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Japan’s Spectee, news video aggregator for press, ready for North America expansion

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This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology. Spectee, at an OrangeFab meetup in Tokyo outlining the program in Asia, noted that from September it will start expanding its presence abroad — most likely in the U.S. which has been the amateur-based newsfeed firm’s largest market. Founder & CEO Kenjiro Murakami worked at a Silicon Valley major prior to starting up Spectee, under a different name. The Tokyo firm is a second batch (the first which covered Japan, Korea and Taiwan) graduate of the accelerator run by the European telecom concern Orange. Spectee will showcase its service at an Austin, Texas confab next month to mark the launch of its active foray into North America. Many competing services are headquartered on this continent. The Japanese startup not only handles copyright management issues for the image data but applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) upon finding and matching the requisite data. It was underscored that by 2020 the Internet will be some 44 ZB (zettabytes) of information floating out on cyberspace, beyond the capacity of a normal human brain alone to thresh through. See also: Japan’s social news aggregator for press…

This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.


Spectee CEO Kenjiro Murakami introduces his service at a recent OrangeFab Asia meet-up.
Image credit: “Tex” Pomeroy

Spectee, at an OrangeFab meetup in Tokyo outlining the program in Asia, noted that from September it will start expanding its presence abroad — most likely in the U.S. which has been the amateur-based newsfeed firm’s largest market. Founder & CEO Kenjiro Murakami worked at a Silicon Valley major prior to starting up Spectee, under a different name.

The Tokyo firm is a second batch (the first which covered Japan, Korea and Taiwan) graduate of the accelerator run by the European telecom concern Orange. Spectee will showcase its service at an Austin, Texas confab next month to mark the launch of its active foray into North America. Many competing services are headquartered on this continent.

The Japanese startup not only handles copyright management issues for the image data but applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) upon finding and matching the requisite data. It was underscored that by 2020 the Internet will be some 44 ZB (zettabytes) of information floating out on cyberspace, beyond the capacity of a normal human brain alone to thresh through.

See also:

Spectee is currently working with Associated Press (AP) among other press organizations to disseminate its visual newsfeed network. Its system is also armed with multiple patents, which is rare for a startup with less than ten years of history, to be applied in expanding into new areas beyond the news field.

In addition to the Spectee talk, OrangeFab outlined its past efforts and announced it was ready to accept applications for the next program term from entrepreneurs. Creww also provided a spiel about the venue it runs (dubbed “docks”), which is a mid-Tokyo open innovation incubation and coworking space near Tokyo Tower, being used for the event series.

Earlier last month, Uzabase — offering the NewsPicks service and tied up with Dow Jones in the U.S. — announced its intention to buy digital-only business news service Quartz from Atlantic Media. Assuming the approximately month-long U.S. government approval goes smoothly, the Tokyo company can expect to be the new Quartz provider.

Japan’s Spectee, news video aggregator for press, snags $2.3M series B for global push

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Spectee, the startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, announced today that it has fundraised 260 million yen (about $2.3 million US) in a series B round. This round was led by YJ Capital with participation from Kyodo News Images, Mizuho Capital, Arco Partners, Quaras (an ad agency of Japanese media conglomerate Fuji Sankei Group), Makoto Naruke (former president of Microsoft Japan, angel investor now), and an unnamed angel investor. This follows the company’s series A round conducted back in July of 2016. Spectee was founded in February of 2014 (previously Euclid Lab), and it graduated in October of 2015 from the 11th batch of Open Network Lab’s incubation program. The team has been offering a service called Spectee (previously known as Newsdeck), curating images and video clips for live events from social media and offering copyright clearance for use by broadcasters and news organizations, similar to Banjo in the US. A patent has been filed for the AI technology for analyzing curated image and video clips. See also: Japan’s Spectee files patents for news writing bot In Japan, Spectee is currently serving almost 100 companies…

Spectee
Image credit: Spectee

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Spectee, the startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, announced today that it has fundraised 260 million yen (about $2.3 million US) in a series B round. This round was led by YJ Capital with participation from Kyodo News Images, Mizuho Capital, Arco Partners, Quaras (an ad agency of Japanese media conglomerate Fuji Sankei Group), Makoto Naruke (former president of Microsoft Japan, angel investor now), and an unnamed angel investor. This follows the company’s series A round conducted back in July of 2016.

Spectee was founded in February of 2014 (previously Euclid Lab), and it graduated in October of 2015 from the 11th batch of Open Network Lab’s incubation program. The team has been offering a service called Spectee (previously known as Newsdeck), curating images and video clips for live events from social media and offering copyright clearance for use by broadcasters and news organizations, similar to Banjo in the US. A patent has been filed for the AI technology for analyzing curated image and video clips.

See also:

Spectee
Image credit: Spectee

In Japan, Spectee is currently serving almost 100 companies including 86 TV broadcasters plus 4 newspaper publishers, such as Nippon TV, TV Asahi, TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System), Fuji TV and Yomiuri Shimbun. We were told that they have a project collaboratively being worked on with a certain Japanese public broadcaster but details were not disclosed. As a news distributor based on the social media-based aggregation technique, the company claims it has a 92% market share in Japan based on the number of clients.

In June, Spectee launched news video distribution via Associated Press’ Video Hub targeting the global market, seeing a steady growth and trying to expand it further. The company also got a subscriptions contract with New York Times because of the partnership with the global news agency. Kenjiro Murakami, co-founder and CEO of Spectee, told The Bridge that they expect sales expansion through news material sales on the global market while securing stable revenue through subscriptions contracts with media companies and news publishers in Japan.

Murakami explained:

With the personnel in Berlin and Los Angeles in addition to Tokyo, we are running a 24-hour nonstop operations such as the distribution of news materials on platform and gaining approvals from social media users who posted images of live events that are likely to be used by news media outfits.

However, video editing and distributing operations are still centralized to our Tokyo office. Because of a fierce competition with other news video providers on AP Video Hub, we want to increase the operating weight at overseas locations to provide news materials as fresh as possible. To make this possible, we expect to focused on securing new staffers at these locations.

AP Video Hub
Associated Press

Spectee is now selling video materials to 33 markets, including the US, UK, Thailand and Brazil in order from the top. The company’s global sales still depends on AP Video Hub but Spectee is considering build-up of their own video sales portal for global media publishers because the agreement with Associated Press is not exclusive.

It is interesting to see how they can expand globally from here.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s Spectee files patents for news writing bot

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Spectee, the Japanese startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, revealed on Monday that they have filed for two patents applications for automated creation of straight news stories to the Japan Patent Office (JPO). Upon being granted the patents by JPO, the technologies related to the high precisioning  / processing of image recognition and natural language analysis using deep learning, and collection of equivalents to the so-called Five Ws from an average of 4-5 social media posts make it  possible to automatically generate straight news stories of about 300 characters. When incidents occur in urban areas and more than 10 posts are likely to be gathered in relation to it they can complete a sufficiently accurate article. See also: Japan’s social news aggregator for press Spectee announces Asian, US expansion In the field of AI-powered news writing, in 2016 the Associated Press started using Automated Insights’ WordSmith to create news articles on sports scores and made headlines. In Japan, Nagoya’s The Mid-Japan Economist, in collaboration with Datasection and Bit A, posted article created by AI; additionally, the Nikkei online edition worked together with the Institute of…

Image credit: maxuser / 123RF

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Spectee, the Japanese startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, revealed on Monday that they have filed for two patents applications for automated creation of straight news stories to the Japan Patent Office (JPO).

Upon being granted the patents by JPO, the technologies related to the high precisioning  / processing of image recognition and natural language analysis using deep learning, and collection of equivalents to the so-called Five Ws from an average of 4-5 social media posts make it  possible to automatically generate straight news stories of about 300 characters. When incidents occur in urban areas and more than 10 posts are likely to be gathered in relation to it they can complete a sufficiently accurate article.

See also:

In the field of AI-powered news writing, in 2016 the Associated Press started using Automated Insights’ WordSmith to create news articles on sports scores and
made headlines. In Japan, Nagoya’s The Mid-Japan Economist, in collaboration with Datasection and Bit A, posted article created by AI; additionally, the Nikkei online edition worked together with the Institute of Language Understanding and Professor Yutaka Matsuo of the University of Tokyo to begin a Financial Summary service written by news bots. Even among Japanese startups, teams have been emerging to tackle the theme of automatically  creating articles using AI.

Spectee was founded in February of 2014 (previously Euclid Lab), and it graduated in October 2015 from the 11th batch of Open Network Lab’s incubation program. In July of 2016, they raised an undisclosed sum of funds in a series A round from Fuji Startup Ventures and a Japanese surveillance camera company, as well as Mizuho Capital.  The Spectee platform, which obtains the rights to content collected from social media and provides it as news material to the mass media and companies, has been adopted by about 100 media companies and publishers across Japan.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

Japan’s social news aggregator for press Spectee announces Asian, US expansion

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Spectee, the startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, announced today that it would start global expansion of Newsdeck, the company’s social news aggregation platform for the press. The expansion will be driven in cooperation with CBC, the company behind a globally-renowned cable TV system brand called Ganz, which participated in a series A round this July. Specifically, Spectee will set up a local subsidiary in Taiwan and Singapore respectively followed by commencing sales operations using CBC’s local sales offices. Regarding US market entry, the company will found a subsidiary there in fall for market research before starting sales operations leveraging CBC’s sales network in the US after next year. In Taiwan, there are more than several dozen satellite TV news channels catering overseas Chinese communities, such as FTV News, CTS News, CTi News, EBC News, NTDAPTV and TVBS. In Singapore, international TV broadcasters like BBC and CNBC have their regional broadcasting centers in addition to the existence of SPH Plug & Play, a media business-focused startup accelerator run by the parent company of Mediacorp, broadcasting international TV channel Channel NewsAsia. In these markets that contain…

spectee_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Spectee, the startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, announced today that it would start global expansion of Newsdeck, the company’s social news aggregation platform for the press. The expansion will be driven in cooperation with CBC, the company behind a globally-renowned cable TV system brand called Ganz, which participated in a series A round this July.

Specifically, Spectee will set up a local subsidiary in Taiwan and Singapore respectively followed by commencing sales operations using CBC’s local sales offices. Regarding US market entry, the company will found a subsidiary there in fall for market research before starting sales operations leveraging CBC’s sales network in the US after next year.

In Taiwan, there are more than several dozen satellite TV news channels catering overseas Chinese communities, such as FTV News, CTS News, CTi News, EBC News, NTDAPTV and TVBS. In Singapore, international TV broadcasters like BBC and CNBC have their regional broadcasting centers in addition to the existence of SPH Plug & Play, a media business-focused startup accelerator run by the parent company of Mediacorp, broadcasting international TV channel Channel NewsAsia. In these markets that contain more potential clients than Japan, Spectee wants to launch full-scale sales operations leveraging local offices of its shareholder CBC.

In the US, nationwide TV news networks are mostly dominated by the existing Big Three comprising CBS, ABC and NBC… in addition to major satellite channels like CNN and Fox News. However, local TV stations - of which more than 2,000 stations are said to be in operation from coast to coast -can be targeted for Spectee as clients. In rural areas that even news agencies unlikely have coverage, local broadcasters which typically have less reporting resources can secure news images and materials by leveraging social media tools. Banjo, a US-based startup offering a service similar to Spectee’s Newsdeck, has been adopted at many local TV stations owned by Sinclair Digital Group. This is why the primary key for Spectee’s success in the US market will rely on what kind of additional values they can offer to such TV stations.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s Spectee secures series A round to analyze live events realtime for broadcasters

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Spectee, the startup behind the platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, announced today that it has secured series A funding. This round was led by Fuji Startup Ventures (FSV for short), the investment arm of Tokyo-based private broadcaster Fuji TV, with participation from Japanese investment firm Mizuho Capital not to mention CBC, the company behind a globally-renowned CCTV system brand called Ganz. Further financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. Spectee was founded under the previous name of Euclid Lab in February of 2014, followed by graduation from the 11th incubation batch of Tokyo-based startup accelerator Open Network Lab in October of 2015. This March, the team launched a new service called Newsdeck, curating images and video clips for live events from social media and offering copyright clearance for use by broadcasters and news organizations, similar to Banjo in the US. The artificial intelligence (AI) technology for analyzing curated image and video clips is now pending patent. Spectee is now offering the Newsdeck service to more than 15 platforms in Japan such as TV broadcasters and online news media sites. Of particular note is the fact that Fuji…

spectee_featuredimage
Image credit: Spectee

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Spectee, the startup behind the platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, announced today that it has secured series A funding. This round was led by Fuji Startup Ventures (FSV for short), the investment arm of Tokyo-based private broadcaster Fuji TV, with participation from Japanese investment firm Mizuho Capital not to mention CBC, the company behind a globally-renowned CCTV system brand called Ganz. Further financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.

Spectee was founded under the previous name of Euclid Lab in February of 2014, followed by graduation from the 11th incubation batch of Tokyo-based startup accelerator Open Network Lab in October of 2015. This March, the team launched a new service called Newsdeck, curating images and video clips for live events from social media and offering copyright clearance for use by broadcasters and news organizations, similar to Banjo in the US. The artificial intelligence (AI) technology for analyzing curated image and video clips is now pending patent.

newsdeck_diagram
Image credit: Spectee

Spectee is now offering the Newsdeck service to more than 15 platforms in Japan such as TV broadcasters and online news media sites. Of particular note is the fact that Fuji TV’s news department has been testing Newsdeck, in preparing for adoption as a platform for fulfilling the core function of the broadcaster’s online news coverage department, which was established this month. The company has also partnered with Fuji TV Lab, planning to launch business involving image/video clip curation and “affairs mining” through integration of the Spectee platform into the broadcaster’s system for accepting video clip and image posting from viewers.

Considering the example of aforementioned Banjo plus that of the Associated Press (AP) which recently began generating news articles using Automated Insights’ WordSmith technology, AI is expanding the range of its applications to the news industry. In particular this year, not only curation of news articles but also generation of original text as well as news material gathering are becoming automated with such technology. Since it is said that AI-powered news generation usually goes well with news categories dealing with figures or stats, such as reporting sport game results or a fact-finder news piece, the one like this article could also be generated using an automated “writing program” in the future.

newsdeck_screenshot1
Image credit: Spectee

By coincidence similar to the writer team structure of The Bridge in terms of locations, Spectee has added new personnel in Berlin and Los Angeles in addition to Tokyo this month in order to manage the distribution of news materials on the Newsdeck platform and gaining approvals from social media users who posted images of live events that are likely to be used by news media outfits. Applying the three-location structure enables 24-hour nonstop operations by distributing employees according to their local time zone.

The CBC Group, one of the companies that Spectee has fundraised from, has many sales offices outside Japan while earning its primary revenue from global sales. Spectee is looking to gain assistance from CBC in selling the Newsdeck solution to TV broadcasters around the globe.

Disclosure: Fuji Startup Ventures has invested in The Bridge.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Spectee: Japanese app delivers local news faster than newspapers and TV

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See the original story in Japanese. More TV news shows have started carrying video clips or photos picked up from social media platforms. News channels like CNN or Fox News have adopted such news materials en masse from earlier on. But surprisingly, Japanese public broadcaster NHK, hitherto considered to be a late adopter of this kind of coverage, now even uses materials from unknown origin in their news programs. This is likely due to a change in generations. Yet despite the advances in news media, no correspondent or news anchor can beat out ordinary citizens witnessing and recording a scene in terms of newsgathering speed. Given that, a news media’s value relies on its ability to edit the materials being delivered. Analysis and provision of obscure background information behind events are needed to help viewers understand the news. As social media has disseminated widely among the public, I see editing of information as the remaining bastion of media. But a new startup aims to disrupt this prevailing view. This is Tokyo-based Euclid Lab, which is developing a mobile app called Spectee. In July, I talked to Euclid Lab CEO Kenjiro Murakami at ICT Spring in Luxembourg, but I could not…

spectee_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

More TV news shows have started carrying video clips or photos picked up from social media platforms. News channels like CNN or Fox News have adopted such news materials en masse from earlier on. But surprisingly, Japanese public broadcaster NHK, hitherto considered to be a late adopter of this kind of coverage, now even uses materials from unknown origin in their news programs. This is likely due to a change in generations.

Yet despite the advances in news media, no correspondent or news anchor can beat out ordinary citizens witnessing and recording a scene in terms of newsgathering speed. Given that, a news media’s value relies on its ability to edit the materials being delivered. Analysis and provision of obscure background information behind events are needed to help viewers understand the news.

As social media has disseminated widely among the public, I see editing of information as the remaining bastion of media. But a new startup aims to disrupt this prevailing view. This is Tokyo-based Euclid Lab, which is developing a mobile app called Spectee.

In July, I talked to Euclid Lab CEO Kenjiro Murakami at ICT Spring in Luxembourg, but I could not then understand the overall concept of the product because they were still early in the development process. Several months have passed, and I wondered how the development of Spectee was progressing. To find out, I visited Euclid Lab to speak to Murakami. (Below is a video of his pitch at ICT Spring 2014.)

Devoting themselves to fine-tuning

Spectee is a platform that curates updates from social media and sorts them based on geotags or keywords contained in every tweet or message post. About 60 locations across Japan are set in the app where users can see what is happening in real time in every location.

Murakami explained:

Since the launch of our service in beta, we have been devoting ourselves to fine-tuning the filtering engine so that it offers users better results. So we haven’t massively exposed ourselves to the media. Location-based analysis, filtering out irrelevant content, machine-learning technology… we have mixed them all together to improve the accuracy of our engine.

Since ICT Spring in July, Euclid Lab has been demonstrating their product on an operational test basis at festivities like the Aomori Nebuta festival in partnership with companies like Japanese telco NTT East and Cisco Systems.

Due to the platform’s ability to collect regionally oriented events, it seems that newspaper publishers are also interested in Spectee. As the form of media continue to diversify, although in general the newspaper business is struggling, many local newspapers are doing well compared to major newspapers, not only in Japan but also in the U.S. and other countries.

Let us consider a local newspaper in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. Without any foreign correspondents, they can buy global updates from news agencies. Updates from Tokyo can be distributed by their affiliates. However, they need to place reporters at every corner of the prefecture to obtain local news updates. But if they adopt Spectee, it will act efficiently as a primary information source for reporters.

Noted Murakami,

Finding relevant regionally oriented updates is not so easy online because most sites show trending updates from the entire base in an upper level of retrieval results. So updates unlikely seen by a big audience will be buried under a pile of information. One can pick up the updates that are really needed with our app.

Spectee crawls social media to curate updates, but they aim to expand to other platforms for crawling, to become a platform that gathers local news updates from around the world.

spectee_screenshots

Will newspapers buy news from citizens?

Thanks to the penetration of social media, word of incidents or events can spread very quickly around the world. Just for speed, social media can deliver updates faster than any conventional news media like newspapers or TV news programs. Murakami elaborated:

I came up with the idea when a big fire broke out on a highway in Shibuya in March. When an incident happens, pictures of the scene will be uploaded to Twitter or other social media right away. In contrast, conventional media takes 60 minutes on average to cover an event after it happens.

Murakami told us that they are receiving offers or potential partnerships from newspapers, railway companies and other curated news media. Euclid Lab can make money if they distribute updates to these potential partners, and the company is exploring a business model of redistributing retained earnings to their users who have properly posted pictures or provided text reporting. Under this concept, people can sell their updates to newspapers instead of buying their papers from the companies.

Taking advantage of the strength in curating regional updates, they want to make another revenue stream by providing local advertisements, as they are more likely to target a regional audience and avail efficient marketing rather than a nationwide campaign.

hk_umbrellarevolution
Curated updates on protests in Hong Kong.

Seeing what’s happening in your neighborhood through smartglasses

While Spectee is available for iOS, Euclid Lab has developed a prototype version for Android Wear and is developing one for Android handsets.

In partnership with Sony, the team participated in IFA 2014 (Internationale Funkausstellung) in Berlin this September and demonstrated the Spectee app (Android Wear prototype version) for Sony’s Smart Eyeglass.

Murakami said,

In Japan, much information is centralized in Tokyo. But in Europe, their information is more regionally fragmented so we garnered a high reputation at the exhibition.

Euclid Lab is a seven-person team and comprises Muarkami, four engineers, and board members like notable serial entrepreneur Tomoyuki Uchida and Kazunori Umino, who is the authority in adopting scientific methologies to businesses.

The start-up was qualified in the second batch of the Orange Fab Asia incubation program, and will pitch at a Demo Day event today (25 November). The Bridge will cover this event including the Euclid Lab team’s presentation.

spectee-sony-eyeglass
Spectee-installed Sony Smart Eyeglass demonstrated at IFA 2014, Berlin.