See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Open Network Lab, the startup incubator operated by Digital Garage and its affiliated companies, announced today it has started accepting applications for the ninth batch of its seed accelerator program. This batch will run from July to September of this year, with qualifying startups able to work from the incubator’s Daikanyama space (in Tokyo). Participants can also work at the recently established DG717 venue in San Francisco, where they can develop products, explore funding opportunities, and receive mentoring in the heart of the US startup community. Since its launch back in 2010, the program has incubated 45 startups over the past eight batches. Many of their graduates have been aggressively seeking business opportunities in Silicon Valley and Japan. You may recalled movie crowdsourcing platform Viibar raised $3 million from Globis Capital Partners and Gree Ventures back in February. On a related note, the incubator will hold a demo day on April 23rd to showcase startups from their eighth batch, so please stay for our coverage of that event. You can also check out our previous articles covering past demo days. Your submissions for the ninth batch will be accepted until May 19th.
A workshop held at DG717, Digital Garage’s incubation space in San Francisco.
Tokyo-based Open Network Lab, the startup incubator operated by Digital Garage and its affiliated companies, announced today it has started accepting applications for the ninth batch of its seed accelerator program.
This batch will run from July to September of this year, with qualifying startups able to work from the incubator’s Daikanyama space (in Tokyo). Participants can also work at the recently established DG717 venue in San Francisco, where they can develop products, explore funding opportunities, and receive mentoring in the heart of the US startup community.
Since its launch back in 2010, the program has incubated 45 startups over the past eight batches. Many of their graduates have been aggressively seeking business opportunities in Silicon Valley and Japan. You may recalled movie crowdsourcing platform Viibar raised $3 million from Globis Capital Partners and Gree Ventures back in February.
On a related note, the incubator will hold a demo day on April 23rd to showcase startups from their eighth batch, so please stay for our coverage of that event. You can also check out our previous articles covering past demo days.
Your submissions for the ninth batch will be accepted until May 19th.
See the original story in Japanese. All photos courtesy of Open Network Lab. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program. The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program. Viibar (The Best Team Award winner) Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills. The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos. Locarise (The Special Award winner)…
See the original story in Japanese. All photos courtesy of Open Network Lab.
Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab (OnLab for short) held a demo day event earlier this week, showcasing five startups from the 7th batch of its incubation program.
The Best Team Award and the Special Award were presented to two startups who have shown solid growth in the last six months of their incubating period. Let’s do a quick rundown of the startups that have graduated from the program.
Viibar is a crowdsourcing platform focusing on video production. For enterprises or startups, you may need to produce video clips or ads to promote your products or services online. By splitting your video production process into small tasks, this platform lets you create high quality videos at affordable rates by taking advantage of crowdsourced skills.
The startup can also accept orders to create YouTube TrueView video ads, providing content optimization advice and measurement of ad effectiveness so that your viewers are more likely keep watching your video through to the end. The concept of its ‘1 min videos‘ production service is similar to that of Korea’s 500videos.
Locarise is an analytics solution for retail stores. By placing small sensors inside and around your store, the system can collect metrics such as how many people passed in front of the store and how many customers you have served.
The system’s web-based dashboard shows you these metrics, as well as other things like visit duration, and retention rate. For a business owner monitoring many store locations, you can easily stay up to date on real-time target rates for KPIs at many stores in a single interface.
Regardless of location, culture, or language, this mobile app lets you to ask or tell other users what you’re looking at. By scanning barcodes, it also helps you find details about what you have in your hand.
When the app’s creator, Hyongchol, Kim visited a drug store here in Japan, he saw a young Indian confused about cold medicine he should buy. Since he couldn’t read Japanese characters, he hesitated to buy the medicine despite the fact that Kim told him which one it was. This experience motivated Kim to create the app, which he is preparing for iOS and Android platforms.
Style With is an e-commerce site for men, helping them coordinate their outfits. Users’ preferences are classified according to the ’taste graph’ concept, and you will receive about five different outfit proposals of outfits every month that you might like. The platform can monetize by letting a user buy any item from the outfits proposed. It targets male users may not be very bold in their fashion but want to purchase clothes that will turn some heads.
Ednity is a vertical social network for school classes. By putting teachers, students, and their parents in a sort of loop, it will help them build a collaborative education environment. The platform gives you a dashboard to manage notifications from school and your homework, and also provides a virtual white board for hand-drawn content that can be shared between teachers and their children.
Open Network Lab is now inviting applications from startups looking to join the upcoming batch of its incubation program starting next January. The application deadline is November 8th. The incubator’s parent company, Digital Garage, will also launch a co-working space in San Francisco pretty soon, where their incubated startups will be able to establish a base.
To commemorate the launch of the facility, the company plans to host Global Pitch 2013 on November 4th, and New Context Conference 2013 in San Francisco on November 5th and 6th. That’s just before digital agency Btrax’s SF Japan Night event at Pivotal Labs on November 7th.
Startup Sauna is a startup accelerator from Helsinki Finland, now touring 25 cities around the world, with an upcoming stop here in Tokyo on September 17th at Open Network Lab. The event will feature a panel including Taizo Son, the CEO of Movida Japan and founder/chairman of GungHo ; Peter Vesterbacka, the chief marketing officer of Rovio ; Hironao Kunimitsu, the founder and CEO of Gumi, and Naoki Aoyagi, the CEO of GREE International. But many of our readers will be pleased to hear that there will be a pitch event as well, with the winner receiving an invitations as well as free airfare (courtesy of the event sponsor Finnair) to attend Slush 2013 in November in Helsinki. That two-day event is expected to host 1,000 startups 5,000 attendees, and more than 600 international investors. So it certainly looks like a great opportunity. Miki Kuusi, the director of Startup Sauna, noted in the event announcement: Our two countries [Japan and Finland] have always had a lot in common. We share strong educational institutions that produce leading technical talent, a culture that has yet to warm to neither entrepreneurship nor failure, plus economies that must lessen their dependency on established electronics…
Startup Sauna is a startup accelerator from Helsinki Finland, now touring 25 cities around the world, with an upcoming stop here in Tokyo on September 17th at Open Network Lab.
The event will feature a panel including Taizo Son, the CEO of Movida Japan and founder/chairman of GungHo ; Peter Vesterbacka, the chief marketing officer of Rovio ; Hironao Kunimitsu, the founder and CEO of Gumi, and Naoki Aoyagi, the CEO of GREE International. But many of our readers will be pleased to hear that there will be a pitch event as well, with the winner receiving an invitations as well as free airfare (courtesy of the event sponsor Finnair) to attend Slush 2013 in November in Helsinki. That two-day event is expected to host 1,000 startups 5,000 attendees, and more than 600 international investors. So it certainly looks like a great opportunity.
Miki Kuusi, the director of Startup Sauna, noted in the event announcement:
Our two countries [Japan and Finland] have always had a lot in common. We share strong educational institutions that produce leading technical talent, a culture that has yet to warm to neither entrepreneurship nor failure, plus economies that must lessen their dependency on established electronics industries and seize huge opportunities in fast-moving companies.
If you’d like to apply to pitch at the event, you can do so here. The last day to apply is September 13th. Good luck!
Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister of Finland Jyrki Katainen visited Startup Sauna’s entrepreneurial co-working space
Japanese internet conglomerate Netprice.com announced today that it has launched a new incubation program called Beenos, which will provide hands-on support to promising young entrepreneurs. Netprice.com has another incubation program called Open Network Lab (aka OnLab), led by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and jointly operated with Digital Garage. So a natural question to ask here is why would Netprice need to run two different incubators at the same time? How do they differ? I had an opportunity to visit the Netprice.com office and hear from key members of the program’s team: Hiro Maeda, Bora Savas, Daisuke Imai, and Kazuya Kawakami. How is the Beenos incubation program different from OnLab? At OnLab, we’ve been helping as many startups as possible to launch and [grow], because it’s a seed acceleration program. In terms of helping participating startups learn more about what they have to do, they can receive advice from our mentors. For the Beenos program, we formed a 15-person hands-on team with the aim of committing ourselves to working with entrepreneurs. Most members of the team have previously launched their own startups, so they know what entrepreneurs are going thorough based on their own experience. What do you provide…
Japanese internet conglomerate Netprice.com announced today that it has launched a new incubation program called Beenos, which will provide hands-on support to promising young entrepreneurs. Netprice.com has another incubation program called Open Network Lab (aka OnLab), led by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and jointly operated with Digital Garage.
So a natural question to ask here is why would Netprice need to run two different incubators at the same time? How do they differ? I had an opportunity to visit the Netprice.com office and hear from key members of the program’s team: Hiro Maeda, Bora Savas, Daisuke Imai, and Kazuya Kawakami.
How is the Beenos incubation program different from OnLab?
At OnLab, we’ve been helping as many startups as possible to launch and [grow], because it’s a seed acceleration program. In terms of helping participating startups learn more about what they have to do, they can receive advice from our mentors.
For the Beenos program, we formed a 15-person hands-on team with the aim of committing ourselves to working with entrepreneurs. Most members of the team have previously launched their own startups, so they know what entrepreneurs are going thorough based on their own experience.
What do you provide in the Beenos program?
We provide everything you need for launching your startup. If you have an idea but no team, we can help you build a one. If you have an app but no user base, we can give you ideas that help boost user growth. You can apply for the program even if you have no great idea because we think the idea is not a key factor in terms of making your startup succeed.
For early-stage startups, we typically provide operational support using our Netprice.com personnel. For mature-startups, we help you expand your business reach globally using our international network comprised of our investees, subsidiaries, and partners.
So what do you expect from entrepreneurs?
For entrepreneurs, we think the success of your startup very much relies on how much your idea fits your mindset rather than your skill set as a business owner. We expect you to have a mindset where many people can follow you, [including] good co-workers or ardent customers.
According to Mr. Maeda, a recent trend in the startup incubation industry has seen US incubators focus on acquiring high-profile people for their advisory or management board, such as Digg co-founder Kevin Rose who joined Google Ventures, or SuccessFactors’ founder Lars Dalgaard who joined Andreessen Horowitz. Beenos expects this trend to seep into the Japanese incubation industry.
The team consists of experienced people from various fields. Dr. Bora Savas is a Turkish entrepreneur and data specialist. Daisuke Imai can help you build up prototype based on your idea, and give you advice from a user experience point if view. Using his network of investors and entrepreneurs in South East Asia, Mr. Kazuya Kawakami can help you expand your business quickly in that region.
For the time being, they will focus on nurturing Japanese startups in their Tokyo office, but they aspire to do more regardless of geography or nationality as it becomes possible later on.
Netprice already boasts an impressive portfolio of services like group-buying platform Netprice, auction site Brandear, and localized e-Bay service Sekaimon. Some of our readers may recall that the company also recently invested in two Turkish Internet companies as well.
Two Japanese mobile trends that we have been following closely over the past few months are high-quality Japanese photo apps, and the evolution of cute culture into an exportable mobile commodity. Popular made-in-Japan collage app Papelook lies at the intersection of these two trends, and that means it has lots of potential to grow, even beyond Japan’s borders. Today Digital Garage announced that it would be investing in Papelook, though the exact sum was not disclosed, the company will take 5% of the startup’s outstanding shares. The announcement also noted that Papelook has surpassed the 6 million downloads milestone (see chart below), boasting that among teenage girl iPhone users in Japan (specifically, those aged 10 to 20) it’s estimated that one in every two have downloaded Papelook. But the app has proven popular in overseas markets, currently ranking as a top 25 iOS photo app in South Korea, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Australia. On Android, It’s performing well in South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Papelook is an Open Network Lab startup, and our readers may recall that it took the top prize at the accelerator’s Demo Day back in May. The parent company of ONL is Digital Garage. For those…
Two Japanese mobile trends that we have been following closely over the past few months are high-quality Japanese photo apps, and the evolution of cute culture into an exportable mobile commodity. Popular made-in-Japan collage app Papelook lies at the intersection of these two trends, and that means it has lots of potential to grow, even beyond Japan’s borders.
Today Digital Garage announced that it would be investing in Papelook, though the exact sum was not disclosed, the company will take 5% of the startup’s outstanding shares.
The announcement also noted that Papelook has surpassed the 6 million downloads milestone (see chart below), boasting that among teenage girl iPhone users in Japan (specifically, those aged 10 to 20) it’s estimated that one in every two have downloaded Papelook.
Papelook’s journey to 6 million downloads
But the app has proven popular in overseas markets, currently ranking as a top 25 iOS photo app in South Korea, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Australia. On Android, It’s performing well in South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan.
Papelook is an Open Network Lab startup, and our readers may recall that it took the top prize at the accelerator’s Demo Day back in May. The parent company of ONL is Digital Garage.
For those not familiar with Papelook, check out our demo video below from a few months back.
See the original story in Japanese. Qiita is a knowledge sharing platform for programmers, a place where they can exchange information and code snippets in order to learn from each other. It has been growing well too, as Increments Inc (the company behind Qiita) announced yesterday that the platform has reached the 20,000 user milestone, boasting about 220,000 monthly unique visitors too. Coinciding with this announcement, the startup also launched brand new service called ‘Qiita Team’, which allows users to share knowledge among a closed group. Qiita was initially launched back in September of 2011, as part of the fourth batch of Open Network Lab incubation program. Of course on a global level, Github is the social coding community with almost 3 million engineers — but there is no overwhelming favorite in Japan [1]. Qiita is quite niche but is dominating this space for now. Interestingly, according to the startup’s designer and co-founder Tomoya Konishi, recent surveys indicate that there are about 400,000 programmers working in the Japanese IT industry [2]. Given that Qiita’s total monthly unique visitors is 220,000, that roughly accounts for 50% of the entire population of Japanese programmers. In addition to Qiita Team, the company has…
Qiita is a knowledge sharing platform for programmers, a place where they can exchange information and code snippets in order to learn from each other. It has been growing well too, as Increments Inc (the company behind Qiita) announced yesterday that the platform has reached the 20,000 user milestone, boasting about 220,000 monthly unique visitors too.
Coinciding with this announcement, the startup also launched brand new service called ‘Qiita Team’, which allows users to share knowledge among a closed group.
Qiita was initially launched back in September of 2011, as part of the fourth batch of Open Network Lab incubation program. Of course on a global level, Github is the social coding community with almost 3 million engineers — but there is no overwhelming favorite in Japan [1]. Qiita is quite niche but is dominating this space for now.
Interestingly, according to the startup’s designer and co-founder Tomoya Konishi, recent surveys indicate that there are about 400,000 programmers working in the Japanese IT industry [2]. Given that Qiita’s total monthly unique visitors is 220,000, that roughly accounts for 50% of the entire population of Japanese programmers.
In addition to Qiita Team, the company has also launched a job/talent matching site called ‘Qiita Carrer’. But how does the company intend to monetize all these services? Konishi explains:
Qitta Career is a gateway for our partner recruiting companies which might be a suitable fit for our users as they advance their careers. We’re currently exploring other business models too by adding some features.
If Qiita can reach half of the country’s programmers, the startup likely has a promising future.
Although Github itself is certainly a favorite here too. ↩
Tokyo startup accelerator Open Network Lab, led by MIT Media Lab’s director Joi Ito, held its demo day event today. We had a chance to check out a wide range of startups, not only from this latest batch, but also from the program’s previous five batches. Here’s a quick overview below. From the sixth batch 1. Zenclerk ¶ Website: zenclerk.com We can’t disclose much about their business because they’re in stealth mode, expected to launch next month. But you can infer what they’re working on from their website, as well as this short introductory video (in Japanese). They did not pitch at the event. 2. Papelook / Pape.mu girls ¶ Website: papelook.co.jp Pitched by: Ichiro Ozawa As some of our readers may remember that we previously featured Papelook, a photo collage/cropping app that allows users to share your fashion snapshots with others. It has now passed 5 million downloads since its initial launch back in March of 2012, growing at the impressive rate of 500,000 downloads a month. Almost 50% of all Japanese female smartphone users aged from 15 to 29 are using the app. In terms of differentiation from competing photo apps like Decopic and Snapeee, Papelook makes it…
Tokyo startup accelerator Open Network Lab, led by MIT Media Lab’s director Joi Ito, held its demo day event today. We had a chance to check out a wide range of startups, not only from this latest batch, but also from the program’s previous five batches. Here’s a quick overview below.
We can’t disclose much about their business because they’re in stealth mode, expected to launch next month. But you can infer what they’re working on from their website, as well as this short introductory video (in Japanese). They did not pitch at the event.
As some of our readers may remember that we previously featured Papelook, a photo collage/cropping app that allows users to share your fashion snapshots with others. It has now passed 5 million downloads since its initial launch back in March of 2012, growing at the impressive rate of 500,000 downloads a month. Almost 50% of all Japanese female smartphone users aged from 15 to 29 are using the app.
In terms of differentiation from competing photo apps like Decopic and Snapeee, Papelook makes it easier to sort good pictures from bad ones, which should keep your camera roll from being filled with unnecessary pictures.
Papelook alone does not make much money, but it transfers users to Pape.mu girls, their cash cow. Pape.mu girls is a fashion app that presents a variety of pictures and updates curated from models’ blogs or fashion brands. The app has 250,000 downloads so far, with 500,000 active users generating six million page views a month. What’s most impressive is the retention time of their users, logging an astounding 50 minutes per visit on average.
In this way, the photo collage app brings users on board, which then creates opportunities for brands to promote products with the fashion app. The startup has already managed to partner with Fashionwalker.com, one of Japan’s largest fashion e-commerce sites. The company is planning business expansion to the US and Mainland China soon.
Some of our readers may remember we featured Yangyang Xi, the founder and CEO of language learning platform Lang-8 in an exclusive interview back in February. The startup launched back in 2007 but since then has been operated by the founder on his own.
Mr. Xi was allowed to participate in the last batch of the acceleration program, hiring a CTO who previously worked at recipe sharing site Cookpad, as well as a designer.
With these fresh faces, Lang-8 has been seeing improvements in its access metrics. The growth rate of paid users is twice what it was a year ago, and revenue has almost doubled compared to a year ago. Business is finally in the black, and they can now begin developing a mobile app.
There’s no CGM-based language learning service using a mobile app, so that they expect to be on top of this space soon.
Back in December of 2011, Companth.me’s co-founder/CEO Hiromichi Ando explained his first app to me in an interview. They’ve been developing a number of apps since then, and the newest one is Kiddy.
Parents typically want to record the growth of their children with pictures, but most would prefer not to share all those snapshots with people on social network platforms who they might not be very close to. To address this problem, Kiddy is a photo sharing app that lets parents to share snapshots of their kids within a family group.
The app was launched last January, and more than 1,000 households have signed up for it so far. Comparing to other photo sharing apps, the Kiddy app is showing good user retention, and the ratio of weekly active users among its entire user base is between 40% to 50%, meaning that about one in every two users makes use of the app at least once a week.
With the potential to generate a great lifetime value, the startup expects to enhance the app as a platform for sharing pictures among family members. They have several monetization ideas including photo printing, or new e-commerce services that propose that you buy something that fits the specific occasion/time of your photo.
Website:govoyagin.com Pitched by: Masashi Takahashi, Entertainment Kick
This service initially set out to create a travel experience marketplace for tourists visiting Japan. But subsequently they enhanced their ideas to cover five Asian countries: Japan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. They are focusing on the Asian market because there are about 42 million travelers that hit region each year, with the market estimated to be worth over $4.2 billion.
Voyagin is planning to move its headquarters to Singapore by the end of this year.
This service is being operated a pair of developer co-founders. They are often asked by other developers to create smartphone apps, and were wondering why developers outsource development work to other developers. Finally they reached a conclusion. System developers in their 20s are familiar with programming languages like Objective-C or Ruby on Rails, but those in their 30s are better versed in conventional technologies like MySQL or Java.
With this insight the startup identified a sort of technology generation gap in the developer community. And it’s a gap that they aim to fill.
They’ve established set up a 20 to 60 hour lecture program for less experienced developers to learn about app development, and a range of related topics. They are also planning to providing some new courses for IT companies to train their employees.
After all the presentations were made, Kaoru Hayashi, the CEO of the accelerator’s parent company Digital Garage, announced that the top prize at the Demo Day event was awarded to the aforementioned Papelook.
The Open Network Lab accelerator is now accepting applications for the next batch of its acceleration program. The deadline is May 31st at noon.
See also this story in Japanese. Open Network Lab (aka OnLab), a Tokyo-based tech incubator backed by Digital Garage and NetPrice.com, has today started receiving applications for the 7th batch of the seed accelerator incubation program. The amount of funds for each qualified startup is 2 million yen (over $20,000), which is double what it was in the past. A special training course called the ‘Onlab Hacker Program‘ allows participating engineers to work with the incubator’s portfolio startups, thus forming an ecosystem where ‘succeeding’ startups can help new entries at the incubator. It’s often said that in order to launch a startup, we need to have three kinds of people: hustlers (management), hipsters (designers/creatives), and hackers (engineers). The incubator now serves all three of these, with doubling the funding for hustlers to work with, UI and UX mentoring from Adaptive Path founder Janice Fraser and AQ CEO Chris Palmieri, and now, they’ve established this program for hackers as well. Incubators usually need to figure out a way to differentiate themselves from others, and OnLab has made a good effort to do that here. Similarly, KDDI Mugen Labo, the tech incubator by Japan’s second largest telco, has set up a special application category…
Open Network Lab (aka OnLab), a Tokyo-based tech incubator backed by Digital Garage and NetPrice.com, has today started receiving applications for the 7th batch of the seed accelerator incubation program. The amount of funds for each qualified startup is 2 million yen (over $20,000), which is double what it was in the past. A special training course called the ‘Onlab Hacker Program‘ allows participating engineers to work with the incubator’s portfolio startups, thus forming an ecosystem where ‘succeeding’ startups can help new entries at the incubator.
It’s often said that in order to launch a startup, we need to have three kinds of people: hustlers (management), hipsters (designers/creatives), and hackers (engineers). The incubator now serves all three of these, with doubling the funding for hustlers to work with, UI and UX mentoring from Adaptive Path founder Janice Fraser and AQ CEO Chris Palmieri, and now, they’ve established this program for hackers as well.
Incubators usually need to figure out a way to differentiate themselves from others, and OnLab has made a good effort to do that here. Similarly, KDDI Mugen Labo, the tech incubator by Japan’s second largest telco, has set up a special application category for HTML5-engineering startups, and OnLab and Movida Japan have begun seeking high potential startups in cities beyond Tokyo. These efforts are good to see, representing a range of new entrepreneurship opportunities for creative minds out there.
Applications for OnLab’s seventh batch open today (March 14th), and the deadline is set for May 31st. If you’d like to apply, you can do so here. Good luck!
Open Network Lab 
Masaru Ikeda
Locarise is an analytics solution for retail stores. By placing small sensors inside and around your store, the system can collect metrics such as how many people passed in front of the store and how many customers you have served. 
Rick Martin
Takeshi Hirano
Tokyo startup accelerator 
Incubators usually need to figure out a way to differentiate themselves from others, and OnLab has made a good effort to do that here. Similarly, KDDI Mugen Labo, the tech incubator by Japan’s second largest telco, has set up a 