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Japan’s Mixi acquires Compath.me, Tokyo startup behind family photo service Kiddy

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Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo service Kiddy, announced on Monday that it had been recently acquired by Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121). Financial terms regarding the deal have not been disclosed but Compath.me’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando plus  his some colleagues will join Mixi upon the acquisition. Mixi’s ‘Vantage Studio’ department, the new business development team directly led by Mixi co-founder and chairman Shinji Kasahara, has been offering a family photo service called Mitene (meaning ‘Check out this!’ in Japanese) since 2015. The company announced earlier this month that the app has acquired over 1 million users. According to the statement from Compath.me, the Kiddy app is expected to be merged into the Mitene app soon with the user migration. The Kiddy app will be completely shutting down in late April. Meanwhile, Mixi recently started broadcasting TV commercials across Japan to boost user acquisition for the Mitene app (see video below). Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011,…

Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo service Kiddy, announced on Monday that it had been recently acquired by Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121). Financial terms regarding the deal have not been disclosed but Compath.me’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando plus  his some colleagues will join Mixi upon the acquisition.

Mixi’s ‘Vantage Studio’ department, the new business development team directly led by Mixi co-founder and chairman Shinji Kasahara, has been offering a family photo service called Mitene (meaning ‘Check out this!’ in Japanese) since 2015. The company announced earlier this month that the app has acquired over 1 million users. According to the statement from Compath.me, the Kiddy app is expected to be merged into the Mitene app soon with the user migration. The Kiddy app will be completely shutting down in late April.

Meanwhile, Mixi recently started broadcasting TV commercials across Japan to boost user acquisition for the Mitene app (see video below).

Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.

Compath.me has fundraised an undisclosed sum in a seed round from DG Incubation (the company operating Open Network Lab as well as the investment arm subsidiary of Digital Garage), Architype and Netprice.com (now known as Beenos, TSE:3328). Subsequently the startup raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United (TSE:2497) in May of 2014.

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Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s Mixi acquires P2P ticket marketplace TicketCamp for $95.5 million

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This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese. Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121) announced today it will acquire Tokyo-based Hunza, the company behind peer-to-peer ticket marketplace TicketCamp, for 11.5 billion yen or about $95.5 million. Since its launch back in April 2013 by former Zynga Japan employees, Hunza has been connecting potential buyers with users who have extraneous tickets for live performances and other amusement events. The company differentiates the platform from other sites such as Yahoo Auction by showing users what tickets the potential buyers can buy. In this space, we’ve seen many competitors including Japanese startup Ticket Street, which raised $3 million from eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) and Gree Ventures last year. Our readers may recall that Mixi acquired fashion commerce startup Muse&Co for $14.8 million just last month. Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

mixi-ticket-camp_logos

This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.

Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121) announced today it will acquire Tokyo-based Hunza, the company behind peer-to-peer ticket marketplace TicketCamp, for 11.5 billion yen or about $95.5 million.

Since its launch back in April 2013 by former Zynga Japan employees, Hunza has been connecting potential buyers with users who have extraneous tickets for live performances and other amusement events. The company differentiates the platform from other sites such as Yahoo Auction by showing users what tickets the potential buyers can buy.

In this space, we’ve seen many competitors including Japanese startup Ticket Street, which raised $3 million from eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) and Gree Ventures last year. Our readers may recall that Mixi acquired fashion commerce startup Muse&Co for $14.8 million just last month.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s Mixi acquires fashion commerce startup Muse&Co for $14.8 million

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121) announced today that it will acquire membership-based fashion commerce company Muse&Co for 1.762 billion yen ($14.8 million). This means that Muse&Co will take a major step forward in as early as three years since its launch back in February of 2012. See also: Japanese fashion commerce site Muse&Co passes $1M in monthly sales Japanese fashion startup Muse & Co raises $3.4 million Muse&Co has successfully brought the flash sales method to the mobile commerce space, seeing a monthly revenue ranging from several hundred thousand US dollars in as soon as a year since launch. Mixi said in a statement that this acquisition will contribute to their smart device businesses in terms of sharing expertise for service operations. This is because about 80% of user traffic for the fashion commerce service comes from smartphone users. Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

mixi-museandco_logos

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121) announced today that it will acquire membership-based fashion commerce company Muse&Co for 1.762 billion yen ($14.8 million). This means that Muse&Co will take a major step forward in as early as three years since its launch back in February of 2012.

See also:

Muse&Co has successfully brought the flash sales method to the mobile commerce space, seeing a monthly revenue ranging from several hundred thousand US dollars in as soon as a year since launch.

Mixi said in a statement that this acquisition will contribute to their smart device businesses in terms of sharing expertise for service operations. This is because about 80% of user traffic for the fashion commerce service comes from smartphone users.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Boasting 6M downloads, Mixi brings Monster Strike to Taiwan

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Yesterday we told you about Mixi’s investment in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. It turns out that this was not the company’s only recent activity in Taiwan, as it has also just launched a localized version of its hit mobile game Monster Strike. The Chinese name for the game is Guàiwu Dànzhū (or ‘Monster Marbles’) and currently it’s only available on Android, but an iOS version will be coming soon. Mixi is partnering with So-net Entertainment Taiwan to launch and market the game in the region. A Monster Strike homepage has been launched at monster-strike.com.tw along with a ‘how to’ page for new users. Interestingly the company is calling this its first overseas deployment of Monster Strike, so I’m going to interpret that as an indication that Mixi’s efforts to bring Monster Strike to mainland China via a partnership with Tencent have not yet come to fruition yet. I expect that perhaps Taiwan is a dry run of sorts before launching the game on the mainland. Mixi has also announced that Monster Strike now has accumulated over six million downloads. We figure that this is still largely due to heavy TV advertising here in Japan, as we mentioned back in April.

monster-strike-taiwan

Yesterday we told you about Mixi’s investment in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. It turns out that this was not the company’s only recent activity in Taiwan, as it has also just launched a localized version of its hit mobile game Monster Strike. The Chinese name for the game is Guàiwu Dànzhū (or ‘Monster Marbles’) and currently it’s only available on Android, but an iOS version will be coming soon.

Mixi is partnering with So-net Entertainment Taiwan to launch and market the game in the region. A Monster Strike homepage has been launched at monster-strike.com.tw along with a ‘how to’ page for new users.

Interestingly the company is calling this its first overseas deployment of Monster Strike, so I’m going to interpret that as an indication that Mixi’s efforts to bring Monster Strike to mainland China via a partnership with Tencent have not yet come to fruition yet. I expect that perhaps Taiwan is a dry run of sorts before launching the game on the mainland.

Mixi has also announced that Monster Strike now has accumulated over six million downloads. We figure that this is still largely due to heavy TV advertising here in Japan, as we mentioned back in April.

monst_tw_04 monst_tw_04

monst_tw_02 Screen Shot 2014-05-15 at 9.57.43 AM

Mixi’s investment firm invests in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178

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I Mercury Capital, the investment arm of Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121), announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Taiwan’s Loyal Sun Holdings, the operator of Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. Prior to this funding, the Taiwanese company raised funding (the sum also undisclosed) from Japanese investment companies Inspire and ICP last August. The company charges advertisers based on a performance basis, so you don’t actually need to pay anything if you don’t hire anyone using the platform. As for job seekers, they can get a cash reward from the company when successfully hired using the platform. The company has been rapidly growing and has acquired more than 3,000 Taiwanese companies as clients. This strategy is similar to that of Japanese recruiting site Livesense (TSE:6054), which has had promising results in terms of acquiring both advertisers and job seekers. Interestingly, Job178 has been leveraging the Line messaging app for marketing and has successfully attracted more than 5.2 million users with their original Line stickers. Mixi has been running its own recruitment site ‘Find Job’, and is considering a possible synergy with the Taiwanese job site. via Mixi

mixi-job178_logos_leadimage

I Mercury Capital, the investment arm of Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121), announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Taiwan’s Loyal Sun Holdings, the operator of Taiwanese recruitment site Job178.

Prior to this funding, the Taiwanese company raised funding (the sum also undisclosed) from Japanese investment companies Inspire and ICP last August.

The company charges advertisers based on a performance basis, so you don’t actually need to pay anything if you don’t hire anyone using the platform. As for job seekers, they can get a cash reward from the company when successfully hired using the platform.

The company has been rapidly growing and has acquired more than 3,000 Taiwanese companies as clients. This strategy is similar to that of Japanese recruiting site Livesense (TSE:6054), which has had promising results in terms of acquiring both advertisers and job seekers.

Interestingly, Job178 has been leveraging the Line messaging app for marketing and has successfully attracted more than 5.2 million users with their original Line stickers. Mixi has been running its own recruitment site ‘Find Job’, and is considering a possible synergy with the Taiwanese job site.

via Mixi

TV ads march Mixi’s Monster Strike past 5M users

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Mixi has announced today that its popular puzzle RPG game, Monster Strike, now has 5 million users. It initially launched on iOS back in September of 2013, and then on Android in December. Mixi announced in February that it would partner with Chinese internet giant Tencent to bring Monster Strike to China, ostensibly the first localization for the title when it happens. The game is still (to my knowledge) only available in Japanese, but if you’d like to give it a try, it’s a free download on iOS and Google Play. The success of Monster Strike thus far has been credited with helping the company return to profit this year, and former general manager of the game department Hiroki Morite was recently named to become Mixi’s new CEO, leading into what the company is calling a ‘regrowth’ stage. Mixi has been promoting Monster Strike heavily on television in Japan, and its commercials have resulted in the last million users coming in just 18 days. Mixi

monsterstrike

Mixi has announced today that its popular puzzle RPG game, Monster Strike, now has 5 million users. It initially launched on iOS back in September of 2013, and then on Android in December.

Mixi announced in February that it would partner with Chinese internet giant Tencent to bring Monster Strike to China, ostensibly the first localization for the title when it happens. The game is still (to my knowledge) only available in Japanese, but if you’d like to give it a try, it’s a free download on iOS and Google Play.

The success of Monster Strike thus far has been credited with helping the company return to profit this year, and former general manager of the game department Hiroki Morite was recently named to become Mixi’s new CEO, leading into what the company is calling a ‘regrowth’ stage.

Mixi has been promoting Monster Strike heavily on television in Japan, and its commercials have resulted in the last million users coming in just 18 days.

Mixi

Japan’s Mixi launches minimalist selfie app

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Originally written in Japanese, in two parts: 1, 2 Japanese social network company Mixi recently launched a photo sharing app named Muuk. What’s so unique about this app? To find out, we spoke with the app’s team leader Yuichi Kawasaki, director Atsushi Osaki, and designer Itsumi Motohara. Muuk’s main target demographic are young women in their teens and early twenties. In short, says the team, it’s a real-time selfie app. It lets you overlay your real-time selfies on top of another photo you might be sending to a friend. Osaki: We aimed to create a user experience that’s like a real conversation, where users can feel like they are actually talking to their friends face-to-face. Users can text additional information about the photo when they share it. But we rather wanted to enable users to share a more genuine atmosphere by adding a real-time portrait shot. Kawasaki: We arrived at Muuk’s current form after many improvements during the short development time. Through many team meetings, we eventually concluded that we didn’t want to make an app that saves photos on the device anymore. People get tired of posing to get the best shot, so we wanted to change this kind…

muuk-mixi

Originally written in Japanese, in two parts: 1, 2

Japanese social network company Mixi recently launched a photo sharing app named Muuk. What’s so unique about this app? To find out, we spoke with the app’s team leader Yuichi Kawasaki, director Atsushi Osaki, and designer Itsumi Motohara.

Muuk’s main target demographic are young women in their teens and early twenties. In short, says the team, it’s a real-time selfie app. It lets you overlay your real-time selfies on top of another photo you might be sending to a friend.

Osaki: We aimed to create a user experience that’s like a real conversation, where users can feel like they are actually talking to their friends face-to-face. Users can text additional information about the photo when they share it. But we rather wanted to enable users to share a more genuine atmosphere by adding a real-time portrait shot.

Kawasaki: We arrived at Muuk’s current form after many improvements during the short development time. Through many team meetings, we eventually concluded that we didn’t want to make an app that saves photos on the device anymore. People get tired of posing to get the best shot, so we wanted to change this kind of tiring activity back to a more natural human communication.

muuk-dark

The app incorporates some key features in order to realize this concept. For example, you only see the shot of your friend’s face only for 3 seconds after you receive it. After that the shot disappears from the device entirely.

To send a photo to your friend, you don’t choose a photo from your camera roll. You just take a photo with the primary/rear-facing camera, and the front-facing camera automatically takes a snapshot of your face and overlays it on top of the main photo.

The team had three values in mind when building this app: simple, minimum, and fast. They decided they could create the greatest user experience by focusing on these aspects. As you can see on the screen, there is just the main screen with a shutter button, as well as an inbox and contacts list.

Motohara: We focused on making it simple, minimum and fast. There are many features that would have been nice to have, but we left them out to make communication as fast as possible. We applied the same idea when designing the app as well.

Kawasaki: We didn’t add things like retaking, and modifying or decorating. If the photo you took is not focused enough, you can simply take another one. And friends whom you have not contacted for more than 30 days will automatically disappear from your contacts list.

The name, Muuk, comes from the Japnese term “muku.” That term has two meanings: being simple, and breaking out of one’s shell. While Mixi is providing this service for just the domestic market, they plan to expand it globally, first expanding to Asian markets after April.

How will the app be received by the users in Japan and (later) around the world? Let’s stay tuned!

For now, if you’d like to give it a try, you can get it as a free download for both iOS and Android.

Mixi partners with Tencent to expand into Chinese gaming market

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Tokyo-based Mixi announced today that it has partnered with Chinese internet giant Tencent to bring its popular Monster Strike game to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao. Mixi’s Monster Strike is an RPG for iOS and Android, and since its launch last October, the title has acquired over three million users. Our readers may recall its rapid growth has helped the company return to profit, with Mixi’s game department general manager Hiroki Morita moving up to take on the CEO role. Coinciding with the Tencent partnership, Mixi will start an aggressive promotion of Monster Strike in Japan tomorrow, including a new TV commercial (see below) broadcast on many networks.

monsterstrike-mixi-tencent-logos

Tokyo-based Mixi announced today that it has partnered with Chinese internet giant Tencent to bring its popular Monster Strike game to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao.

Mixi’s Monster Strike is an RPG for iOS and Android, and since its launch last October, the title has acquired over three million users. Our readers may recall its rapid growth has helped the company return to profit, with Mixi’s game department general manager Hiroki Morita moving up to take on the CEO role.

Coinciding with the Tencent partnership, Mixi will start an aggressive promotion of Monster Strike in Japan tomorrow, including a new TV commercial (see below) broadcast on many networks.

Back to the Future: Interactive image timeline wins top prize at Photo Hack Day Japan

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Readers may recall that we have written much about Kyoto-based startup Qooq Inc, whose Yesterscape app provides a new and interesting way to view photos of the past. But viewing old photos according to location is just one way show images of the past. This past weekend at Photo Hack Day Japan [1], hosted by Aviary and Mixi, the winning project for the two-day hackathon was a similar solution to view photos of the past. But instead of narrowing the presentation by location, the ‘Back to the Future’ web app (as it was dubbed) grouped images by topic according to a keyword search. The project was created by Theeraphol Wattanavekin, a developer working here in Japan, and three other team members (Rapee Suveeranont, Yoonjo Shin, and Thiti Luang) who joined him remotely [2]. The app made use of the Getty Images API and used Leap Motion as an interface, in order to create a sort of walk through time experience. As you can see in the picture above, Theeraphol did a search for the term ‘computer’ with image results restricted to a time range of 1972 to 2012. Using Leap Motion, he could walk through the timeline by making a…

photo-hack-day-japan-13

Readers may recall that we have written much about Kyoto-based startup Qooq Inc, whose Yesterscape app provides a new and interesting way to view photos of the past. But viewing old photos according to location is just one way show images of the past. This past weekend at Photo Hack Day Japan [1], hosted by Aviary and Mixi, the winning project for the two-day hackathon was a similar solution to view photos of the past. But instead of narrowing the presentation by location, the ‘Back to the Future’ web app (as it was dubbed) grouped images by topic according to a keyword search.

The project was created by Theeraphol Wattanavekin, a developer working here in Japan, and three other team members (Rapee Suveeranont, Yoonjo Shin, and Thiti Luang) who joined him remotely [2]. The app made use of the Getty Images API and used Leap Motion as an interface, in order to create a sort of walk through time experience.

As you can see in the picture above, Theeraphol did a search for the term ‘computer’ with image results restricted to a time range of 1972 to 2012. Using Leap Motion, he could walk through the timeline by making a sort of stepping motion with both hands. Of course, it doesn’t take much to imagine possible applications for such a presentation. Aviary CEO Tobias Peggs mentioned that something like this would be interesting for kids to use in a museum, for example.

backtothefuture-screenshot
Walk through the history of the computer using ‘Back to the Future’ web app

I was personally more impressed with the actual design of the timeline (above), and if you think about integrating more photo sources, especially rich sources like museums or historical archives or even news organization, then it could be really exciting. In a way, it looks like a more refined version of Timeline.js from Knight Lab, which has been popular among news organizations (we’ve used it here on The Bridge as well). I hope that the team can keep developing this project, or alternatively make it available in a way that is easy for people to use [3].

Back to the Future was chosen as the winning project out of the 23 projects that were presented, walking away with 300,000 yen as the top prize, the Leap Motion API prize of Leap controllers for all team members and a Unity3D license, and the Gettyimages Connect API prize of a 50,000 yen gift card. There were lots of other fun ideas developed over the weekend, and hopefully we can tell you about more of them soon.

If you’d like to see more photos from event, do check out the album over on our Facebook page.

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Theeraphol and his team also won the prize for best use of the Leap Motion API.

  1. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I volunteered to participate as one of the judges as a way of lending some support for this competition.  ↩

  2. I understand the three others are co-founders of Boonmee Lab, though Rapee and Yoonjo have worked in Japan like Theeraphol.  ↩

  3. Theeraphol has made his code available on Github (I hope he doesn’t mind me linking to it), and I managed to get it running myself, but not entirely functional due to the Chrome web security issue. (Note that it only runs on Chrome for now.)  ↩

Japan’s Mixi to appoint new CEO (again!), Yusuke Asakura to step down

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Japanese internet company Mixi today announced its financial report for the previous quarter. But they also announced that their CEO, Yusuke Asakura, will step down, appointing Hiroki Morita, general manager of the game department as the new CEO, effective after the scheduled shareholder meeting on June 24th. According to the company, the huge success of its gaming apps (like Monster Strike) have helped them return to profit, despite the prediction that the company might show a $10 million loss in the fiscal year ending this March. They appointed the new CEO as part of their shifting from a recovery phase to a “re-growth” stage. Asakura was appointed as the CEO just last June. Prior to joining Mixi back in 2011, he had been running the startup Naked Technology, subsequently acquired by Mixi. His former colleagues include Miku Hirano, whose startup Spicy Cinnamon recently announced a new round of funding, as well as a new photo app.

From the left: Co-founder Kenji Kasahara and the current CEO Yusuke Asakura
From the left: Co-founder Kenji Kasahara and the current CEO Yusuke Asakura

Japanese internet company Mixi today announced its financial report for the previous quarter. But they also announced that their CEO, Yusuke Asakura, will step down, appointing Hiroki Morita, general manager of the game department as the new CEO, effective after the scheduled shareholder meeting on June 24th.

According to the company, the huge success of its gaming apps (like Monster Strike) have helped them return to profit, despite the prediction that the company might show a $10 million loss in the fiscal year ending this March. They appointed the new CEO as part of their shifting from a recovery phase to a “re-growth” stage.

Asakura was appointed as the CEO just last June. Prior to joining Mixi back in 2011, he had been running the startup Naked Technology, subsequently acquired by Mixi. His former colleagues include Miku Hirano, whose startup Spicy Cinnamon recently announced a new round of funding, as well as a new photo app.