THE BRIDGE

tag IBM BlueHub

Meet 8 startups on inbound travel from IBM BlueHub program’s latest batch in Tokyo

SHARE:

See the original story in Japanese. IBM Japan held the Demo Day event for their BlueHub open innovation program last week. The latest batch features startups focused on inbound travel businesses. A number of companies offering inbound travel services participated, with four big corporates: NTT Docomo, Zenrin, Zenrin DataCom, and Softbank, and eight startups: Andeco, Crea Japan, Fesbase, Pretia, Mybase, Metro Engines, Rich Table, and Realista. Presented services and companies were: Fesbase: chatbot platform focused on serving Chinese visitors to Japan (by Crea Japan) Quippy for Restaurants: Marketing and product development support tool for restaurants (by Rich Table) Sakevel: Sake brewery tourism and personal sake sommelier service (by Mybase) SnapGo: AR(augmented reality)-based navigation service (by Pretia) Miccossy: Mobile app curating Japanese local festivals (by Andeco) Travel experience sharing platform (by NTT Docomo) 1Minute Japan: Video-based service for helping foreign visitors to Japan solve problems (by Realista) Metro Engines: AI (artificial intelligence) tool that helps hotels determine competitive pricing In late February, teams composed of a mix of the companies carried out kick-off meetings and held six workshops throughout the three month planning phase. Following the Demo Day they will begin to work on firm plans for commercialization. In the spirit…

See the original story in Japanese.

IBM Japan held the Demo Day event for their BlueHub open innovation program last week. The latest batch features startups focused on inbound travel businesses.

A number of companies offering inbound travel services participated, with four big corporates: NTT Docomo, Zenrin, Zenrin DataCom, and Softbank, and eight startups: Andeco, Crea Japan, Fesbase, Pretia, Mybase, Metro Engines, Rich Table, and Realista.

Presented services and companies were:

  • Fesbase: chatbot platform focused on serving Chinese visitors to Japan (by Crea Japan)
  • Quippy for Restaurants: Marketing and product development support tool for restaurants (by Rich Table)
  • Sakevel: Sake brewery tourism and personal sake sommelier service (by Mybase)
  • SnapGo: AR(augmented reality)-based navigation service (by Pretia)
  • Miccossy: Mobile app curating Japanese local festivals (by Andeco)
  • Travel experience sharing platform (by NTT Docomo)
  • 1Minute Japan: Video-based service for helping foreign visitors to Japan solve problems (by Realista)
  • Metro Engines: AI (artificial intelligence) tool that helps hotels determine competitive pricing

In late February, teams composed of a mix of the companies carried out kick-off meetings and held six workshops throughout the three month planning phase. Following the Demo Day they will begin to work on firm plans for commercialization. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was asked to participate in this event as a judge. The following are introductions of the seven services that gave presentations.

Fesbase: chatbot platform focused on serving Chinese visitors to Japan (by Crea Japan)

When planning vacations overseas you may often rely on TripAdvisor and Yelp, but it is hard to tell the atmosphere of a place and whether it is suitable for kids or not. It is easy to imagine the same situation occurring during the expected boom in inbound tourism to Japan. Many tourists from China come to Japan for the cuisine. They may be left wondering how to make a reservation in such situations. That’s where the Yoyaku app uses chatbot and AI to come to the rescue.

Users select the category of restaurant they want to reserve and input details like the area they hope to go to. The app supports voice input so it is easy for travelers to use, and recommended information is delivered leveraging IBM Watson.

Since Fesbase already has an existing project that offers a human concierge, there is a large amount of training data, so it is possible to provide accurate recommendations. If, due to the contents of the question, the bot cannot answer, it is possible for AI to sort and select a human concierge who can. They are currently in negotiations with the Chinese media and also looking into acquiring users before their arrival in Japan.

In terms of business, they are thinking to charge a fee to restaurants based on driving user traffic to them, and in the future, once the number of users increases, they are planning to offer a platform for restaurant searching services to businesses.

Quippy for Restaurants: Marketing and product development support tool for restaurants (by Rich Table)

The Quippy app

Quippy provides a restaraunt searching tool on Instagram. It offers users with the chance to discover (even the unexpected) restaurants via searching. When the user launches the app, information linked to the location information of the restaurant and the picture pulled from Instagram is displayed. Since the app will learn what content the user has browsed, it will recommend additional restaurants later on.

For the service geared at restaurants, the tool will show them posts in English on social network sites and restaurant review sites as negative or positive. If a specific dish receives a negative review, it can recommend Instragram examples from another shop to the restaurant to improve. The searching service is free, while the service for restaurants will be offered based on a monthly subscription model.

Sakevel: Sake brewery tourism and personal sake sommelier service (by Mybase)

Takashi Kageyama, CEO of Mybase

88 of the 100 foreigners questioned at Narita International Airport said they want to drink Japanese sake. On the flipside, they don’t really have any information about sake breweries. Moreover, more than 99% of such breweries are mid-sized or family run so they may not be able to fully support foreigners who show up unannounced, but even before that 60% of consumption by foreigners visiting Japan is in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The idea behind Sakevel is to utilize tourism resources to awaken the small sake breweries that sleep in unknown areas, thus promoting regional development.

The Sakevel app

As for the sake itself, the Sakevel app recognizes the images on labels and provides that information in multiple languages. It also introduces personalized sake recommendations for tourists based on information gathered from past posts on social media sites. Since breweries cannot attract customers alone, Mybase plans to offer sake brewery tours along the same lines as a winery tour. Services are set to begin in October this year.

SnapGo: AR-based navigation service (by Pretia)

The SnapGo app

SnapGo will take you where you want to go without GPS by specifying your location with a mobile picture. This solves the problem of the numbers of foreign tourists who get lost due to lack of multilingual signage in Japan.

The company receives a photo of the place from its premise owner, creates an algorithm from it, and makes it possible to identify places from photographs taken by users through machine learning. As a result, users without GPS on their devices or who experience language difficulties can get to their destination by simply taking pictures.

In order to develop the algorithm it appears they need about forty 360-degree images. Additionally, it is assumed that the destination is input using images or text.

Miccossy: Mobile app curating Japanese local festivals (by Andeco)

Simply put, it is a festival information service for foreign tourists in Japan. It is difficult for users to acquire real-time festival information even if they refer to guide books, etc. People outside of Japan search for “matsuri (literally festivals in Japanese)” on YouTube as much as “Mt. Fuji” so there is a demand. Moreover, the company expects that there are 310,000 festivals all over Japan.

The Micossy app displays festival information in the surrounding area and provides related information like how to participate, and so on, in multiple languages. Their business model is the sale of “happi” or traditional clothing to be worn at the festival. Initially they plan to start by offering information on 100 festivals.

1Minute Japan: Video-based service for helping foreign visitors to Japan solve problems (by Realista)

1Minute Japan is designed for travelers to Japan who come on their own, not as a tour. It provides help to travelers before departure on topics like SIM cards and Wifi in Japan, and once they begin their journey, the company offers transportation and ticket information, as well as a restaurant reservation service. Using Watson to analyze the information learned from these tasks, it can analyze sentiments and classify what kind of problems people in various countries experience. Then they release video content to solve these problems.

The service can be used in this way: the example that, “an American traveler in their 20’s doesn’t know how to eat at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant”, guides them to create video content to help this person. They started test marketing in April and have acquired around 5,000 followers on their Facebook page.

Metro Engines: AI tool that helps hotels determine competitive pricing

Metro Engine

Metro Engines can optimize revenue for hotels and inns. The tool targets the 35,000 facilities throughout Japan, with 1.2 million rooms. Many of the rooms were priced using an individual’s expertise. Some chains use tools, but set their prices based on past performance and competing room prices. However, it can be said that this method will become ineffective as the supply-demand balance collapses due to access to private residences, etc.

That is where Metro Engines comes in. It predicts the reservation behavior of guests, and then set room prices through data analysis peppered with budget information, reviews, and furthermore, information on renting private homes and rooms, as well as guest room photos. In addition, It has also visualized human behavior based on mobile behavior data from NTT Docomo, Zenrin, and Softbank and included it.

Based on the big data obtained through these measures, they can tangibly present how a room should be priced. The service was announced on the 25th of last month and is currently under evaluation at 50 facilities. When they link up with the individual systems of hotels and inns, they can verify that the price setting was appropriate.

Watson’s unique open innovation program and future issues

IMGP2544
Yuta Hagiwara, CEO of Prevent. His team won the previous program batch last year.

Followed by the previous batch focused on automotive and healthcare verticals, this was the second edition of the IBM BlueHub open innovation program. Prevent, one of the grads from the previous program batch last year, is a startup spun off from Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine. The team presented a solution preventing lifestyle diseases, which was collaboratively developed with a health insurance company.

Based on his research experience having succeeded in lowering the recurrence rate of high blood pressure, diabetes, cerebrovascular disease and other symptoms to less than 30%, he has developed an online consultation service. He claims that they will aim to gain the consultation efficiency by implementing the Watson technology into a chat-based consultation service.

In the latest batch focused on the inbound travel topic, participating companies were trying to create new values by combining with the unique strength of the services, technologies and resources that they have had.

Metro Engines was highly evaluated because of not only telling hotels optimized room pricing leveraging big data analysis but also predicting details and suggesting ideas about how to improve. The team is outstanding with having already 50 companies as potential clients.

Regarding aforementioned Predict and Metro Engines, they could unveil clear results through the program, however, the ideas of other teams were still “small” in the potential about their technologies and services or their ideas are still rough and unclear in the potential merit to come out of a collaboration work.

Moreover, we saw some projects which had probably managed to adjust their ideas into Watson in the program, meaning that they have turned a means into a purpose there.

It might sound good if we say a collaboration between resourceful corporates and game-changing startups with technologies. However, if the collaboration become a purpose, I assume that it will not bring a good result because of the gap in expectations and cultures on both sides, or the program host’s egotism.

Where is the problem to solve? Does it require any technology? What kind of businesses should be get together to speed it up? Open Innovation is now trending in Japan, that’s especially why I think these well-considered preparation may be more important.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

IBM BlueHub holds demo day, showcases five teams from its first accelerator batch

SHARE:

See the original story in Japanese. IBM BlueHub, IBM Japan’s startup accelerator program in association with Tokyo-based incubator Samurai Incubate, held a demo day for its first batch earlier this week, showcasing five teams graduated from the recent three-month program starting in December. According to Catherine Solazzo, Director for Performance Marketing at IBM, who leads the accelerator program, the best team from the first batch will be selected upon voting at IBM XCITE Spring 2015, which will take place in Tokyo on 19 and 20 of May. As I wrote when the first batch was started, IBM Japan is expecting to help these startups foster their services as the one representing the Japanese tech industry by the year of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics Games. So Norihiko Nakabayashi, big data and analytics architect at IBM Japan, who also leads the acceleration initiative, confirmed that the company will keep supporting these startups even after their graduation from the batch. Yoshiaki Ishii, Director of New Business Policy Office, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, delivered a guest speech in the beginning of the event, where he claimed that the Japanese government wants to massively support a global company like IBM conducting…

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

IBM BlueHub, IBM Japan’s startup accelerator program in association with Tokyo-based incubator Samurai Incubate, held a demo day for its first batch earlier this week, showcasing five teams graduated from the recent three-month program starting in December.

According to Catherine Solazzo, Director for Performance Marketing at IBM, who leads the accelerator program, the best team from the first batch will be selected upon voting at IBM XCITE Spring 2015, which will take place in Tokyo on 19 and 20 of May.

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-catharine
Catherine Solazzo, IBM BlueHub

As I wrote when the first batch was started, IBM Japan is expecting to help these startups foster their services as the one representing the Japanese tech industry by the year of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics Games. So Norihiko Nakabayashi, big data and analytics architect at IBM Japan, who also leads the acceleration initiative, confirmed that the company will keep supporting these startups even after their graduation from the batch.

Yoshiaki Ishii, Director of New Business Policy Office, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, delivered a guest speech in the beginning of the event, where he claimed that the Japanese government wants to massively support a global company like IBM conducting such an activity in the country.

So now let’s have a quick look down about how the participating startups have been advanced in the last three months.

Gene Quest

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-genequest-mentor
From the left: Gene Quest’s Shoko Takahashi, her mentor IBM BluHub’s Norihiko Nakabayashi

Gene Quest provides a large-scale human genome analytics service for consumers via the Internet. The company’s personal genome service can detect the largest variety of detectable potential diseases in Japan, which can be adopted to many areas including disease prevention, custom-made medical treatment, avoiding from prescribing medicines which may cause a side effect for a patient by learning his/her genetic risk beforehand.

When you ask for analyze your genome sample using a genetic inspection kit, your ‘my page’ will be provided on the company’s website where precautions for your health are provided in addition to continuously updating when a new medical or pharmaceutical update comes in.

Gene Quest analyzes and anonymizes genetic data collected from users, planning to provide the analytics to pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations with the aim of contributing to the invention of new medicines and the development of medical industry. As differentiation from competitors, the company can offer the service on a white-brand basis, so they have been partnering with the Health Data Lab service on Yahoo Japan since last October.

Shoko Takashi, who leads the company, has been majored in molecular biology at the graduate school of the University of Tokyo. She shared her passion that her team wants to contribute to society by providing feedback to the medical and pharmaceutical research rather than pursuing profitability.

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-genequest

Brand Pit

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-brandpit-mentor
From the Left: BrandPit’s T. T. Chu, his mentor Samurai Incubate’s Mariko Yazawa

About 1.8 billion photos are being posted on social media every day, but 80% of them has no text profiles such as hash tag. Brand Pit analyzes visual context in these photos, helps brand managers understand consumer behaviors and learn new markets that they consider to expanding into. Brand Pit CEO T. T. Chu showed the audience a sample data as an example, which was acquired using Dutch beer brand Heineken as a keyword (see below [in Japanese]).

Brand Pit has already partnered with global big companies such as health care manufacturer Unilever and marketing agency Ogilvy & Mather. The company offers customer-made reporting and online dashboard for brand managers on a monthly charging but an annual subscription basis. Their technology can recognize context in still images for now, considering to advance it to motion images.

See also:

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-brandpit-heineken

Terrace Mile

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-terracemile1
Terrace Mile CEO Yuichi Ikoma

While it is said that farmer’s earnings are decreasing every year, the Japanese market is still as big as valued at 8 trillion yen ($67.3 billion) in agriculture, seeing a 100 trillion yen ($841 billion) market if consolidated with the food industry. Yuichi Ikoma, CEO of Terrace Mile, believes that they can help farmers make their business more profitably by offering them a data-driven agriculture methodology. Upon a series of interviews with more than 200 people farming 100 different types of crops, Ikoma has been devoted to developing the solution which helps farmer better run their business with visualized management system, sales forecast, and metrics showing how supply chains work.

The company has developed an iOS app called TeraScope during the accelerator program, which will be released in late April. With the app, farmers can visualize data about their business just only by entering the amount of harvested crops to be shipped or produced. TeraScope was developed aiming to increase a farmer’s income to 140% for the current state.

The company intends to offer the service consisting of the mobile app and the crowd service for free for three years from now. They will also provide an analytics service called TeraReport for JA Zen-noh(Japan’s National Federation of Agricultural Co-operative Associations) and local governments, giving them three-times detailed metrics for the one-third cost of other conventional services. They will participate in Jump Start Nippon, the entrepreneurship encouragement program by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), from April to further polish up the service.

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-terracemile2

Link Sports

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-linksports-mentor
From the left: Link Sports’ Shinya Koizumi, his mentor Samurai Incubate’s Mariko Yazawa

People enjoying sports in a casual way tend to have a common problem. When they have a team match with other teams, they typically have the following problems:

  • Hard to share updates and adjust schedules among team members because more than a half of them still use feature phones.
  • Hard to record and manage scores. 95% of amateur sports players record scores on paper, copy them to an Excel file to share with other team members.
  • Hard to collect money or for splitting  the bills for match venue rent and drinking party after the match.

Link Sports has developed a mobile app to solve all these issues, which will be released in late April. When a manager posts updates like the schedule of an upcoming team match game, it will be delivered via push notification from the app, in-app alert as well as e-mail so as to enable even feature phone users updates to be kept.

Planned monetization streams include crowd storage for sport-training movies, paywalled features, recruiting supplementary members for a game match as well as sales of sports items, uniforms, and sports insurance. Based on assumption that 5% of all sports teams in Japan use the service, Link Sports expects to generate a 150 million yen ($1.26 million) monthly sales in the future.

The company has already partnered with Nihon University, Waseda University, Japan’s National Institute of Fitness and Sports, Bluetag.jp (online athlete supporting platform), Mizuno (sports equipment and sportswear company), YKK Group (manufacturing company famous for making zippers), and Jognote (cloud-based exercise tracking platform).

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-linksports-screenshots

Yamap

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-yamap-mentor
From the left: Yoshihiko Haruyama, his mentor Samurai Incubate’s Ryo Tamaki

Yamap is a mobile app that lets users find where they are even when outside mobile telephony range. The app was to develop a system to prevent mountain climbers, anglers and outdoor-goers from getting lost.

Since it launched back in March 2013, the app has acquired 100,000 downloads while map data for the app have surpassed 430,000 downloads. The app will hit the 300,000 downloads and 1 million map downloads milestone in 2015, where more than 1 million photos are uploaded by users onto the app’s social network function.

Going forward, Sefuri, the company behind the app, expects to generate annual sales of 100 million yen ($841,000) sales from premium membership and that of 600 million yen ($5 million) from Yamap Gears, a planned price comparison site that reviews mountain climbers and outdoor gears. Our readers may recall that the company won a pitch competition at B Dash Camp 2015 Spring in Fukuoka last week.

See also:


Following a series of these pitches, Samurai Incubate’s CEO Kentaro Sakakibara delivered a closing speech to participating startups and the audience. In relation to his current base in Israel, he joked that IBM has started this accelerator program in Japan as the second market following Israel.

He sent hearty cheers to the graduating teams and explained that Samurai Incubate join forces with IBM because he thought leveraging the power that such a huge global company has would definitely help startups better gain the potential in making their business more successful.

ibm-bluehub-1st-batch-sakakibara
Samurai Incubate CEO Kentaro Sakakibara (left)

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

IBM BlueHub selects five startups for first incubation batch

SHARE:

IBM BlueHub is an incubation program by IBM Japan in partnership with Tokyo-based startup incubator Samurai Incubate. Prior to the start of the program in January 2015, the five startups that will join the first batch were unveiled on Tuesday. Yamap (by Sefuri) Designed for mountain climbers, this mobile map app keeps climbers updated on their location even when out of cellphone service coverage. BrandPit Analytics tool for brands that leverages image recognition technology to see how brands are trending in the real or social media spaces (See this article for details). Terrace Mile Data-driven platform to help farmers make their agricultural activities more profitable. Gene Quest Internet-based genome analytics service for consumers. Link Sports Question-and-answer website/app for sports-minded people, helping them understand how to better manage themselves from a sports science perspective. During the program, these incubatees will further develop their technologies especially around data analytics as well as improve user experience and interface with assistance from IBM Japan. The participating startups expect being allowed to partner with big businesses in addition to IBM Japan. Some startups like Sefuri (from Fukuoka) or Terrace Mile (from Miyazaki) flew all the way to Tokyo to participate in the program. Through the…

ibmbluehub-1st-batch-featuredimage

IBM BlueHub is an incubation program by IBM Japan in partnership with Tokyo-based startup incubator Samurai Incubate. Prior to the start of the program in January 2015, the five startups that will join the first batch were unveiled on Tuesday.

Designed for mountain climbers, this mobile map app keeps climbers updated on their location even when out of cellphone service coverage.

Analytics tool for brands that leverages image recognition technology to see how brands are trending in the real or social media spaces (See this article for details).

Data-driven platform to help farmers make their agricultural activities more profitable.

Internet-based genome analytics service for consumers.

Question-and-answer website/app for sports-minded people, helping them understand how to better manage themselves from a sports science perspective.

During the program, these incubatees will further develop their technologies especially around data analytics as well as improve user experience and interface with assistance from IBM Japan. The participating startups expect being allowed to partner with big businesses in addition to IBM Japan. Some startups like Sefuri (from Fukuoka) or Terrace Mile (from Miyazaki) flew all the way to Tokyo to participate in the program.

Through the program, IBM Japan aims to help these startups develop their services as masterpieces of the Japanese startup scene by 2020, the year of the Tokyo Olympic Games. We will see how they fare during the batch at a demo day event scheduled for April or May 2015.

ibmcbluehub-and-incubatees-logos