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Japan’s Chatwork brings its business chat tool to Europe

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See the original story in Japanese. Chatwork Inc., a Japanese startup that operates a cloud-based chat tool for business, has announced that it would start expanding service operations to the European region from Luxembourg. This follows its international expansion to North America last year, and the Asian region this past spring. The Chatwork app was launched back in March of 2011, providing a business chat environment for corporate users, with features like group chat, task management, file management, and video conferencing. Luxembourg is known for having a very low tax rate, and has succeeded in inviting a number of multinational companies to set up shop there. It’s surrounded by Germany, France, and Belgium, and most local citizens can speak English, Luxembourgish, German, and French. Chatwork has decided to start its European operations here because of these geographical and linguistic advantages. The company was in attendance at ICT Spring 2013, an annual tech startup conference in the country taking place this week. The startup recently unveiled that it has acquired more than 200,000 users as of this month. In terms of the ratio of paid to unpaid users, Chatwork has performed even better than services like Dropbox or Evernote, which are…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Chatwork Inc., a Japanese startup that operates a cloud-based chat tool for business, has announced that it would start expanding service operations to the European region from Luxembourg. This follows its international expansion to North America last year, and the Asian region this past spring.

The Chatwork app was launched back in March of 2011, providing a business chat environment for corporate users, with features like group chat, task management, file management, and video conferencing.

Luxembourg is known for having a very low tax rate, and has succeeded in inviting a number of multinational companies to set up shop there. It’s surrounded by Germany, France, and Belgium, and most local citizens can speak English, Luxembourgish, German, and French. Chatwork has decided to start its European operations here because of these geographical and linguistic advantages. The company was in attendance at ICT Spring 2013, an annual tech startup conference in the country taking place this week.

The startup recently unveiled that it has acquired more than 200,000 users as of this month. In terms of the ratio of paid to unpaid users, Chatwork has performed even better than services like Dropbox or Evernote, which are said to be around 4 to 4.5%. More than 50,000 users visit the service every day, and more than 100 million messages have been exchanged using the platform.

The startup unveiled a screen-sharing feature called ChatWork back in May. And from here, it will be interesting to see how much traction it can build in the country where Skype started its journey.

Japan’s CloudDock has big plans for enterprise

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Readers may remember when we mentioned Japan-based cloud service CloudDock back in April at the Echelon Tokyo satellite event. The company which operates it, Eugrid, is just a five-man team, but their offering is extremely ambitious. As we mentioned in our previous report, CloudDock is an enterprise cloud solution for Windows and iOS, that lets you keep all your user information, like documents and pictures, stored in the cloud, as opposed to storing it locally, or syncing a local file to the cloud. This is a big contrast to consumer cloud services like Dropbox, which can still be a security problem if your device is lost or stolen. The folks at CloudDock point out that some companies even have strict policies in place prohibiting employees from taking PCs out of the office for this very reason. With CloudDock, which launched in beta back in February, users can see their cloud files only after they login to the service. It’s at that point that icons are shown representing your files – but they are still not downloaded onto the device until you click on them. Upon logout, the device memory is wiped clean again. You can get a more visual explanation…

Readers may remember when we mentioned Japan-based cloud service CloudDock back in April at the Echelon Tokyo satellite event. The company which operates it, Eugrid, is just a five-man team, but their offering is extremely ambitious.

As we mentioned in our previous report, CloudDock is an enterprise cloud solution for Windows and iOS, that lets you keep all your user information, like documents and pictures, stored in the cloud, as opposed to storing it locally, or syncing a local file to the cloud. This is a big contrast to consumer cloud services like Dropbox, which can still be a security problem if your device is lost or stolen. The folks at CloudDock point out that some companies even have strict policies in place prohibiting employees from taking PCs out of the office for this very reason.

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With CloudDock, which launched in beta back in February, users can see their cloud files only after they login to the service. It’s at that point that icons are shown representing your files – but they are still not downloaded onto the device until you click on them. Upon logout, the device memory is wiped clean again. You can get a more visual explanation in the promo video above.

What I find most intriguing about CloudDock’s game plan to date is that the company expects to support other public cloud storage services (as opposed to providing their own cloud storage or on-premise storage), such as Skydrive or Google Drive, but still letting users benefit from their end-to-end security enhancement solution.

The folks from CloudDock just recently attended the main Echelon conference in Singapore, and they tell me that they learned a lot while there, meeting lots of VCs and companies. A representative explained:

Singapore and the surrounding regions were pretty different from Japan. Especially when we look at security, most SMEs don’t care about it. Dropbox is fine for them. Very large companies such as banks and government related agencies do care, but it will be very difficult for a tiny company like us to penetrate. This is the same as Japan.

For now, I understand that the company will stay focused on their home market of Japan in order to “strengthen the fundamentals”. But as feedback has been very positive so far, they also want to spread the word about their service internationally too.

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