THE BRIDGE

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News curation app Gunosy buys Game8, Japan’s leading game strategy wiki guide

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See the original story in Japanese. Here a new young entrepreneur has taken another step forward. Gunosy (TSE:6047), the Japanese company behind a news curation app under ths same name, in December announced an agreement to take over Game8, one of Japan’s leading game strategy wiki guides, from its parent company Labit. Gunosy will acquire a 100% in Game8 and turn it into a subsidiary. Game8 started as a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Labit which had developed a schedule app for university students called Sugoi Jikanwari. After transferring the app business to Japan’s Job Direct in 2014, the firm started its game media business led by an employee, Kentaro Nishio, and it showed strong performance. At the stage of recruiting human resources, the game business was spun-off as Game8 where Nishio became CEO. See also: A new service gives Japanese students key info about their classes and profs For a year and four months since its launch, Game8 has grown into a sizeable media with more than 10 million monthly unique users. Looking ahead to further growth, the firm has made the decision to become affiliated by Gunosy. Nishio explained: I could not decide between IPO and M&A, but in the…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Here a new young entrepreneur has taken another step forward.

Gunosy (TSE:6047), the Japanese company behind a news curation app under ths same name, in December announced an agreement to take over Game8, one of Japan’s leading game strategy wiki guides, from its parent company Labit. Gunosy will acquire a 100% in Game8 and turn it into a subsidiary.

Game8 started as a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Labit which had developed a schedule app for university students called Sugoi Jikanwari. After transferring the app business to Japan’s Job Direct in 2014, the firm started its game media business led by an employee, Kentaro Nishio, and it showed strong performance. At the stage of recruiting human resources, the game business was spun-off as Game8 where Nishio became CEO.

See also:

For a year and four months since its launch, Game8 has grown into a sizeable media with more than 10 million monthly unique users. Looking ahead to further growth, the firm has made the decision to become affiliated by Gunosy.

Nishio explained:

I could not decide between IPO and M&A, but in the end I chose M&A. As a reason for that, what we need is not funding but resources for our business growth or management.

Game8 has already achieved profitability in a single month based on the ad network as its main profit center. On the other hand, website development is handled almost exclusively by Nishio himself, and is facing development resource shortage.

Through this acquisition and becoming able to utilize development resources, not only improved development speed but also enhanced back office environment or joint development of ad products can be expected. Game8 will leverage Gunosy’s accumulated know-how about ad business, while Gunosy aims to acquire new ad clients from the gaming industry.

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L to R: Gunosy Executive Officer Tetsuya Nagashima, Game8 CEO Kentaro Nishio

With this buyout, Gunosy CEO Yoshinori Fukushima and CFO Mitsushige Ito will join the management board of Game8. While Nishio continues to lead Game8 as its CEO, he joins Gunosy to supervise the web media gunosy.com.

Nishio elaborated:

I am thinking of a way to utilize the data obtained from apps to web media. There has been no service successful for both app and web. Examining the data, I will look for a way under the trial-and-error method. An integration plan of both growth teams has been suggested, so that I think I am supposed to use my time at Game8 and Gunosy equally.

Tstsuya Nagashima, Executive Officer at Gunosy, commented on this acquisition:

We won’t just paste ad banners but will adopt various measures that are beneficial to each user by sharing technical and advertisement know-how.

Gunosy earlier on acquired shares in Pikicast, a Korean startup offering a mobile content curation platform under the same name. Gunosy made clear its intention to continue investing in media having as many monthly active users as Game8.

In the game industry, not only content development but also other related activities including media, video distribution and e-sports have been gaining momentum recently. How will Game8 act in such an environment?

Nishio replied for this question:

I feel that the social status of the game industry is regarded as being lower than other entertainment sectors such as music or fashion. Game8 intends to improve this situation to a level equal to others.

To do so, we must spend more time on it to realize this. While running a web media that’s easy to expand at present, we may need to run other types of business in the future so are preparing teams to do that. We want to build a resilient system that matches our vision.

Nishio has steadily been expanding his media; let us see what further plans he has, what he will do next.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy and Masaru Ikeda

Japanese news curation app developer Gunosy files for IPO

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See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s Gunosy, a Tokyo-based company behind a news curation app under the same name, submitted an IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange and was approved today. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 28 April with plans to offer 3.5 million shares for public subscription and to sell 886,500 shares in over-allotment options for a total of 2.41 million shares. The underwriting will be led by Nomura Securities. Its share price range will be released on 8 April, bookbuilding is scheduled to start on 20 April. According to the consolidated statement as of May 2014, they posted a revenue of 359 million Japanese yen ($3.3 million) and an ordinary loss of 1.37 billion yen ($11.4 million). Gunosy was launched in October 2011 by three graduate students at the University of Tokyo, and was incorporated as a joint-stock company in 2012. Serial entrepreneur and investor Shinji Kimura came on to help manage the company as co-CEO in 2013 but subsequently stepped down last September. According to TechCrunch Japan, Kimura’s departure is to avoid the risk of breaching the non-compete clause, which requires him to refrain from competing with other companies…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Japan’s Gunosy, a Tokyo-based company behind a news curation app under the same name, submitted an IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange and was approved today. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 28 April with plans to offer 3.5 million shares for public subscription and to sell 886,500 shares in over-allotment options for a total of 2.41 million shares. The underwriting will be led by Nomura Securities.

Its share price range will be released on 8 April, bookbuilding is scheduled to start on 20 April. According to the consolidated statement as of May 2014, they posted a revenue of 359 million Japanese yen ($3.3 million) and an ordinary loss of 1.37 billion yen ($11.4 million).

Gunosy was launched in October 2011 by three graduate students at the University of Tokyo, and was incorporated as a joint-stock company in 2012. Serial entrepreneur and investor Shinji Kimura came on to help manage the company as co-CEO in 2013 but subsequently stepped down last September. According to TechCrunch Japan, Kimura’s departure is to avoid the risk of breaching the non-compete clause, which requires him to refrain from competing with other companies in the same sector.

See also:

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by Kurt Hanson
Proofread by “Tex” Pomeroy

News curation startup Gunosy secures $12M funding from three Japanese companies

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Bloomberg reported earlier today that Tokyo-based Gunosy, the company behind the curation news app under the same name, has secured funds worth 1.2 billion yen ($12 million) from Japanese telco KDDI (TSE:9433), investment firm Jafco, and B Dash Ventures. This follows their previous funds worth $12 million from KDDI back in March. Regarding the money raised back in March, the company used over 80% of it to broadcast a TV commercial to increase penetration of their news app among Japanese consumers. They recently launched the app in the US and UK markets over the last few months, and it is told that they plan to use the funds raised at this time to intensify their global promotion efforts. In this sector of the Japanese market, we’ve seen a number of competitors like SmartNews, NewsPick, Antenna, and Kamelio. In the US market, we’ve also seen that Flipboard surpassed 85 million users last year and acquired news reader app Zite from CNN back in March. In our recent interview with the company’s co-CEO Shinji Kimura, he told us that they are targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide in three years.

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Bloomberg reported earlier today that Tokyo-based Gunosy, the company behind the curation news app under the same name, has secured funds worth 1.2 billion yen ($12 million) from Japanese telco KDDI (TSE:9433), investment firm Jafco, and B Dash Ventures. This follows their previous funds worth $12 million from KDDI back in March.

Regarding the money raised back in March, the company used over 80% of it to broadcast a TV commercial to increase penetration of their news app among Japanese consumers. They recently launched the app in the US and UK markets over the last few months, and it is told that they plan to use the funds raised at this time to intensify their global promotion efforts.

In this sector of the Japanese market, we’ve seen a number of competitors like SmartNews, NewsPick, Antenna, and Kamelio. In the US market, we’ve also seen that Flipboard surpassed 85 million users last year and acquired news reader app Zite from CNN back in March.

In our recent interview with the company’s co-CEO Shinji Kimura, he told us that they are targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide in three years.

Japanese news curation startup Gunosy earns seven-digit dollar figures every month

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See the original story in Japanese, part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Sapporo 2014. Our readers may recall that Japanese news curation startup Gunosy raised about $12 million back in March. The company recently started distributing ads on its news app, and we’re told they generate several millions of US dollars monthly from the advertising sales. We spoke with the company’s co-CEO Shinji Kimura at the Infinity Ventures Summit to find out more. The Bridge: We heard that your business has been rapidly growing after you starting broadcasting a TV commercial. What kind of download numbers are you seeing? Kimura: We had acquired 1.8 downloads as of March 15th, but we’re going to hit 4 million downloads pretty soon. The Bridge: So you’ve been doing very well in the last two months since the commercial started. On the other hand, some people were disappointed with some unexpected changes. Kimura: We are sorry for the users who have been using the app since launch. But some users pointed out that the personalization feature we initially adopted results in many duplicate articles. Furthermore, curated content includes many longer articles, which can be tiring to read especially on weekends. So…

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See the original story in Japanese, part of our coverage of the Infinity Ventures Summit Sapporo 2014.

Our readers may recall that Japanese news curation startup Gunosy raised about $12 million back in March. The company recently started distributing ads on its news app, and we’re told they generate several millions of US dollars monthly from the advertising sales.

We spoke with the company’s co-CEO Shinji Kimura at the Infinity Ventures Summit to find out more.

The Bridge: We heard that your business has been rapidly growing after you starting broadcasting a TV commercial. What kind of download numbers are you seeing?

Kimura: We had acquired 1.8 downloads as of March 15th, but we’re going to hit 4 million downloads pretty soon.

The Bridge: So you’ve been doing very well in the last two months since the commercial started. On the other hand, some people were disappointed with some unexpected changes.

Kimura: We are sorry for the users who have been using the app since launch. But some users pointed out that the personalization feature we initially adopted results in many duplicate articles. Furthermore, curated content includes many longer articles, which can be tiring to read especially on weekends.

So we adjusted the app to provide users with lighter content, and that resulted in a boost in our daily active users.

The Bridge: We also know that the demographic of our readers would be very limited if we focus too much on startups. So when you think of business opportunities, it must be difficult to determine how wide-ranging to set your scope.

Kimura: Yes, advertising opportunities are also limited if you persist in a niche. For instance, female users don’t like our app. Even my wife used to use SmartNews. I realized we had to change it. (Laughs) Now she uses Gunosy. So we think our adjustment was successful. […] About 10 million people launch our apps every day, and almost 30% of them do it to check out news articles in morning. So we can publish articles written by professional writers exclusively for our readers.

The Bridge: In Japan, there are quite few platforms, including Yahoo News Bylines, where professional or independent writers can write articles and get paid.

Kimura: I think monetization is important. Driving traffic back to media companies is sort of meaningless without monetization opportunities. But we know there’s opportunity out there in smartphone ads.

The Bridge: We’re told that your monthly revenue has reached around several million US dollars. It this true?

Kimura: I can’t disclose details but it seems like that, yes.

The Bridge: So now you can give some benefit back to media from which you’re curating articles?

Kimura: Typical media give you as little as $US 0.02 per page view. But I think our platform will be able to pay you as much as one US dollar. Considering that we can make our platform open to contributors in the future, if you can write an article earning 300,000 page views, you can earn 3,000 US dollars from us. I think we need to establish a content distribution ecosystem that helps creators or authors make a living.

The Bridge: How can you achieve such high profitability?

Kimura: It’s because of smartphone ads. The existing types of ads on desktop websites don’t effectively keep the attention of their audience. A smartphone ad is placed in a limited space and has higher visibility. This was proved by Facebook. One of the reasons why TV commercials perform well is because they are inserted right in the middle of a program.

The Bridge: But because ads are inserted between articles, some people feel it’s annoying.

Kimura: I know that. So we’re thinking more carefully about how to insert ads. We’re also planning to provide a full-page ad package. If we start it, I think our users will not hate it. Because we’ve been conducting A/B tests many times to find out what kind of ads users are comfortable with.

The Bridge: Thank you for your time.

Leading Japanese news app Gunosy launches in the US. But is it ready?

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A couple of weeks ago Japanese mobile news startup Gunosy launched an English version of their app for the UK. Now today the company has announced that it has released its iOS app in the US as well, with an Android version to follow at the end of the month. The company says that it is targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide. And while I’m usually encouraged to see Japanese companies venturing abroad, there are three reasons I can think of why this app – in its current form – will fail spectacularly. No ‘readability’ view – I’ve written about why I think so before. Gunosy does not provide news articles in a stripped-down, Readability-style view. Most Western news apps, in contrast, do. Check out the view of the same article below, first on Gunosy, then on Pocket. Which would you prefer to read on mobile? Late mover advantage squandered – As a startup, if you enter a market late as Gunosy is now doing, you benefit from seeing what competitors have done, and you have a chance to do it better. Gunosy, for some reason, seems to think it has a chance against the…

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A couple of weeks ago Japanese mobile news startup Gunosy launched an English version of their app for the UK. Now today the company has announced that it has released its iOS app in the US as well, with an Android version to follow at the end of the month.

The company says that it is targeting 80 million installs outside of Japan, and 100 million worldwide. And while I’m usually encouraged to see Japanese companies venturing abroad, there are three reasons I can think of why this app – in its current form – will fail spectacularly.

  1. No ‘readability’ view – I’ve written about why I think so before. Gunosy does not provide news articles in a stripped-down, Readability-style view. Most Western news apps, in contrast, do. Check out the view of the same article below, first on Gunosy, then on Pocket. Which would you prefer to read on mobile?

    gunosy

  2. Late mover advantage squandered – As a startup, if you enter a market late as Gunosy is now doing, you benefit from seeing what competitors have done, and you have a chance to do it better. Gunosy, for some reason, seems to think it has a chance against the competition without bothering to do anything. In my view, their app does not in any way compare with even the 2012 version of Flipboard (for example), let alone the current one.
  3. Doesn’t serve the user first – Just for kicks, I tried to send an article from Gunosy to Pocket. It worked, but the link that Gunosy lets users share not actually the article link, but a Gunosy link of this format: https://gunosy.today/r/gEqFt. At first I thought it might be just a link shortener, but it’s not, as you can see below. It’s pure Gunosy promotion with a download link and the top, and below too if you scroll down. Warning, this mess may induce flashbacks to the Hootsuite toolbar.

    gunosy-page

So where is Gunosy’s proposed value add? I confess, I have no idea. Perhaps KDDI knows? I can think of 12 million reasons why they should know!

Gunosy’s push notifications/reminders at different times during the day might be touted as a differentiator, but it’s not really a big selling point.

I think if the company hopes to do well beyond Japan, they’ll need to make some serious user-focused iterations on this app first.

Japan’s news curation app Gunosy launches English version for the UK

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Tokyo-based Gunosy, the startup behind the news curation app of the same name, launched an iOS app for the UK market this week. This version lets you to curate updates and articles from about 500 publications including UK-based news resources, such as The Register, BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph. The company plans to launch an Android app for the UK market next month, and an app for the US market will follow soon. They aim to reach 80 million downloads in the global market three years from now. via TechCrunch Japan

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Tokyo-based Gunosy, the startup behind the news curation app of the same name, launched an iOS app for the UK market this week. This version lets you to curate updates and articles from about 500 publications including UK-based news resources, such as The Register, BBC, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph.

The company plans to launch an Android app for the UK market next month, and an app for the US market will follow soon. They aim to reach 80 million downloads in the global market three years from now.

via TechCrunch Japan

Why Japan’s mobile news startups are scared to disrupt

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This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this: Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile. While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1]. But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the…

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Scared?

This is a complex issue, but I think it boils down to this:

Most of Japan’s news app creators do not put the interests of their users above the interests of content publishers. So while users around the world can read news in apps with beautiful typography of an appropriate size (see Pocket, Instapaper, or Reeder), most Japanese readers – or those who use domestically produced apps anyway – are given the original webpage in an in-app browser, often showing typeface that’s too small to read, or a page that has not been optimized for mobile.

While the app developers I’ve spoken to are reluctant to acknowledge it, most industry observers I ask point to publishers who cry foul over copyright law, complaining about stripped-out ads, and a lack of metrics from readers who come on site. These debates occurred on a global scale years ago, and while they were not resolved in a neat and tidy fashion, the internet appears to have generally settled that such use (whether it is via a republished RSS feed for via scraping) is ok [1].

But Japanese companies who have ventured to create news apps have almost universally opted to err on the side of caution by showing the original webpage content in their app, as is, without any effort to ensure that it’s readable on mobile [2]. They have purposefully chosen to not disrupt or challenge current content models.

Let’s look at a few examples from some of Japan’s leading news apps. Here’s Gunosy:

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Gunosy does what most Japanese news apps do. They serve up the original web page when the title is clicked, whether its very readable or not. Other Japanese apps that do this are Presso, Romly, Vingow, Mynd, and Kamelio [3]. These news apps are primarily aggregators or curation tools. I wouldn’t go so far as to call any of them ‘news readers’, because technically, you’re just being directed to a traditional reading experience on the source site.

SmartNews’s approach is an interesting one, maybe the only one that is even a little daring. They are one of the few companies to present a readability mode, boasting offline caching as a feature for Japanese users who might be beyond internet signal on the subway. When you tap to read an article on SmartNews, you are flashed an option to read in ‘SmartMode’. This is SmartNews’s more readable view, but it’s presented as something the user must choose to view deliberately. What’s more, when you press back, the app sneakily presents the original source page (see this below). This is a clever way of giving both the publisher and the user what they want, and I’m sure it took them a while to figure out this compromise.

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Line News is also mildly daring, showing longer excerpts relating to one story, collected from various sources. Tapping on any of those sources brings you to the original source, however (see lower left), including ads and undesirable cruft (lower right).

Overall I think it is pretty clear that the relationship that exists between content publishers and news apps that tiptoe around their requirements/expectations is not good for innovation in the content space. Publishers cling to old monetization models instead of searching for new ones, and Japanese readers are denied the kind of beautified reading experience that the rest of the world enjoys [4].

And that’s a shame.

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[Photo]


  1. For more on this, see ‘Is Flipboard Legal?’ (2010), and ‘Could loading a feed into an RSS reader be grounds for legal action?’ (2010). Of course now even Apple has a ‘Reader’ function for Safari and Mobile Safari that strips away ads and gives you a simplified, readable version.  ↩

  2. Mobile-friendly news sites are far more common in Japan than in other countries, so if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that. the original page view on mobile is typically not so bad.  ↩

  3. Kamelio does some interesting things with timelines which I think are admirable, but they still opt to show the original source in this way.  ↩

  4. Unless they use something like Pocket, of course, which many do.  ↩

News curation startup Gunosy fundraises $12 million from KDDI

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese telco KDDI announced today that it has invested in Gunosy, the creator of a popular news curation app of the same name. Details of the investment were not disclosed but it’s likely worth somewhere from $12 million to $14 million according to certain sources. Coinciding with this funding, the startup is set to begin broadcast of a TV commercial in Japan tomorrow. Gunosy previously raised 31.6 million yen (about $300,000) back in February of 2013, and an undisclosed amount back in July of 2013. We have also confirmed they secured a seed round funding from several investors including B Dash Ventures. Gunosy was launched back in October of 2011 by three graduate students (Yoshinori Fukushima, Yoshifumi Seki, and Koji Yoshida) at the University of Tokyo. They incorporated their company in November, and co-CEO Shinji Kimura came on to help manage the company last October. Their main revenue stream has been Gunosy Ads, which have performanced well since launching last November. That feature was instrumental in helping them raise so much funds this time around.

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Gunosy CEO Yoshinori Fukushima

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese telco KDDI announced today that it has invested in Gunosy, the creator of a popular news curation app of the same name. Details of the investment were not disclosed but it’s likely worth somewhere from $12 million to $14 million according to certain sources. Coinciding with this funding, the startup is set to begin broadcast of a TV commercial in Japan tomorrow.

Gunosy previously raised 31.6 million yen (about $300,000) back in February of 2013, and an undisclosed amount back in July of 2013. We have also confirmed they secured a seed round funding from several investors including B Dash Ventures.

Gunosy was launched back in October of 2011 by three graduate students (Yoshinori Fukushima, Yoshifumi Seki, and Koji Yoshida) at the University of Tokyo. They incorporated their company in November, and co-CEO Shinji Kimura came on to help manage the company last October.

Their main revenue stream has been Gunosy Ads, which have performanced well since launching last November. That feature was instrumental in helping them raise so much funds this time around.

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From the left: Co-CEO Yoshinori Fukushima, Co-CEO Shinji Kimura, COO Yuya Taketani

Approaching 2M downloads, Japan’s mobile news app Gunosy gets a makeover to attract female users

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Gunosy CEO Yoshinori Fukushima See the original article in Japanese Japan’s leading news curation app Gunosy has been given an overhaul. To learn more about how it has changed, we caught up with the company’s co-CEOs, Yoshinori Fukushima and Shinji Kimura, at their recently relocated office. Before the renewal, Gunosy served 25 articles to users´ smartphones twice a day, based on topics they are interested in. While many users find this limited curation feature helpful, the company also faced the problem of providing a wide-range of news to its users. Kimura told us: When more people started using the app, we found that it lacked the ability to provide a wide-range of news and more detailed news. […] Many users still use multiple news apps, not just Gunosy. We were aiming to provide a one-stop solution. Personally I use other apps like SmartNews to check news in a specific category (mostly technology), so I think it’s quite helpful that Gunosy has incorporated several categories. The design overhaul, including an icon change, was intended to attract more female users. A simple icon with just the letter of G doesn’t really fit well on more feminine-looking smartphone screens. Here is the a…

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Gunosy CEO Yoshinori Fukushima

See the original article in Japanese

Japan’s leading news curation app Gunosy has been given an overhaul. To learn more about how it has changed, we caught up with the company’s co-CEOs, Yoshinori Fukushima and Shinji Kimura, at their recently relocated office.

Before the renewal, Gunosy served 25 articles to users´ smartphones twice a day, based on topics they are interested in. While many users find this limited curation feature helpful, the company also faced the problem of providing a wide-range of news to its users. Kimura told us:

When more people started using the app, we found that it lacked the ability to provide a wide-range of news and more detailed news. […] Many users still use multiple news apps, not just Gunosy. We were aiming to provide a one-stop solution.

Personally I use other apps like SmartNews to check news in a specific category (mostly technology), so I think it’s quite helpful that Gunosy has incorporated several categories.

The design overhaul, including an icon change, was intended to attract more female users. A simple icon with just the letter of G doesn’t really fit well on more feminine-looking smartphone screens.

Here is the a look at Gunosy’s new interface:

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The formerly simple icon has been changed one featuring a colorful paper plane. The plane is based on the concept of delivering news to users.

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They’ve incorporated flat design, using a color palette that makes a more neutral impression.

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This redesign looks to be a remarkable turning point for Gunosy. The service had not let users choose news themselves, but now it lets users to select information by indicating multiple categories.

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The new app has now 11 different categories. According to the co-CEOs, the targeted demographic is in their twenties and thirties who don´t read newspapers anymore but still they feel that they should. This answer, in a way, represents the young generation in Japan very well.

We’re told that downloads of the Gunosy app are now around 1.8 million, creeping up on the 2 million downloads milestone. Over twenty employees work in their newly relocated office. I erroneously assumed that most of their members are developers, but actually almost half of them work in the company’s business operations. After the startup began selling ads, they needed to add more operational staff.

Regarding the structure of their team, I asked them if they plan to have an editorial department in the future. Fukushima tells us:

I think it would be interesting to have an editorial team. But if we had one, it would be quite different a general editorial team. It would be a unique team to deal with special tasks. For example, a picture of homicide was shown on the top page the other day. I thought we had to change it, considering the feelings people involved. There are things like this which only a human can edit.

A human hand could play an important role in Gunosy´s engine in the future. But overall I think the team is doing really interesting work in terms of news distribution and content management.

Technology created by a few university students just a few years ago is now making a real difference in news distribution.

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Shinji Kimura. He went right back to work after the interview.

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Gunosy´s office, which was recently relocated. There was still some vacant space there, perhaps reserved for future members.

CNet Japan Startup Award nominees: Mobile news services Gunosy and Smartnews

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This is part three of our CNET Japan Startup Awards nominee rundown. The rest can be found here. News aggregation apps are a dime a dozen in the US. There’s Flipboard, Pulse, Circa, Prismatic, Zite, Summly, News360 and the list goes on. In Japan, there’s News Hub, @nifty, and now LINE News as well. Smart News (pictured below) resembles US-based Pulse, where content is segregated in tabs by category. The content comes pre-loaded but feeds can be added. After using Smart News, the experience of Pulse seems clumsy in comparison. The load times are also significantly faster on Smart News than on Pulse. I want to say Gunosy (pictured below) is the Flipboard of Japan but the only similarity is their popularity. Gunosy’s interface and content is structured like a newspaper, and there are tabs for the AM edition, PM edition and a location-based, real-time trend tab. Articles are separated in large, easy to read boxes with prominent call-to-action buttons. Like Prismatic, Gunosy curates content based on machine learning. It displays the kind of stories the user has liked, shared, or clipped in the past. What really sets Gunosy aside from all news aggregation services is its approach to ads….

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This is part three of our CNET Japan Startup Awards nominee rundown. The rest can be found here.

News aggregation apps are a dime a dozen in the US. There’s Flipboard, Pulse, Circa, Prismatic, Zite, Summly, News360 and the list goes on. In Japan, there’s News Hub, @nifty, and now LINE News as well.

Smart News (pictured below) resembles US-based Pulse, where content is segregated in tabs by category. The content comes pre-loaded but feeds can be added. After using Smart News, the experience of Pulse seems clumsy in comparison. The load times are also significantly faster on Smart News than on Pulse.

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Smartnews

I want to say Gunosy (pictured below) is the Flipboard of Japan but the only similarity is their popularity. Gunosy’s interface and content is structured like a newspaper, and there are tabs for the AM edition, PM edition and a location-based, real-time trend tab.

Articles are separated in large, easy to read boxes with prominent call-to-action buttons. Like Prismatic, Gunosy curates content based on machine learning. It displays the kind of stories the user has liked, shared, or clipped in the past.

What really sets Gunosy aside from all news aggregation services is its approach to ads. The service separates ad types into three categories: business, fashion, health/beauty, and then behaviorally targets based on user habits. The sign-up and onboarding process for potential advertisers is automated and simple. They are one of, if not the global leader in this category 1.

Regarding both these news services, I’m really happy to see such a high calibre of product comings out of Japan.

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  1. Gunosy’s ad service launched in November. We recently spoke with new Gunosy team member Shinji Kimura, who elaborated more on this aspect of their business. ↩