Ohma Inc., a Tokyo-based tech start-up known for semantic web-based who’s-who app Spysee[J], released a Kickstarter-like crowd fundraising service called “ReadyFor?[J]” this week.

The service intends to giving fundraising opportunities to amateur filmmakers, musicians and artists who would like to publish their works. If you invest in someone’s plan to develop his/her work, in return, you can get benefits like putting your names on it and seeing him/her face-to-face.

The company is currently running a campaign for helping the earthquake victims in the Tohoku area, for the time being, all the revenues earned from their services will be donated for the disaster relief efforts.

The following is a video clip shooting Miss Mera from Ohma has presented the app at Startup Dating‘s lightening talk session.

See Also:

• Japan’s Kickstarter-like Online Patronage Platform Campfire To Be Launched
  
• Spysee’s web campaign: Collect 1 million Yen for Japan’s Paralympics ski team

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Tokyo-based tech start-up Pido[J] unveiled the company’s first iPhone app today, which is called TwitVoice[J] and allows you to leave your voice messages via Twitter.   It’s a free app, and you can tweet with your real voice recorded within fifteen seconds.   The company expects to add some features in the future to attract the users more.

Pido was a tech start-up specializing in mobile business and co-founded in 2010 by Yusuke Tanaka, previously serving as the managing director for Fractalist[J], and Ryo Umezawa, the managing director of J-Seed Ventures.

The following is a video clip shooting Mr. Umezawa has presented the app at TechWave‘s 1000 English Speakers.

See Also:

• JIMS On The Plane: What They Learn From SV Tech Start-ups

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Japan has quite a few “social drawing services” that let users upload self-drawn images and connect with each other. But Pixiv is the biggest of them all.

The eponymous company behind the service has announced that Pixiv hit 3 million members on March 29. The number of users doubled since January last year, when we reported that Pixiv counted 1.5 million members. All in all, it took 1,296 days to hit the 3 million mark.

The page views even more than doubled in that time frame, growing from 1 billion per month to a staggering 2.3 billion (including mobile Pixiv). This is not too surprising, as members post 22,000 drawings daily (there are now a total of 17.7 million drawings on the site).

If you want to give Pixiv a spin, you can sign up in English here (even though the service shows a weird mix of both languages on some pages).

I can also recommend the great entry on Pixiv on Wikipedia, which highlights the background and history of the service in English.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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