the app went live in July 2013. They say that 10,000 items are added to the app everyday.

As this market gets more competitive, what kind of strategy does Mercari have? We spoke to Shintaro Yamada, the CEO of Mercari, and Fumiaki Koizumi about this.

The Bridge: First of all, I’d like to know how Koizumi-san will get involved in the management of the company.

Yamada: As we expand the business, building strong management is key. The company’s advisor, Atsushi Ishikawa (former vice-president of Unoh Inc., CSO of Wonderplanet Inc.) was the first hire of CyberAgent and understands very well what kind of problems a startup goes through as it expands. He points out these possible problems in advance. I invited Koizumi-san as CFO, but I expect him to be active in the overall business, and in PR, aggressive PR. We had been focusing on development, and couldn’t spare much resources for PR so far.

The Bridge: Koizumi-san recently joined Trippiece as well, right?

Yamada: We encourage double work, and I invested in Smartnews myself. So, we don’t have any problem with that.

The Bridge: What do you think of the flea market app space?

Koizumi: Since resources in our society are limited, I was interested in C2C transactions as a solution. And now that this trend moving forward, I’d like to be a part of it.

The Bridge: What strategy do you have for PR and marketing? Will you put advertisements in magazines and such mass media?

Koizumi: We don’t have a plan to put large resources into advertisement.

The Bridge: Japan’s C2C market won’t grow without significant effort. We previously featured classifieds site Jmty.jp and looked at their challenges. What do you think is the key to succeeding in the C2C market?

Yamada: I was talking about this with my friends who have management experience. What makes Mercari different from others is that we really care about the product. For example, we carefully look at points where users drop out from the purchasing process, and try to improve it.

Koizumi: Our customer support is simple, but we think that a good user experience is very important.

Whenever I speak with Yamada, I’m always impressed with his passion to make a perfect product. Considering that the most of the members of Mercari have been engineers, bringing new perspective to make the product more sophisticated must be important. A user-friendly interface and a solid app is inevitable for consumer service.

The competition among flea market apps will be fierce in 2014. It reminds me of the past competition in the group buying market. Stay tuned to see who can win out in this space.

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