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Open Network Lab showcases 6 teams from 17th batch Demo Day

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See the original story in Japanese. Digital Garage hosted the Demo Day for its Open Network Lab acceleration program earlier this month. The program celebrated its 17th batch and has supported 97 companies so far, with 60% of these successfully raising funds. This year 90 companies applied, and it appears female entrepreneurs, medical services, and inbound travel have become the prominent trends. Recruitment for the 18th batch began on October 9th. Six companies that received support such as mentoring over three months beginning in July took the stage to to share their results. After review, the medicine management platform 9lione (pronounced Kulione) was awarded the Best Team and Audience prizes, while the mental health support app KibunLog secured the Special Award. (Below is an introduction to each companies’ pitch.) Best Team & Audience Awards winner: 9lione Medical facilities using medicines experience the problem of having to discard medicine due to incorrect orders and other reasons. The total amount lost due to discarded medicine is 770 billion yen (nearly $6.9 billion US; estimated to be 10% of the total cost of medicine), which brings the loss per institution to 5 million yen (about $45K US) per year or roughly equivalent to…

onlab-17th-demoday-all-presenters
Award winners and other graduating teams from the 17th Batch
Image credit: Takeshi Hirano

See the original story in Japanese.

Digital Garage hosted the Demo Day for its Open Network Lab acceleration program earlier this month. The program celebrated its 17th batch and has supported 97 companies so far, with 60% of these successfully raising funds. This year 90 companies applied, and it appears female entrepreneurs, medical services, and inbound travel have become the prominent trends. Recruitment for the 18th batch began on October 9th.

Six companies that received support such as mentoring over three months beginning in July took the stage to to share their results. After review, the medicine management platform 9lione (pronounced Kulione) was awarded the Best Team and Audience prizes, while the mental health support app KibunLog secured the Special Award. (Below is an introduction to each companies’ pitch.)

Best Team & Audience Awards winner: 9lione

9lione_screenshot
9lione

Medical facilities using medicines experience the problem of having to discard medicine due to incorrect orders and other reasons. The total amount lost due to discarded medicine is 770 billion yen (nearly $6.9 billion US; estimated to be 10% of the total cost of medicine), which brings the loss per institution to 5 million yen (about $45K US) per year or roughly equivalent to the operating profits of a privately run hospital.

The cause of the problem is simple: information management is still largely done with general-purpose tools such as handwriting and Excel. It is this point that “9lione honed in on.

The company uses a SaaS model to make pharmaceutical management more efficient. It is equipped to read prescriptions using OCR (optical character recognition), can manage the medicine per capsule, and has a function that can keep track of expiration dates using the barcodes of the medicine. Some healthcare providers saw a loss improvement of 75% after introducing the beta version because it is able to manage and propose the optimal order quantity based on consumption data.

The company’s traction is also on the up and up, with 91 companies submitting advance applications in two weeks. The business model is based on monthly subscriptions, with 150,000 medical institutions apart from pharmacies as potential customers. In the future, the company’s aim is to become a buying/selling platform like Amazon which utilizes inventory data.

Special Award winner: KibunLog

kibunlog_screenshots
KibunLog

There are 300 million people suffering from depression worldwide, with 5 million of those in Japan alone. It is a difficult illness to cure with just medicine, and while treatment using psychotherapeutics based on “emotional records” is widely known, it is difficult for depression sufferers to accurately grasp and record their symptoms.

Kimamani’s KibunLog is a support app for improving users’ mental health and looks to solve this problem. Psychotherapy work can be carried out in the app itself, and emotions can be recorded and analyzed to make control easier.

The company has prepared an interface that can record situations accurately with the app, and the recorded emotions can be analyzed by easy-to-understand mood classifications. There is also a community function for interested users, and support for mental health improvement with psychotherapy. In terms of business, the company anticipates a community pricing model through sales of content to improve consumers’ health, an online salon, etc.

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Giftpack

Giftpack is an on-demand gifting service that can deliver gifts from remote locations. The company is focusing particularly on gift giving experiences; for example, it offers the fun experience that involves local delivery people singing as they give the gift.

The company began the service after interviewing some 70,000 people, 70% of whom reported dissatisfaction with deliveries and experiences. Deliveries occur within three hours. The fee is 20%-30% and it aims to become the new gifting platform preferred by the millennial generation and as such has implemented a campaign in partnership with the 17 livestreaming app. The company is developing services in five countries, focusing mainly on Taiwan and San Francisco.

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Everyplus

For care recipients at nursing facilities, more than half of the day is spent at leisure. Recreational activities are one way to use this time, but EveryPlus is focusing on the efficiency of this. It is necessary to improve satisfaction with recreational options amongst the elderly using nursing facilities, and while the budget for such places is between 10,000 and 500,000 yen (around $89-$4,445 US), it does not receive priority, so we end up with cases like the facility organizing a magic show for care recipients, who suffer from dementia, who cannot understand it.

Every Plus has partnered with companies, prepared a recreation package for singing karaoke at care facilities, and provides a matching service that takes into consideration the degree of care required and size of the facility. As a result, facility business hours can be reduced more than 700 hours a year, and the number of times the service has been implemented has increased to 3500.

signature-pitch
Signature

Signature focuses on craft beer trends among the 30,000 brewing companies globally. Today, the craft beer market in Japan is attracting attention from all over the world because of the momentum exemplified by the 20% annual growth rate; however, it faces a roadblock in that just 2% succeed in expanding overseas. The reason lies in the alcohol licensing required by each country, and with businesses who possess licenses unwilling to take on inventory risks. Futhermore, when expanding to multiple countries, it is necessary to negotiate with each of them.

Signature is a marketplace that makes these inconvenient points more efficient. The company has eliminated inventory risks with an advance booking model, and has additionally removed the roadblock by offering liquor license bundles. The result is 70% of trial users repeatedly coming back. It is considering a D2C (direct-to-consumer) model in the future based on user data acquired by the company.

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Mediction

Mediction allows “medical tourist” users to settle the procedures required for medical treatment in Japan online. It targets visitors in particular from China as they account for 70% of the 430,000 medical tourists that come to Japan for treatment purposes.

When a user uploads their clinical records to the service, it translates them and matches them with relevant medical providers. Additionally, the service introduces hospitals, seeks missing information, and prepares examination reports. Usually, with this treatment process it takes two months to produce a diagnosis. While it takes one month for the treatment, translation and other processes can be reduced from three weeks to two days, thereby improving efficiency.

The diagnosis plan will check if treatment in Japan is necessary and can be used for 150,000 yen (about $1,334 US). In the future, the company plans to provide treatment services to affluent people by accumulating the medical record data.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

 

Dr. Fellow wins OnLab Demo Day in Tokyo with clinical case sharing tool for doctors

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab last week held Demo Day for its Seed Accelerator Program 16th batch. From among 84 teams including 17 applicants from overseas, six teams were chosen to receive mentoring and support during a three-month period. Five of the six teams excepting one disclosed team gave pitches within the event, then awarded by votes of major mentors and the audience. The judges for the pitch session were as follows: Kaoru Hayashi (CEO / Group CEO, Digital Garage) Shonosuke Hata (CEO, Kakaku.com) Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com) Rei Inamoto (Co-founder / Creative Director, Inamoto & Co.) Best Team Award winner: Dr. Fellow by Fellow Dr. Fellow is a clinical case-sharing platform for medical doctors. It is common to share clinical cases by case presentation through academic journals or academic conferences but these conventional methods are inefficient for busy doctors. By creating a non-anonymous doctor community, Dr. Fellow enables clinical case-sharing among doctors in the open for a wider range of medical fields. For example, although 200,000 stroke events are estimated to occur annually, only 2,000 cases (1% of the total cases) have been reported in the form of academic articles. In the…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab last week held Demo Day for its Seed Accelerator Program 16th batch. From among 84 teams including 17 applicants from overseas, six teams were chosen to receive mentoring and support during a three-month period.

Five of the six teams excepting one disclosed team gave pitches within the event, then awarded by votes of major mentors and the audience.

The judges for the pitch session were as follows:

  • Kaoru Hayashi (CEO / Group CEO, Digital Garage)
  • Shonosuke Hata (CEO, Kakaku.com)
  • Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com)
  • Rei Inamoto (Co-founder / Creative Director, Inamoto & Co.)

Best Team Award winner: Dr. Fellow by Fellow

Dr. Fellow is a clinical case-sharing platform for medical doctors. It is common to share clinical cases by case presentation through academic journals or academic conferences but these conventional methods are inefficient for busy doctors. By creating a non-anonymous doctor community, Dr. Fellow enables clinical case-sharing among doctors in the open for a wider range of medical fields.

For example, although 200,000 stroke events are estimated to occur annually, only 2,000 cases (1% of the total cases) have been reported in the form of academic articles. In the conventional online doctor communities, information sharing based on Q&A style between doctors is available, but the strength of Dr. Fellow is that direct clinical case-sharing using images or text information of clinical cases.

The team aims to monetize through fixed-amount charging by issuing their official accounts targeting companies / academic societies and rate charging by in-feed ads targeting doctors.

Audience Award winner: ReShape by Navier

Navier, the team consisting of three engineers, develops AI (artificial intelligence)-driven image-editing service named ReShape. To edit digital images including shake correction, exposure correction or trimming, image-editing tools are commonly used but requires specialized skill or labor and cost.

ReShape enables easy use of advanced image-editing techniques by applying Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) technology. Not correcting target image but creating new one by GAN, ReShape can provide higher quality images rather than ones corrected by professionals. The team expects to charge 20 yen (about 20 cents) per edited image for individual users and a monthly flat-rate fee for amateur photographers or photo productions.

Brushing up the service as providing it through web or app during the early stage, the team will provide the service for business operators through cloud API (Application Programming Interface) in the future. Also it plans a quality improvement service of videos using GAN.

Hale by LINK

Hale, developed by LINK, is a nursing-care concierge service to realize wishes. Some persons in care have much wealth but cannot enjoy their hobbies such as going on a trip to an island, dining at a three-star restaurant or going to a favorite singer’s concert which require constant nursing care.

At Hale, its staffers conduct arrangement of welfare vehicles or preparatory investigation of facilities to visit, while interviewing users’ requests and confirming physical / disease conditions. Partnering restaurants, hotels or travel agencies, the team provides the service in two charging systems: a fixed rate system with the service of nurse under an exclusive contract with Hale and an optional charging system for each matter.

Pickupon by Pickupon

Generally, 64% of functions implemented in software have not been used on the average, although a great amount of labor was spent for the development. The Pickupon team thought the cause of this gap was that engineers did not collect users’ comments or impression directly so that they could not analyze user demands quantitatively, and the team developed a SaaS (Software as a Service) for transcribing / analyzing / recording users’ utterances.

Pickupon records primary information as is and enables sharing  among several people to realize correct information, preventing missed information. By analyzing multiple utterances integrally, it enables acquisition of tendencies and consideration of measures too. The team provides the service in a freemium system allowing users to hold data up to six hours for free.

ShareTable by ShareTable

ShareTable is sitter / nursery teacher matching service targeting households in which both partners working that have  elementary school children. An investigation by the team conducted through interviews of 70 households showed that most of them use private childcare support services, private schools or Family Support Centers, the childcare support service run by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare during work-hours. However, these services have drawbacks such as limited locations or requiring labor to pick up and drop children off.

To solve these problems, ShareTable offers an afterschool class to study home economics centered on food. The team offers  situational learning at teachers’ home close to users’ home on weekdays and somewhere outside on holidays or during long vacations. ShareTable matches households needing childcare and individuals / companies providing classes and charges 20% as commission fees.


According to Masahiko Sarukawa, Director of DG Incubation organizing Open Network Lab, the accelerator has produced 91 startups in total with the completion of this 15th batch. The rate of successful fundraising by startups being produced through 15 batches reached 57.5%.

Coinciding with the holding of this 16th Demo Day, Open Network Lab has started accepting applications to the 17th batch. It will provide 10 million yen (about $92,000) maximum as activity funding for this batch over three months. Also it plans to provide the right to use three bases (in Daikanyama of Tokyo and Kamakura, plus San Francisco) gratis for a year, and mentoring by managers of startups that came out of the past Seed Accelerator Program. The application deadline for the 17th batch is noon on May 21th (Japan Standard Time).

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Famione wins Open Network Lab Demo Day with app that helps couples get pregnant

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab earlier this month held Demo Day for its Seed Accelerator Program 15th batch. From among 89 teams both inside and outside of Japan which entered this batch, six teams were chosen to receive mentoring and various support over a three-month period. Of the six teams, two teams were not shown then and four teams gave pitches at the Demo Day. They were examined through voting by major mentors and audiences. The judges for the pitch were as follows: Kaoru Hayashi (CEO / Group CEO, Digital Garage) Shonosuke Hata (CEO, Kakaku.com) Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com) Adam Lindemann (CEO, Mind Fund) Naofumi Tsuchiya (CEO, Goodpatch) Top Award: Famione by Famione Famione is a platform to support married couples trying to get pregnant. Assisted by staffers of the University of Tokyo and St.Luke’s International University, this service analyzes users’ lifestyle using its own algorithm which received high evaluation by learned societies, in addition to providing a chat-based communication support between husband and wife such as schedule arrangement for having sex. Famione has been running services focusing on the trying-to-conceive support including the community website Flipp or the owned media Famit, and…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab earlier this month held Demo Day for its Seed Accelerator Program 15th batch. From among 89 teams both inside and outside of Japan which entered this batch, six teams were chosen to receive mentoring and various support over a three-month period.

Of the six teams, two teams were not shown then and four teams gave pitches at the Demo Day. They were examined through voting by major mentors and audiences. The judges for the pitch were as follows:

  • Kaoru Hayashi (CEO / Group CEO, Digital Garage)
  • Shonosuke Hata (CEO, Kakaku.com)
  • Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com)
  • Adam Lindemann (CEO, Mind Fund)
  • Naofumi Tsuchiya (CEO, Goodpatch)

Top Award: Famione by Famione

Famione is a platform to support married couples trying to get pregnant. Assisted by staffers of the University of Tokyo and St.Luke’s International University, this service analyzes users’ lifestyle using its own algorithm which received high evaluation by learned societies, in addition to providing a chat-based communication support between husband and wife such as schedule arrangement for having sex.

Famione has been running services focusing on the trying-to-conceive support including the community website Flipp or the owned media Famit, and holds 1,860 users related to these services. The team aims to monetize through charged program for trying-to-conceive, data sales for drug development and user transfer to medical organizations.

Audience Award: Logi-kura by NewRevo

The Logi-kura warehouse management platform tackles excessive stock problems at small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which is supposedly 5.4 trillion yen in scale (approximation) in Japan. Many persons in charge of ordering at SMEs order merchandise depending on their experiences and feelings, and that causes excessive stock. Logi-kura provides a data-driven ordering environment through forecasting demand for merchandise based on economic trends, weather, competitor information or breakage rate.

Since there is no similar service covering from warehouse management to demand forecast in succession within Japan yet, Logi-kura is ensured of its superiority in that point. The team provides this service at 600,000 yen (about $5,200) annually at the lowest according to the scale, aiming at a 30% reduction of domestic excessive stock and the beta version of the service has already been introduced in 11 companies. In the future, the team plans to construct a marketplace function allowing trade of excessive stock / stock shortage between users.

Hideout Club by Hideout Club

Hideout Club is a community app for whisky lovers, where 12,000 users has already been attracted. The app was launched one year before by two whisky experts who formerly worked at Rakuten, aiming to bridge a gap between bars and users.

Users can gain a free drink on a day designated, from registered 80 bars in Shibuya, Shinjuku and Ginza, by paying 1,500 yen (about $13) monthly. For bar users, user retargeting becomes possible by registering new customers to the ledger, and bar information is displayed in users’ search results by registering whisky brands they can serve.

Most of its promotion activities to bars depend on introduction from other bar owners and the rate of successful acquisition of new bar users reaches 50%. Targeting 6.5 million whisky lovers in Japan, the team is going to expand the service coverage range to all parts of Japan, like inbound customers or high-grade resorts, aiming to acquire one million users by 2021.

Better Engage by BtoA

Better Engage supports preventing employees’ turnover by a data-driven approach. Linking with various cloud services and APIs, it acquires employees’ data about attendance, years of service, performance and survey results. Based on these acquired data, the service evaluates each employee’s engagement by five indices: relationship with superiors, relationship with co-workers, degree of satisfaction with work, degree of satisfaction with offices, and growth feels.

Among the five indices, relationship with superiors / co-workers are evaluated not only by surveillance but also communication log on in-house tools. Since its launch back three months before, this service has been introduced into 12 companies as trial and 25% of them indicate their intention to use the paid service. The monthly charge is 800 yen (about $7) per employee.

According to Masahiko Sarukawa, Director of DG Incubation organizing Open Network Lab, the accelerator has produced 85 startups in total with the completion of this 15th batch. The rate of successful fundraising by startups being produced through 14 batches reached 56.7%.

Coinciding with the holding of this 15th Demo Day, Open Network Lab hasstarted accepting applications to the 16th batch. It will provide 10 million yen (about $92,000) maximum as activity funding for this batch over three months. Also it plans to provide the right to use three bases (in Daikanyama of Tokyo and Kamakura, plus San Francisco) gratis for a year, and mentoring by managers of startups that came out of the past Seed Accelerator Program. The application deadline for the 16th batch is noon on November 27th.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Cloud for patent lawyers, marketplace for non-refundable hotel reservations win Tokyo’s Open Network Lab demo day

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Open Network Lab startup incubator held last week a Demo Day for participant startups of its Seed Accelerator Program 14th batch. In this batch, five teams including two foreign teams were chosen from among 76 applicants from Japan and abroad, having received mentoring and support over the last three months. From this batch, Open Network Lab provided mentoring by startups appearing in its past batches. The followings were the judges for the pitch competition of the Demo Day. Kaoru Hayashi (President Executive Officer, Digital Garage / Group CEO) Shonosuke Hata (President, Kakaku.com) Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com) Tomoya Sasaki (Senior Marketing Director, DG Incubation / President, Open Network Lab) Masayuki Sarukawa (Managing Director, DG Incubation) Best Team Award winner: Toreru by Toreru Toreru is a cloud service regarding intellectual property rights. The firm was founded by patent attorney Masafumi Miyazaki, who has dealt with more than 1,000 patent / trademark registration matters. Originally, the mission of patent attorneys is to protect intellectual property rights, as well as to maximize the profit while minimizing the risk for their clients, and yet it has turned out that 95% of working time required for the patent /…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Open Network Lab startup incubator held last week a Demo Day for participant startups of its Seed Accelerator Program 14th batch. In this batch, five teams including two foreign teams were chosen from among 76 applicants from Japan and abroad, having received mentoring and support over the last three months.

From this batch, Open Network Lab provided mentoring by startups appearing in its past batches. The followings were the judges for the pitch competition of the Demo Day.

  • Kaoru Hayashi (President Executive Officer, Digital Garage / Group CEO)
  • Shonosuke Hata (President, Kakaku.com)
  • Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com)
  • Tomoya Sasaki (Senior Marketing Director, DG Incubation / President, Open Network Lab)
  • Masayuki Sarukawa (Managing Director, DG Incubation)

Best Team Award winner: Toreru by Toreru

Toreru is a cloud service regarding intellectual property rights. The firm was founded by patent attorney Masafumi Miyazaki, who has dealt with more than 1,000 patent / trademark registration matters. Originally, the mission of patent attorneys is to protect intellectual property rights, as well as to maximize the profit while minimizing the risk for their clients, and yet it has turned out that 95% of working time required for the patent / trademark application process is spent for tasks extraneous to the basic missions, such as document preparation or reporting work to clients.

The patent / trademark registration application process can be divided into four tasks: consideration of the scope of claims, investigation, preparation of application documents and reporting to clients. Among these, Toreru made it possible for a series of work from investigation to reporting to be carried out on the cloud; one can investigate related patents by one-click search and create documents automatically, while enabling information-sharing on the cloud with clients. With this service, the average time required for each matter was reduced to 0.5 hours which is one-tenth of the conventional time, about five hours.

Patent attorneys will be able to spend the idle time for detailed service with their clients or on marketing activities. Within this year, the firm will launch a closed beta version of the service having three functions such as business efficiency improvement, CRM and customer attraction. In addition, it plans to implement foreign patent application support through cooperation with foreign patent attorneys, in addition to auto-investigation / observation of competitor trends by utilizing accumulated data.

Best Team Award / Audience Award winner: Cansell by Cansell

Cansell is marketplace for non-cancelable accommodation reservation rights between guest users. Kyohei Yamashita, who was formerly Product Manager at Dreampass (purchased by Yahoo Japan later), gathered the crew and launched this service as a preview-version in September of 2016. Dreampass is the film-showing service in response to requests from users and is a graduate of Open Network Lab 4th batch.

According to Dohop 2015 Hotel Report, 19% of the online accommodation reservations of hotels are canceled. Many online travel services do not allow cancellation instead of setting cheaper accommodation charges, and Cansell aims to distribute the vacant rooms by transferring name of the holder of accommodation reservations.

In Cansell, exhibitor users can sell accommodation rights only by transferring the confirmation email upon completion of reservation. The security of all exhibited accommodation rights is maintained by pre-marketing examination, and Cansell staffers perform the procedure for transferring accommodation reservations on behalf of users. Since its launch, 130 reservations have been exhibited and the agreement rate exceeded 50% as for expensive cases costing more than 100,000 yen (about $920).

In the future, the firm also aims to deal with cancellation of flights, restaurant reservations, wedding ceremonies or travel plans, in addition to accommodation, while supporting payment methods other than cash, such as service points, virtual currency or right-to-right trading (equivalent exchanges with unnecessary accommodations, for example).

Ninomin by Matsuri Technologies

Under the new Japanese law which will be enacted this June regarding paid accommodation in private homes in Japan, vacation rental business activities will be restricted to less than 180 days per annum for each property. The hosts owning properties for the vacation rental are deprived of business opportunities over a period of half a year, and some of them may be forced to withdraw.

Ninomin, provided by Matsuri Technologies, is a customer attraction service to support renting out of vacation rental properties for various uses such as company-owned house, short-term rental, rental meeting room or room sharing, through cooperation with real estate brokerages. Monitoring market prices in each area and taking into account the operational efficiency of investments, Ninomin proposes the best pricing in line with the use requested by hosts.

As online explanation of important matters related to real estate transactions will be permitted through a revision of another law, Matsuri Technologies expects more and more new players to enter the real estate business. The firm aims to grow capturing demands of these new players or withdrawing vacation rental hosts due to the enactment of the new law.

Café Wifi by Remote Work

The number of remote workers, working at café and so on outside the office, has been steadily increasing and is 50 million just in the US alone. On the other hand, valuable information for remote workers such as whether the Wi-Fi speed is fast, a power source is available or the atmosphere for each spot is not provided so much by conventional portal websites.

Café Wifi determines the score of each café based on unified criteria including auto-measured Wi-Fi speed and on posted information from remote workers all over the world, and shows a list of suitable cafés for remote working in any desired area. In addition, information about late-night operation or meal provision is also available.

The number of registered users has increased tenfold since its launch in December of 2016, and the current WAU (Weekly Active Users) is about 1,000. Information about 3,100 spots in 98 countries including San Francisco and Tokyo has been registered. The team plans to implement a seat reservation function by advance payment via app in the near future. The app is currently available only for iOS but will be soon be offered for Android as well.

Psygig by Psygig

The demand of mobility IoT (Internet of Things) has been increasing with the rising number of autonomous cars, autonomous drones or robotics. Typical mobility products require various sensors and thus some problems for developers may occur; for example, a necessary sensor may be missing, engineering is costly or processing becomes complicated due to the enormous data.

Psygig is a mobility IoT (Internet of THings) diagnostic tool based on the cloud. Mobility developers are allowed to implement this tool easily with the SDK (Software Development Kit). It notifies error information when an abnormality is detected, and also assists the performance evaluation / comparison. This service is provided in two type of SaaS (Service as a service) or on-premise.

In the future, the team will support any type of mobility IoT, and will provide additional functions such as DMP (Data Management Platform), traffic control assistant, P2P (Peer-to-Peer) sharing between mobile IoT devices.


According to Takayoshi Matsuda, Managing Director of Open Network Lab, this incubator program has produced 80 startups until the end of the 14th batch. The funding success rate of the startups to 13th batch are 49.2%.

Coinciding with the end of the Demo Day for 14th batch, it started accepting applications for the 15th batch. Open Network Lab will provide participant startups 10 million yen (about $92,000) at most as their activity funds during the three-month batch period. The participants will be allowed to use Open Network Lab’s three bases (at Daikanyama of Tokyo, Kamakura, and San Francisco) freely for one year, as well as to receive mentoring by startup managers who graduated the past Accelerators Program. The application for the 15th batch will be accepted until noon of May 22nd.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Comiru, cloud platform for cram schools and students’ families, wins Open Network Lab’s Demo Day

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab held the demo day for the 13th batch of their Seed Accelerator Program last month. 88 teams from Japan and the rest of the world applied for this batch (22 of these from abroad), with 5 teams selected to undergo a 3-month mentoring and support program. It should be noted that, from the 5 teams, 1 team disbanded before making it to the demo day, and 1 other team failed to meet the conditions set forth internally by Open Network Labs, resulting in 3 teams making pitches on demo day. In the previous demo day events by Open Network Lab the evaluation format was often based on a vote by key mentors as well as an audience. This time around, the winner was chosen based on examinations only by the following five judges: Kaoru Hayashi (President and CEO, Digital Garage) Tomoya Sasaki (Incubation Senior Marketing Director, DG Incubation / President & CEO, Open Network Lab) Masayuki Sarukawa (Managing Director, DG Incubation) Shonosuke Hata (President & CEO, Kakaku.com) Atsuhiro Murakami (Managing Director, Kakaku.com) Best Team Award winner: Comiru by Poper Comiru is an app that facilitates communication between cram…

onlab-13th-batch-demoday-all-presenters

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab held the demo day for the 13th batch of their Seed Accelerator Program last month. 88 teams from Japan and the rest of the world applied for this batch (22 of these from abroad), with 5 teams selected to undergo a 3-month mentoring and support program. It should be noted that, from the 5 teams, 1 team disbanded before making it to the demo day, and 1 other team failed to meet the conditions set forth internally by Open Network Labs, resulting in 3 teams making pitches on demo day.

In the previous demo day events by Open Network Lab the evaluation format was often based on a vote by key mentors as well as an audience. This time around, the winner was chosen based on examinations only by the following five judges:

  • Kaoru Hayashi (President and CEO, Digital Garage)
  • Tomoya Sasaki (Incubation Senior Marketing Director, DG Incubation / President & CEO, Open Network Lab)
  • Masayuki Sarukawa (Managing Director, DG Incubation)
  • Shonosuke Hata (President & CEO, Kakaku.com)
  • Atsuhiro Murakami (Managing Director, Kakaku.com)

Best Team Award winner: Comiru by Poper

onlab-13th-batch-demoday-best-team-award-winner-comiru

Comiru is an app that facilitates communication between cram schools and parents. Founder Shingo Kurihara, after a stint with Sumitomo 3M, went on to work as a web marketer for Opt (TSE:2389), followed in 2012 by a position as a lecturer in a cram school in Tokyo’s suburb of Saitama, all together forming a unique career. Through his 4 years of experience as a cram school teacher, information was managed using an analog system, meaning all paperwork, even progress reports that were handed to parents, were hand written onto paper. Thus, Kurihara became keenly aware of the negative effects this had on work efficiency. Cram school teachers and parents had already directed their attention to the fact that this is the digital age, so he devised a method to thoroughly digitize business processes and parent communication for cram schools. The average cram school instructor spends 70% of their working hours on tasks such as contacting parents, managing grades, class preparation, etc., but through the use of Comiru the team proposes it is possible to compress the time it takes to complete tasks outside of teaching hours to one tenth of what they have been.

onlab-13th-batch-demoday-comiru

During the pitch the team demo-ed that users who are cram school instructors can easily send quick emails to parents by using templates. They also gave an example using one of the most important jobs teachers must complete outside of the class: collecting the content of students’ report cards from schools, and how it could be completed within five minutes. It is also possible for parents to use their smartphones to respond to communications, and with the introduction of Comiru the recovery rate for collecting necessary data improved greatly from 40% to 90%.

Within half a year since their official release they have signed contracts with 21 one cram school companies, with the ID base responsible for managing cram school students reaching more than 2,000 users (with a price of 200 yen or about $2 US per month per student). As opposed to chain cram schools, they are targeting privately managed small-scale “strong cram schools” popular among parents and students. In the future, they will continue to not only provide communication support between cram schools and parents and operational support for teachers, but also aim to increase sales by providing information about courses to parents and teachers in the form of advertisements based on the data accumulated in accordance with the rise in users.

The judges evaluation was generally high since Comiru already has paying users and are able to validate user input, and also because of the idea that this service was born due to Kurihara having an outsider’s point of view (and would have been difficult for people who have been in the cram school world exclusively to understand). At their demo booth they introduced a feature that allows schools to use the FeliCa NFC (near field communication) technology to manage the arrivals and departures of students on a dashboard. This is useful in determining a child’s safety because notifications can be sent to a parents’ smartphones when students arrive at and depart from the school.

Foxsy by Xpresso

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When talking about dating apps, Tinder is usually the first to come to mind. But, even in the US where Tinder is based, it has been reported that after using Tinder less than 0.1% of user pairs actually meet. According to Jin (Hitoshi) Tanaka of Xpresso, this low conversion rate is to due to the overwhelming low level of men taking action (amount of outgoing information) compared to the anticipated level of women seeking men (amount of information). In general women seek over 50 items of information about their potential male partners, including their profiles, personality information, and pictures, etc. A majority of men, on the other hand, do not understand what information women are looking for, or in many cases feel it is cumbersome and do not fill out their profiles.

Foxsy is a dating bot that supports encounters between men and women and is capable of cooperating with message apps such as Facebook Messenger, Kik, and Line. In the app, every user is requested to input his/her information based on questions from the bot. Using that information the bot introduces a female user to a male user. The bot asks questions about common topics, thereby activating communication between the male and female users. Thanks to this feature, from the start of the conversation until actually meeting face-to-face, the percentage of user pairs has risen to 40% with Foxsy.

Tanaka, having used Tinder more than 1,500 times, takes an interesting guerrilla-style user acquisition technique, and he declares that Foxsy has attracted users from Tinder. The number of users has reached 500 in the few months since launching, and it has led to 305 established matches. When referring to future aspirations, Tanaka said Foxsy can be used not only for dating support, but also for events, business, travel, etc. providing a variety of day-to-day opportunities by supplementing information and processes to encourage people to meet.

Senso by Appledore

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Appledore was established by Tiffany Pang, previously a software engineer at the food delivery service Instacart, and Joh Cadengo, previously a software engineer for the P2P car sharing service Getaround. By making full use of image recognition technology and GIS (geographic information systems) they developed Outreach Grid as a means to assist the homeless by facilitating the sharing of information between social workers, police, public support institutions, and city hall, etc. As a means of shifting their focus, or perhaps as an additional alternative service, they pitched a separate project, Senso, during this demo day.

Senso uses emotion analysis as an advertising effectiveness measurement tool. With both Pang and Cadengo specializing in emotion recognition and computer vision, by measuring to what degree viewers felt emotion and relief they can understand whether the advertising and contents made an impression. Marketers can then analyze performance which leads to the creation of even better results. In fact, advertising campaigns are unable to meet expectations to increase performance, and the majority suspend their campaigns before making it to the end of the planned period of implementation. In using Senso, users can upload a test ad to the platform, measure the feelings of the testers who saw the ad, and marketers can choose the ad that made the largest emotional impact.

Unlike the slightly similar services, such as TVision Insights, etc. Senso does not apply only to TV audiences, but they have developed a system that through video analysis can measure how engaged viewers are. Even for ads where conversion cannot be measured, for example, CPV (cost-per-view) and CPC (cost-per-click) ads, they quantitatively analyze the extent of viewers’ levels of engagement, perhaps leading to the birth of completely performance-based billing for ads.

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According to Open Network Lab’s Program Director Takayoshi Matsuda, with the completion of this 13th batch, Open Network Lab has produced 75 startups in total. In July Digital Garage (TSE:4819), along with Kakaku.com (TSE:2371) and Credit Saison (TSE:8253), began running a research organization for open innovation called DG Lab, and at this event guests from 40 VC firms and 30 companies watched on from the audience likely opening doors for follow-on investments and business collaborations.

In conjunction with the demo day for the 13th batch, they have begun accepting applications for the 14th batch. For teams participating in the 3 month batch, Open Network Lab provides up to 10 million yen (nearly $100,000 US) for running costs. In addition to providing free use of their facilities in Daikanyama, Kamakura, and San Francisco for one year, they plan to offer mentoring by the management of startups that previously graduated from Open Network Lab’s Seed Accelerator Program. The application deadline for the 14th batch is noon on November 28th.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

360° video livestreaming platform HUG wins Open Network Lab 12th Demo Day in Tokyo

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab held a Demo Day to showcase startups coming out of the 12th batch of its Seed Accelerator Program earlier this month. 93 teams including 19 teams from overseas had applied for this batch. Eventually, six teams were selected from among these for mentoring and support over a three-month period. Although details for one of these teams has not been disclosed, the other five teams made pitches. At the end of the event, the teams were judged and commended on the basis of votes from the main mentors or audiences. Best Team Award winner: HUG by Ducklings HUG is a platform for live streaming with cameras for a 360-degree view. The video can be watched on PCs or smartphones; in addition, the service supports distribution and sharing of 360-degree videos available for virtual reality devices, such as head-mounted displays, both in live or archived format by notifying the URL links. It can also accept comments on the video from viewers in real-time. According to Ducklings CEO Norikazu Takagi, while various cheap 360-degree cameras have been released by Samsung, LG, Nikon and other makers since the beginning of this year,…

onlab-12th-batch-demoday-all-presenters

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab held a Demo Day to showcase startups coming out of the 12th batch of its Seed Accelerator Program earlier this month. 93 teams including 19 teams from overseas had applied for this batch. Eventually, six teams were selected from among these for mentoring and support over a three-month period.

Although details for one of these teams has not been disclosed, the other five teams made pitches. At the end of the event, the teams were judged and commended on the basis of votes from the main mentors or audiences.

Best Team Award winner: HUG by Ducklings

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HUG is a platform for live streaming with cameras for a 360-degree view. The video can be watched on PCs or smartphones; in addition, the service supports distribution and sharing of 360-degree videos available for virtual reality devices, such as head-mounted displays, both in live or archived format by notifying the URL links. It can also accept comments on the video from viewers in real-time.

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According to Ducklings CEO Norikazu Takagi, while various cheap 360-degree cameras have been released by Samsung, LG, Nikon and other makers since the beginning of this year, a simple distribution platform for them does not exist yet in the world so he commenced development of the service. Thus far, video streaming using the platform has been done 1,800 times by users in 100 countries. Also it has been used in introducing a new product by Nike at their event in Hong Kong, a live broadcast of a keynote speech at an event of American EduTech company Coursera, or a live broadcast of a cherry blossom viewing by Japanese meteorological company Weathernews.

Special Award / Audience Award winner: Shonika Online

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Shonika Online, literally meaning Pediatrics Online, by KidsPublic is a platform to connect homes and pediatricians via smartphones. One can consult doctors about symptoms of their children via the Line messaging app, phone, Skype or Facebook Messenger. According to KidsPublic CEO Naoya Hashimoto, who is also a pediatrician, diagnoses for 80% of the children visiting emergency wards are considered to be slight. Their parents had no choice but to visit the emergency wards because they did not know well about the disease even after browsing on the Internet, or asking on hotlines provided by local governments.

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With Shonika Online, pediatricians respond to users whether they should go to hospital, judging from medical interviews which is created by supervisory pediatricians, pictures of abnormalities photographed by smartphones or past medical treatment histories on electronic medical records. Currently ten pediatricians participate in this service as counselors, and it aims to monetize by serving the demand from companies, affiliation with nurseries or social services of municipalities, or meeting personal needs. Its goal is to construct a system where the check-ups at hospital can be judged by accumulating and analyzing case data without support from MDs.

Kakaku.com Award winner: BabyMap by Trim

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BabyMap is an app focusing on search of tables for diaper exchange and nursing rooms for babies. It is not easy to find these information even with general search engines, and this led to development of the app. This app has more than 17,000 monthly active users and been realized through accumulation of information; more than 100 posts are sent from users per day. It is used for 2.5 years on average from birth of babies until potty training, and that results in a high retention rate.

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Trim CEO Yusuke Hasegawa emphasized that it can be also utilized for marketing purposes by leveraging data accumulation of both users (attributes, activities or preferences) and facilities (details of facilities, products or word-of-mouth). For example, BabyMap can be partially used as preliminary surveys for city planning, so he suggests the possibility of monetization upon usage by developers or commercial facilities.

Listed below are startups that made interesting pitches though they missed winning prizes.

Túpac Bio Designer by Túpac Bio

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Túpac Bio Designer is a DNA design software for drug development. The firm was founded by biomedical researchers at the University of Tokyo. Although major pharmaceutical companies typically spend much money for drug research and development, it is still not uncommon to end up with a failure. This platform aims to increase the success rate of drug development.

By digitalizing experiment processes which are being carried out manually, and by utilizing a custom drug library with synthetic DNA, periods of experiment processes which formerly required weeks or months can be shortened down to the level of several days. It aims to differentiate from similar platforms by using genome compilers, DNA sequences, collaboration functions, links with external databases or high-level processing capability.

Withfluence by HIP Stores

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Withfluence is a marketing platform allowing requests to be made of top influencers in Asia for promotion work. It launched the beta version in Taiwan, Thailand and Hong Kong this February; clients can ask for promotion by suitable Instagrammers who match the purposes or conditions of projects.

Clients select influencers among the list on Withfluence by checking out their past works, and then request promotion projects. The feature of this service is that clients can also check increases / decreases in the number of influencers’ followers or changes in the number of “Like,” or engagement rates after ordering promotion. It has been sounded out about usage from an advertising agency in Southeast Asia or a mobile carrier in Thailand, and moreover, Japanese cosmetics major KOSE (TSE:4922) has already decided to utilize this service for promotion of its product Sekkisei in the Southeast Asian region.

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According to Takayoshi Matsuda, the program director of Open Network Lab, the accelerator has produced 64 startups in total with the completion of this 12th batch. The total amount of market capitalization for all these startups being produced through 11 batches is 43.8 billion yen (about $405 million), showing a performance of 14.52 times as much as that at the start of investment.

Coinciding with the holding of this 12th Demo Day, Open Network Lab has started accepting applications to the 13th batch. It will provide 10 million yen (about $92,000) maximum as activity funding for this batch. Compared with conventional batches, it will enhance support to startups so that success overseas can be better attained. Also it plans to provide the right to use three bases (in Daikanyama of Tokyo, Kamakura, and San Francisco) gratis for a year, and mentoring by 70 startups that came out of the Accelerator Program through the 12th batch. The application deadline for the 13th batch is noon on May 27th.

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

Social media-based news photo aggregator Spectee wins Open Network Lab 11th Demo Day

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See the original story in Japanese. All photos in this article are courtesy of Open Network Lab. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab) held a demo day event on Friday, showcasing seven startups from the 11th batch of its incubation program. These teams have been receiving mentoring and support for the last three months. At the end of the demo day event, mentors selected and commended promising teams from the batch. ‘Best Team Award’ winner: Spectee The Spectee platform delivers videos or images of various happenings in the world, leveraging their original artificial intelligence engine to pick up updates which better tell the scenes of big events. Euclid Lab, the company behind the service, recently partnered with Sony, showcasing another product called Spotpedia – which was enhanced from Spectee – showcased at international conferences like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. See also: Spectee: Japanese app delivers local news faster than newspapers and TV ‘Special’ award winner: Sparkle Box Sparkle Box was founded by three females who are all familiar with e-commerce businesses. They are providing a subscription-based accessory rental service for the monthly cost of 2,500 yen (about $21), allowing users to rent their favorites of three accessories valued…

onlab-11th-batch-demoday-all-presenters

See the original story in Japanese.

All photos in this article are courtesy of Open Network Lab.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab) held a demo day event on Friday, showcasing seven startups from the 11th batch of its incubation program. These teams have been receiving mentoring and support for the last three months. At the end of the demo day event, mentors selected and commended promising teams from the batch.

‘Best Team Award’ winner: Spectee

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The Spectee platform delivers videos or images of various happenings in the world, leveraging their original artificial intelligence engine to pick up updates which better tell the scenes of big events.

Euclid Lab, the company behind the service, recently partnered with Sony, showcasing another product called Spotpedia – which was enhanced from Spectee – showcased at international conferences like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

See also:

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‘Special’ award winner: Sparkle Box

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Sparkle Box was founded by three females who are all familiar with e-commerce businesses. They are providing a subscription-based accessory rental service for the monthly cost of 2,500 yen (about $21), allowing users to rent their favorites of three accessories valued around 25,000 yen (about $209) in total.

Subscribing to the service, one will be requested to select two accessories from a list while Sparkle Box’s stylist will handpick additional one piece that may suit you based upon preference about colors or fashion styles registered on the site.

Now over 500 accessory items from 18 brands are available. If one can find any item to buy among what is rented, a discount of 20% off the ordinary retail price is applied.

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‘Special’ award winner: Codenews

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Codenews is a curated news platform for engineers, keeping readers updated with optimized news articles and tips around programming. Because of supporting multiple languages, the platform acquired about 30% of the entire user base from English-speaking countries.

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The following startups did not win but gave interesting pitches.

Qangaroo

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Qangraoo is a testing process management tool for web app integration. To eliminate possible troubles that may be frequently occurred in the testing process, the tool provides developers with many features for status management, creating test patterns, checking consistency between a requirement specifications and testing cases.

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Dragonfly Pay

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Dragonfly Pay allows users to transfer money to someone overseas cheaply and quickly by converting real currencies like Japanese yen or US dollars into a digital currency leveraging the blockchain technology.

In view of other startups working on international money transfer platforms using Bitcoin or the blockchain technology, Korea’s Coinplug recently raised about $5 million while Korea’s Sentbe is also planning to launch their service very shortly.

Hacker Analytics

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Tokyo-based Labbits, which is known for having developed gourmet curation app Tapli, is now working on another service called Hacker Analytics. By analyzing GitHub and other engineering SaaS platforms for engineers, it visualizes skills of engineers and help recruiting personnel at companies who are less familiar with engineering skills streamline their hiring efforts to find the right type of engineers in need.

asQme

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asQme was founded by British neuroscientist Sam Mokhtary whom we have previously featured in introducing a crowdfunding site focused on live musical performances called Alive.

The asQme platform allows users to ask celebrities and artists in the world as well as receiving video feedback from them. Some members from globally notable music band Red Hot Chili Peppers have started using it. It provides artists with a new experience in interacting with their fans.

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Tomoya Sasaki, president of Open Network Lab, said that they have received an accumulation of applications for the program from 500 teams over the past 11 batches.

After the demo day event, Open Network Lab started receiving applications for the 12th batch of their incubation program. The incubator had been offering funds ranging from 2 to 10 million yen (about $16,800 to $84,000) to every qualified startup depending on how their stage is. However, it will be switched to three options in terms of the investment amount — 2, 5 or 10 million yen ($16,800, $42,000 or $84,000). The application deadline for the 12th batch is 12:00 on 16th November, Japan Standard Time.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Cloud-based personnel management tool SmartHR wins Open Network Lab 10th Demo Day

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing six startups from the tenth batch of its incubation program. One startup was not disclosed because they are in stealth mode. While this batch received applications from 80 startups including 20 team from overseas, only seven teams were selected and allowed to receive mentoring and other support for three months. At the end of the demo day event, mentors selected and commended promising teams from the batch. ‘Best Team Award’ winner: SmartHR Personnel management requiring the preparation of forms and documents to be filled is a time consuming task, especially at small companies. SmartHR is a cloud-based platform that enables users to complete all these tasks in one week for free versus three weeks for a cost of 20,000 yen ($170) on average if outsourced to a labor and social security attorney. The service has not yet been launched, but the SmartHR team received pre-registrations from more than 125 companies employing 1,449 people two weeks after the launch of a ‘coming soon’ landing page. The team received responses from 10 companies among these applicants that are willing to…

onlab-10th-batch-demoday-all-presenters

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing six startups from the tenth batch of its incubation program. One startup was not disclosed because they are in stealth mode.

While this batch received applications from 80 startups including 20 team from overseas, only seven teams were selected and allowed to receive mentoring and other support for three months. At the end of the demo day event, mentors selected and commended promising teams from the batch.

‘Best Team Award’ winner: SmartHR

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Personnel management requiring the preparation of forms and documents to be filled is a time consuming task, especially at small companies. SmartHR is a cloud-based platform that enables users to complete all these tasks in one week for free versus three weeks for a cost of 20,000 yen ($170) on average if outsourced to a labor and social security attorney.

The service has not yet been launched, but the SmartHR team received pre-registrations from more than 125 companies employing 1,449 people two weeks after the launch of a ‘coming soon’ landing page. The team received responses from 10 companies among these applicants that are willing to pay for the service after watching an on-site service demo.

SmartHR is targeting four million small and medium-sized enterprises employing 27 million people in Japan. The team is planning to integrate it with the E-Gov API (application program interface) that the Japanese government will introduce soon. A database of employees is also formed by using the platform so it will also provide the feature that encourages companies to enact office rules or hire an industrial physician according to how many employees they have.

Tokyo-based Kufu, the company behind SmartHR, has developed several web services including Yknot, a buzz marketing site focused on business-to-business and business-to-employee services, and Skillsand, a platform introducing web creators with their profiles and quantified skills.

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‘Special’ award winner: Lifeclips

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Prior to launching Ideakitt, the company behind Lifeclips, CEO Ryohei Fujita was previously worked at Tokyo-based mobile event and ticketing startup Peatix as a business development specialist. In a conversation with his previous boss and Peatix CEO Taku Harada, Fujita heard that Harada has been exploring a good place to speak his mind because he was connected to too many people on Facebook while he thought blogging was tiresome. That inspired Fujita to develop Lifeclips.

Lifeclips is a social network platform where users can express their thoughts. The small number of inputs required, such as user id and password, makes it easy for users to start writing, while also allowing users to set the range to be shared for every article posted such as public, private, or for selected people.

Since its launch in November, more than 20,000 articles have been posted on the platform, where monthly active user ratio is over 50% and users remain on site for over ten minutes on average. The team aims to make LifeClips a standard for noting and sharing texts, following Instagram as in photo sharing and Vine for videos. An iOS app was launched on Tuesday and was featured as a recommended app on the Apple iTunesStore.

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‘Special’ award winner: Tsunagu Japan

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Tsunagu Japan is a website that introduces Japanese lifestyles to the world in English and Chinese, and publishes articles on sightseeing spots and other attractions in a curated format, which conventional travel portals have never offered in this way before. They earned a high reputation from readers around the world with a recent article introducing Halal-certified shabu-shabu restaurants in Tokyo.

The team has acquired 430,000 monthly unique visitors, increasing 245% on a month-on-month basis. Leveraging assets like 1 million Facebook fans, 320 overseas ambassadors, and content syndications with Digg and TripZilla.sg, the team is aiming to hit the one million user milestone by July.

They plan to establish more vertical media platforms focused on hot spots in Japan such as hotels, restaurants, and shopping venues, as well as publishing more articles, especially in Chinese.

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The following startups did not win but gave interesting pitches.

Makey

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Makey is a web-based knowledge sharing platform focused on women’s make-up. The team has been offering makeup lectures for users in collaboration with Japanese cosmetics brands like Kao and Kose, and will launch a mobile app in late April.

The Makey team expects to generate a primary revenue stream from advertising and affiliate marketing by driving user traffic to cosmetics e-commerce sites. They will launch an online media site after summer, aiming to establish a solid media presence in the Asian and Chinese markets, which are valued at $12.6 billion.

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Flap

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Flap is a matchmaking platform that connects hairstylists and their potential customers. There have been search portals that introduce hair salons in Japan, but nothing for hairstylists. Users can browse hairstylist portfolios on the Flap platform. Hairstylists gain a primary income from basic pay and a commission received from their salon when they are selected by customers for offering treatments. The amount of this commission consist much of their income so hairstylists are always expected to have more steady customers.

Users can browse portfolios of various hairstylists on the Flap platform, whereby the psychological hurdle of potential customers is lowered to choose a specific hairstylist when booking for a treatment. 42% of the first-time users has posted their profiles, 35% of them keeps using for over a month, and 7.5% of them has succeeded to acquire new customers.

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HouseCare

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HouseCare provides house cleaning services. Originally launched as a crowdsourced baby-sitting service, but they pivoted because they thought that the business is tough in Japan. If you choose which rooms to clean and book online one day before the date of cleaning, the service costs 2,500 yen ($21) per hour.

While Duskin, one of Japan’s major cleaning service operators, usually charges around 10,800 yen ($91) to clean a bathroom, HouseCare will clean an entire house for the same price (the capacity depends on the size of the house and number of rooms). Some 37% of those who have signed up for the service made a booking for cleaning in two days. HouseCare at present only serves the Tokyo area, but will partner with vacation rentals such as AirBnB.

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Tomoya Sasaki, president of Open Network Lab, said that 58 startups have graduated from the incubator in all past ten batches, whereby the total market cap of all the startups graduated from the first to the eight batches are now valued at 3.3 billion yen ($273 million), a 23-fold increase in value compared to the initial investment opportunities in these startups.

After the demo day event, Open Network Lab started receiving applications for the eleventh batch of their incubation program. The incubator had been offering a maximum 2 million yen ($16,800) to every qualified team, but they announced that this will be raised to 10 million yen ($84,000). The amount of investment will depend on the phase of the startup. The application deadline is 12:00 on 18 May, Japan Standard Time.

Edited by Kurt Hanson

Japanese tea marketplace Yunomi wins Open Network Lab’s latest Demo Day in Tokyo

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab held a demo day event for its ninth incubation batch on Tuesday. Starting in July, this batch has nourished six teams from Japan and the rest of the world, but one team was not showcased because they are in stealth mode. A “Best Team” and a “Best Growth” award were presented to two startups that have shown solid growth in the last three months of their incubation period. Let’s take a quick look at those two and other startups that graduated from the program. Yunomi (‘Best Team’ award winner) Yunomi is an online marketplace that sells Japanese tea globally. According to the Japanese ministry of agriculture, Japanese tea exports stood at $50 million as of 2013, but the government aims to boost this to $150 million by 2020. However, the team pointed out that even Poland generates three times more value in tea exports than Japan. There are obstacles to the extremely low amount of Japanese tea exports despite its high quality and the huge global tea market of $85 billion. The obstacles are language, logistics, and high prices. By connecting Japanese tea farmers to global tea brands,…

onlab-9th-batch-all-teams

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab held a demo day event for its ninth incubation batch on Tuesday. Starting in July, this batch has nourished six teams from Japan and the rest of the world, but one team was not showcased because they are in stealth mode.

A “Best Team” and a “Best Growth” award were presented to two startups that have shown solid growth in the last three months of their incubation period. Let’s take a quick look at those two and other startups that graduated from the program.

Yunomi (‘Best Team’ award winner)

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The Mattacha Latte Media team commended by Digital Garage CEO Kaoru Hayashi (pictured right).

Yunomi is an online marketplace that sells Japanese tea globally. According to the Japanese ministry of agriculture, Japanese tea exports stood at $50 million as of 2013, but the government aims to boost this to $150 million by 2020. However, the team pointed out that even Poland generates three times more value in tea exports than Japan.

There are obstacles to the extremely low amount of Japanese tea exports despite its high quality and the huge global tea market of $85 billion. The obstacles are language, logistics, and high prices. By connecting Japanese tea farmers to global tea brands, the Matcha Latte Media team wants to eliminate obstacles and increase the competency of Japanese tea in the global market. They have acquired 2,300 users, and their conversion rate is 35%. While half of their sales are to the US, they have shipped to buyers in 55 countries. If tea sales sees good growth, they will expand to other products such as Japanese tea utensils, tea-taste food products, and Japanese food products.

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Tabeena (‘Best Growth’ award winner)

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The Tabeena team commended by Open Network Lab managing partner Fumihiko Ishimaru (pictured right)

At sightseeing spots, many tourists can be seen taking photos with their smartphones to record their travel experience. However, most of these photos remain stored on a smartphone. Facebook is a good platform to share experiences with friends, but it is not always suitable for recording memorable moments.

The team developed the Tabeena app that allows users to shoot and review photos instantly. Their survey of smartphone users in Japan found that a user will take five shots on average during a trip. Japan has a cumulative total of 380 million tourists in Japan, so the team can target 1.7 billion travel photos annually.

The team aims to make the Tabeena app a customized travel guide that will give users travel tips based on their interests, location, weather, and time.

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Mobingi

Deploying apps to a server or a cloud environment is a time-consuming task for engineers. By automating this process as SaaS (software as a service), Mobingi helps users complete the arduous task without help from other engineers. Heroku, Engine Yard, and Digital Ocean are potential competitors, but Mobingi has an advantage with several features such as non-app software deployments, no vendor lock-in, and auto scaling.

This space has a market volume of $2 billion in Japan, as well as $190 billion in the global market. Mobingi started developing the platform in January and launched a closed beta version in September followed by an open beta version in October.

Untickle

Untickle's CEO Chiyo Nomura
Untickle’s Chiyo Nomura

In Japan, one out of 20 people suffers from atopic dermatitis who pay more than $2,400 per year on average for products to alleviate symptoms of the skin disorder, a market valued at $9 billion.

Chiyo Nomura and her team have developed a social network for atopic dermatitis sufferers called Untickle. Atopic dermatitis sufferers can use Untickle to find a workaround that will suit their symptoms from messages posted by other users who have similar symptoms.

In cooperation with Japan Atopic Dermatitis Patients Association and a curative hot spring spa, they have acquired 5,600 users, 10 advertising requests, and two sponsors. They plan to monetize the business by partnering with food or cosmetics companies that make atopic-friendly products. They aim to expand globally.

Kabotip

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Kabotip7s Claude Eguienta

Kabotip is a platform where users can post and find digital content and give monetary tips via digital currency to other users who have created preferred content.

They aim to acquire users via a viral marketing campaign in partnership with over 200 influential bloggers worldwide, 12 magazines in the US, Japan, and France, as well as globally notable fashion blogs. They will monetize content by allowing users to give tips to creative talent at real-world events, as well as premium memberships.


Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the next batch of its incubation program starting in January. The application deadline is November 10th. Qualified teams will be able to use co-working spaces in Daikanyama Tokyo and Kamakura, as well as Digital Garage’s co-working space DG717 in San Francisco. At DG717, they are planning to increase mentoring opportunities having entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley.

ShouldBee wins OnLab Demo Day in Tokyo with automated web app testing solution

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Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the eighth batch of its incubation program. A “Best Team” and “Special” award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubation period. Let’s take a quick look at those two, and take a look at the other startups that graduated from the program as well. ShouldBee (‘Best Team’ award winner) It is said that typical software development requires that you spend almost 50% of time just testing. What the ShouldBee team provides is an automated testing process for web-based systems that are under development. By using this solution, developers can automate the process of filling and submitting forms on their web app, and it can complete testing 12 times faster than human testers, and reduce cost to one-sixtieth of what would normally be required for conventional human-based testing. Since its launch several months ago, it has acquired 105 companies as users without any significant promotional effort. Jidoteki (‘Special’ award winner) There are many convenient SaaS-based tools out there, such as DropBox or Evernote. But often many corporations resist using…

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Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the eighth batch of its incubation program.

A “Best Team” and “Special” award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubation period. Let’s take a quick look at those two, and take a look at the other startups that graduated from the program as well.

ShouldBee (‘Best Team’ award winner)

shouldbee-pitch

It is said that typical software development requires that you spend almost 50% of time just testing. What the ShouldBee team provides is an automated testing process for web-based systems that are under development.

By using this solution, developers can automate the process of filling and submitting forms on their web app, and it can complete testing 12 times faster than human testers, and reduce cost to one-sixtieth of what would normally be required for conventional human-based testing.

Since its launch several months ago, it has acquired 105 companies as users without any significant promotional effort.

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From the left: ShouldBee’s Hidehito Nozawa, Reo Mori, and Digital Garage CEO Kaoru Hayashi

Jidoteki (‘Special’ award winner)

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There are many convenient SaaS-based tools out there, such as DropBox or Evernote. But often many corporations resist using such tools because of their internal guidelines or security reasons. Jidoteki lets SaaS vendors to create a virtual appliance having their apps. It encourages enterprise users to adopt a such SaaS tools by setting up such an appliance behind their firewall.

The Jidoteki team
The Jidoteki team

Orange Magazine

orangemagazine-pitch

Orange Magazine is a mobile content platform that targets relatively older female users. In contrast with many mobile services that go after the younger generation these days, this team learned that senior women are having difficulties finding information about things like movies, health, travel, and much more.

To address this, they have developed a mobile app that is easy to use, and comfortable to read even for seniors. In order to provide a good user experience and content likely to fit their preference, they asked several older women to curate news articles as well.

For their monetization strategy, they considered partnering with existing book or magazine publishers to distribute their content to premium users through the app.

Astero

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Astero is a notification-focused news delivery app that aspires to bring you what you want to know at the right time. Typical users subscribe to many resources or visit many websites to collect things you want to know about. It could be things like appointments, weather updates, public transit updates, or when your favorite publication is on sale in stores.

In order to keep you from missing something important, they have developed an app that focuses on following three factors:

  1. Curation – Opt out of updates likely to be unnecessary to you.
  2. Recommendation engine – They’ve developed an engine using own original algorithm
  3. Notification management – Users can adjust the frequency of notification updates, or even receive a single ‘digest’ of many notifications at once.

They are considering monetizing their service by partnering and integrating with third-party apps.

StudyPact

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Our readers may recall that we told you a bit about StudyPact during our recent coverage of the HackOsaka event. It is a service that lets users set a study goal with monetary stakes as a sort of bet with themselves. For example, you can set a goal of studying English for two hours a week, and then set the target stakes at $5. If you reach that goal, you get $5, but if not, you have to pay $5. In the event that you have to pay, the fee is split in half among users who supported the goal and the rest will go to StudyPact.

To realize more effective learning platforms, the startups plans to tie up with other educational platforms and services like like Duolingo, Anki, Memrise, Coursera and Edx. They launched an Android version of the app several weeks ago, and they have learned their users’ completion rate for online courses has reached 85%. Typically the completion rate for MOOCs is somewhere around a lowly 5%.


Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the next batch of its incubation program starting in July. The application deadline is May 19th.