Ichiyaha is a Japanese, mobile optimized web service that lets users sign up to play games which have yet to be released. It’s sort of like betali.st where you can sign up early for startup services. Ichihaya was released back in June, and is operated by CyberZ, a mobile advertising and marketing company in Japan. The company is a subsidiary of internet giant CyberAgent. Ichihaya has content partnerships with over 40 app review sites and game portals, like Kamiapu (roughly translated as ‘god apps’), one of the major iPhone app review portals in Japan. Users can sign up by email using their Facebook or Google credentials. Once registered, they can choose games they find interesting, and will subsequently be notified with updates about that game. Ichihaya lets users download exclusive items for many games as well. For game developers it’s a fast, sure way to reach potential fans. Ichihaya can also be used as a marketing tool by publishing game-related content, such as tips on how to master a certain game. By implementing the SDK for Force Operation X, an advertising solution tool provided by CyberZ, game data can be analyzed as well. It’s only been a little over a…
Ichiyaha is a Japanese, mobile optimized web service that lets users sign up to play games which have yet to be released. It’s sort of like betali.st where you can sign up early for startup services. Ichihaya was released back in June, and is operated by CyberZ, a mobile advertising and marketing company in Japan. The company is a subsidiary of internet giant CyberAgent.
Ichihaya has content partnerships with over 40 app review sites and game portals, like Kamiapu (roughly translated as ‘god apps’), one of the major iPhone app review portals in Japan. Users can sign up by email using their Facebook or Google credentials. Once registered, they can choose games they find interesting, and will subsequently be notified with updates about that game. Ichihaya lets users download exclusive items for many games as well.
For game developers it’s a fast, sure way to reach potential fans. Ichihaya can also be used as a marketing tool by publishing game-related content, such as tips on how to master a certain game. By implementing the SDK for Force Operation X, an advertising solution tool provided by CyberZ, game data can be analyzed as well.
It’s only been a little over a month since its release, so we don’t see a whole lot of up-coming games yet. But for light game users, it’s a great place to keep track of soon-to-be-released titles. Ichihaya can currently be viewed on mobile browsers, but in the future a native app certainly would not hurt either.
Ameba Pigg is a virtual community operated by Japanese tech giant CyberAgent, perhaps most famous for its Ameba Blog platform. The virtual community was launched back in Feburary of 2009, and has over 15 million registered users to date. After creating an avatar on Ameba Pigg, users can play around in the virtual community and chat with friends. This community is especially popular among the younger generation, especially women. According to a study over on Game Business about a year ago, the breakdown of monthly active users was about 35% men and 65% women. Ameba Pigg’s users are so enthusiastic that recently a middle school girl was arrested for stealing virtual currency from friends’ accounts. These currencies are used to purchase items for user’s avatars, which is a major source of income for the company. Ameba Pigg has successfully pulled off what Second Life attempted to do. As a platform with over 15 million users, brands now seek to promote their business on the service, even politicians sometimes as well. Back in May, Japanese convenience store Lawson, launched an O2O advertisement campaign on the social game Pigg World. Lawson opened an official account on the site and delivered coupons that…
Ameba Pigg is a virtual community operated by Japanese tech giant CyberAgent, perhaps most famous for its Ameba Blog platform. The virtual community was launched back in Feburary of 2009, and has over 15 million registered users to date. After creating an avatar on Ameba Pigg, users can play around in the virtual community and chat with friends.
This community is especially popular among the younger generation, especially women. According to a study over on Game Business about a year ago, the breakdown of monthly active users was about 35% men and 65% women. Ameba Pigg’s users are so enthusiastic that recently a middle school girl was arrested for stealing virtual currency from friends’ accounts. These currencies are used to purchase items for user’s avatars, which is a major source of income for the company.
Ameba Pigg has successfully pulled off what Second Life attempted to do. As a platform with over 15 million users, brands now seek to promote their business on the service, even politicians sometimes as well. Back in May, Japanese convenience store Lawson, launched an O2O advertisement campaign on the social game Pigg World. Lawson opened an official account on the site and delivered coupons that could be used at its stores, of which there are over 10,000 in Japan. The first coupon was a 30 yen discount from Lawson’s signiture sweets, Premium Rollcake.
CyberAgent also launched a special website on Ameba for the upper house election which will take place on July 21. Already 120 candidates in the election have opened blogs on Ameba, and over on Ameba Pigg, candidates have created their own avatars, and election patrolled around the virtual city of Shibuya to raise awareness of the election. On July 4th, candidates from different parties even gave speeches in the virtual city of Shibuya.
Ameba Pigg lauched its English version back in March of 2010 as Ameba Pico, and was largely accepted by users in Asian countries. The virtual community gained over three million users in six months, but the service closed down in December of last year.
CyberAgent is now aggressive in moving to mobile. The company now operates over 100 mobile apps in total, and many consumers are aware of it because of its TV commercials running in heavy rotation. It will be interesting to see whether the company will be as successful on mobile as much as they have been on PCs, and whether or not it can build the next Ameba Blog or Pigg in the age of mobile.
For more information on how Ameba Pigg works, check out one user’s video below.
This is part of our cute Japanese apps series (RSS), examining a trend of ‘kawaii’ success stories emerging from Japan’s mobile space. We’ve looked at quite a few cute Japanese apps recently, but it’s hard to get any cuter than a deco-pic app for sharing pictures of babies. CyberAgent’s BabyDays app is exactly that, delivering a ‘kawaii’ overload in both presentation and content. Like most photo decoration apps these days, BabyDays comes with an assortment of frames, decorative texts and stickers. You can like pictures submitted by other users, voting them up if they are especially cute. This is a pretty smart feature, letting parents enjoy the feeling if having scores of people complement their baby all at once [1]. BabyDays also has heavy social integration, with Ameba authentication and the ability to share your pictures to Facebook, Twitter, and Mixi if you choose. You also have the option of viewing your photos in a calendar presentation as well. While the app has been around since late last year, it surged to become Japan’s top iOS photo app back on May 24th after a new version was released. Currently there is a promotion ongoing that gave the app a kick…
This is part of our cute Japanese apps series (RSS), examining a trend of ‘kawaii’ success stories emerging from Japan’s mobile space.
We’ve looked at quite a few cute Japanese apps recently, but it’s hard to get any cuter than a deco-pic app for sharing pictures of babies. CyberAgent’s BabyDays app is exactly that, delivering a ‘kawaii’ overload in both presentation and content.
Like most photo decoration apps these days, BabyDays comes with an assortment of frames, decorative texts and stickers. You can like pictures submitted by other users, voting them up if they are especially cute. This is a pretty smart feature, letting parents enjoy the feeling if having scores of people complement their baby all at once [1]. BabyDays also has heavy social integration, with Ameba authentication and the ability to share your pictures to Facebook, Twitter, and Mixi if you choose. You also have the option of viewing your photos in a calendar presentation as well.
While the app has been around since late last year, it surged to become Japan’s top iOS photo app back on May 24th after a new version was released. Currently there is a promotion ongoing that gave the app a kick start too, whereby if users decorate their baby pics with special Miki House frames, the have a chance to have their baby become a model for the famous baby brand. This promotion extends to the BabyDays Facebook page, where one baby’s picture will be featured each day.
In addition to CyberAgent’s popular Ameba Pigg virtual world, the company has produced a number of very ‘cute’ apps in the past, including its Decolink chat app, and just recently Girls Pic Plus. We think this is a pretty smart space to be in these days, and they should probably consider offering BabyDays in traditional Chinese for Greater China, and then maybe in English too.
If you’d like to try the app out for yourself, you can pick it up over on the App Store or on Google Play. Or if you’re in the market for other fun baby apps, check out another Japan-made product, Kiddy, or my own personal favorite, Notabli.
See the original story in Japanese. Below is a condensed, translated version. For startups in their launching phase, sometimes the founders may have interpersonal issues, and the team may fall apart as a result. In order to find some insight from some of Japan’s more successful companies, we recently heard from the executives of three Japanese internet giants, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at their management systems. The panel, which took place at last week’s Infinity Ventures Summit, included: Yoshikazu Tanaka, CEO at GREE Kotaro Yamagishi, executive vice president at GREE Yusuke Hidaka, vice president at CyberAgent Tetesuhito Soyama, managing director at CyberAgent Yasuhiro Hagino, managing director at Mixi Yuichi Kawasaki, executive officer at Mixi Moderator: Etsuko Okajima, CEO at Pronova Most executives at GREE have been working together for a long time. Yoshikazu Tanaka, the company’s CEO explains: GREE’s Tanaka: At some companies, growth heavily relies on the founder’s effort. I previously worked at Rakuten where I saw how Hiroshi Mikitani managed the company, I sometimes wanted to work in a way that followed his management style. From my perspective, mobility of personnel is not essential as long as the company keeps growing. But for a startup founder, if…
For startups in their launching phase, sometimes the founders may have interpersonal issues, and the team may fall apart as a result. In order to find some insight from some of Japan’s more successful companies, we recently heard from the executives of three Japanese internet giants, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at their management systems. The panel, which took place at last week’s Infinity Ventures Summit, included:
Most executives at GREE have been working together for a long time. Yoshikazu Tanaka, the company’s CEO explains:
GREE’s Tanaka: At some companies, growth heavily relies on the founder’s effort. I previously worked at Rakuten where I saw how Hiroshi Mikitani managed the company, I sometimes wanted to work in a way that followed his management style. From my perspective, mobility of personnel is not essential as long as the company keeps growing. But for a startup founder, if you still keep a large stake in your company, your management board does not work anymore – because all the other board members do is just follow your judgment.
To avoid this particular issue, GREE is working on adding external people to its board of directors.
GREE’s Yamagishi: Our business has been rapidly expanding in the last few years, we actually have many issues to address in our management process. Recently we invited someone new to our board of directors, and asked him to provide some general business advice. He’s 65 years old but has been working in the global manufacturing business.
CEO Tanaka described the external director as a sort of mirror, since he can restrain himself based on things that person points out. When asked by the moderator about a possible change of board members, Tanaka responded he would add more people as the company becomes larger.
In a contrast with GREE, CyberAgent takes a different approach to deliver a improved and efficient management. The system is called CA8, and changes the board members every two years. This was deployed to eliminate employees’ anxiety that they might have no chance to join the board of directors in the future.
CyberAgent’s Hidaka: Our CEO Fujita has alone decided everything about the CA8 system. He said we would create the rules of personnel management and employee welfare from the scratch. If a rule works appropriately, we’ll keep using it in the company. To be honest, the system has some negative effects, but the positive aspects surpass the negative one.
A person from the audience asked if the company has any intention to invite a non-employee to become an executive at a future subsidiary. In response, Hidaka explained:
CyberAgent’s Hidaka: For an entrepreneur running a startup, if you can understand our corporate culture, we can acquire your startup and invite you to our team, which will work well. We haven’t yet done this because we haven’t found such a high-potential talent or startup. We are used to growing a business with our own employees rather than acquiring new business from outside the company. This trend will continue.
Perhaps by this he means that the company requires no drastic changes as long as its business keeps growing.
Mixi’s Ogino: Unlike the other two companies, our growth is in a crucial stage right now. In this situation, some of our employees started to stand in the way of their most competitive colleagues. That is unfortunate. In the beginning of 2010, my previous company was acquired and I joined the team. At that time our people were always following what their boss said, and they had no interest in competing with other internet companies or aiming for the top in the global markets.
In the crucial moments for management or executives, unless you change your mind significantly, your people are likely to see that you are not seriously determined to make things happen. But I learned the entire company may change if a small number of people change their mind.
Mixi acquired Naked Technology back in 2011, and Kamado in 2012. Those startups’ co-founders Yusuke Asakura and Yuichi Kawasaki joined Mixi, and now its board is filled with experienced entrepreneurs.
See this story in Japanese. Below are selected excerpts from the original. This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Sapporo, Japan. You can read more of our reports from this event here. In this panel, CyberAgent CEO Susumu Fujita spoke with five young Japanese entrepreneurs to find out more about how they got to where they are today. Participants in the discussion included: Riki Kojima, CEO of Willgate (an SEO solution provider) Nobuhiro Ariyasu, CEO of Coach United (a private lesson provider) Shintaro Otake, the CEO of Tri-fort (social app and smartphone app developer) Kensuke Furukawa, the CEO of Nanapi (an archive of how-to and daily tips) Natsuko Shiraki, the CEO of Hasuna (jeweler) Startup strategies in the face of hardships Otake: I intended to take a radical approach in order to make it successful. I set a target that we surpass Facebook, and I learned that we need radical and rapid growth to reach that goal. Kojima: At the age of 20, my company was still two years old but employed too many people, even though I didn’t have much business experience at that time. With our 100 million yen funding ($1 million), I…
This is part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit 2013 in Sapporo, Japan. You can read more of our reports from this event here.
In this panel, CyberAgent CEO Susumu Fujita spoke with five young Japanese entrepreneurs to find out more about how they got to where they are today. Participants in the discussion included:
Riki Kojima, CEO of Willgate (an SEO solution provider)
Nobuhiro Ariyasu, CEO of Coach United (a private lesson provider)
Shintaro Otake, the CEO of Tri-fort (social app and smartphone app developer)
Kensuke Furukawa, the CEO of Nanapi (an archive of how-to and daily tips)
Natsuko Shiraki, the CEO of Hasuna (jeweler)
Startup strategies in the face of hardships
Otake: I intended to take a radical approach in order to make it successful. I set a target that we surpass Facebook, and I learned that we need radical and rapid growth to reach that goal.
Willgate’s CEO Riki Kojima
Kojima: At the age of 20, my company was still two years old but employed too many people, even though I didn’t have much business experience at that time. With our 100 million yen funding ($1 million), I hired 30 people but the company unexpectedly collapsed too soon. Subsequently I found a colleague’s chat post that mentioned ‘I shouldn’t work with this company.”
Fujita: What are the advantages and disadvantages of launching your business when attending school?
Kojima: I had no business experience, so that I couldn’t figure out what was the best approach. I was forced to take a roundabout route and fail repeatedly. I’m still young, so people tend to see me as an immature business person, but in fact this makes me better at feeling people’s pains.
Monetization and business strategies
Fujita to Furukawa: I frequently visit your blog, and I know you’re quite good at writing stories. You, the company’s president, often show up on the web. What is there to gain from that?
Nanapi CEO Kensuke Furukawa
Furukawa: If you’re running an internet service, you should be familiar with the space. But on the other hand, it was once pointed out at an important business appointment that I might have too much time to spare. Many employee applicants come to us through my blog. Compared to applicants we find through talent search services, they are highly motivated and bring much benefit to our business.
Fujita: For today’s business owners, your blogging strategy makes sense. Not only to help your hiring efforts, but it may also help you bring your vision and message to employees as well. But what’s your overall strategy behind Nanapi? Are you just focused on growing it without considering monetization? Do you plan to sell it off to other companies?
Furukawa: In order to monetize the service, we need to make it grow. We have 20 million monthly unique users, not yet sufficient for the monetization. In Japan, if you monetize an internet service, it should be among the top 50 sites in the country in terms of internet traffic. Some web media companies have succeeded to monetize, but my interest is in making big stuff.
Coach United CEO Nobuhiro Ariyasu
Fujita: In my view, Cyta.jp (Coach United’s private lessons portal) is not very ‘Internettish’. How do you feel about it?
Ariyasu: No, our operations are not ‘Internettish’, as you say. For many online service providers, you typically send inquires to consumers to find out if they are satisfied with the customer experience. We actually use mystery shoppers to conduct surveys. In case that we can’t acquire users by e-mail marketing, sometimes even use telephone marketing.
Entrepreneurial culture in Japan
Fujita to Furukawa: Gradually we’re getting a culture where people admire exits. Do you plan to run your business independently without funding? Or are you interested in selling off?
Furukawa: We actually fundraised from Globis Venture Partners. In terms of our business model, our focus is on enlarging our media business. Selling off is a good option. But for now, we’d like to look at buying someone else’s service in order to enlarge our business.
I developed the Nanapi service because I couldn’t find any similar one. In our four-year experience since the launch, I eventually learned that it’s not so promising. Everyone wanted to have it but nobody actually did it, since it’s a bother.
Fujita: In Japan, entrepreneurs are generally not admired much. What do you think about this?
Furukawa: In my understanding, Japan is a country where we can easily launch a startup. We can also receive orders from big companies regardless of the size or maturity of the business. Compared to foreign countries, startup founders in Japan are relatively older, probably because we (generally) prefer to launch a business after getting work experience at a big company. For me, I’ve worked at Recruit for three years, which I think helps me do business more easily. If you are a student, people typically look down on you.
Kojima: When I failed in my business, I was bothered by the issues surrounding capitalization strategy and employment. I wanted more details about this information. I failed once but I bounced back even though I was immature. I hope our society can be tolerant of people who fail.
Ariyasu: Japan is heaven for entrepreneurs. Considering the huge amount of cash flow available in the market, the population of entrepreneurs going after that cash is extremely low. We need more success stories than we need government efforts to help entrepreneurship. If we get more billionaires, more people will get excited about entrepreneurship.
Fujita: Absolutely. If we have more success stories, that will certainly have an impact on people’s mindsets.
Tri-fort CEO Shintaro Otake
Otake finishes by asking Fujita a question: When are you planning to retire? What kind of people would you want to hand the company over to?
Fujita: To be honest, I’ve been always thinking [about] stepping down — when our business became profitable, when we completed the launch of Ameba (CyberAgent’s blog service). But the fact is, every time that we make an achievement, another new goal comes up.
For our media business especially, I was heavily involved in building it up. I did too much, and now I can’t really hand it over to someone else. (big laugh from the audience.)
There’s a lot of hype around the e-commerce space in Japan, particularly mobile commerce. According to a recent survey, one of four smartphone owners who read news on their mobile (the most popular activity among those polled) also report having bought something on their device. So it is not surprising to find many tech companies eager to get a piece of this growing market. One approach that many companies are taking is to create a sort of mobile flea market platform. To understand more about this trend, here are five apps from the sector which we think are worthy of recognition. Mainichi Frima ¶ The Mainichi Frima app (roughly translated as ‘Everyday Flea Market’) from CyberAgent features a range of stores and items, and a bulletin board upon which you can negotiate deals and prices. The app has successfully reproduced the offline flea market experience in the online space. The service is most popular among women in their 20s and 30s, and just five months after its initial release, the app already features items worth over 300 million yen (nearly $3 million) in total. The app is available both on iOS and on Android if you’d like to check it…
There’s a lot of hype around the e-commerce space in Japan, particularly mobile commerce. According to a recent survey, one of four smartphone owners who read news on their mobile (the most popular activity among those polled) also report having bought something on their device. So it is not surprising to find many tech companies eager to get a piece of this growing market. One approach that many companies are taking is to create a sort of mobile flea market platform. To understand more about this trend, here are five apps from the sector which we think are worthy of recognition.
The Mainichi Frima app (roughly translated as ‘Everyday Flea Market’) from CyberAgent features a range of stores and items, and a bulletin board upon which you can negotiate deals and prices. The app has successfully reproduced the offline flea market experience in the online space. The service is most popular among women in their 20s and 30s, and just five months after its initial release, the app already features items worth over 300 million yen (nearly $3 million) in total. The app is available both on iOS and on Android if you’d like to check it out.
For those of you with kids, you know how fast they grow. They keep out-growing the clothes and toys you have bought for them faster than you can buy them. Web and mobile development company Xtone came up with a solution they call Prima.
Parents can simply hand down their items to other parents who have younger kids. The app is free for anyone who wishes to sign up, but it will take a 10% commision for every transaction made. Prima for Android can be downloaded here.
A graduate startup of the Open Network Lab incubator, Fril is a flea market app targeting young girls and women. Just a month after its launch, the app had over 8,000 items for sale. Fril very deliberately made the entire auction process mobile only — which is unconventional, but at this point it looks like a sound strategy. Of its total registered users, one in five girls puts their items on sale with the average price of a item falling somewhere between 2000 to 3000 yen (about $20 to $30). The app is available on both iOS and Android.
Behind every item in your closet, there is a story. Where you bought it and why, or maybe someone gave it to you for a reason. Miyazaki-based development company Aratana has created a commerce app for iOS called MicroStore.me. It provides a place where people can sell an item by telling the story behind that item. Users can share these stories on different social networks, allowing them to not only make money from what they don’t want anymore, but through the story process they get to connect with like-minded people. Check out how the app works in the video below.
Pashaoku is an auction app developed by the folks over at CyberAgent. As a comprehensive auction application, its competitors are internet giants like Yahoo Auction and Bidders (now known as DeNA Shopping). Auction categories ranges from fashion to interior decorations, or even manga and books. CyberAgent is using the same strategy that it has taken with its Ameba Blog, leveraging the power of celebrities and well-known TV talent. These celebrities are selling signed books and sneakers that they have worn, for which I’m sure fans will pay a high price. Pashaoku is available for download on both iOS and Android.
Mobile commerce is definitely a fascinating sector to watch. Online auctions and flea markets can often be simplified when conducted on smartphones, wheras they sometimes confuse users on PCs. There’s certainly lots of potential for small services like these to seep into the mainstream.
We’ve covered the cutthroat chat application war in the Japanese market in a recent post, illustrating how NHN Japan’s Line leads the game so far, with DeNA’s Comm and KakaoTalk as distant runners-up. As if there weren’t enough chat apps already, CyberAgent (TYO:4751) just launched yet another player, but this one has a slightly different angle. Decolink (yes, it’s another Deco-something app!) is CyberAgent’s newly minted application for iOS and Android, which is aming to snag teenage girls as its target users. The app lets you chat with a maximum of 100 friends, and you can also change the background image and fonts for different chat windows. This latter ability to customize the look of a product is essential when the primarily target market is younger girls. What’s even more essential perhaps are the decorative stamps, of which Decolink provides over 10,000. Stamps are often cited as the major reason behind Line’s huge success so far. Sort of like emoji on steriods, people often use stamps in chat to express themselves instead of using text. In much the same way that a Facebook Like is a sort of mindless response that doesn’t require any words, stamps are often used…
We’ve covered the cutthroat chat application war in the Japanese market in a recent post, illustrating how NHN Japan’s Line leads the game so far, with DeNA’s Comm and KakaoTalk as distant runners-up. As if there weren’t enough chat apps already, CyberAgent (TYO:4751) just launched yet another player, but this one has a slightly different angle.
Decolink (yes, it’s another Deco-something app!) is CyberAgent’s newly minted application for iOS and Android, which is aming to snag teenage girls as its target users. The app lets you chat with a maximum of 100 friends, and you can also change the background image and fonts for different chat windows. This latter ability to customize the look of a product is essential when the primarily target market is younger girls.
What’s even more essential perhaps are the decorative stamps, of which Decolink provides over 10,000. Stamps are often cited as the major reason behind Line’s huge success so far. Sort of like emoji on steriods, people often use stamps in chat to express themselves instead of using text. In much the same way that a Facebook Like is a sort of mindless response that doesn’t require any words, stamps are often used in the same way among many Japanese users.
Deco-disrupter?
CyberAgent does have a competitive advantage, as the company runs the huge Ameba Blog platform which had more than 20 million users as of January 2012. The platform is widely used by Japanese people including celebrities. Through cross-promotions with other products under the Ameba umbrella, Decolink might be able to eclipse some of the other chat app competitors — although it’s unlikely that it could catch Line.
Decolink was developed by a team within CyberAgent that creates products dedicated for teens. I have to wonder if these cute, more feminine stamps are a key differeciator from Line, and if any teenage girls will take the bait. We’ll find out sooner or later, so stay tuned.
CyberAgent 
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Rick Martin
Takeshi Hirano
