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Japanese social media promotion startup raises $1.5M

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.30

See the original story in Japanese. Interest marketing is a Tokyo-based startup focused on social media marketing for brands. The startup announced today that it has raised 150 million yen (approximately $1.5 million) from Japanese investment firm Nissay Capital. The total amount of funds in this round is assumed to exceed 200 million yen ($2 million), as it expects to receive additional funding from other VC firms next month. The startup introduced a social media promotion tool called Kolor back in March. Based on requests from advertisers, this service shows you ads in the form of missions to be completed. When you finish a mission, you will be able to receive a reward that can be later be redeemed for discounts or products at partnering merchants. In the six months since its launch in March, the startup has acquired 40 advertisers and the service’s iOS app has seen 40,000 downloads. According to the company, its main userbase is males in their 30s who are relatively familiar with digital services. Kolor has two primary aspect: it is a tool to improve recognition for brands, and an O2O tool for merchants to invite potential customers to their physical tools. In the first…

The Interest Marketing team. CEO Hikari Sakai is in front.

See the original story in Japanese.

Interest marketing is a Tokyo-based startup focused on social media marketing for brands. The startup announced today that it has raised 150 million yen (approximately $1.5 million) from Japanese investment firm Nissay Capital. The total amount of funds in this round is assumed to exceed 200 million yen ($2 million), as it expects to receive additional funding from other VC firms next month.

The startup introduced a social media promotion tool called Kolor back in March. Based on requests from advertisers, this service shows you ads in the form of missions to be completed. When you finish a mission, you will be able to receive a reward that can be later be redeemed for discounts or products at partnering merchants. In the six months since its launch in March, the startup has acquired 40 advertisers and the service’s iOS app has seen 40,000 downloads. According to the company, its main userbase is males in their 30s who are relatively familiar with digital services.

Kolor has two primary aspect: it is a tool to improve recognition for brands, and an O2O tool for merchants to invite potential customers to their physical tools. In the first sector, the service’s competitors include Monipla (by Allied Architects), Crocos (acquired by Yahoo Japan back in 2012), and Fantastics (by Gaiax).

So how can the startup expand its business in such a fiercely competitive arena? I asked Sakai about his future plan.

The more interesting missions (ads) we can present on Kolor, the more users we can acquire. So that it’s all about getting as many interesting missions as we can from our advertisers. We need to keep motivating advertisers to use the platform. When we offer a mission to our users on the platform, we pay attention to see what segments of the userbase the advertiser should specifically target.

The current version of Kolor is only integrated with Facebook, but the startup aspires to enhance the service further, developing a social media promotion tool that requires no social media integration.

On a related note, Interest Marketing acquired fellow startup company Appoi earlier this month. Appoi was founded by Hikari Sakai (also the head of Interest Marketing) and has been providing a calendar view service for sharing entertainment event updates with other users. He tells us why he merged these two companies prior to the funding.

Appoi was founded back in February of 2012 for [serving] the US market, and subsequently we started providing its white label service to major Japanese entertainment businesses such as E-plus (online box office) and Avex (music company). I’ve been running Interest Marketing as a startup focused on developing new services like Kolor. Coinciding this latest funding, we needed to focus our resources to a company. That’s why I had our two companies merge.

Transferring engineers over from Appoi, Interest Marketing is now about a 30-people team. Back in August, the startup partnered with Japanese credit card company Credit Saison and online reward program NetMile, which will help them accelerate user acquisition growth.

While B2C-focused social media tools are on the decline, the B2B2C field has great potential to expand further. In Sakai’s words, Japanese businesses’ usage of social media is not yet mature and still has much room to be cultivated.

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QuerySeeker helps app developers find the source of sudden downloads

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.24

The Tokyo Game Show 2013 this past weekend showcased more than just games. Some companies were exhibiting solutions for game developers, one of the most interesting being QueryEye, a Nagoya-based startup that provides a marketing analysis solution. For mobile developers, if you see a sudden download surge for your app, you may have difficulty in figuring out what caused the spike. But QueryEye’s solution QuerySeeker gives you insight based on metrics and analytics that it collects. It continually crawls more than 45 million pages of popular blogs and app-focused websites. In this way you can figure out what social media post or online article helped give your app a boost. QuerySeeker was recently upgraded and so that now it can give you analytics in almost real time, updating every minute. It can be used for apps in a variety of app stores, like Apple’s AppStore, Google Play, KDDI’s au Smartpass, NTT Docomo’s dmenu, Amazon Kindle Store, the iTunes iBook Store, and Google Books. A single analysis package for an app is available for a monthly charge starting at 148,000 yen (about $1,500) not including the initial setup fee. The company was founded back in 2010 by Masashi Mizuno, known for…

The Tokyo Game Show 2013 this past weekend showcased more than just games. Some companies were exhibiting solutions for game developers, one of the most interesting being QueryEye, a Nagoya-based startup that provides a marketing analysis solution.

For mobile developers, if you see a sudden download surge for your app, you may have difficulty in figuring out what caused the spike. But QueryEye’s solution QuerySeeker gives you insight based on metrics and analytics that it collects.

It continually crawls more than 45 million pages of popular blogs and app-focused websites. In this way you can figure out what social media post or online article helped give your app a boost.

QuerySeeker was recently upgraded and so that now it can give you analytics in almost real time, updating every minute. It can be used for apps in a variety of app stores, like Apple’s AppStore, Google Play, KDDI’s au Smartpass, NTT Docomo’s dmenu, Amazon Kindle Store, the iTunes iBook Store, and Google Books. A single analysis package for an app is available for a monthly charge starting at 148,000 yen (about $1,500) not including the initial setup fee.

The company was founded back in 2010 by Masashi Mizuno, known for contributing insightful mobile market analysis in Japanese tech media.

In the area of user retention, we’ve recently seen more than a few solution providers, including planBCD, Growth Push, Fello, and Korea’s 5Rocks. What QuerySeeker provides is somewhat different but helps developers find more efficient ways to market their apps and bring in more users.

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Japan’s Uzabase introduces business news curation app

Takeshi Hirano 2013.09.22

See the original story in Japanese. The advent of social media and smart devices has allowed us to receive continuous updates from content producers at any time, no matter where we are. So these days people really need practical solutions to help them filter what to receive and read. We’ve seen several outstanding Japanese startups working on such information solutions, including Smart News, Vingow, and Gunosy. It’s an economic journal for the smartphone era On Friday another player jumped into this space. Tokyo’s Uzabase, the startup behind corporate profile database Speeda, unveiled an iOS app that curates financial and business news updates. It’s called News Picks. News Picks aggregates business and financial updates from 30 news entities in Japan and around the world, delivering them to subscribers with in-depth analysis by the startup’s team of economists and high profile entrepreneurs. The app is available for iOS, and its desktop version will be also introduced by the end of this year. If you think this is just a RSS news aggregator, you’re partly right. But the biggest draw of this service is that it is developed and managed by a team with a solid background in finance. The startup was founded…

See the original story in Japanese.

The advent of social media and smart devices has allowed us to receive continuous updates from content producers at any time, no matter where we are. So these days people really need practical solutions to help them filter what to receive and read. We’ve seen several outstanding Japanese startups working on such information solutions, including Smart News, Vingow, and Gunosy.

It’s an economic journal for the smartphone era

On Friday another player jumped into this space. Tokyo’s Uzabase, the startup behind corporate profile database Speeda, unveiled an iOS app that curates financial and business news updates. It’s called News Picks.

News Picks aggregates business and financial updates from 30 news entities in Japan and around the world, delivering them to subscribers with in-depth analysis by the startup’s team of economists and high profile entrepreneurs. The app is available for iOS, and its desktop version will be also introduced by the end of this year. If you think this is just a RSS news aggregator, you’re partly right. But the biggest draw of this service is that it is developed and managed by a team with a solid background in finance.

The startup was founded back in 2008. The company’s first app, Speeda, was invented by its founding members who previously worked with investment banks. It collects news updates and business analysis from think tanks, and provides them to finance businesses. In terms of differentiation from big players like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, the service requires users to have no special terminal nor master specific commands or functions.

The company is rapidly expanding its focus on Asia, and has overseas offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Curation by economic experts might be the key

One key service provided by the startup is a strong expertise in business trends, with valuable news updates curated by financial experts.

When you launch the app, you’re required to log in to the service with your social media accounts. But I found it somewhat discouraging that it asked me to create a user account/password for the service in addition to the social media login. Subsequently, you choose persons or business categories that interest you. This process is similar to that of the Vingow app as well.

You can browse updates in the timeline curated by other users you follow, or check out the news crawling robots. You can add notes on updates, which then allows other users know why you liked it. Like conventional RSS reader apps, you can jump to the original website from any given update.

From my perspective, there’s still room to improve in terms of choosing updates to suit my preference. It’s difficult to choose which high profile user I should follow. For example, if I follow Japanese dotcom tycoon Takafumi Horie, I don’t know what kind of curated updates I will get through his timeline.

Here on this site, we also bring you updates from startup scenes around the world, including business updates. From a media person’s perspective, I’m looking forward to seeing how this kind of solutions changes how consumers’ get news updates.

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New Japanese 3D Printing Marketplace Officially Debuts

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.09.11

A new 3D printing marketplace recently made its debut in Japan. It’s called Rinkak, which roughly means ‘outline of objects’ in Japanese. Anyone with 3D data can open shops on the platform and sell products from their designs, which is sort of similar to Shapeways. Rinkak has been operating in beta for three months, and has now opened up to the public. There are many materials available on the site including plastic, pottery, and metal. Designers can set a price for their products based on the manufacturing fee, and Rinkak takes a 30% cut from sales. Manufacturing and shipping will be handled by partner companies of Kabuku, the company behind the new 3D platform. On Rinkak, designers can publish 3D data under a Creative Commons license. This allows for other creators to modify parts of the design to produce remixed products. Currently, there are only around 40 products available (some by the same designer) on Rinkak. But there is no shortage of amazing designs, as you can see below. The products are only available to purchase in Japan right now, so overseas buyers will have to wait. LovelyHeart paper cup holder for ¥2,434. Polygon espresso cup, ¥5274. Shop card stand,…

A new 3D printing marketplace recently made its debut in Japan. It’s called Rinkak, which roughly means ‘outline of objects’ in Japanese. Anyone with 3D data can open shops on the platform and sell products from their designs, which is sort of similar to Shapeways. Rinkak has been operating in beta for three months, and has now opened up to the public.

There are many materials available on the site including plastic, pottery, and metal. Designers can set a price for their products based on the manufacturing fee, and Rinkak takes a 30% cut from sales. Manufacturing and shipping will be handled by partner companies of Kabuku, the company behind the new 3D platform.

On Rinkak, designers can publish 3D data under a Creative Commons license. This allows for other creators to modify parts of the design to produce remixed products.

Currently, there are only around 40 products available (some by the same designer) on Rinkak. But there is no shortage of amazing designs, as you can see below. The products are only available to purchase in Japan right now, so overseas buyers will have to wait.

LovelyHeart paper cup holder for ¥2,434.

Polygon espresso cup, ¥5274.

Shop card stand, ¥5,000.

Stratum vase, ¥27,954.

BigA paper cup holder, ¥1,317.

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15 Japanese startups pitch at Rising Expo 2013, TwitCasting takes top prize

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.09

See our Japanese coverage of Rising Expo here On Friday, Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures held its annual Rising Expo 2013 event which showcased up-and-coming 15 startups to a crowd of local investors and entrepreneurs [1]. Last year smartphone-based credit card payment provider Coiney won the top prize of 2 million yen (about $20,000), and the startup subsequently raised 100 million yen ($1 million) from CyberAgent Ventures, East Ventures, and an individual angel investor. Among the 15 participating startups this time around, TwitCasting was chosen as the audience favorite by way of voting. TwitCasting is a mobile live-broadcasting application that was launched back in February of 2010. Its userbase is currently around 3 million, a larger total than Ustream currently has in Japan. Almost 20% of it user base comes from the overseas, and it is getting more and more popular in places like Brazil and the Middle East. It raised 64.8 million yen (approximately $648,000) from East Ventures and Japanese entrepreneur Masao Ito (who runs User Local). TwitCasting was pitched by Yosuke Akamatsu (@Yoski) of Moi Corp. For this competition, every single finalist had 10 minutes for their pitch, longer than most other startup events. This gave Akamatsu a chance to…

See our Japanese coverage of Rising Expo here

On Friday, Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures held its annual Rising Expo 2013 event which showcased up-and-coming 15 startups to a crowd of local investors and entrepreneurs [1]. Last year smartphone-based credit card payment provider Coiney won the top prize of 2 million yen (about $20,000), and the startup subsequently raised 100 million yen ($1 million) from CyberAgent Ventures, East Ventures, and an individual angel investor. Among the 15 participating startups this time around, TwitCasting was chosen as the audience favorite by way of voting.

TwitCasting is a mobile live-broadcasting application that was launched back in February of 2010. Its userbase is currently around 3 million, a larger total than Ustream currently has in Japan. Almost 20% of it user base comes from the overseas, and it is getting more and more popular in places like Brazil and the Middle East. It raised 64.8 million yen (approximately $648,000) from East Ventures and Japanese entrepreneur Masao Ito (who runs User Local).

TwitCasting was pitched by Yosuke Akamatsu (@Yoski) of Moi Corp. For this competition, every single finalist had 10 minutes for their pitch, longer than most other startup events. This gave Akamatsu a chance to explain the app’s user experience by showing a live online chat being broadcast by some high school girls. In a response to his question “Why you are TwitCasting”, the girls answered “Because its fun”. This impressed the audience a lot, possibly because typical middle-aged men usually have no chance to talk with young girls!

Like Coiney, which won the grand prize award at last year’s event, TwitCasting is expected to accelerate its global expansion and user acquisition moving forward.

To learn about all the other startups that pitched at Rising Expo, check out our overview below.

15 Startups from Rising Expo ¶

1. Kosodate Share (co-operative childcare), pitched by Keiko Koda (Asmama)

This service allows you to ask other users in your neighborhood to take care of your children. Available tasks vary from babysitting to taking them to schools or kindergartens when you can’t manage. For parents, when you ask someone for a nursery task using the service, it will charge 500 yen (about $5) as a usage fee. The fee covers insurance in case of emergency, and which will ease your concerns about your child’s safety. To date the service has acquired more than 3,000 users.

2. Conyac.cc, pitched by Naoki Yamada (Anydoor)

Conyac is a crowdsourced translation service for individual and corporate users. The company recently set up a San Francisco office and is intensifying its global service expansion. In terms of user demographic, the company’s major clients include buzz marketing sites, media websites, and social gaming studios. The startup has fundraised 40 million ($400,000) from United, Skylight Consulting, angel investor Anri Samata.

3. Cafetalk, pitched by Kohtaro Hashizume (Small Bridge)

Cafetalk is a C2C marketplace focused on learning foreign languages online. The service itself does not provide any learning service but rather it connects teachers with students. To date it has acquired 15,000 students and 2,000 teachers who have posted more than 1,000 available lessons. The company has recently seen more than a few teachers who can make a living through this marketplace only. According to a Searchina interview with CEO Hashizume with, the service is in high demand among females in their 30s, who typically want to learn foreign languages as a hobby.

4. Factelier, pitched by Toshio Yamada (Life Style Accent)

This startup claims to enable fashion enthusiasts buy Louis Vuitton-class fashions for prices as reasonable as Uniqlo. By eliminating the middleman between fashion retailers and clothing factories, the startup succeeded in bringing low-priced but high-quality Japan-made clothes to consumers worldwide. Prior to launching this startup, CEO Toshio Yamada worked at Gucci Paris when attending university, and he subsequently worked at Fashionwalker.com, one of Japan’s leading fashion e-commerce sites and the host of Tokyo Girls Collection. Readers may recall that my colleague Yukari Mitsuhashi previously spoke with him about how the company plans to change the industry.

5. Kawaii Museum JPN, pitched by Taketo Tanaka

Kawaii Museum is a global platform for distributing Japanese character franchises. To date it has acquired more than 4 million likes on Facebook and several tens of thousand users for its Pinterest-like curation website. The startup is currently being developed by Ruby programmer Taketo Tanaka (below) who previously worked with DeNA. It was chosen back in March to be included in the fouth batch of KDDI Mugen Labo’s incubation program.

6. Relux, pitched by Takaya Shinozuka (Loco Partners)

Relux is a satisfaction-guaranteed marketplace for Japanese inns. Every month its user number grows by 1.5 times, and the company expects to see more traffic from all around the world. To date the startup has received investments worth 60 million yen ($600,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and Recruit Incubation Partners. You can also check out our previous interview with Shinozuka.

7. Base, pitched by Yuta Tsuruoka (Base)

Base is a Shopify-like instant e-commerce platform developed by Project Liverty, a tech savvy team led by entrepreneur Kazuma Ieiri. Since its launch back in November of 2012, the company has acquired more than 40,000 merchants. It raised 23 million yen ($230,000) back in January, and is aiming to transact 100 million yen ($1 million) in deals by the end of this year.

8. Event Regist, pitched by Kosuke Hirayama (Event Regist)

Event Regist provides a platform for event organizers to market their events and issue tickets online. The service is available in Japanese, English, Indonesian, Thai, and traditional Chinese. Many players are fiercely competing in C2C-based ticket deals (e.g. Ticket Street or Ticket Camp), and its B2C business is dominated by box office companies (e.g. Ticket Pia). So the startup has decided to focus on the B2B business model. It raised seed investment from East Ventures, Skyland Ventures, and Shinwa Agency back in June, and has exclusively handled ticket issuing for events like the Tokyo Game Show 2013 and CEATEC 2013 Japan.

9. Ubiregi, pitched by Keita Kido

Ubiregi is a cloud-based POS (point of sales) system that uses an iPad at storefronts. Compared to conventional systems, it can be eailsy deployed and maintained, especially for individual merchants like small restaurants, standing bars, and accessory shops. The startup was launched by Keita Kido in August of 2010, and raised around 20 million yen (over $200,000) from Voyage Ventures and Kronos Fund. It also has a capital tie-up with SalesForce.com. To date it has acquired 7,000 merchants nationwide, with the expectation of reaching 20,000. That would account for 1% of the Japanese cash register market.

10. WebPay, pitched by Kei Kubo (FluxFlex)

WebPay is an easy-to-install, API-based card payment solution for Japanese e-commerce companies. In order to give developers an easy interface for payments, the startup partnered with GMO Payment Gateway, one of the oldest and biggest payment processing companies in Japan. Upon its official launch, the company also received an undisclosed amount of funding from CyberAgent Ventures, Architype, and GMO Payment Gateway.

11. SLASH 7, pitched by Nobuhiro Hayashi (pLucky)

Slash–7 aims to gives website owners sophisticated data analysis for reasonable rates. Many executives at Japanese companies are becoming increasingly interested in making the most of big data analysis to improve their business. This company’s CEO believes it has an advantage over similar services (like Mixpanel) in terms of offering a variety of features for a cost. The company previously raised 20 million ($200,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and Incubate Fund.

12. planBCD, pitched by Kenji Sudo (KAIZEN platform)

PlanBCD is a platform that helps developers improve the user interface of their web services. It provides developers with an A/B testing environment, especially useful for improving web content and interfaces. Using the service, you can also crowdsource the UI and UX improvement process. It raised seed funding worth $800,000 from Gree Ventures, GMO Venture Partners, and CyberAgent Ventures back in August.

13. Seconds, pitched by Miku Hirano (Spicy Cinnamon)

Seconds is a mobile app for sharing photos between intimate friends or family members. You just take a photo, and choose your desired album for upload. Photos added are immediately visible to members who have access to that album, and those members can also upload pictures as well. The app was launched back in April, and it has acquired more than 40,000 users from three Asian countries in two months. It was incorporated in Singapore back in October and has engineers in HoChi Minh City (Vietnam) and Bangkok (Thailand). It received seed funding back in December from CyberAgent Ventures and other angel investors.

14. TwitCasting (see above)

15. Candy, pitched by Yosuke Fukada (Yoyo Holdings)

Incorporated in Singapore, this company plans to form a mobile economic ecosystem in emerging markets such as the Philippines. Since very few people pay with credit cards in these upcoming Southeast Asian markets, the company believes there are huge opportunities to cultivate business around monetary needs over there. Candy is a platform that gives users rewards which can be used to pay their cellphone bills in return for completing ‘microtasks’ such as participating in an online survey.

Disclaimer: I was involved in a preliminary screening process at the competition to choose the finalists with the other judges. ↩

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Finland’s Startup Sauna coming to Tokyo, brings opportunity for local entrepreneurs

Rick Martin 2013.09.05

Startup Sauna is a startup accelerator from Helsinki Finland, now touring 25 cities around the world, with an upcoming stop here in Tokyo on September 17th at Open Network Lab. The event will feature a panel including Taizo Son, the CEO of Movida Japan and founder/chairman of GungHo ; Peter Vesterbacka, the chief marketing officer of Rovio ; Hironao Kunimitsu, the founder and CEO of Gumi, and Naoki Aoyagi, the CEO of GREE International. But many of our readers will be pleased to hear that there will be a pitch event as well, with the winner receiving an invitations as well as free airfare (courtesy of the event sponsor Finnair) to attend Slush 2013 in November in Helsinki. That two-day event is expected to host 1,000 startups 5,000 attendees, and more than 600 international investors. So it certainly looks like a great opportunity. Miki Kuusi, the director of Startup Sauna, noted in the event announcement: Our two countries [Japan and Finland] have always had a lot in common. We share strong educational institutions that produce leading technical talent, a culture that has yet to warm to neither entrepreneurship nor failure, plus economies that must lessen their dependency on established electronics…

Startup Sauna is a startup accelerator from Helsinki Finland, now touring 25 cities around the world, with an upcoming stop here in Tokyo on September 17th at Open Network Lab.

The event will feature a panel including Taizo Son, the CEO of Movida Japan and founder/chairman of GungHo ; Peter Vesterbacka, the chief marketing officer of Rovio ; Hironao Kunimitsu, the founder and CEO of Gumi, and Naoki Aoyagi, the CEO of GREE International. But many of our readers will be pleased to hear that there will be a pitch event as well, with the winner receiving an invitations as well as free airfare (courtesy of the event sponsor Finnair) to attend Slush 2013 in November in Helsinki. That two-day event is expected to host 1,000 startups 5,000 attendees, and more than 600 international investors. So it certainly looks like a great opportunity.

Miki Kuusi, the director of Startup Sauna, noted in the event announcement:

Our two countries [Japan and Finland] have always had a lot in common. We share strong educational institutions that produce leading technical talent, a culture that has yet to warm to neither entrepreneurship nor failure, plus economies that must lessen their dependency on established electronics industries and seize huge opportunities in fast-moving companies.

If you’d like to apply to pitch at the event, you can do so here. The last day to apply is September 13th. Good luck!

Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister of Finland Jyrki Katainen visited Startup Sauna's entrepreneurial co-working space — Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister of Finland Jyrki Katainen visited Startup Sauna’s entrepreneurial co-working space

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Japan’s My Chef sends professional chefs to your home

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.09.04

Today a really neat service for busy mothers was released here in Japan. My Chef is a website that brings professional chefs to people’s home for a reasonable price. Whether you’re throwing a home party or just craving a delicious meal for dinner, the chefs come right to your door to cook at your house. The site limits its users to females only, and requires login via Facebook authentication. On the website users can enter the train station nearest to their location, as well as the date when they would like to use the service. After that it will provide a list of available chefs. After a chef is chosen the site sends out a short questionnaire, and based on the answers the chef will create a menu that suits the user’s preferences. The chef takes care of everything including buying the necessary ingredients, cooking, and even cleaning up afterwards. All of this can be enjoyed for a very affordable price, starting at 3,000 yen (or about $30), which is the minimum order for four people. My Chef is available in bigger cities in the Kanto area like Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, and Saitama. At the time of release, the number…

Today a really neat service for busy mothers was released here in Japan. My Chef is a website that brings professional chefs to people’s home for a reasonable price. Whether you’re throwing a home party or just craving a delicious meal for dinner, the chefs come right to your door to cook at your house.

The site limits its users to females only, and requires login via Facebook authentication. On the website users can enter the train station nearest to their location, as well as the date when they would like to use the service. After that it will provide a list of available chefs. After a chef is chosen the site sends out a short questionnaire, and based on the answers the chef will create a menu that suits the user’s preferences. The chef takes care of everything including buying the necessary ingredients, cooking, and even cleaning up afterwards. All of this can be enjoyed for a very affordable price, starting at 3,000 yen (or about $30), which is the minimum order for four people.

My Chef is available in bigger cities in the Kanto area like Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, and Saitama. At the time of release, the number of chefs registered on the site is still limited to roughly 30, but we can expect this number to grow as the service expands. There are a variety of professional chefs on the site, including some restaurant chefs and cooking class Instructors.

Women’s lives change enormously after they have kids, with fewer opportunities to go out and enjoy meals. My Chef was started as a solution for such women to enable them to experience great food in the comfort of their own home. My Chef hopes to make this new dining experience a viable and affordable option for a wide user base in less than three years.

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Japanese startup qualifies for global competition with real life analytics for retail stores

Masaru Ikeda 2013.09.01

SeedStars World is an initiative touring 20 cities worldwide to discover high profile startups. Here in Japan, a local preliminary competition event took place on Friday at Samurai Startup Island, an incubation office located on Tokyo’s bayfront. More than a dozen of startups from Japan and the rest of the world gave pitches in an effort to qualify for the final global competition next February in Lausanne, Switzerland. Here is a quick rundown of the three teams selected from the bunch. 1st place: Locarise 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. 2nd place: Eigooo Eigooo is a service that lets users learn English by chatting with a native speaker using mobile message apps such as Line. The service was launched…

SeedStars World is an initiative touring 20 cities worldwide to discover high profile startups. Here in Japan, a local preliminary competition event took place on Friday at Samurai Startup Island, an incubation office located on Tokyo’s bayfront.

More than a dozen of startups from Japan and the rest of the world gave pitches in an effort to qualify for the final global competition next February in Lausanne, Switzerland. Here is a quick rundown of the three teams selected from the bunch.

1st place: Locarise

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.

2nd place: Eigooo

Eigooo is a service that lets users learn English by chatting with a native speaker using mobile message apps such as Line. The service was launched by Peter Rothenberg, who previously worked in Japan’s public schools as an English conversation teacher. Through his own experience of exchanging messages on mobile during his commutes, he was convinced that messaging using mobile apps is a good way to master foreign languages.

3rd place: Infogra.me

Infogra.me is a sort of slideshare for infographics. You can upload your infographic and share it with many users for free, or even ask the company to create an infographic from your own data. The service is available in six languages, both on the web or with its iOS app.

Their offering is comparable to Piktochart from Malaysia.

In my view, this world championship tour is well-organized, supported by global entrepreneur network SandBox. However, it’s probably too early to see how much impact the event make can have on the global startup community, since it’s still just the first batch.

On the event website, you can browse the many startups that have been selected in other participating cities. After Tokyo, the next local event will take place next Friday in Sydney, Australia.

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Smartrip app lets you create a travel diary in minutes

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.08.29

We have written about many Japanese companies offering travel-related services in the past. For example, with Trippiece users can create their own customized travel plans, and with Kitchhike, travelers can experience home-prepared meals by locals. Smartrip is another such travel service that was just recently released. It lets you create your own travel diary in a matter of minutes. Going on trips and taking photos is a lot of fun, but the required organizing that comes after can sometimes be a headache. With Smartrip, all you need to do is enter information such as title, theme, photos, and your travel companions, and you can have your own travel diary to look back on any time. Smartrip is available on the web as well as on iOS. With the iPhone app, you can upload as many as ten photos at once. Photos from Facebook or Instagram can easily be uploaded to the site as well. Smartrip is a creation by D2C, an advertisment and consumer service development company here in Japan. The brains behind the service is Shin Harada, who went on a round-the-world trip and wanted to simplify the process of logging the details. His solution for this probelem is…

We have written about many Japanese companies offering travel-related services in the past. For example, with Trippiece users can create their own customized travel plans, and with Kitchhike, travelers can experience home-prepared meals by locals. Smartrip is another such travel service that was just recently released. It lets you create your own travel diary in a matter of minutes.

Going on trips and taking photos is a lot of fun, but the required organizing that comes after can sometimes be a headache. With Smartrip, all you need to do is enter information such as title, theme, photos, and your travel companions, and you can have your own travel diary to look back on any time.

Smartrip is available on the web as well as on iOS. With the iPhone app, you can upload as many as ten photos at once. Photos from Facebook or Instagram can easily be uploaded to the site as well.

Smartrip is a creation by D2C, an advertisment and consumer service development company here in Japan. The brains behind the service is Shin Harada, who went on a round-the-world trip and wanted to simplify the process of logging the details. His solution for this probelem is Smartrip.

The company plans to grow the service into a place where trip experiences can be accumulated to become an inspiration for people searching for their next travel destination. We can expect to see more social features to be added to the site as well as to the Android app in the near future. To get an idea of how the site works, you can check out the video below.

news

Why a Japanese startup is betting on human-powered data entry over OCR

Masaru Ikeda 2013.08.21

See the original story in Japanese. BearTail, a startup comprised mainly of graduates from Tsukuba University, today unveiled a cloud-based household accounting solution called Dr. Wallet. The service lets you do personal finance data entry by simply scanning your receipts. It was launched in beta back several months ago, and is now available for the Android platform. In Japan, there are more than a few competitors in this space. Since last year, we’ve seen more than 20 startups providing cloud-based accounting services for freelancers and SMEs. (See our previous article for more info.) In terms of differentiation from conventional services, Dr. Wallet does not use OCR (optical character recognition) but instead depends on human-powered data entry for ensuring accuracy. It also automatically sorts and classifies your purchases. With this human-powered processing, the startup could achieve data entry accuracy of up to 99.98%, likely enough to ease users’s concerns of erroneous inputs. But why is this startup providing the service for free when the back-end human component is likely so costly and time-consuming? We’re told that BearTail is exploring monetizing the accounting service with big data solutions. If they collect purchase histories from users, they establish some behavior models. For example,…

See the original story in Japanese.

BearTail, a startup comprised mainly of graduates from Tsukuba University, today unveiled a cloud-based household accounting solution called Dr. Wallet. The service lets you do personal finance data entry by simply scanning your receipts. It was launched in beta back several months ago, and is now available for the Android platform.

In Japan, there are more than a few competitors in this space. Since last year, we’ve seen more than 20 startups providing cloud-based accounting services for freelancers and SMEs. (See our previous article for more info.)

In terms of differentiation from conventional services, Dr. Wallet does not use OCR (optical character recognition) but instead depends on human-powered data entry for ensuring accuracy. It also automatically sorts and classifies your purchases. With this human-powered processing, the startup could achieve data entry accuracy of up to 99.98%, likely enough to ease users’s concerns of erroneous inputs.

But why is this startup providing the service for free when the back-end human component is likely so costly and time-consuming? We’re told that BearTail is exploring monetizing the accounting service with big data solutions. If they collect purchase histories from users, they establish some behavior models. For example, if you find users who frequently stay at a certain hotel or use a beauty salon, you can give them a discount coupon that encourages them to pay with a specific brand of credit card.

This scheme calls to mind fellow Japanese startup Sansan, which operates a free CRM business card solution called Eight. Their strategy is also “Grow first, monetize later”, building a reputation and driving users to their high-end service Link Knowledge.

BearTail unveiled a subscription-based, e-commerce service called Amazon Gacha back in February, which randomly selects items from Amazon’s showcase and delivers them to users. But it was subsequently forced to shut down in order to avoid a possible infringement on Amazon’s trademark. But I believe its new service is well thought out in terms of a monetization, and it will be an interesting company to watch as it continues to grow.

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