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Japan’s Anydoor, offering crowdsourced translation service, acquired for $14M

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese translation service giant Rosetta (TSE:6182) announced today that it would take the entire stake in Tokyo-based Anydoor, the company behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, for about 1.4 billion yen (about $14 million).  In this deal, the startup plans to exchange its 49.88% stake for the acquirer’s share and receive a value for the remaining 50.12% stake in cash. Established in February of 2009 by Naoki Yamada, who had studied abroad, Conyac is a product of his experience as he was often asked to translate short messages. According to the company’s website, it has acquired over 80,000 crowdsourced translators across 100 countries as of this month. After winning seed money at a business competition hosted by Skylight Consulting, Yamada paired up with his buddy Tomohiro Onuma and kicked it into gear by encountering Tokyo-based startup accelerator Samurai Incubate. Since then, Anydoor has successfuly secured funds totaling $600,000 from Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and SMBC Venture Capital in October of 2013 while receiving funding from Japanese VC firm ngi group (now known as United) as well as venture capitalist Anri Samata. See also: Japan’s Conyac now provides more than translation, better helping companies go global Japan’s…

naoki-yamada
Anydoor co-founder and CEO Naoki Yamada

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese translation service giant Rosetta (TSE:6182) announced today that it would take the entire stake in Tokyo-based Anydoor, the company behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, for about 1.4 billion yen (about $14 million).  In this deal, the startup plans to exchange its 49.88% stake for the acquirer’s share and receive a value for the remaining 50.12% stake in cash.

Established in February of 2009 by Naoki Yamada, who had studied abroad, Conyac is a product of his experience as he was often asked to translate short messages. According to the company’s website, it has acquired over 80,000 crowdsourced translators across 100 countries as of this month.

After winning seed money at a business competition hosted by Skylight Consulting, Yamada paired up with his buddy Tomohiro Onuma and kicked it into gear by encountering Tokyo-based startup accelerator Samurai Incubate.

Since then, Anydoor has successfuly secured funds totaling $600,000 from Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and SMBC Venture Capital in October of 2013 while receiving funding from Japanese VC firm ngi group (now known as United) as well as venture capitalist Anri Samata.

See also:

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Translations startups targeting non-tech Japanese SMEs

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This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology. Translations startups like Shibuya-headquartered Gengo and anydooR, the Conyac crowdsourced translations operator, took part in Tokyo Business Summit 2014 held late last week at the waterfront Big Sight convention facilities. This year’s event had more tech-related firms showcasing their wares than ever before, including those related to use of the space environment. This was the first time for Gengo to set up a booth at the event, which in the past brought together non- and low-tech Japanese small and medium-sized Enterprises for the most part. Gengo’s marketing manager Nozomi Umenai said, Gengo is expanding to mass market, as exemplified by Tokyo Business Summit participants. We wanted to showcase how easy and affordable it is to use Gengo API. Many of the participants are currently looking to expand overseas business dealings, both outbound as well as inbound (especially those related to the free trade agreement with Australia, as exemplified by meat products, and Trans-Pacific Partnership), so the venue provided a ready pool of Japanese SMEs for contact by translations outfits. Conyac — whose operation is based in Kanda, Tokyo known for…

This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.


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Image credit: Tokyo Business Summit

Translations startups like Shibuya-headquartered Gengo and anydooR, the Conyac crowdsourced translations operator, took part in Tokyo Business Summit 2014 held late last week at the waterfront Big Sight convention facilities. This year’s event had more tech-related firms showcasing their wares than ever before, including those related to use of the space environment.

This was the first time for Gengo to set up a booth at the event, which in the past brought together non- and low-tech Japanese small and medium-sized Enterprises for the most part. Gengo’s marketing manager Nozomi Umenai said,

Gengo is expanding to mass market, as exemplified by Tokyo Business Summit participants. We wanted to showcase how easy and affordable it is to use Gengo API.

Many of the participants are currently looking to expand overseas business dealings, both outbound as well as inbound (especially those related to the free trade agreement with Australia, as exemplified by meat products, and Trans-Pacific Partnership), so the venue provided a ready pool of Japanese SMEs for contact by translations outfits.

Conyac — whose operation is based in Kanda, Tokyo known for its many low-tech SMEs — also had a booth out at the event, which was held for the 28th time since 1988.

The Conyac booth staff also noted,

We just released a website translation management tool called ‘Conyac Front‘ last month. At the summit, we’re looking for the testers for the Conyac Front(β).

Other firms of interest this year were those focused on Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and other emergency-related businesses.

Further info on Tokyo Business Summit is available at http://www.business-summit.jp/tbs/

Japan’s Conyac launches new platform that turns a website into a multilingual environment

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation platform Conyac, unveiled a new translation platform called Conyac Front in beta last week. The platform allows website owners to turn their sites into multilingual versions using crowdsourced translation forces. The fee includes a hosting charge (about $100 a month for each language), a translation charge, and other optional charges when needed. The company is inviting monitor users, where up to 20 companies can use the new platform without paying translation and optional charges until December. Anydoor CEO Naoki Yamada says they will start charging for the service next January. Conyac Front helps companies develop multilingual websites. The localization process, including translation, usually requires a massive workload, where the most difficult part is selecting correct words in translation. We also have the English version, and we know the word picking process in translation for delivering right context is quite difficult. We have to see if translation results are naturally expressed for native speakers and terminology is also common to many people in the industry. So we understand that many startups postponed launching multilingual websites despite the fact that they have typically announced their global expansion. How will…

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credit: Free Grunge Textures – www.freestock.ca via FindCC

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation platform Conyac, unveiled a new translation platform called Conyac Front in beta last week. The platform allows website owners to turn their sites into multilingual versions using crowdsourced translation forces.

The fee includes a hosting charge (about $100 a month for each language), a translation charge, and other optional charges when needed. The company is inviting monitor users, where up to 20 companies can use the new platform without paying translation and optional charges until December. Anydoor CEO Naoki Yamada says they will start charging for the service next January.

Conyac Front helps companies develop multilingual websites. The localization process, including translation, usually requires a massive workload, where the most difficult part is selecting correct words in translation.

We also have the English version, and we know the word picking process in translation for delivering right context is quite difficult. We have to see if translation results are naturally expressed for native speakers and terminology is also common to many people in the industry. So we understand that many startups postponed launching multilingual websites despite the fact that they have typically announced their global expansion.

How will the new platform solve this problem? Yamada said that the platform enables the translation of websites dynamically using a proxy server. Conyac Front crawls a website and lists an index of webpages. Website owners can point to the part that is common across these webpages (such as menu or site description) and order a translation.

Website owners do not need to build a multilingual interface. When a user visits a website, the platform will detect their access location. If the access is from outside your language region, the platform will transfer the access to a proxy server and show translated results.

Translated results will be dynamically updated, which will allow website owners to adopt the platform even for websites using content management systems such as WordPress. But the company says that some membership-based websites, which typically require a user login process or a paywall, may not work properly in transferring user access to the proxy server.

The platform is more suited for translating corporate websites rather than news websites like The Bridge, where content is not often updated and very few technical terms are used.

In conversation with Japan’s Samurai Incubate, Anydoor about early-stage startups (Part 3 of 3)

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See the original article in Japanese The partnership between investors and entrepreneurs is an interesting one. In the seed money round, investors not only invest funds, but they cooperate with entrepreneurs on many aspects of the business. But what’s actually going during the very early funding round? We spoke with an investor and an entrepreneur to find out more about this. Kentaro Sakaibara is the CEO of Samurai Incubate, a pioneer among independent incubators in Japan. Naoki Yamada is the CEO of Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, a portfolio startup of Samurai Incubate. In the previous article, they talked about how they cooperated on the Conyac translation service early on. This conversation is the third and final part, where Sakakibara talked about his long term goals. History of Anydoor Feburary 2009: Naoki Yamada and Tomohiro Onuma founded Anydoor. May 2009: Conyac, crowdsourced translation service, was launched. March 2010: Yamada met Sakakibara, and became one of the first portfolios of Samurai Incubate. December 2011: Anydoor fundraised from United. February 2013: Conyac for Business was launched. October 2013: Anydorr fundraised from three VCs. Yamada: How do you support young startups recently? Sakakibara: For the first half a year after…

See the original article in Japanese

The partnership between investors and entrepreneurs is an interesting one. In the seed money round, investors not only invest funds, but they cooperate with entrepreneurs on many aspects of the business. But what’s actually going during the very early funding round? We spoke with an investor and an entrepreneur to find out more about this. Kentaro Sakaibara is the CEO of Samurai Incubate, a pioneer among independent incubators in Japan. Naoki Yamada is the CEO of Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, a portfolio startup of Samurai Incubate.

In the previous article, they talked about how they cooperated on the Conyac translation service early on. This conversation is the third and final part, where Sakakibara talked about his long term goals.

History of Anydoor

Feburary 2009: Naoki Yamada and Tomohiro Onuma founded Anydoor.
May 2009: Conyac, crowdsourced translation service, was launched.
March 2010: Yamada met Sakakibara, and became one of the first portfolios of Samurai Incubate.
December 2011: Anydoor fundraised from United.
February 2013: Conyac for Business was launched.
October 2013: Anydorr fundraised from three VCs.

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Yamada: How do you support young startups recently?

Sakakibara: For the first half a year after investment, I use more schemes when I give advice, more than before. Hands-on for half a year, and then changing the meetings to twice a week… things like that.

Yamada: It’s more formulated rather than working together through trial and error.

Sakakibara: Right.

Yamada: Do you still have the Excel spreadsheet we used before?

Sakakibara: Yes, the form has changed though.

Yamada: Wow, I miss that. I struggled with filling out the tables, but I think that sheet helped me a lot in finding the next investor. The template made it easier for me to pitch in front of investors.

Sakakibara: Actually, some don’t like the sheet. They feel like they’re being controlled.

Yamada: Will you continue to support startups this way? Will you look at startups in Japan from a broader point of view?

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Sakakibara: I think both perspectives are important. Some startups, incubators and CVCs were founded because of our influence. But I personally feel I shouldn’t be in Japan; I should create successful startups overseas.

Yamada: Are you going overseas? I remember when we were in the US, you’d been saying you want to try there.

Sakakibara: I’d rather go to Israel than the US, actually. I’d like to move on from Kobayashi-san to take a chance in Silicon Valley, and make connections on my own with investors in the Middle East and create a chance for startups in Japan to get investment from them.

Yamada: What is your final goal?

Sakakibara: The Nobel Peace Prize.

Yamada: You are very consistent about that. At our first meeting at Tully’s Coffee, you mentioned that. I thought you might be a crazy…

Sakakibara: Really? Did I say that then?

Yamada: And you mentioned Eiichi Shibusawa half a year later [1].

Sakakibara: Actually when I looked up business people related to the Nobel Peace Prize, I found information about Eiichi Shibusawa. He founded 521 companies, so I thought I would create 522 companies by the year 2020. You know, if I become a successful incubator in developing countries and contribute to making those countries richer, then it would be possible to win the prize.

Yamada: Quite a simple plan.

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The Bridge: How do you spend your free time?

Yamada: When I used to spend weekends in Samurai House, I asked Sakakibara-san what he does. I remember he said that he watched DVDs, and I thought he was sort of introverted. We went to a rental video shop together, and I recommended him all the good DVDs for half an hour. But every time he replied he’d already watched them.

Sakakibara: Yeah, at GEO in Ekoda [2].

Yamada: The rental fee was very low, like 50 yen for each. He watched them all and had nothing left to watch.

Sakakibara: Haha. Right.

Yamada: I’m sure you will miss those days 10 years later. You will look back at the old days from Israel. Don’t you have a partner?

Sakakibara: No. Startups are my girlfriend.

Yamada: Ahhhh….

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The Bridge: You got married, Yamada-san. Right?

Yamada: We started our relationship when I was 18 years old. We went to the US together. Quite a long relationship. A bit complicated though.

Sakakibara: Onuma-san told me that this subject is taboo.

Yamada: The funny thing is when we got investment from Sakakibara-san, Onuma’s marriage was then fixed. And when the next investment was settled, I got married. After our recent capital increase, the marriage of our CTO was fixed.

Sakakibara: Haha. Marriage-raising, eh?

The Bridge: I think we’ll end there. Thanks guys.


  1. Referred to as the father of Japanese capitalism.  ↩

  2. GEO is a movie rental chain in Japan.  ↩

Japanese translation startup Conyac raises $600,000

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, announced today that it has raised funding worth 60 million yen (approximately $600,000) from three Japanese VC firms: United, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Capital. Coinciding with this announcement, Conyac also unveiled that its total number of corporate users exceeds 1,000. With these new funds, the company plans to intensify business and system development efforts. We’ve been using Conyac for translating news stories between Japanese and English. In the interests of full dislosure, I spoke with some of the investors to help them understand how much potential the startup might have. Here is the points I told them: Language barriers can be a big problem, especially here in Asia where languages are so diverse. There could be big potential in launching news media sites that making the most of translation services like Conyac, in the same way that we do. Many people in Japan have difficulty finding information because of language barriers. If the startup can eliminate the loss of such business opportunities, it could potentially have a great impact on business and culture. Even in this era, I’m still a little skeptical about whether…

naoki-yamada
Naoki Yamada

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, announced today that it has raised funding worth 60 million yen (approximately $600,000) from three Japanese VC firms: United, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Capital. Coinciding with this announcement, Conyac also unveiled that its total number of corporate users exceeds 1,000.

With these new funds, the company plans to intensify business and system development efforts.

We’ve been using Conyac for translating news stories between Japanese and English. In the interests of full dislosure, I spoke with some of the investors to help them understand how much potential the startup might have. Here is the points I told them:

  • Language barriers can be a big problem, especially here in Asia where languages are so diverse.
  • There could be big potential in launching news media sites that making the most of translation services like Conyac, in the same way that we do.

Many people in Japan have difficulty finding information because of language barriers. If the startup can eliminate the loss of such business opportunities, it could potentially have a great impact on business and culture.

Even in this era, I’m still a little skeptical about whether or not machine translation services will be able to overcome language barriers. Crowdsourced translation services is just one available option.

I think they might need to publish more case studies about how companies or entrepreneurs can expand their business by breaking language barriers. For many users, if you can recognize Conyac as a platform that enhances your business, then you can recognize the real value proposition of the platform.

Translation startup Conyac partners with World Jumper, introduces new API

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Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, announced today that it has partnered with Yaraku, the provider of website translation tool World Jumper. Since its launch back in 2009, Anydoor has been providing translation services between multiple languages using crowdsourced workers. The company recently set up its first overseas office in San Francisco, and is intensifying its global expansion efforts to better serve users worldwide and diversify the language base of its crowdsourced workers. To date the startup has raised a total of approximately 40 million yen ($431,000) from several Japanese investors. World Jumper was launched last year, and has been a translation service mainly for website owners. The company outsources orders to third-party agencies (such as Conyac or Gengo), but it also accumulates frequently-used translation requests and results in its database for future reference. This results in better translation results without the need to outsource to agencies, and it helps keep translation costs down while the quality improves as time goes by. The company raised 110 million yen (about $1.1 million) from several Japanese investors back in May. By joining forces, the two startups expect to serve more translation needs, but at affordable rates. Surely this sector…

conyac-worldjumper-logos

Tokyo-based Anydoor, the startup behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, announced today that it has partnered with Yaraku, the provider of website translation tool World Jumper.

Since its launch back in 2009, Anydoor has been providing translation services between multiple languages using crowdsourced workers. The company recently set up its first overseas office in San Francisco, and is intensifying its global expansion efforts to better serve users worldwide and diversify the language base of its crowdsourced workers. To date the startup has raised a total of approximately 40 million yen ($431,000) from several Japanese investors.

World Jumper was launched last year, and has been a translation service mainly for website owners. The company outsources orders to third-party agencies (such as Conyac or Gengo), but it also accumulates frequently-used translation requests and results in its database for future reference. This results in better translation results without the need to outsource to agencies, and it helps keep translation costs down while the quality improves as time goes by. The company raised 110 million yen (about $1.1 million) from several Japanese investors back in May.

By joining forces, the two startups expect to serve more translation needs, but at affordable rates. Surely this sector will be positively impacted by recently announced Tokyo Olympic Games coming up in 2020. With the partnership, Conyac also changed its web interface today and released a new API that allows third-party developers to integrate the translation solutions with their apps.

Meet the 9 startups from e27’s Japan satellite event

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At e27’s Echelon satellite event in Tokyo yesterday, nine startups pitched their businesses in front of a panel of judges. The lineup of startups was pretty high quality, not only with startups from Japan but also from Korea, Taiwan, and beyond. Check out our overview of the pitches below to find out which idea walked away the winner. 1. Belladati ¶ Pitched by Martin Trgina, this is a business analytics service that helps companies visualize and analyse all sort of data. Belladati can connect to over 100 different sources of data for a client, including Twitter, Google, Oracle, or SAP, and “bring your data out of the dark,” exported to powerpoint, PDF, or embedded in your own apps. They have predefined templates for certain industries, so users don’t have to start from scratch if they don’t want to. The service is already being used by a number of prominent companies including Red Bull and Korea Telecom. It can be used as either a cloud solution or installed on-premise. 2. CloudDock ¶ This cloud enterprise solution was presented by Shigeta Okamoto, pitched as a sort of Dropbox for business. They want to isolate user data from the PC (things such as…

e27 Echelon Japan satellite event

At e27’s Echelon satellite event in Tokyo yesterday, nine startups pitched their businesses in front of a panel of judges. The lineup of startups was pretty high quality, not only with startups from Japan but also from Korea, Taiwan, and beyond. Check out our overview of the pitches below to find out which idea walked away the winner.

1. Belladati

Pitched by Martin Trgina, this is a business analytics service that helps companies visualize and analyse all sort of data. Belladati can connect to over 100 different sources of data for a client, including Twitter, Google, Oracle, or SAP, and “bring your data out of the dark,” exported to powerpoint, PDF, or embedded in your own apps. They have predefined templates for certain industries, so users don’t have to start from scratch if they don’t want to. The service is already being used by a number of prominent companies including Red Bull and Korea Telecom. It can be used as either a cloud solution or installed on-premise.

belladati
Belladati

2. CloudDock

This cloud enterprise solution was presented by Shigeta Okamoto, pitched as a sort of Dropbox for business. They want to isolate user data from the PC (things such as documents, pictures, music, etc.), so once you log into CloudDock on a Windows machine, you’ll see your files as normal, but with a small cloud icon on top of them, sort of like Dropbox puts a green check mark on files which have been synced. And when you access that file in an application, it’s quickly downloaded for use. But upon logging out of CloudDock, the data is no longer on that device. This service can be used on mobile as well.

The startup is targeting customers considering VDI systems, and so far they have already managed to sell over 9000 licenses in just two months since their launch in February.

clouddock
CloudDock

3. Conyac for Business

We’ve heard from Conyac a few times before, so regular readers are likely somewhat familiar with this service. Naoki Yamada pitched the startups offering for business, explaining that their crowdsourced translation solution can provide quick translations for businesses for a low price. As a typical business use case, he gave the example of a 10-slide powerpoint presentation, which was translated in five hours and cost $36. In comparison to competing services, Naoki explained that on their platform translators can be educated by more experienced translators, thus giving them an opportunity to improve themselves.

Conyac
Conyac

4. Million Moments

This app is a product from Sony Digital Network Applications (SDNA), a group that presentor Masato Kuninori describes as a team of ‘intrapreneurs’ who operate as a startup somewhat independent of its parent company Sony. This photo app was released about a year ago (I gave it a short review), which presents pictures in a magazine style reminiscient of Flipboard, with a great design and the ability to add labels to organize your photos. But I was curious to hear Kuninori describe one of their business models as becoming a B2B service, where they would create versions of Million Moments for various companies. He also noted that once they create a cloud service, they might try to use the labels that users add to photos, although he was somewhat vague on the details, unable to disclose too much.

Million Moments
Million Moments

5. Quick Language Learning

This Taiwanese startup offers a range of preschool and entertainment apps for kids, a sort of learning cirriculum in the form of fun games. Currently QLL has over 140 applications, with the goal of offering 300. To date they have seen 4.5 million downloads, 50,000 daily active users, the majority of which are from their home market of Taiwan. The business model is paid advertising in app, as well as licensed content. The company began one and a half years ago, but are now trying to expand abroad, eyeing the Japanese market as one of their next targets. Serkan Toto, one of the judges, asked about how the company planned to market their apps, and presentor Lulu Yeh explained that since they often have a few of their apps ranked very high in app stores, they can then cross promote their other offerings. It seems like a solid idea, and it will be interesting to see how they fare outside Taiwan.

Lulu from QLL
Lulu from QLL

6. Roam & Wander

This was another interesting games/entertainment offering for kids, a games and toy startup that was originally launched late last year. The company’s games offer physical stickers as a reward, which they say has worked really well in terms of getting kids excited about playing. For some kids who receive these stickers, it might be the first piece of physical mail they ever receive, so naturally they get quite excited. Typically Roam & Wander will send about 300 stickers a day, with a peak of about 700. But presentor Jason describes it as a viral gateway, and the cost of mailing has dropped a little as they have grown.

The startup also plans to bring their Tutu game character to life in the form of a doll that uses a smartphone as the characters face. Special capacitive touch toys are individually recognized by the application, allowing kids to give the doll a drink for example. They are hoping to soon launch a Kickstarter project in order to drum up some awareness about their product.

Roam & Wander
Roam & Wander

7. Zimly

The only Korean entry in attendance, Zimly is a startup that has been around for a few years now. But at the pitch event, it was presented as a solution to share video across devices, or as a way to watch videos together with friends. Currently the service shares video from PC to mobile, but they hope to make it from “any device to any device” soon. The previous version of Zimly has about two million users, and it is planned to move them over to this new version, and then increase the number of users.

Zimly
Zimly

8. DecoAlbum

While there’s no shortage of cute photo apps on the market, this one looks sort of promising. Decoalbum’s value proposition is to offer two of the typical cute photo app functions – photo decoration and photo collage – combined in a single app. Readers may remember that we recently featured the collage creation app Papelook, which had racked up more than 4 million downloads since its initial release back in mid–2011. DecoAlbum, which appears to have been on the app store since the middle of last year, boasts 1 million downloads, and the founders say that’s without any paid promotion. Their business model is printing photos, which they plan to do in cooperation with print service Tolot, as well as photo storage. They also mentioned plans to release stickers next month.

DecoAlbum
DecoAlbum

9. TopAdmit (Winner)

Another Taiwan-based service, TopAdmit offers the editing services of its team of 45+ English speaking editors. The pitched use case was a Japanese student who has written an application to a university abroad, but needs some editing to ensure the quality of the document. But TopAdmit also aspires to expand to provide editing of research papers and business editing. They charge 30 cents per English word, or a retainer feed of $500 per month. TopAdmit was judged the winner of the pitch event [1].

TopAdmit
TopAdmit

  1. Speaking as an editor, I’m curious to hear how they handle really awful submissions. I wonder what kind of back-and-forth communication, if any, occurs when a given sentence’s meaning is not clear.  ↩

Korea’s beSuccess holds startup competition in Tokyo, winner moves on to Seoul for main event

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Read our Japanese report on this event Our partner tech site beSuccess will hold the second edition of its beLAUNCH event in Seoul this May, one of the largest tech startup conferences in the Asia region. In association with Tokyo-based Skyland Ventures and Seoul-based startup VCNC, the media company had a local satellite event in Tokyo on Wednesday, where one finalist was chosen from six participating Japanese startups to pitch at the main event in Korea. Let’s rundown through the lineup and take a closer look to who’s going to Gangnam, Seoul this May. The participating judges for the pitching session were (in alphabetical order): Hyungseok Dino Ha, CEO, Memebox (Seoul) James Jung, CEO, beSuccess (Seoul) Jimmy Jihoon Rim, CEO, Kcube Ventures (Seoul) Kiyo Kobayashi, CEO, Nobot Inc., (Tokyo) Ryuichi Nishida, editor-in-chief, TechCrunch Japan (Tokyo) Tetsuro Oshita, managing director, Cyber Agent Ventures (Tokyo) Yasuhiko Yurimoto, president and CEO, Global Brain (Tokyo) Yoshiro Taneda, senior director of digital media, Fuji TV (Tokyo) Designclue (the 3rd prize winner) ¶ Prize: Wins a complimentary booth to exhibiting at the Seoul event When you order logo design in Japan, it will usually not be very cheap due to high labor costs in the country. It can also be very hard for most Japanese people to order design work from…

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Read our Japanese report on this event

Our partner tech site beSuccess will hold the second edition of its beLAUNCH event in Seoul this May, one of the largest tech startup conferences in the Asia region. In association with Tokyo-based Skyland Ventures and Seoul-based startup VCNC, the media company had a local satellite event in Tokyo on Wednesday, where one finalist was chosen from six participating Japanese startups to pitch at the main event in Korea.

Let’s rundown through the lineup and take a closer look to who’s going to Gangnam, Seoul this May. The participating judges for the pitching session were (in alphabetical order):

Designclue (the 3rd prize winner)

Prize:

  • Wins a complimentary booth to exhibiting at the Seoul event

designclue

When you order logo design in Japan, it will usually not be very cheap due to high labor costs in the country. It can also be very hard for most Japanese people to order design work from overseas because of the language barrier.

Designclue is a logo-focused crowdsourcing site which allows users to easily place orders from independent foreign designers. Readers may recall that we we featured them on this site last week. The website has multilingual interfaces to easily facilitate your orders. Users can receive many design proposals at affordable rates from registered designers in emerging markets.

Not long ago, the startup announced that it had fundraised 14.7 million yen (about $150,000) from two Japanese seed investors, Incubate Fund and East Ventures.

Comobaco

comobaco

Comobaco allows you and your friends to create a pool of shared items both on the web and in real life. With this service, you can easily share things you own (such as books, DVDs, and game titles) with your office colleagues, your roommates, or any similar sort of group.

To use the service, someone at your location has to become the manager of a box, which will then be used to hold the exchanged items. If you put in things you don’t want to use any more, others will have a chance to take them without having to buy. The service’s founder hopes to change the concept of buying things for yourself only into buying things for the sake of the many people around you as well.

Job Share

jobshare_logo Job share is a community-based talent seeking site that helps companies find new employees who might enjoy working together. When you post a job opportunity on the service, your posting will be shared via social media through colleagues at your company. If someone sees it and would like to work at your company, you can then hire them if they’re a good fit. The startup aims to help companies create a workplace with a positive atmosphere by enlisting the help of existing employees in finding their new colleagues.

Conyac (the 1st prize winner)

From left: Conyacs CEO Naoki Yamada (the 1st prizw winner), Global Brain's Yasuhiko Yurimoto (award presenter), and beSuccess James Jung (award presenter)
From the left: Conyac’s CEO Naoki Yamada (the 1st prize winner), Global Brain’s Yasuhiko Yurimoto (award presenter), and beSuccess’ James Jung (award presenter)

Prizes:

  • A complimentary booth for exhibiting at the Seoul event
  • Round-trip air tickets for two, Tokyo/Seoul
  • A chance to pitch at the main competition

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Conyac is a crowdsourced translation service that gives users an interesting way to communicate with someone in a foreign language for affordable rates. When we spoke to them in a recent interview, they introduced the launch of a high-end service for business use, and told us about their first overseas expansion to San Francisco.

Booklap (the 2nd prize winner)

Prizes:

  • A complimentary booth for exhibiting at the Seoul event
  • Round-trip air tickets for two, Tokyo/Seoul

booklap Finding the right book to buy at bookstore can often take a long time. One recent survey says that 39% of all bookstore purchases take more than an hour. Similarly when you buy a book on Amazon.com, you’ll rely on book reviews posted by other users — but some of them are not reliable or just not good enough to help you decide.

Booklap is a service that wants to help you find a book you will love to read. It has two ways of doing this. The first is based on your interests which are pulled from ‘social graphs’ such as your Facebook profile. The other way by presenting quotes from books that have impressed other users.

The startup is planning to introduce a smartphone app which will allow a user to easily post quotes by just shooting a picture. What differentiates this from Amazon.com is that book reviews are being posted with the real names of those who have written the review.

Their revenue model is expected to come from affiliate fees from online bookstores like Amazon.com, driving users to buy books on their site. Booklap raised 3 million yen (about $32,000) from Incubate Fund last July.

UI Scope

UIscope

UI Scope allows software and hardware developers to crowdsource product testing tasks. A registered tester (called a ‘panel’ in the service) receives a camera from the startup so that it can record the testing process. When a developer (called ‘a client’) chooses someone from all registered testers and asks them to test the product, that person will take about 20 minutes to test it and report back with a video of the testing process. The developer pays 3,000 yen (about $32) for this testing, and the tester receives 500 yen. The testing results are reported online in the form of video, screenshots, and behavioral reports in text.

UI Scope was launched last August with the aim of creating a huge database of product testing by gathering such test results and case studies. It has raised 5 million yen (about $53,800) from Movida Japan, and has acquired 120 developers and 2500 testers during the last six months.

And now from Korea…

Three Korean startups also attended the meet-up, pitching their remarkable services to the Japanese crowd. Let’s have a look at what’s hot in this neighboring tech community.

BeNative

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BeNative aims to help students have a more organic language learning experience by providing them with content that imitates real-life situations with native speakers. By presenting video clips of a specific occasion in English or other languages, the service allows users to learn more natural ways to speak new languages. According to Alan Moonsoon Kim, the CEO of parent company Smatoos, they are currently providing English version  and Chinese versions of the language learning site, as well as running news sites in English, Korean and Japanese. For more information, check out this feature over on Technode for more details.

Profeel.me

profeel.me_logo

Profeel.me is your digital business card, incorporating your social network accounts. It can be exchanged through text, messaging services, and social networks. Following the model of a real/physical business card, Korean-startup Venster has created an online business card that can be used as a virtual ID or calling card.  The startup’s CEO HoSuk Jeong presented. beSuccess has further information if you’d like to learn more.

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Profeel.me CEO HoSuk Jeong pitches to a Japanese crowd

Memebox

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Memebox is the Korean version of Birchbox, a subscription-based e-commerce service that periodically delivers a box of cosmetics to users. The startup’s CEO Hyungseok Dino Ha explains they have partnered with 185 brands worldwide, and have delivered 52,900 boxes to their customers since launching in February of 2012. Subscribers can sign up for the service using three different subscription options: one, two, or six months. So far there are over 5,000 total subscribers.

There are 31 people on the team with an expected revenue of $1.3 million in Q2 of 2013. The startup is from the first batch of graduates coming out of Seoul-based SparkLab’s incubation program.


The beLAUNCH 2013 main event is scheduled to take place at COEX, an exhibition center in Korea’s capital on May 1st and 2nd. If you’d like to join. please feel free to sign up.

From the left: Kcube Venture's Jimmy Rim and VCNC's Keisuke Kajitani with a collection of autographs.
From the left: Kcube Venture’s Jimmy Rim and VCNC’s Keisuke Kajitani with a collection of autographs.

Translation start-up Conyac plans presence in San Francisco, now offers services for businesses

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Conyac is a Tokyo-based startup that focuses on providing cost-effective translation services, leveraging crowdsourced expertise. It recently added a new service to its repertoire called Conyac for Business, and the company also announced its first overseas expansion to San Francisco. In addition to those developments, we also learned that Una Aruna Softic has joined the team to help their international marketing efforts in San Francisco. She previously worked with EverConnect.me, a social media account aggregation service that was shut down last September. We spoke with Una as well as Conyac’s CEO Naoki Yamada, about their plans to grow this translation business. Tell us about this new business service, and why you are expanding your offerings in this way. It’s called Conyac for Business, and it is designed better suit business translation needs. We started our service in May of 2009, aiming at giving individual users a way to break language barriers at affordable rates. [But] now we’re receiving more translation requests from corporate users, and that’s why we created the new service, to better serve those users. How is it different from your existing service? Our regular service provides translation services for casual communication purposes, such contacting a sales representative…

Conyac is a Tokyo-based startup that focuses on providing cost-effective translation services, leveraging crowdsourced expertise. It recently added a new service to its repertoire called Conyac for Business, and the company also announced its first overseas expansion to San Francisco. In addition to those developments, we also learned that Una Aruna Softic has joined the team to help their international marketing efforts in San Francisco. She previously worked with EverConnect.me, a social media account aggregation service that was shut down last September. We spoke with Una as well as Conyac’s CEO Naoki Yamada, about their plans to grow this translation business.

Conyac's Una Softic (left) and CEO Naoki Yamada (right)
Conyac’s Una Softic (left) and CEO Naoki Yamada (right)

Tell us about this new business service, and why you are expanding your offerings in this way.

It’s called Conyac for Business, and it is designed better suit business translation needs. We started our service in May of 2009, aiming at giving individual users a way to break language barriers at affordable rates. [But] now we’re receiving more translation requests from corporate users, and that’s why we created the new service, to better serve those users.

How is it different from your existing service?

Our regular service provides translation services for casual communication purposes, such contacting a sales representative at an e-commerce site abroad when ordering. For the purpose of encouraging our (crowdsourced) translators to make a translation request very quickly, the maximum length in each ‘request unit’ was limited to [a maximum of] 720 characters. However, for the business service, the limit is extended up to 50,000 characters so that our users need not to split sentences into pieces when placing a translation order, meaning it may fit even for business documents as well.  

Of course, in terms of satisfying clients with the translation quality, we also established a new qualification process to choose highly skilled translators for business needs. The business service can accept original documents for translation requests not only as text files but also in some different business document file formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, and Keynote Files. This feature would be really helpful for our business users, because they no longer need to replace texts in their original documents with translation results.

conyac_for_business

So why do this now?

We found there’s a need for much work coming from the social gaming industry. Social gaming developers are now intensifying their international expansion. And in terms of localizing their gaming apps with foreign languages, they have a tremendous need for translation because the release cycles of new apps and updates are very, very short. We believe our service fit them well, and that’s why we also added to our sales headcount in order to cultivate more corporate clients from the industry.

Does the recent change of your major shareholders have anything to do with this new business strategy?

Yes. So far, we have fundraised a total of approximately 40 million yen ($431,000) from Samurai Incubate, United (previously known as ngi group), and Skylight Consulting. The shares previously held by our first investor Samurai Incubate were handed over to angel investor Anri Samata, because he has many connections with our potential clients, so that he could help us.

You’re launching a new office in San Francisco. What’s the main purpose of that office?

Yes, my new colleague Una will be in charge of that, and we will be setting up a new office (or a desk) at a co-working space in San Francisco. We’ve not yet decided the location or the date of its launch, but will announce that very shortly. Basically, the main role of our SF office is to intensify our marketing efforts and gain a presence in the global startup community. Through the new office, we expect to get more new clients from the West coast who are in need of translation as well.

Do you have any plan to set up other overseas offices after San Francisco?

Yes. We’re now exploring the potential of setting up a new office in Singapore, where a number of Japanese and Asian gaming/tech startups have their offices.


The competition in the translation space is getting more intense these days. A Conyac competitor, 500Starups-backed Gengo is considered to be slightly ahead when it comes to serving businesses, as they have developed many tools and interfaces for business translation needs. In the Asian region, other startups in the translation space include OneSky and Translation Market – both from Hong Kong.