Asiajin

OpenTrace is a service that “Traces items through the supply chain and adds them together to show the impact of products on the environment” (from TechCrunch). OpenTrace is run by Rinen Inc, which is owned by Hirofumi Manganji and Hiroaki Shimachi.

Rinen has received a Japanese government grant called Exploratory Software Project which is given to independent software developers who creates an original product or technology.

GazoPa (Crunchbase), a site operated by Hitachi Ltd, is “an image search engine by Hitachi that uses features from an image to search for and identify similar images” (from CrunchBase). Hitachi (TYO: 6501, NYSE: HIT) is a large multi-national IT company group headquatered in Japan.

I’ve met two Hitachi senior management guys at TechCrunch 40 last year. We (Akky and Arai) have decided to start Asiajin at TC40, and probably they’ve decided to launch their product at TC50.

See Also:

1. SiliconValleyWatcher: Tokyo Diary Day 2 – A Japanese Garage Startup . . .

Tags: Company, Japan, New Service, Service, Software by Shunichi Arai
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Cookpad is the biggest recipe site in Japan, and has 416,000 recipes on the site. Alexa shows that Cookpad has a higher rating than Food Network or AllRecipes (with 40,000 recipes). Cookpad has 4.5 million unique visitors per month, and 280 million page views per month.

Ofcourse, recipes are posted by users. Unlike other recipe site, cookpad has many social features. Users who tried a recipe can post a review. Also users can write a cooking diary (blog) on the site.

Cookpad has a paid membership plan (294yen per month) (approx. $3) which allows users to sort recipes with popularity order, or expand favorite recipe folder from 20 to 3000 items. CEO Akimitsu Sano said that he wants users to pay for a good web service. Providing a web service without a fee is not a norm in his point of view.

Sano started the service in October 1998. Cookpad has gained many users from its early stage, but had suffered from lack of revenues. Cookpad is not a public company (yet as of 2008 Sep.), so its revenue is not disclosed. Now they are hiring an accountant (JP), so I assume that they are profitable and ready to be public.

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
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