It was Global Entrepreneurship Week between November 14 and 21 when a variety of business development events took place in Tokyo and Kyoto. In time with this opportunity, there was a three-day tech event called Startup Weekend Tokyo last weekend, which was the second edition here in Japan. At this event, people having a variety of skill sets came together and attempted to develop new services during the weekend.
Let’s have a look at great app prototypes and services that nine teams have developed.
Panelist judges who had chosen prize-winning projects were:
- Robert Goldberg, CEO of Zynga Japan[J] (@robertgoldberg)
- Akky Akimoto, Chief Editor of Asiajin (@akky)
- Mikihiro Yasuda, CTO of Digital Garage (@mikihiro_yasuda)
- Sunil Paul, Founding Partner of Spring Ventures (@sunil_paul)
- Takuya Matsutani, CEO of Project Nippon Inc.[J] (@taku_matsutani)
Eatomo.com
Eatomo.com is a web service that allows you to receive a consultation for improving eating habits by answering simple questionnaires. Based on accumulated data, the service assesses your condition and recommends several restaurants that will serve good meals for your health. Subscription-based revenue model.
Pipedit.com
Facebook Messages, Twitter DMs, and G-mails – Today we are forced to use multiple communication methods to keep in touch with a number of people. Pipedit is a tool that aggregates e-mails and messages from multiple messaging platforms, prioritize them in accordance with a combination of the user’s setting and detecting characteristic of the messages, and forward them to each of the platforms according to the priorities, which makes it possible for Internet users to communicate in a more convenient way.
CouponTimely
CouponTimely is a flash-marketing tool that allows restaurant owners to promote their business and offers discount dining opportunities to consumers. The service is exclusively designed for smartphone users, and it requires no advance purchase unlike Groupon and the other daily deal services. All you have to do is just show a coupon on your smartphone screen to your server at a restaurant. CouponTimely is expecting to provide 30% discount coupons, and they will have no rivals in terms of high discount rate.
Breeder’s Lounge (Temporarily offline from Facebook)
Breeder’s Lounge is a Facebook app that connects cat breeders and cat lovers through cat pedigrees. It aims at becoming a social network and an information hub for cat lover’s community, and possible accumulation of cat pedigrees allows them to predict the incidence of cat diseases and to launch an insurance business focusing on pet animals.
Sociopad
Sociopad is a web app that aggregates your interesting tweets/Facebook status and arrange it as a diary. That makes you easier to remember what happened to you day by day in the past, and also gives your friends a fun.
Kachop
Kachop is a smartphone app (they actually developed an Android prototype) that allows you to crop favorite portrait and override it on your favorite background very easily without graphical technique nor Adobe Photoshop-like software.
Margo
Margo is a web-based service that helps elderly people communicate with their grand sons/daughters living apart by using picture drawings.
Catch Me
Catch Me is an iPhone app especially designed for teenage girls to exchange profiles among friends. In order to meet their tastes, the app has also several features such as making “purikura (photo sticker)”-like portraits and decorated virtual name cards. Open-social compatible.
Oh My Pic
OhMyPic is a web-based app that allows you to get rewards by tagging your pictures with brand names. Find something branded in your pictures and tag it with a brand name. The owner of the brand name will pay you a reward for the tagging because that may contribute to their marketing efforts. You can choose to donate rewards to charity.
Five panelists discussed to determine which prizes should go to which nominees, then Zynga Japan’s Robert Goldberg announced it on behalf of all them.
From left to right: Jonny Li (@jonnyli, Startup Weekend Tokyo co-organizer), Robert Goldberg (Zynga Japan CEO)
< Prize-winning Projects >
1st prize: Kachop 2nd prize: Sociopad 3rd prize: OhMyPic
Kachop, who won the first prize at Startup Weekend Tokyo, can move forward to the next step, Global Startup Battle, a global competition organized and supported by Startup Weekend.
Congratulation to Kachop development team.
Masaru IKEDA
how is this different from photochop? it seems there had been the same app already in 2008?
If I understand correctly, the Photochop you mention is an app you can manually erase any part of photo by fingers, and overlay it with another photos. (I did not know the app) You need lots of work and some skill is required.
What Kachop demo-ed was that you can cut the person’s shape by single tap.
They also mentioned about web site socially share and enjoy others’ photos.
Of course, it is possible that all 5 judges did not know other similar products already exist. For the short time, basically we trust all teams that they had done research during the three days. If not, they waste their three days.