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Japanese marketing campaign puts idol group HKT48 in ‘selfie’ videos

HKT48
Lotte

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.10.31

Japan’s AKB48 is the biggest pop idol group in terms of CD sales. So it’s only natural for companies and brands to try leverage that marketing power in their promotions. Google Plus did so once before, as did game developer Nijibox with the band’s Indonesian sister group JKT48. And now sweets manufacturer Lotte, famous for its signature Ghana chocolate, is getting in on the action as well. The company has a new promotion called Lotte x HKT48 Jidori 48. ‘Jidori’ means ‘selfie’ in Japanese, and HKT48 stands for Hakata48, another branch of the huge idol group. On a special site dedicated to this new campaign, you can find videos of the group’s 39 members, where each one poses as if they are feeding you chocolate. Users can cast their vote for their favorite video, and the most popular idol will win a TV commercial all by herself. In that commercial she will call out a name of one lucky user who will be chosen by lottery. The campaign has proven quite popular already, and in the first three days after launch there were around 2.7 million votes. Whether we like it or not, ‘selfies’ are an important part of self-expression…

Japan’s AKB48 is the biggest pop idol group in terms of CD sales. So it’s only natural for companies and brands to try leverage that marketing power in their promotions. Google Plus did so once before, as did game developer Nijibox with the band’s Indonesian sister group JKT48.

And now sweets manufacturer Lotte, famous for its signature Ghana chocolate, is getting in on the action as well. The company has a new promotion called Lotte x HKT48 Jidori 48. ‘Jidori’ means ‘selfie’ in Japanese, and HKT48 stands for Hakata48, another branch of the huge idol group.

On a special site dedicated to this new campaign, you can find videos of the group’s 39 members, where each one poses as if they are feeding you chocolate. Users can cast their vote for their favorite video, and the most popular idol will win a TV commercial all by herself. In that commercial she will call out a name of one lucky user who will be chosen by lottery. The campaign has proven quite popular already, and in the first three days after launch there were around 2.7 million votes.

Whether we like it or not, ‘selfies’ are an important part of self-expression for many young people in Japan. These videos by HKT48 are all selfies, with idols using lots of different ideas to make their own video stand out from the rest.

To learn more about this unique campaign, check out the TV commercial below.

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Japanese restaurant finder service Retty sees over 1M monthly visitors

Takeshi Hirano 2013.10.30

See the original story in Japanese Retty, a Tokyo-based startup providing social restaurant recommendations, announced that it has surpassed 1 million monthly unique visitors this month (see chart below). It’s growing by 200,000 visitors every month, and the month of October was almost double what it was back in August. The company’s CEO Kazuya Takeda attributes this growth spurt to a recently added feature that lets users easily to find their favorite restaurants. 65% of Retty visitors come from smartphones, and it has over 600,000 review postings for 160,000 restaurants. He adds: Some foodies are using our app to just explore restaurants in their spare time. In addition to the community function, we plan to make the app more helpful for you to find restaurants you will like. Takeda also revealed that his team will move to a monetization phase early next year. For restaurants owners, you will be able to get in touch with users who like your restaurant as well. The company has the eventual goal of reaching over 15 million monthly unique visitors in two years.

See the original story in Japanese

Retty, a Tokyo-based startup providing social restaurant recommendations, announced that it has surpassed 1 million monthly unique visitors this month (see chart below). It’s growing by 200,000 visitors every month, and the month of October was almost double what it was back in August.

The company’s CEO Kazuya Takeda attributes this growth spurt to a recently added feature that lets users easily to find their favorite restaurants. 65% of Retty visitors come from smartphones, and it has over 600,000 review postings for 160,000 restaurants. He adds:

Some foodies are using our app to just explore restaurants in their spare time. In addition to the community function, we plan to make the app more helpful for you to find restaurants you will like.

Takeda also revealed that his team will move to a monetization phase early next year. For restaurants owners, you will be able to get in touch with users who like your restaurant as well.

The company has the eventual goal of reaching over 15 million monthly unique visitors in two years.

retty-visitorsgrowth — The growth of monthly unique visitors at Retty

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Pinterest testing localized service in Japan

Pinterest

Rick Martin 2013.10.30

Pinterest, the web service that lets users share (or pin) photos and other content, is currently testing out a localized version of its service in Japan. We heard confirmation from a company representative earlier today that these initial trials are underway with some users: We’re thrilled at the enthusiasm from our growing community of Japanese pinners. We’re currently conducting a first test of a more localized service to some of these early adopters to get their feedback. Japanese tech media Weekly Ascii posted images of the localized service yesterday, which you can check out over on their site. Pinterest, of course, received $100 million in investment back in May, led by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. So this localization could pave the way for Rakuten to leverage Pinterest in some way. Our readers may recall that Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann participated in the Japan New Economy Summit back in May of this year, offering his insights to Japanese audiences about entrepreneurship and innovation.

Pinterest CEO, Ben Silbermann, on stage in Tokyo last May

Pinterest, the web service that lets users share (or pin) photos and other content, is currently testing out a localized version of its service in Japan. We heard confirmation from a company representative earlier today that these initial trials are underway with some users:

We’re thrilled at the enthusiasm from our growing community of Japanese pinners. We’re currently conducting a first test of a more localized service to some of these early adopters to get their feedback.

Japanese tech media Weekly Ascii posted images of the localized service yesterday, which you can check out over on their site.

Pinterest, of course, received $100 million in investment back in May, led by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. So this localization could pave the way for Rakuten to leverage Pinterest in some way.

Our readers may recall that Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann participated in the Japan New Economy Summit back in May of this year, offering his insights to Japanese audiences about entrepreneurship and innovation.

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To the Bat-cave! Upcoming Puzzle & Dragons collaboration to feature the Dark Knight

Rick Martin 2013.10.30

Back in June we told you about GungHo Online Entertainment’s Puzzle & Dragons collaboration with Finnish publisher Supercell, promoting the latter’s Clash of Clans game. That tie-up involved a CoC themed dungeon and collectable monsters as well. It wasn’t the first collaboration of this kind, and – as we can see today – it’s not the last. Yesterday GungHo announced a similar collaboration with Warner Bros’ Batman: Arkham Origins, with a themed dungeon available from October 30 to November 12, in both English and Japanese versions of the game. The announcement says that villains, such as the Joker, will be available to collect [1]. Batman, Robin, and Catwoman will be available through a special egg machine (the game’s gacha mechanism). There will be three unique Batman characters available, and the folks over on the Puzzle & Dragons subreddit look to have an early scoop on what they will look like, so be sure to check that out. The Clash of Clans dungeon just wrapped up a second run in Puzzle & Dragons, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see this Batman event recur in the future. The results were fruitful for Supercell, and I expect the outcome will be very…

Back in June we told you about GungHo Online Entertainment’s Puzzle & Dragons collaboration with Finnish publisher Supercell, promoting the latter’s Clash of Clans game. That tie-up involved a CoC themed dungeon and collectable monsters as well. It wasn’t the first collaboration of this kind, and – as we can see today – it’s not the last.

Yesterday GungHo announced a similar collaboration with Warner Bros’ Batman: Arkham Origins, with a themed dungeon available from October 30 to November 12, in both English and Japanese versions of the game. The announcement says that villains, such as the Joker, will be available to collect [1]. Batman, Robin, and Catwoman will be available through a special egg machine (the game’s gacha mechanism).

There will be three unique Batman characters available, and the folks over on the Puzzle & Dragons subreddit look to have an early scoop on what they will look like, so be sure to check that out.

The Clash of Clans dungeon just wrapped up a second run in Puzzle & Dragons, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see this Batman event recur in the future. The results were fruitful for Supercell, and I expect the outcome will be very positive for Warner Bros.

Supercell subsequently sold a 51% stake to Softbank and Gungho for $1.5 billion.

Hopefully this means a wide variety of villains, and not just the Joker. ↩

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San Francisco’s Gumroad doubles down on its Japanese sellers

Rick Martin 2013.10.30

San Francisco-based startup Gumroad launched their platform for selling digital goods back in February of 2012. It enables various kinds of artists (such as musicians, authors, software developers, or even comic creators) to sell their wares easily over the net. Speaking with Ryan Delk, who is in charge of the company’s growth strategy, I was surprised to hear that Gumroad became popular with Japanese creators almost immediately after its initial launch. “This happened entirely organically,” he points out. And now the company is making an effort to better serve its Japanese userbase, adding support for Zengin System payouts for sellers in the country. This marks Gumroad’s first international payment rollout, Ryan tells us. Zengin is the protocol that Japanese banks use to transfer funds, and Gumroad’s new integration will mean that sellers can move funds to their banks without using any go-between like PayPal [1]. I’m told that Zengin System support has been beta tested in Japan since about three weeks ago, and with very promising results so far, according to Ryan: Since we first rolled out Zengin payouts to existing sellers, growth in the Japanese market on the creator side is beating the global average by 28%. We asked…

San Francisco-based startup Gumroad launched their platform for selling digital goods back in February of 2012. It enables various kinds of artists (such as musicians, authors, software developers, or even comic creators) to sell their wares easily over the net.

Speaking with Ryan Delk, who is in charge of the company’s growth strategy, I was surprised to hear that Gumroad became popular with Japanese creators almost immediately after its initial launch. “This happened entirely organically,” he points out.

And now the company is making an effort to better serve its Japanese userbase, adding support for Zengin System payouts for sellers in the country. This marks Gumroad’s first international payment rollout, Ryan tells us. Zengin is the protocol that Japanese banks use to transfer funds, and Gumroad’s new integration will mean that sellers can move funds to their banks without using any go-between like PayPal [1].

I’m told that Zengin System support has been beta tested in Japan since about three weeks ago, and with very promising results so far, according to Ryan:

Since we first rolled out Zengin payouts to existing sellers, growth in the Japanese market on the creator side is beating the global average by 28%.

We asked Gumroad for some examples of Japanese sellers making use of the platform. Interestingly the very creative Maiwa Denki is a seller on there, with a published work about how to think about new ideas.

In Japan, there is already a similar service (knock-off?) called Ameroad, meaning Candy Road. That service was subsequently sold, on Yahoo Auction of all things, for about $15,000 in what was described as a very short term buyout. Currently, the service looks pretty neglected, and is likely not much competition for Gumroad.

Sellers can be paid out ever other Friday to Zengin, with a minimum payment amount of $100. You can set this up by going to the Zengin section of Gumroad’s payouts page. ↩

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Japanese startup detects social media threats to kids, warns parents

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.29

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup A’s Child (pronounced as Ace Child) recently launched a web service that aims to protect children from bullying and other threats stemming from social media interactions. It’s called Filii. The service lets you analyze your children’s posting or messaging through social media (with their approval), and it will notify you to take counter- or preventative measures when any cause for concern is detected. These days, with words like sexting creeping into mainstream conversation, social media and messaging apps are coming under greater scrutiny. But the fact is many of these undesirable issues arise not from the social media platforms, but by malicious users. The operators of these platforms are requested to deploy countermeasures, but Japanese telecommunication law prohibits operators from tapping or interfering with users’ communications. To keep a moral and legal balance, Filii wants to give Japanese parents an option to protect your children using technology. The company plans to partner with local governments, schools, crime prevention organizations, and personal security service companies like Mimamorl. Filii claims that its technology can work to help ensure the security of not only children, but also adults. For example in Korea, where the suicide…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup A’s Child (pronounced as Ace Child) recently launched a web service that aims to protect children from bullying and other threats stemming from social media interactions. It’s called Filii. The service lets you analyze your children’s posting or messaging through social media (with their approval), and it will notify you to take counter- or preventative measures when any cause for concern is detected.

These days, with words like sexting creeping into mainstream conversation, social media and messaging apps are coming under greater scrutiny. But the fact is many of these undesirable issues arise not from the social media platforms, but by malicious users. The operators of these platforms are requested to deploy countermeasures, but Japanese telecommunication law prohibits operators from tapping or interfering with users’ communications.

To keep a moral and legal balance, Filii wants to give Japanese parents an option to protect your children using technology. The company plans to partner with local governments, schools, crime prevention organizations, and personal security service companies like Mimamorl.

Filii claims that its technology can work to help ensure the security of not only children, but also adults. For example in Korea, where the suicide rate is very high, data analysis company Daumsoft succeeded in developing a technology that can identify persons exhibiting suicidal behavior by analyzing their tweets or interactions on social media.

A’s Child was founded earlier this month by two engineers who previously work with a systems integration company. The startup is based out of Samurai Startup Island, an incubation space in Tokyo.

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Japanese personal accounting startup Money Forward raises $5 million

Takeshi Hirano 2013.10.28

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Money Forward, the startup behind the personal accounting app of the same name, announced today that it has raised 500 million yen ($5 million) from Japanese investment company Jafco. Money Forward provides online personal accounting for individuals, allowing them to easily manage their daily expenses by integrating with their bank passbooks and credit purchase history with information scraped from their web bank and credit accounts. The service is also available for desktop, as well as iOS and Android platforms. The company also announced that it will launch a cloud-based accounting service for individual and corporate users, and it will also start publishing an online newsletter. The service launched back in December of 2012 in beta, and subsequently launched its official version back in July of 2013. The company’s CEO Yosuke Tsuji told us that their service has acquired over 100 million accounting records from users, up 43% on average in the last several months [1]. He explained: We launched an asset simulation tool called ‘Yoso-Q’ this past July, and it has been getting lots of attention from our users. Its daily active users are much higher than we expected. When we look at…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Money Forward, the startup behind the personal accounting app of the same name, announced today that it has raised 500 million yen ($5 million) from Japanese investment company Jafco.

Money Forward provides online personal accounting for individuals, allowing them to easily manage their daily expenses by integrating with their bank passbooks and credit purchase history with information scraped from their web bank and credit accounts. The service is also available for desktop, as well as iOS and Android platforms. The company also announced that it will launch a cloud-based accounting service for individual and corporate users, and it will also start publishing an online newsletter.

The service launched back in December of 2012 in beta, and subsequently launched its official version back in July of 2013. The company’s CEO Yosuke Tsuji told us that their service has acquired over 100 million accounting records from users, up 43% on average in the last several months ^[1]. He explained:

We launched an asset simulation tool called ‘Yoso-Q’ this past July, and it has been getting lots of attention from our users. Its daily active users are much higher than we expected. When we look at visiting frequency, almost 30% of our users who have registered their bank accounts on our service are using the simulation tool once every two days.

Their personalized credit card recommendation engine is especially popular among users. It proposes cards based on how much you pay on a monthly basis, or what kind of rewards you want to get. Their 60% of users are male, and 40% are female.

moneyforward_dataaccumulation — *CHART: The growth of expense data collected from Money Forward users*

Simplifying income tax reporting

Cloud-based accounting is a fierce space here in Japan, where Tokyo-based startup Freee is doing well in its user acquisition. According to Tsuji, Money Forward will be also getting into this space, launching a tax reporting tool later next month. It will simplifies your tax reporting tasks by scraping expenses from your bank accounts and sorting out automatically.

So what is his overall goal for Money Forward? He explains:

Along with the account aggregation technology, we’ll be providing various services for users including asset management and simulation for individuals, and cloud-based accounting for SMEs. When you have money management troubles, you find the answer at Money Forward. That’s what we’re aiming to be.

With the funds raised this time around, the company plans to hire more engineers in an effort to be a leading one-stop solution provider.

The startup was spun-off from Tokyo online stock brokerage Monex in 2012. It raised 100 million yen (over $1 million) back in March from several angel investors and WIT Corporation, a technology licensing organization under Waseda University.

Not to be confused with user growth, of course.↩

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Japanese mobile payments processor Coiney secures $8M in funding

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.28

Japan’s Nikkei reported that Tokyo-based mobile payments processor Coiney will soon raise up to 800 million yen (approximately $8 million) from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, the country’s state-run investment fund which promotes emerging technology businesses. Our readers may recall that the startup raised 500 million yen ($5 million) back in August from Credit Saison, one of Japan’s top credit card companies. The company expects to transact more than 1 trillion yen ($10 billion) through its payment platform in the next five years. Coiney was launched back in March of 2012 by ex-PayPal Japan employee Naoko Samata, and has been providing mobile payments solutions using swipe card readers for smartphones. In Japan, other competitors in this space are Square, Paypal Here, and Rakuten Smartpay. On a related note, it was announced a couple of weeks ago that the aforementioned fund announced will also invest up to 1 billion yen ($10 million) in another payments processor company, Royal Gate.

Japan’s Nikkei reported that Tokyo-based mobile payments processor Coiney will soon raise up to 800 million yen (approximately $8 million) from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, the country’s state-run investment fund which promotes emerging technology businesses.

Our readers may recall that the startup raised 500 million yen ($5 million) back in August from Credit Saison, one of Japan’s top credit card companies. The company expects to transact more than 1 trillion yen ($10 billion) through its payment platform in the next five years.

Coiney was launched back in March of 2012 by ex-PayPal Japan employee Naoko Samata, and has been providing mobile payments solutions using swipe card readers for smartphones. In Japan, other competitors in this space are Square, Paypal Here, and Rakuten Smartpay.

On a related note, it was announced a couple of weeks ago that the aforementioned fund announced will also invest up to 1 billion yen ($10 million) in another payments processor company, Royal Gate.

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Viibar wins OnLab demo day with crowdsourced video production solution

Open Network Lab

Masaru Ikeda 2013.10.27

See the original story in Japanese. All photos courtesy of Open Network Lab. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program. The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program. Viibar (The Best Team Award winner) Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills. The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos. Locarise (The Special Award winner)…

See the original story in Japanese. All photos courtesy of Open Network Lab.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program.

The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program.

Viibar (The Best Team Award winner)

Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills.

The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos.

Locarise (The Special Award winner)

Locarise is an analytics solution for retail stores. By placing small sensors inside and around your store, the system can collect metrics such as how many people passed in front of the store and how many customers you have served.

The system’s web-based dashboard shows you these metrics, as well as other things like visit duration, and retention rate. For a business owner monitoring many store locations, you can easily stay up to date on real-time target rates for KPIs at many stores in a single interface.

Shakring

Regardless of location, culture, or language, this mobile app lets you to ask or tell other users what you’re looking at. By scanning barcodes, it also helps you find details about what you have in your hand.

When the app’s creator, Hyongchol, Kim visited a drug store here in Japan, he saw a young Indian confused about cold medicine he should buy. Since he couldn’t read Japanese characters, he hesitated to buy the medicine despite the fact that Kim told him which one it was. This experience motivated Kim to create the app, which he is preparing for iOS and Android platforms.

Style With

Style With is an e-commerce site for men, helping them coordinate their outfits. Users’ preferences are classified according to the ’taste graph’ concept, and you will receive about five different outfit proposals of outfits every month that you might like. The platform can monetize by letting a user buy any item from the outfits proposed. It targets male users may not be very bold in their fashion but want to purchase clothes that will turn some heads.

Ednity

Ednity is a vertical social network for school classes. By putting teachers, students, and their parents in a sort of loop, it will help them build a collaborative education environment. The platform gives you a dashboard to manage notifications from school and your homework, and also provides a virtual white board for hand-drawn content that can be shared between teachers and their children.

Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the upcoming batch of its incubation program starting next January. The application deadline is November 8th. The incubator’s parent company, Digital Garage, will also launch a co-working space in San Francisco pretty soon, where their incubated startups will be able to establish a base.

To commemorate the launch of the facility, the company plans to host Global Pitch 2013 on November 4th, and New Context Conference 2013 in San Francisco on November 5th and 6th. That’s just before digital agency Btrax’s SF Japan Night event at Pivotal Labs on November 7th.

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New digital comics site provides free manga in English

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.10.27

A new digital comics website called Manga Samurai Style was recently launched in Japan. It’s an initiative by publishing companies Gakken Holdings and Gakken Publishing which will host digital manga. There are other digital books services for the manga genre, such as Kodansha’s ‘D-morning’ which which we have written about previously. But what differentiates Manga Samurai Style from competitors is that content is provided in both Japanese and English. The manga featured on the site are ‘Wa-fu’ (or ‘Japanese style’) comics, where many of the characters are samurai or ninja. So in addition to manga fans, this might be of interest to history buffs as well. The stories are written exclusively for the site by well-known authors, and all of the stories can be read for free. The very first title to be released is ‘Nobunaga no Yabou’, which is created in collaboration with the hit historical simultion game to mark its 30th anniversary. Another unique manga title is ‘Stray Wolves’ which will be released on November 8th. This latter story will take in readers’ opinion to determine how the story will evolve. Manga Samurai Style has given a name to this type of user-participation in stories: ‘Join the Story’ or…

A new digital comics website called Manga Samurai Style was recently launched in Japan. It’s an initiative by publishing companies Gakken Holdings and Gakken Publishing which will host digital manga.

There are other digital books services for the manga genre, such as Kodansha’s ‘D-morning’ which which we have written about previously. But what differentiates Manga Samurai Style from competitors is that content is provided in both Japanese and English.

The manga featured on the site are ‘Wa-fu’ (or ‘Japanese style’) comics, where many of the characters are samurai or ninja. So in addition to manga fans, this might be of interest to history buffs as well. The stories are written exclusively for the site by well-known authors, and all of the stories can be read for free.

The very first title to be released is ‘Nobunaga no Yabou’, which is created in collaboration with the hit historical simultion game to mark its 30th anniversary. Another unique manga title is ‘Stray Wolves’ which will be released on November 8th. This latter story will take in readers’ opinion to determine how the story will evolve. Manga Samurai Style has given a name to this type of user-participation in stories: ‘Join the Story’ or JOS. The readers can expect to see more such JOS stories on the site.

New episodes will be released every Friday and they can be enjoyed on the web as well as on mobile. It will be interesting to see if Manga Samurai Style can expand the existing fan base of Japanese manga or enhance Japanese creative culture . You can follow the most recent news from the site on their Facebook page.

News

Japanese marketing campaign puts idol group HKT48 in ‘selfie’ videos

Japanese restaurant finder service Retty sees over 1M monthly visitors

Pinterest testing localized service in Japan

To the Bat-cave! Upcoming Puzzle & Dragons collaboration to feature the Dark Knight

San Francisco’s Gumroad doubles down on its Japanese sellers

Japanese startup detects social media threats to kids, warns parents