CyberAgent Ventures[J], an invest arm of Tokyo’s web business conglomerate CyberAgent, previously known as CyberAgent Investment, announced today the result of Startups 2010[J] or their program digging up hidden tech start-ups from Japanese market.  Five teams were chosen to be financially and physically supported by CyberVentures in the program.

Totally 108 teams have submitted their ideas for the program during the application period starting last summer.   The chosen teams will be invested and allowed to set their offices in a incubation facility provided by CyberAgent Ventures.

The teams chosen in the program are:

• TechMonkey: develops “Loca-Tomo”, a location-based avatar training game app.

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  Food Foto: provides a service that allows you to share updates with your friends about what you’ve eaten at restaurants and what you’ve cooked.

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  Mind Palette[J]: develops Snapeee, a picture-based social network having the feature of decorating user’s snapshots.

• Tori ningen[J] (meaning ‘bird man’): develops smartphone/tablet education apps for children.

• Jipanglish[J]: operates a language learning platform for allowing users to master English in a short time.

CyberAgent Ventures’ “Startup” program has been an annual opportunity for tech start-ups to apply, but there will be two periods a year since the next edition which is scheduled to due next March.

See Also:

• CyberAgent Ventures Press Release: Announcing Five Teams supported in the Startup 2010 Program[J, PDF]
• Cyber Agent Investments Organizes Business Plan Competition

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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One of Japan’s biggest web industry events is the so-called Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS), a two-day, invitation-only event that takes place twice a year (Asiajin is a media partner). The fall event will happen in Kyoto next week, namely on December 7 and 8.

Organized by VC firm Infinity Venture Partners, the IVS this time has over 500 people on the guest list: for example, i-mode creator Takeshi Natsuno, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, or GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka, to name just a few (yours truly will be there as well).

There will also be a launchpad giving a total of 14 new and existing startups the chance to set out pitches (a panel of 10 judges will then select a winner and four runners up).

Here’s a (very) quick preview of all 14 demos we’ll see at the IVS next week- as tweeted out by Infinity Venture Partner Masashi Kobayashi yesterday:

Demo 1: VoiSticky (voice memo system that visualizes recordings as “stickies in a virtual space”)

Demo 2: Energy Literacy Platform (system to keep track of how much energy people use at home)

Demo 3: Gazopa (similar image search engine developed by Hitachi America)

Demo 4: Lingo Project (text correction tool to check the grammar and vocabulary in English sentences typed in a browser in real time)

Demo 5: Questetra BPM Suite SaaS Edition (business process management suite)

Demo 6: New service by Togetter creator Toshiaki Yoshida

Demo 7: MCS Elements 2010 by Ubiquitous Entertainment (iPad app (iTunes) containing data from “the first large-scale investigation of internet and contents consumption in Japan” by major publishing company ASCII Media Works)

Demo 8: FlashInFlash (server solution for Flash developers by i-Broadcast)

Demo 9: Odette Solution by Orso (CMS for mobile Flash applications)

Demo 10: Hatena Koko (Hatena’s LBS offering)

Demo 11: AndFriends (social app search service for Android users by milog)

Demo 12: Cheerz (service that adds social elements to web sites by Klab)

Demo 13: Botspace (a “communication tool”)

Demo 14: New service by web marketing company hottolink

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
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Japanese Internet behemoth CyberAgent (listed with a $1.2 billion market cap) is ready to expand its activities in the US. The company today announced it will establish a development base in San Francisco this Wednesday (December 1) with the goal of creating smartphone apps for international markets.

CyberAgent has been active in the US since February 2008 when the company established its subsidiary CyberAgent America. The plan is to boost the number of employees from the current 30 to 100 by September 2012, mainly by hiring American and Japanese engineers.

CyberAgent wants to start rolling out the first smartphone apps in March next year and expects to have a total of eight titles in its portfolio by September 2011.

CyberAgent is one of the few Japanese web companies that successfully launched services outside the country. Their biggest international hit is Ameba Pico, a virtual world that’s reportedly on track to hit the 3 million user mark by year-end. A similar platform, TinierMe, currently counts about 1.4 million members worldwide.

In September this year, CyberAgent America announced a marketing and distribution deal with Silicon Valley-based Mochi Media.

Tags: Japan, News, USA by Serkan Toto
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