news

Kawara: A made-in-Japan news reader for the global market

Rick Martin 2013.11.06

A few weeks back we told you about a fun Japanese photo app called Kawaiit which helps you rank cute photos. That app was the brainchild of Tokyo-based Jig.jp, a company that is increasingly looking to audiences abroad for its smartphone services. It’s latest offering, a mobile news reader application called Kawara, is launching today, now available as a free download for iOS. According to the announcement, the app’s name comes from the word Kawaraban, a newspaper from Japan’s Edo Period. The app is pretty simple to use, with preferences that allow you to specify which region’s news you’d like to read. Available regions include Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the UK, and the US. The language of the news updates you read is dependent on this selection [1]. Once you choose your locale, you can further customize by arranging sections (Sports, Business, Entertainment, Technology, etc.) to suit your preference. Regrettably, the customization appears to end there. This is not an RSS reader, so you can’t input your own sources, nor is it a social service like Gunosy. But for a casual news reader it looks perfectly fine. There is a very handy autoplay function that you…

A few weeks back we told you about a fun Japanese photo app called Kawaiit which helps you rank cute photos. That app was the brainchild of Tokyo-based Jig.jp, a company that is increasingly looking to audiences abroad for its smartphone services. It’s latest offering, a mobile news reader application called Kawara, is launching today, now available as a free download for iOS. According to the announcement, the app’s name comes from the word Kawaraban, a newspaper from Japan’s Edo Period.

The app is pretty simple to use, with preferences that allow you to specify which region’s news you’d like to read. Available regions include Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the UK, and the US. The language of the news updates you read is dependent on this selection [1].

Once you choose your locale, you can further customize by arranging sections (Sports, Business, Entertainment, Technology, etc.) to suit your preference.

Regrettably, the customization appears to end there. This is not an RSS reader, so you can’t input your own sources, nor is it a social service like Gunosy. But for a casual news reader it looks perfectly fine. There is a very handy autoplay function that you can trigger simply by setting your device in landscape mode [2]. In this way, it does make a nice little desktop companion to place alongside your regular work area.

Other interesting features include the ability to expand or contract the size of news update panels shown on your screen, as well as a clip feature that lets you flag certain articles for easy access later. Social sharing is also built into Kawara.

Overall, it’s a very simple but useful reader application. And if you need something to keep you updated at your desk-side while you work, it’s not a bad addition to your iPhone or iPad.

I’m not certain where the content is coming from, but it appears to be Google News. I’ve inquired with Jig.jp and will update if I hear more details. Update: It is. ↩
This autoplay feature is one that I really enjoyed in the Trickle Twitter app before it got all crashy and unusable. But I wish more Twitter apps and news readers would implement this. ↩

news

Japan’s Uzabase introduces business news curation app

Takeshi Hirano 2013.09.22

See the original story in Japanese. The advent of social media and smart devices has allowed us to receive continuous updates from content producers at any time, no matter where we are. So these days people really need practical solutions to help them filter what to receive and read. We’ve seen several outstanding Japanese startups working on such information solutions, including Smart News, Vingow, and Gunosy. It’s an economic journal for the smartphone era On Friday another player jumped into this space. Tokyo’s Uzabase, the startup behind corporate profile database Speeda, unveiled an iOS app that curates financial and business news updates. It’s called News Picks. News Picks aggregates business and financial updates from 30 news entities in Japan and around the world, delivering them to subscribers with in-depth analysis by the startup’s team of economists and high profile entrepreneurs. The app is available for iOS, and its desktop version will be also introduced by the end of this year. If you think this is just a RSS news aggregator, you’re partly right. But the biggest draw of this service is that it is developed and managed by a team with a solid background in finance. The startup was founded…

See the original story in Japanese.

The advent of social media and smart devices has allowed us to receive continuous updates from content producers at any time, no matter where we are. So these days people really need practical solutions to help them filter what to receive and read. We’ve seen several outstanding Japanese startups working on such information solutions, including Smart News, Vingow, and Gunosy.

It’s an economic journal for the smartphone era

On Friday another player jumped into this space. Tokyo’s Uzabase, the startup behind corporate profile database Speeda, unveiled an iOS app that curates financial and business news updates. It’s called News Picks.

News Picks aggregates business and financial updates from 30 news entities in Japan and around the world, delivering them to subscribers with in-depth analysis by the startup’s team of economists and high profile entrepreneurs. The app is available for iOS, and its desktop version will be also introduced by the end of this year. If you think this is just a RSS news aggregator, you’re partly right. But the biggest draw of this service is that it is developed and managed by a team with a solid background in finance.

The startup was founded back in 2008. The company’s first app, Speeda, was invented by its founding members who previously worked with investment banks. It collects news updates and business analysis from think tanks, and provides them to finance businesses. In terms of differentiation from big players like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, the service requires users to have no special terminal nor master specific commands or functions.

The company is rapidly expanding its focus on Asia, and has overseas offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Curation by economic experts might be the key

One key service provided by the startup is a strong expertise in business trends, with valuable news updates curated by financial experts.

When you launch the app, you’re required to log in to the service with your social media accounts. But I found it somewhat discouraging that it asked me to create a user account/password for the service in addition to the social media login. Subsequently, you choose persons or business categories that interest you. This process is similar to that of the Vingow app as well.

You can browse updates in the timeline curated by other users you follow, or check out the news crawling robots. You can add notes on updates, which then allows other users know why you liked it. Like conventional RSS reader apps, you can jump to the original website from any given update.

From my perspective, there’s still room to improve in terms of choosing updates to suit my preference. It’s difficult to choose which high profile user I should follow. For example, if I follow Japanese dotcom tycoon Takafumi Horie, I don’t know what kind of curated updates I will get through his timeline.

Here on this site, we also bring you updates from startup scenes around the world, including business updates. From a media person’s perspective, I’m looking forward to seeing how this kind of solutions changes how consumers’ get news updates.

news

Kyoto startup unveils a simple alternative to Google Reader

Masaru Ikeda 2013.06.17

As many of our readers likely already know, Google will retire Google Reader on July 1st. More than a few startups and developers around the world have put forth alternatives to the dying de-facto standard. Which one will emerge as the new front runner? Kyoto-based startup Modelor today unveiled a new RSS reading app called Presser, which is available both on the web and for iOS. It will follow with versions for Android, Mac, and iPad soon. The Presser team is mostly comprised of students attending Kyoto University. In addition to the general RSS reading feature, the app will learn your preferences and recommend several news articles you may like every day. Modelor was founded by Kyoto-based UI/UX designer Yosuke Nishida. He previously co-founded and worked with Reventive, the startup behind Close, a social networking app. He recently decided to begin his own startup, as Reventive recently managed to secure funding from Mixi.

As many of our readers likely already know, Google will retire Google Reader on July 1st. More than a few startups and developers around the world have put forth alternatives to the dying de-facto standard. Which one will emerge as the new front runner?

Kyoto-based startup Modelor today unveiled a new RSS reading app called Presser, which is available both on the web and for iOS. It will follow with versions for Android, Mac, and iPad soon. The Presser team is mostly comprised of students attending Kyoto University.

In addition to the general RSS reading feature, the app will learn your preferences and recommend several news articles you may like every day.

Modelor was founded by Kyoto-based UI/UX designer Yosuke Nishida. He previously co-founded and worked with Reventive, the startup behind Close, a social networking app. He recently decided to begin his own startup, as Reventive recently managed to secure funding from Mixi.

news

Japanese news curation app Vingow boasts 250% growth in two months

Takeshi Hirano 2013.06.15

See the original story in Japanese. A recent survey by Japanese ad agency Hakuhodo indicated that consumers in Tokyo have very saturated contact with media these days. So perhaps it’s no wonder that online news curation services are getting lots of attention recently. The technology behind these services seems to be only getting better. Tokyo-based startup JXPress is providing one such service, a news curation app called Vingow. Earlier this week, the startup added an interesting new feature to its iOS app, pulling the lead portion of curated news articles, creating handy abstracts for users. The startup’s founder and CEO Katsuhiro Yoneshige explained: If you look at a service like Summly, they’re doing this pretty easily (creating abstracts from curated articles), because in English and they can detect which part of the article is the lead, by finding key nouns, verbs, and finding the frequency of spaces or finding a period in a sentence. However, this process is very difficult to do in Japanese. To solve this problem, they needed to use natural language processing technology. The team initially thought this would take a lot of time, but things proceeded far better than they expected. Some of our readers may…

See the original story in Japanese.

A recent survey by Japanese ad agency Hakuhodo indicated that consumers in Tokyo have very saturated contact with media these days. So perhaps it’s no wonder that online news curation services are getting lots of attention recently. The technology behind these services seems to be only getting better. Tokyo-based startup JXPress is providing one such service, a news curation app called Vingow.

Earlier this week, the startup added an interesting new feature to its iOS app, pulling the lead portion of curated news articles, creating handy abstracts for users.

The startup’s founder and CEO Katsuhiro Yoneshige explained:

If you look at a service like Summly, they’re doing this pretty easily (creating abstracts from curated articles), because in English and they can detect which part of the article is the lead, by finding key nouns, verbs, and finding the frequency of spaces or finding a period in a sentence. However, this process is very difficult to do in Japanese.

To solve this problem, they needed to use natural language processing technology. The team initially thought this would take a lot of time, but things proceeded far better than they expected.

Some of our readers may recall that Yahoo has recently acquired the aforementioned news curation app Summly, which was developed by a 17-year-old in UK. The Vingow app was developed by students attending Waseda University, and is very similar to the Summly app, not only in function but also in that it was created by young developers.

In order to prevent possible copyright issues (which sometimes occur with news curation apps) the team is discussing with their legal advisor and news media companies.

Since their launch back October of 2012, the app has been growing well, seeing a 250% increase in downloads over the last two months. Their users read as many as 22 articles at a time on average. Yoneshige adds:

In terms of duration of visits, a typical user will stay on general news sites for a few minutes. But on our app they stay for as long as 40 minutes. […] Since our launch last year, we’ve been tagging articles to improve accuracy, giving better recommendations to users. From now, we’ll focus on making it easier to find interesting articles. These two approaches will definitely help our users save their time.

JX Press was founded back in 2008, and introduced the first edition of the Vingow app in 2011. The startup has previously received investments from Cyber Agent, NetAge, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and others.

In the Japanese media landscape, they will definitely be one to watch moving forward.

news

FeedDrop: A new iPhone news reader app just for Japan

Rick Martin 2013.05.06

There are no shortage of newsreader apps out there these days, especially as the landscape adjusts in the wake of the announcement of Google Reader’s upcoming retirement. Most of our readership will no doubt already be aware of useful reader apps like Reeder, Feedly, Leaf, or even maybe even SlowFeeds. But it’s also interesting to see what kinds of reader apps are emerging here in Japan [1]. We recently featured the news curation app Gunosy which pulls news that you might like by analyzing your social media accounts, and even emailing you interesting stories every morning. It’s a handy service, although it’s currently for the Japanese language only [2]. But today I stumbled across another handy made-in-Japan reader app called FeedDrop. While it’s not as smart as Gunosy, the app is useful in that it comes with a number of pre-made content categories, each of which can be toggled on or off by the user. You can also search for your own content feeds, and this process works surprisingly well, giving you RSS and XML feeds for just about any search you can muster – in English or Japanese (note, I tried it with English ones, see pictures below). There’s…

There are no shortage of newsreader apps out there these days, especially as the landscape adjusts in the wake of the announcement of Google Reader’s upcoming retirement. Most of our readership will no doubt already be aware of useful reader apps like Reeder, Feedly, Leaf, or even maybe even SlowFeeds. But it’s also interesting to see what kinds of reader apps are emerging here in Japan [1].

We recently featured the news curation app Gunosy which pulls news that you might like by analyzing your social media accounts, and even emailing you interesting stories every morning. It’s a handy service, although it’s currently for the Japanese language only [2].

But today I stumbled across another handy made-in-Japan reader app called FeedDrop. While it’s not as smart as Gunosy, the app is useful in that it comes with a number of pre-made content categories, each of which can be toggled on or off by the user. You can also search for your own content feeds, and this process works surprisingly well, giving you RSS and XML feeds for just about any search you can muster – in English or Japanese (note, I tried it with English ones, see pictures below).

There’s also a ‘read later’ function that allows you to simply tag any article to be sent to your ‘read later’ queue. While this is certainly useful, there isn’t any styling that makes the articles any easier to read within the app, so it’s hard not to just send articles to Pocket each time. However, in terms of integration with applications that typical Japanese users like, FeedDrop excels. Twitter, Facebook, Hatena Bookmarks, Evernote, and Line are all supported, as well as the afore-mentioned Pocket.

But of course, like Gunosy, the app’s interface is in Japanese only, which is disappointing to see [3]. But it’s definitely an app that might be of interest to our readers here in Japan.

I’m curious to hear what news readers you guys are experimenting with these days. If you have any interesting recommendations, particularly anything that might be made in Japan, do let us know in the comments.

Some other Japanese reader apps worth mentioning include Vingow, SmartNews, and Naver Matome Reader. ↩
The Gunosy app interface looks very much inspired by Reeder, so if you like Reeder, you’ll feel comfortable with this app too. ↩
I can’t help but recall what Atomico’s Niklas Zennström mentioned back during the Japan New Economy Summit, noting that if you’re in the software business, you might as well be making it for the global market. I think an app like FeedDrop would be welcomed by users outside Japan if it ventured beyond just Japanese. ↩

news reader

Kawara: A made-in-Japan news reader for the global market

Japan’s Uzabase introduces business news curation app

Curation by economic experts might be the key

Kyoto startup unveils a simple alternative to Google Reader

Japanese news curation app Vingow boasts 250% growth in two months

FeedDrop: A new iPhone news reader app just for Japan

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