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Japan’s Designclue delivers crowdsourcing industry insights [Infographic]

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Back in February we featured logo crowdsourcing service Designclue, which leverages the power of freelance designers regardless of their location. It’s operated by Tokyo-based startup Purple Cow, and recently the company released some information about its user base and how they work. The company conducted a survey of 135 of its users, which is not an especially large sample size, but it does give us an idea of which nations are keen to use Designclue. It appears most popular in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, although it also has users in its home market of Japan. As you can see in the graphic below, When those users were asked where they receive crowdsourced requests from, the most common answers were the US, followed by Australia and Japan. These workers are using, on average, about four different crowdsourcing services to earn income, including Designclue, earning an average wage of about $1100 from that activity. To see more of this information put together from the folks at Designclue, you can check out the full infographic below. It’s in Japanese, but I’ve summarized most of the main points above.

Back in February we featured logo crowdsourcing service Designclue, which leverages the power of freelance designers regardless of their location. It’s operated by Tokyo-based startup Purple Cow, and recently the company released some information about its user base and how they work.

The company conducted a survey of 135 of its users, which is not an especially large sample size, but it does give us an idea of which nations are keen to use Designclue. It appears most popular in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, although it also has users in its home market of Japan.

As you can see in the graphic below, When those users were asked where they receive crowdsourced requests from, the most common answers were the US, followed by Australia and Japan. These workers are using, on average, about four different crowdsourcing services to earn income, including Designclue, earning an average wage of about $1100 from that activity.

To see more of this information put together from the folks at Designclue, you can check out the full infographic below. It’s in Japanese, but I’ve summarized most of the main points above.

Crowdsourcing infographic -- click for larger view

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

conyac_logo

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

benative_logo

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.

profeel.me_presenting
Profeel.me CEO HoSuk Jeong pitches to a Japanese crowd

Memebox

memebox_logo

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.

Japan’s Designclue wants to build Asia’s largest logo crowdsourcing market

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See also this story in Japanese. Designclue is a service that lets you crowdsource logo creation to freelance designers regardless of their location or nationality. It’s run by the Tokyo-based startup called Purple Cow, which recently announced it had fundraised 14.7 million yen (approximately $157,000) in a seed round from Incubate Fund and East Ventures. We had a chance to interview all the three members of the startup, Kensuke Shibata, the CEO; Kyohei Teshima, the chief global officer; and Akira Kudo, the web developer. What exactly motivated you guys to launch this service? Shibata: I was studying in high school in Canada, and our CGO Kyohei Teshima was studying in the UK. As both he and I were outside Japan, we saw a variety of services for outsourcing tasks to emerging countries. We didn’t really call it ‘crowdsourcing’ in the past, but it was an [early] form of today’s crowdsouricing concepts. Kyohei and I met each other while working at DeNA as interns. We were so inspired by the concept of The World is Flat, the best-selling book by Thomas Friedman, and started working together exploring an innovative project that might disrupt the global market. With the idea of building…

From left: Kyohei Teshima (CGO), Keisuke Shibata (CEO), and Akira Kudo (web developer)
Kyohei Teshima (CGO), Kensuke Shibata (CEO), and Akira Kudo (web developer)

See also this story in Japanese.

Designclue is a service that lets you crowdsource logo creation to freelance designers regardless of their location or nationality. It’s run by the Tokyo-based startup called Purple Cow, which recently announced it had fundraised 14.7 million yen (approximately $157,000) in a seed round from Incubate Fund and East Ventures. We had a chance to interview all the three members of the startup, Kensuke Shibata, the CEO; Kyohei Teshima, the chief global officer; and Akira Kudo, the web developer.

What exactly motivated you guys to launch this service?

Shibata: I was studying in high school in Canada, and our CGO Kyohei Teshima was studying in the UK. As both he and I were outside Japan, we saw a variety of services for outsourcing tasks to emerging countries. We didn’t really call it ‘crowdsourcing’ in the past, but it was an [early] form of today’s crowdsouricing concepts.

Kyohei and I met each other while working at DeNA as interns. We were so inspired by the concept of The World is Flat, the best-selling book by Thomas Friedman, and started working together exploring an innovative project that might disrupt the global market. With the idea of building up a global project-sharing platform without considering language barriers and cultural gaps, we won a grand prize award plus 3 million yen ($32,000) at an entrepreneur contest from Skylight Consulting. That’s where my colleague Akira Kudo joined the team too.

When thinking about what was the easiest category of crowdsource-able tasks [unlikely to be impeded by] language barriers, we concluded we should focus on a platform specializing in logo design.  Since we started working on it, we’re haven’t been interested in business in a specific country but rather one that works in the global market. [1]

Can you tell us how the system works?

When you order logo design here in Japan, it will usually not be very cheap due to high labor costs in the country. And it can also be very hard for most Japanese people to order such work from overseas because of the language barrier. Our service allows users to easily place orders from independent foreign designers.

The website has multilingual interfaces to easily facilitate this. We’ve developed a non-verbal interface that allows users to let the designers know what kind of tastes you like or what kind of additional changes you want by just choosing selective designations or pointing [things] out over the artwork on screen.  Users can receive many design proposals at affordable rates from registered designers in emerging markets.

How do you monetize this?

We charge our user almost 20% of the ordering fee as our commission (this can vary according to some order criteria) when the design artwork is delivered to the user. When a user submits the order, we’ll charge our fee including the commission. And after that user then selects one of the design proposals, Designclue will pay the designer. So, Designclue plays a sort of escrow role in terms of money flow. All payments on the platform are processed via PayPal.

What kinds of business are using the service the most?

About 50% of all orders on the platform came from Japanese startups, followed by large-sized IT enterprises which accounted for 30% of orders.

How geographically varied are the designers?

About 30% of registered designers comes from Indonesia, followed by the Philippines, the US, India, Serbia, and the UK (in descending order). There was even a South African freelance designer who could make a living for three months as long as he accomplished a single task.

It seems that in Indonesia the locals are aggressively developing their skills to make a living.  Many people are using [similar services] like 99designs.com and are used to submitting their artwork ideas as side jobs.   99designs is an English language site and helps them work with Western countries.  But for the Indonesian designers, we are a way to enlarge their business opportunities to non-English-speaking countries, including Japan.

Can you share any interesting metrics about your service so far?

123 design proposals are delivered for an order on average, and 95% of all the order requests are completed with users satisfied with the outcome. We have 800 designers in 60 countries, and more than 85% of all the designers came from outside Japan. We’ve handled more than 100 transactions during the last six months since the site launch.

What do you foresee for Designclue in the future?

We think we’ll be moving towards the realization of a project sharing platform, where users can easily split their tasks to small pieces and outsource to freelancers.


Designclue was chosen as one of the finalists for the SF Japan Night event that will take place in San Francisco in early March.

They’re currently hiring Ruby developers, preferably English speakers.  If you are interested in joining them and being a part of a platform that may disrupt the global market, please feel free to contact them.

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  1. After this point, all three pitch in to answer various questions.  ↩