THE BRIDGE

tag Movida Japan

Movida Japan opening up startup program under new chief accelerator

SHARE:

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Movida Japan publicized its new regime on Wednesday. While CEO Taizo Son will remain in his current position, their “chief accelerator” Kengo Ito is leaving the initiative and will become more focused on managing their spun-off investment fund called Genuine Startups as a general partner. Instead of Ito, Hideyuki Shimane will be named to head the acceleration program. Coinciding with this reorganization, Movida Japan changed its participation criteria for startups in their acceleration program, the participants not necessarily being required to be a Movida investment vessel, while the period for every batch of the program was cut by two months, from six months to four. They will announce the acceptance for applications for a new batch when it becomes available. See also: Meet Japan’s seed accelerators and VC firms [MAP] Separating incubation and investments Movida Japan has been providing its incubation program and seed investments. They initially used their own funds for these investments, but this role was transferred to their spun-off fund Genuine Startups back in 2013. They intended to make an explicit separation of the two functions with this, but the problem was Ito was forced to administer both of them. They explained about what happened to…

kengo-ito-hideyuki-shimane
L to R: Kengo Ito (Genuine Startups), Hideyuki Shimane (Movida Japan)

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Movida Japan publicized its new regime on Wednesday. While CEO Taizo Son will remain in his current position, their “chief accelerator” Kengo Ito is leaving the initiative and will become more focused on managing their spun-off investment fund called Genuine Startups as a general partner. Instead of Ito, Hideyuki Shimane will be named to head the acceleration program.

Coinciding with this reorganization, Movida Japan changed its participation criteria for startups in their acceleration program, the participants not necessarily being required to be a Movida investment vessel, while the period for every batch of the program was cut by two months, from six months to four. They will announce the acceptance for applications for a new batch when it becomes available.

See also: Meet Japan’s seed accelerators and VC firms [MAP]

Separating incubation and investments

Movida Japan has been providing its incubation program and seed investments. They initially used their own funds for these investments, but this role was transferred to their spun-off fund Genuine Startups back in 2013. They intended to make an explicit separation of the two functions with this, but the problem was Ito was forced to administer both of them. They explained about what happened to them over the past year:

Aiming to incubate more high-profile startups, we established a shared office space called Startup Dojo in Shibuya last year. As a result, it led to more high-profile startups. But as our portfolio exceeded over around 50 companies, it turned out we unable to spend time enough to follow up on their business developments or help them seek their next round funding opportunities.

Movida Japan decided to appoint Shimane as head to address this issue. He had been substantially committed to creating the content of the incubation program since launch. Shimane explained about what they aim to do with the reorganization at this time:

We aim to eliminate possible misunderstanding from people that startups graduating from our program are solely after fundraising through our investment scheme. That’s why we’ll enhance co-investments in them with other seed investors.

As one of its good examples, our readers may recall Japanese gaming startups Translimit, one of Movida Japan’s portfolio companies, recently raising about $100,000 from Genuine Startups and Skyland Ventures.

Pivoting business model

Typical seed accelerators scrape up their operating cost from management fees from their funds or capital gains. But with the reorganization at this time, Movida Japan will lose its existing income source and need to find another revenue stream. Shimane told us how they will solve this problem:

We’ll make money by helping established companies build and run their in-house incubation initiatives, which is similar to what US-based startup incubator TechStars is providing to major companies. We established such a program with Yahoo Japan back in July, and I think they will soon announce the results made over the past year.

We understand they are receiving requests to help run similar projects at other companies. Regarding their weekly lecture session inviting outstanding entrepreneurs as guest speakers, it has been provided on an invitation-only basis but will be opened up to anyone. For audience convenience, the session will be rescheduled to 7pm on Wednesdays, because many Japanese companies encourage employees not to overtime work every Wednesday; more aspiring entrepreneurs may be expected to attend.

Meet the 13 startups from Movida Japan’s incubation program (part 2)

SHARE:

Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program. This is the part 2 of our quick rundown (See this article for part 1). Let’s have a look at the last six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months. Movie Lovie There are many events like public viewing or group jogging where you can share your fun time with other participants. But Movie Lovie founder Keisuke Nakamura wondered how we can share an experience with others when we watch a movie at a cinema theater. There are difficulties in “sharing” because the experience is heavily dependent on the content of the movie. Movie Lovie is an online platform and allows you to create a bulletin board for a movie you like, where you can enjoy interactions with other users before watching the movie. Movie distributors or theater owners can also create their boards online for encouraging consumers to come and watch their movies. The service will go live next month. Combinator Combinator is an online job site for startups which allows them to find their potential employees…

Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program.

This is the part 2 of our quick rundown (See this article for part 1). Let’s have a look at the last six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months.

Movie Lovie

movida-japan-demo-day-movielovie
Keisuke Nakamura

movielovie_screenshot

There are many events like public viewing or group jogging where you can share your fun time with other participants. But Movie Lovie founder Keisuke Nakamura wondered how we can share an experience with others when we watch a movie at a cinema theater. There are difficulties in “sharing” because the experience is heavily dependent on the content of the movie.

Movie Lovie is an online platform and allows you to create a bulletin board for a movie you like, where you can enjoy interactions with other users before watching the movie. Movie distributors or theater owners can also create their boards online for encouraging consumers to come and watch their movies. The service will go live next month.

Combinator

movida-japan-demo-day-combinator
Takumi Shimizu

Combinator is an online job site for startups which allows them to find their potential employees from a pool of people who have their current jobs and are not aggressively finding their next jobs. For engineers, you can sign up for the service and tag yourself with your skill sets so that other users can easily touch base with you.

Since the launch of its alpha version back in late March, notable startups such as Vinclu and Wizpra have succeeded in hiring eleven workers in total. The hiring platform has currently 72 projects and 2,000 users registered.

What differentiates it from other similar platforms is that it encourages users to switch to work for a new company by attracting such users to one of the company’s projects rather than the company itself.

Tabi no Tatsujin

tabitatsu_screenshot

Tabi no Tausjin (literally meaning ‘travel experts’ in Japanese) is an online marketplace for international travel, aiming to connect Japanese travelers with Japanese locals living in foreign travel destinations.

In terms of startups giving users similar experience, we’ve seen many startups including Meetrip, but most of these services require you to communicate with locals in English or their languages. So it will be difficult to use for Japanese users who are not good at speaking in unfamiliar languages.

With the service, their guides can help keep the traveler from being nervous while better enjoying their travel, even for those less familiar with local culture at the destination or worried about safety conditions there. The company has 150 select guides in 12 cities worldwide based on qualification checks via online interviews.

4meee!

movida-japan-demo-day-4meee
Arisa Sakanashi

Women are always looking for tips regarding clothing dress-up or make-up. They used to get information from magazines but now they depend on online media. There are many curation sites offering useful tips for them, but these typically require much time to finish reading. That’s why Arisa Sakanashi and her team invented 4meee!, a user-generated content site in a four-panel comic strip style, specifically targeting teenage girls and women in their 20s.

They plan to monetize it by advertising, publishing advertorial posts, and embedding affiliate links to e-commerce sites. As of this writing, they have published 1,000 articles and surpassed 1 million monthly pageviews. They are currently planning to translate all articles into Chinese and start serving the Chinese markets.

4meee_screenshot

Aorb

movida-japan-demo-day-aorb
Jumpei Ikeda

Aorb is a mobile app that allows users to present two pictures and ask others to choose the best one. For example, when you can’t decided between two outfits, you can take pictures and upload them using the app. Subsequently, you will be able to see a list of responses from other users.

Every question posted gets 70 answers on average. Almost a half of their users are teenagers, and about 60% of them are females. So their primary users are high school girls. They have acquired users from 20 countries around the world because the app uses pictures, requiring no verbal communication. In view of a huge user base from the Asian regions, they are planning to add an English interface by the end of this month.

aorb_screenshots

Hima Switch

movida-japan-demo-day-hima-swtich
Takuya Moriguchi

When you have spare time, this app helps you interact with other users who are also free. Takuya Moriguchi, the inventor of this app, had difficulty in finding someone who has time to spare via Facebook. The app allows you to chat using as short as 10 Japanese characters, while storing as little as past five sets of interactions.

They are planning to add a new feature of simple games this coming weekend (June 7-8). In order to improve their 7-day user retention rate to over 80%, they also plan to roll out a new gamification feature – the more you enjoy chatting with other users using the app, the more characters you are allowed to use in the chat feature – as well as proposing topics to discuss so as to keep them using the app.

himaswitch_screenshot

Meet the 13 startups from Movida Japan’s incubation program (part 1)

SHARE:

Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program. This is the part 1 of our quick rundown. Let’s have a look at the first six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months. Eigooo! Eigooo is an online chat-based English learning service. When they initially launched its mobile app back in February, it initially marked a conversion rate of 1.85%. But we understand that they succeeded in improving it to 2.627% after its interface and function adjustment. In similar services using Skype or other teleconferencing tools, a learning course is typically provided on a person-to-person basis, but is likely to require advance booking and charge users per hour. But Eigooo uses a text-based chat, so its teachers can interact with up ten students simultaneously, which requires no advance booking from students but pay a higher compensation to the teachers. They are also planning to expand to mainland China and Korea in the future, aiming to hit an annual revenue of $60 million and go IPO in five years. BrainWars BrainWars is a social quiz app and…

Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program.

This is the part 1 of our quick rundown. Let’s have a look at the first six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months.

Eigooo!

movida-japan-demo-day-eigooo
From the left: Eigooo co-founders Peter Rothenberg, Mizuno Nozue

Eigooo is an online chat-based English learning service. When they initially launched its mobile app back in February, it initially marked a conversion rate of 1.85%. But we understand that they succeeded in improving it to 2.627% after its interface and function adjustment.

In similar services using Skype or other teleconferencing tools, a learning course is typically provided on a person-to-person basis, but is likely to require advance booking and charge users per hour. But Eigooo uses a text-based chat, so its teachers can interact with up ten students simultaneously, which requires no advance booking from students but pay a higher compensation to the teachers.

They are also planning to expand to mainland China and Korea in the future, aiming to hit an annual revenue of $60 million and go IPO in five years.

BrainWars

BrainWars is a social quiz app and pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. See these articles to learn how it works.

Categorific

Categorific is a data-mining service using the image recognition technology. Ikkyo Technology, the startup behind the service, initially started their business with providing a content monitoring service for web service companies, helping them eliminating pirated content from their web services using the same technology.

They have been consulted by their clients about the possibilities of a new business using an enormous collection of images stored for the aforementioned countermeasure application. As a result of that, their team has invented Categorific.

They explained that the new service can be adopted for many purposes. For example, if you sell a sticker for a messaging app like Line, you can help users choose other stickers that they may like, by giving them a recommendation based on the service.

categorific_slide

Graph

movida-japan-demo-day-graph
Shunsuke Takahashi

In Japan, people are trying to find statics over 100 million times an year. Even if you could successfully find the one you wanted, you would need more than an hour to edit or visualize it to be used in your presentation deck.

Graph allows you to find the statistics you want easily and embed it on your blog post. They understand that there are several competitors in this space but most of their platforms have difficulties in search accuracy or usability. So the company plans to focus on increasing the variety of statistics and easy-to-understand infographics. They expect to acquire 1 billion annual page views and monetize it by launching a premium service.

graph_screenshot

Pedal Forge

movida-japan-demo-day-pedal-forge
Takakazu Nakamura

Pedal Forge aims to allow users to test out a musical instrument before they but it. They will launch a web service enabling users to play the guitar virtually, with aiming to help them choose at home before visiting a guitar shop.

The service will be available in Japanese, English, and French this month. Since musical instrument makers learn that this will help them promote better their products, they are seen willing to provide sampling tone data to the platform.

pedalforge_screenshot

Sttir

movida-japan-demo-day-sttir
Ryo Tsukahara

When you think about how to compose a song, some people create it from scratch but others would remix songs created by someone else. Sttir wants to focus on serving the latter users and help them easily obtain songs and remix them in a way, as in sharing open source codes in the programmer community. They want to be called a GitHub for musicians.

sttir_screenshot

Live3

movida-japan-demo-day-live3
Kyohei Tejima

When you have no plan to hang out after hours, it’s likely hard to find an event you may like using conventional ways like typical search engines. Live3 is a mobile app and allows you to match with your nearby events whose organizers still have many tickets unsold.

The service gives you 10 choices of live performances happening nearby every day, and you can buy it on the Live3 website or app if you like it. They plan to monetize it by charging 10% of the ticket price as a commission fee to event organizers. Their average conversion rate is as high as 7.39%.

live3_screenshots

Japanese startup Translimit raises $100,000 to launch social quiz app

SHARE:

Tokyo-based startup Translimit announced today that it has raised 10 million yen (about $100,000) from Genuine Startups [1] and Skyland Ventures. The funds will go towards launching a mobile quiz app with social competition features. The app will be called BrainWars, with an iOS version coming in mid-April, and an Android version to follow in June. BrainWars pits players against one another, playing three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. Since these games require no verbal response [2], and users around the world can play and compete against each other regardless of language. The match is arranged to let you to play in real time, but if you can’t find anyone available to compete with, you can compete with someone you know according to their past results. In this space, we’ve already seen US-based Plain Vanilla Games, the startup behind trivia app QuizUp, which secured series B funding of $22 million from Sequoia Capital late last year. Here in Japan Namco Bandai has been selling a brain exercise app called Zen Notore. There’s Colopl Quiz RPG which has seen some success as well (iOS/Android). Translimit was initially launched back in January by Hiroki…

hiroki-takaba
Translimit CEO Hiroki Takaba

Tokyo-based startup Translimit announced today that it has raised 10 million yen (about $100,000) from Genuine Startups [1] and Skyland Ventures. The funds will go towards launching a mobile quiz app with social competition features. The app will be called BrainWars, with an iOS version coming in mid-April, and an Android version to follow in June.

BrainWars pits players against one another, playing three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. Since these games require no verbal response [2], and users around the world can play and compete against each other regardless of language. The match is arranged to let you to play in real time, but if you can’t find anyone available to compete with, you can compete with someone you know according to their past results.

battlehome

In this space, we’ve already seen US-based Plain Vanilla Games, the startup behind trivia app QuizUp, which secured series B funding of $22 million from Sequoia Capital late last year. Here in Japan Namco Bandai has been selling a brain exercise app called Zen Notore. There’s Colopl Quiz RPG which has seen some success as well (iOS/Android).

Translimit was initially launched back in January by Hiroki Takaba and Takuma Kudo, both of whom previously worked at CyberAgent companies. They have been involved in several game projects together, including the virtual avatar service Ameba Pico (which shut down back in 2012) and mobile social game Girl Friend BETA. The Translimit team is participating in Movida Japan incubation program here in Tokyo.


  1. Genuine Startups is an investment fund spun off from Movida Japan.
  2. It could be a mathematical equation where you have to fill in the operator, for example.

Check out Japanese news app Bizzlio and 8 other startups from Movida Demo Day

SHARE:

Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Friday, showcasing more than two dozens startups from the fourth batch of its incubation program. We’d like to tell you about a few that we liked, so here’s a quick rundown. Bizzlio Bizzlio is a mobile news curation app that allows users to learn more about a news story by following it. If there is any update to that story, you’ll be updated too. In this space we’ve seen many competitors, including Gunosy, SmartNews, and Vingow. Shiroyagi Corporation, the startup behind the app, wants to differentiate from others by using a unique algorithm and recommendation engine rather than creating just an RSS aggregation tool. The company’s co-founders have unique backgrounds. Their chief scientist Akira Shibata previously worked at New York University, and chief strategist Yoshi Watanabe previously worked at Panasonic. The pair met at Boston Consulting Group and decided to launch their own company. Their app is not yet available but will be live soon. Flier Flier is an abstract app especially designed for busy people. It allows users to finish reading a book in as little as ten minutes, something that usually takes most people several hours. It…

Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Friday, showcasing more than two dozens startups from the fourth batch of its incubation program. We’d like to tell you about a few that we liked, so here’s a quick rundown.

Bizzlio

Bizzlio is a mobile news curation app that allows users to learn more about a news story by following it. If there is any update to that story, you’ll be updated too. In this space we’ve seen many competitors, including Gunosy, SmartNews, and Vingow. Shiroyagi Corporation, the startup behind the app, wants to differentiate from others by using a unique algorithm and recommendation engine rather than creating just an RSS aggregation tool.

The company’s co-founders have unique backgrounds. Their chief scientist Akira Shibata previously worked at New York University, and chief strategist Yoshi Watanabe previously worked at Panasonic. The pair met at Boston Consulting Group and decided to launch their own company. Their app is not yet available but will be live soon.

bizzlio_screenshot

Flier

Flier is an abstract app especially designed for busy people. It allows users to finish reading a book in as little as ten minutes, something that usually takes most people several hours. It gives you two ways to choose books to read: trending books, and the books recommended by high-profile people. Abstracts for books are created by the company’s writers.

The company has partnered with 17 Japanese publishers, with abstracts from 20 books distributed to users every month via desktop, tablets, and smartphones. When you read an abstract, you can easily buy the original book at Amazon via a (referral) link from the service. According to the company’s CTO Yasushi Ohga, Flier is currently being provided for corporate users, where their employees can save time when a company requests that they read a certain book. The service was developed with an inspiration from getAbstract which has 40,000 corporate accounts and 10 million users.

flier_screenshot

ShareWis

ShareWis is a learning site that provides a number of online learning courses, motivating users to learn new things by visualizing their learning process, thus creating a feeling of the accomplishment. The service was launched in Osaka in December of 2012, and the website has seen over 300,000 visitors and more than 300,000 registered users.

In partnership with Skype-based English conversation learning service Rarejob, it is now testing a model of driving traffic to the service using the latter’s educational materials. The service is currently available on desktop and iOS, with an Android app to be released very soon.

UI Scope

UI Scope allows software and hardware developers to crowdsource product testing tasks. A registered tester (called a ‘panel’ in the service) receives a camera from the startup so that it can record the testing process. When a developer (called ‘a client’) chooses someone from all registered testers and asks them to test the product, that person will take about 20 minutes to test it and report back with a video of the testing process.

The developer pays 3,000 yen (about $30) for this testing, and the tester receives 500 yen. The test results are reported online in the form of video, screenshots, and behavioral reports in text. The company was launched back in August of 2012, had acquired 600 mobile developers as their users including the following notable companies.

Hima Switch

Hima Switch is a mobile app that will connect you with someone when you have free time. The app’s developer wants to give people an alternative option to find friends who are available to hang out. Since the launch of its beta version one month ago, it has seen 10,000 downloads, with the goal of acquiring 1.5 million users by the end of next year.

himaswtich_screenshot

Beatrobo

Beatrobo is a music-focused startup that lets users build music playlists, primarily from YouTube music content. The company recently unveiled a mobile accessory called PlugAir, which has a unique ID and functions as sharable playlist. Users simply insert the device in the earphone jack of their smartphones in order to access the playlist.

The company plans to partner with music artists and the entertainment industry, and is already in talks with Universal Music Japan and American rock group Linkin Park. The startup launched its social music platform back in October of 2010, and fundraised about $600,000 from CyberAgent Ventures, Klab Ventures, and Movida Japan back in April of 2012.

Ciatr

Ciatr (a sort of Japanese pronunciation of ‘theater’) is a movie-focused buzz portal. The service was launched back in July, conducting an online promotional campaign in partnership with the Festival Cinema Brazil 2013. Users of the platform can leave comments on movies introduced at the event.

According to Viviane, the startup behind the service, they were originally targeting consumers in their 30s and 40s, but its main userbase turned out to be females aged 18 to 20 years. The service has 120,000 visitors in total, 140,000 buzz posts, and 8,000 registered users, and are aiming at reaching 1 million users by next July.

ciatr_screenshot

Aorb

Aorb is a mobile app that allows users to present two pictures and ask others to choose the best one. For example, when you can’t decided between two outfits, you can take pictures and upload them using the app. Subsequently, you will be able to see a list of responses from other users. The app will be available for iOS on November 28th.

aorb_screenshot

MiCHi

With the idea of selling Japan-made items to overseas markets, Michi tests a variety of products and then post articles on its Facebook wall. In this way, they can find out what ones get the best responses from their global audience, thus gaining insights about user tastes, especially about popular nail art, which is its speciality.

Many nail artists are working in the Japanese market, but after rapid growth they’re struggling to acquire more customers and revenue in the saturated domestic market. So now they are now looking for opportunities overseas. Michi sells artificial nails designed by Japanese nail artists to overseas customers online. And since its launch back in August, the service has seen almost 200% user growth every month. CEO Shun Nakazaki says he expects to make the business sort of like a Uniqlo of the artificial nail industry.

michi_screenshot

Meet the 5 newest startups from Movida Japan’s acceleration program

SHARE:

Tokyo-based startup accelerator Movida Japan, led by billionaire Taizo Son, today held its Demo Day unveiling five startups from the third batch of its acceleration program. They pitch their ideas in front of more than 150 people, including investors and media. Here’s a quick rundown on what they’ve been working on. Reep ¶ Pitched by: Hiromasa Yoshikane People take many daily snapshots with their smartphones, but they often forget to which social network or which file sharing service they’ve uploaded pictures. Reep.me aggregates your past snapshots from your many social network accounts, letting you easily see what you’ve shot an year ago for example. Their iPhone app is live as of today. Vise ¶ Pitched by: Keinichiro Nishioka Vise is an alternative document management platform to Google Docs or Microsoft Word. When you edit a document for a client, you may need to exchange it many times, revising the draft again and again. That process results in many revisions, often making it hard to keep track of the newest version. Vise has adopted the Markdown syntax, and its version control feature helps you manage revision history on a document. When you create a new version of your original document, a…

Tokyo-based startup accelerator Movida Japan, led by billionaire Taizo Son, today held its Demo Day unveiling five startups from the third batch of its acceleration program. They pitch their ideas in front of more than 150 people, including investors and media. Here’s a quick rundown on what they’ve been working on.

Reep

reep_logoPitched by: Hiromasa Yoshikane

People take many daily snapshots with their smartphones, but they often forget to which social network or which file sharing service they’ve uploaded pictures. Reep.me aggregates your past snapshots from your many social network accounts, letting you easily see what you’ve shot an year ago for example. Their iPhone app is live as of today.

Vise

3idea_logoPitched by: Keinichiro Nishioka

Vise is an alternative document management platform to Google Docs or Microsoft Word. When you edit a document for a client, you may need to exchange it many times, revising the draft again and again. That process results in many revisions, often making it hard to keep track of the newest version.

Vise has adopted the Markdown syntax, and its version control feature helps you manage revision history on a document. When you create a new version of your original document, a revision on the original document may be automatically reverted to the original as well. Other members sharing the document may also be notified about your revision.

They expect to launch a beta version in July.

vise_pitch

Michi

michimall_logoPitched by: Shun Nakazaki

With the idea of selling Japan-made products to overseas markets, Michi tests a variety of products and then post articles on a Facebook wall to find out what ones get the best response from their global audience. In this way, they’ve gained insights about user tastes, especially about popular nail art.

Many nail artists are working in the Japanese market, but after rapid growth they’re struggling to acquired more customers and revenue in the saturated domestic market. And that’s why they are now looking overseas.

Michi sells artificial nails designed by Japanese nail artists to overseas customers online. It creates a new revenue stream for nail artists whose sales have leveled off, and it allows foreign nail art lovers to buy cute Japanese designs. They’ve already acquire more than 330,000 likes on their Facebook fan page.

michimall_fbscreenshot

Street Academy

streetacademy_logoPicthed by: Takashi Fujimoto

StreetAcademy gives you a new way to learn. A survey says that Japanese people, ranging from thirty-somethings to seniors, is interested in teaching something to someone. This service provides them with an opportunity for teach.

By listing the thing that you can teach, you can then easily create a page announcing your lecture. Your profile is automatically imported from your Facebook profile, so you don’t need to enter everything from scratch. In terms of venues, lessons usually take place at coffee shops, co-working spaces, or even at a reserved room in a public bath site.

streetacademy_screenshot

U-Note

u-note_logoPicthed by Yuto Koide

There are many learning opportunities and events taking place in any given town. But most likely you’re not able to attend them all. And even if you could, it would cost a lot.

Typically event attendees take notes about what they’ve hear at events. Very often everyone is taking notes about the same stuff in a very similar way. It might be beneficial to share these notes with others who would have liked to attend the event.

The U-note app aims to give people lecture experience without actually real attending. The startup expects to acquire 5 million monthly page views by the end of this year. Its mobile app is available for Android, with an iOS version to follow soon.

u-note_pitch


taizoson_speaksThe accelerator’s CEO Taizo Son emphasized that these five presenters do not make up all the graduates from the third batch, because they’ve raised the bar for qualification to pitch at this Demo Day event. He urged the audience to assist (financially or otherwise) all the startups from the accelerator.

Movida Japan is now receiving applications for the next batch of its acceleration program. The deadline is next Monday, May 20th.