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SF New Tech Calls For Entries To Present At Japan Night


Brandon Hill, the CEO/founder of San Francisco-based web consultancy btrax, gave us an invitation to potential presenters and attendees at a must-join tech start-up demo event that will take place next month.

As of this writing, four start-ups of Kayac, Chatwork, J-Grab, and Conyac have passed the first screening.   Entries to present are acceptable until May 20.

Here’s some of what we have covered the previous event. (including Ustream video)

Who’s Brandon Hill:

Born in Hokkaido, Japan.  He has a Japanese mother and a American father.  Prior to founding web consultancy btrax in San Francisco in 2004, he was attending San Francisco State University where he started his carrier as a designer and programmer.

SF New Tech:

It is literally a tech start-up’s demo and presentation event that takes place monthly at a nightclub in San Francisco.   The event celebrated its 5th anniversary last month.   Some events in a year feature start-ups from outside the US., which are titled like Belgian Night and Japan Night.   btrax is deeply involved with organizing Japan Night.

In light of the Japan’s worst disaster, web tech startups are giving the nation of Japan some hope for normalcy and economic recovery with their efforts to go global. In fact, the entry point for web tech globalization seems to be San Francisco.  In a local SF article, San Francisco was named as the second-fastest growing city in high-tech employment, with 65 percent growth over a five-year period.  The whole region which includes San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco supports over $48 Billion in payroll.

Last year we wrote about a first of a kind tech event featuring Japanese start-up web tech companies called SF Japan Night. This year, the organizer, btrax, Inc. a multicultural Web agency, is going to hold the event again this year.

Last year’s SF Japan Night event was the capstone of a week of Japanese tech events and was a huge success. Over 500 people attended the week long event with over 300 people just showing up for SF Japan Night alone. One of the presenters, myGengo received seed funding after the event from the Dave McClure’s incubator program 500 Startups.


This year’s event hopes to be even better with many start-up companies from Japan showing great interest including a company including Kayac. Kayac Inc. is a Japanese digital agency with a strength on developing games and apps and plans to go public within the next year.

In partnership with SF New Tech, btrax hopes to continue the theme of helping Japanese web start-ups go global. Brandon K. Hill, president/CEO of btrax, said “We are again excited to help organize this event and with the great interest in sponsorships we hope to defer the web start-up expenses.”  In fact, Mr. Hill told us that the event just received a sponsorship from NTT Investment Partners deferring a portion of the event’s costs.

This is one of the better platforms for Japanese web start-ups to begin their global journey. btrax works on coaching the start-ups in various aspects of the event, from developing a presentation style to coaching on how to answer business model questions that the SF Tech community audience typically asks. This gives Japanese start-ups an opportunity to interact with the SF Tech scene which is debated to be the hottest tech venues in the world. The btrax team helps the applying companies by providing a free feedback report on their services and if selected the presenting companies will get a more comprehensive feedback from the event’s audience.

Mr. Hill is also planning to hold “International Startup Night” in 2011, and a couple popular companies from SF Japan Night could get a chance to present and compete with other global start-up from around the world.

If you are willing to sponsor please contact them at sfjapannight@btrax.com and if you are willing to apply for demonstration please do so from here.

Tags: Japan, News, USA by Masaru IKEDA
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Fashion Recommendation Site iQon Fundraises USD1.7M From Itochu And GMO


Tokyo-based tech start-up Vasily[J], who is known for running a fashion recommendation site called iQon, has fundraised JPY140M (approx. USD1.7M) from Itochu Technology Ventures and GMO Venture Partners.

iQon does not sell clothes online but recommends you a bunch of ready-to-wear collection of fashionable clothes, accessories and shoes etc. with links that take you to sales stands of online fashion retailers that the company has partnered with.  You can create a collection of your own on the site, which the other users may prefer, and the company will give away rewards to users whose collection particularly impress others.  Every time you purchase a piece of clothes through any of collections showcased on the site, the company can receive a commission from the retailer that you have actually purchased it at.  All clothing pictures on the site are being collected from the websites of the retailers.  They will use the raised money to develop smartphone apps that may encourage more customers to join the service, which is expected to be introduced this summer.

Vasily was launched two years ago by two men who had been previously worked with Yahoo Japan and been involved with development of their fashion e-commerce services[J].

Tags: Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Kayac Introduces FB-integrated VoIP App For The iPhone


Kanagawa-based funny app developer Kayac introduced Reengo, a VoIP app for the iPhone that allows you to place a call to your Facebook friend without dialing the number.   According to TechCrunch Japan[J], the company chose Facebook from available options as an integration platform because they would like to spread the app out globally.

As of this writing, the app is available only on the Japanese AppStore, however, it will be released internationally as soon as their server-side environment stands by for possible heavy load.   That will be happening in a couple of days, they say.   They’re planning to introduce the app for the Android handsets in late-May.

Tags: Japan, News, Service by Masaru IKEDA
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GMIC 2011 Beijing: Where Are Social Media Going In The World’s Largest Mobile Population?


The Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC), one of the world’s largest annual conference featuring mobile and social app trends, took place at China’s national convention center, which is located the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, Chinese capital.  The two-day event celebrated its fourth edition this time, and it has been solely organized by Great Wall Club, a team of CEOs and executives of telcos, social network service providers and mobile app developers in Japan and Mainland China.   I had another assignment in Tokyo, and I could make it only on Day 2.


Just in front of the venue, China Telecom’s base station van was standing by for burst mobile traffic which might be generated by an enormous number of the event attendees.

The Day 2 started with a keynote speech by Charles Zhang(张朝阳), CEO of Sohu.com(搜狐), where he reviewed what he had done during the last ten years and poured out his regrets including the acquisition of Chinaren[C] or the largest online alumni club in China with over 80 million registered users. (video by Tech163 [C])

 

 

G-Startups Competition

Between panels and speeches by Internet business tycoon and celebrities from China, Japan and the rest of the world, there were on-stage live demos by the G-startup competition winners who had been chosen from 20 start-up finalists.  The both winners will won the prizes including participating incubation programs by Innovation Works (Beijing-based incubator founded by Kai-Fu Lee, the ex-president of Google China), China Accelerator (Dalian-based incubator founded by angel investor Cyril Ebersweiler), and Plug and Play Tech Center in Silicon Valley.

The 1st place winner of the seed/early-stage category:

SmarTots (Beijing, China)

SmarTots is a mobile education platform for children aged 2-7. It brings together educators, parents, and developers to create an interactive, fun, and manageable learning experience for kids through mobile apps. The company strives to unlock the true educational value of mobile devices by providing parents with reports, parental tools and personalized recommendations across many hardware and software ecosystems.

 

The 1st place winner of the growth-stage category:

Word Engine (Tokyo, Japan)

Word Engine is the fastest way to permanently memorize up to 99% of all the vocabulary required for important subjects. Word Engine is fast, inexpensive and mobile. They offer vocabulary courses for test preparation and special business needs.  The app is a proven scientific solution already in use at hundreds of universities and multinational corporations around the world. They very much look forward to entering the China market.

After those demos, Takeshi Natsuno(@tnatsu[J]),  the inventor of Japan’s mobile web standard for feature phone i-Mode and the president of GWC (Great Wall Club) Japan, was interviewed on the stage by Plus8Star‘s Benjamin Joffe(@benjaminjoffe) who is very familiar with the Asian tech scenes.  Mr. Natsuno explained what has been happening on the Japanese mobile industry during the last few years, saying Japanese manufacturers once quit the development of feature phone handsets requiring a bunch of costs, but got back to develop additional features for the global cost-free mobile platforms such as Android.

He emphasized it is very important to have this kind of event in China, furthermore, organized by Chinese and Japanese industry players.   (YouTube Video by Asiajin)

 

 


Peter Vesterbacka, Marketing Manager of Rovio Mobile (Maker of Angry Birds) interviewed on stage.

In association with the event organizers, Chinese mobile game portal d.cn[C] presented the Global Mobile Game Awards. The following ten games won the awards. (YouTube Video by Asiajin)   Angry Birds captured an audience’s extra attention because they reportedly had earned USD2M in their 1Q.  Beijing’s Global Times reported they would partner with a certain local game platform operator to launch their business in Mainland China.

The awards went to:

 

 

DeNA makes a big announcement at GMIC


Isao Moriyasu, the COO of Japan’s leading social app platform operator DeNA, unveiled they would partner with Fujian-headquartered Net Dragon (listed on the HK Stock Exchange), running mobile app store 91.com in China, and start co-developing social apps in the both countries. Furthermore, he announced the company would launch a CNY10M (USD15.4M)-worth foundation to encourage Chinese app developers to bring out more social apps to their platform.

 

After the Event

After the event, Asiajin contributor Hiroumi Mitani and I had a chance to join a dinner party with Japanese businessmen who are actively working with the Chinese mobile industry in Beijing. (Thanks to Jin Uehara(@ueharajin[J]) of MyNet Japan[J])   They insisted that we put our eyes on two emerging Chinese companies – Dianping.com(大众点评网)[C] and Vancl(凡客诚品)[C].  Dianping.com is an Yelp-like local search and reviews online service.   Vancl is China’s largest e-commerce retailer that delivers fast fashion clothing to online consumers nationwide, and a noteworthy fact is that they have a distribution network of their own for a better user experience such as the rapid delivery of merchandise.   A number of great internet entrepreneurs were seated around the party table, but I won’t tell you who they were because it was a private opportunity for all of them.

 

In The End

Smartphone handsets are not inexpensive for average Chinese people, I couldn’t see a lot of people carrying the iPhone or the Android phone on streets in Beijing where workers get comparatively higher income.   (Regardless to say, everyone at the event had s smartphone of some kind.  That circumstance did not reflect the average of what’s going on in the country.)   That’s why Chinese and foreign handset manufacturers are competing one another to introduce inexpensive range line-ups of smartphones which can be easily accepted by Chinese consumers.  (But I know “average” makes no sense in the country.)   It’s volume zone business that intends to earn the market shares of the average-income workers.

For social app and mobile app developers, to achieve a great success in the country having the world’s largest mobile population, their products should fit not only the user interface of typical smartphone handsets but also that of China-made simple but intelligent handsets that are ranged between smartphone and featurephone.


Daily deal site ads at Beijing Subway: Groupon.cn[C] (upper-left), Lashou.com[C] (upper-right), 24quan.com (lower-left) and Nuomi.com(lower-right)

During my stay in Beijing, I often used the subway to go somewhere, and I found a great number of the daily deal site ads at stations and on trains.   Reportedly there are more than 4,000 Groupon-like daily deal sites in the country.   In addition, it is surprising that a company running “Groupon.cn” site has nothing to do with US-based Groupon.     4,000 deal sites and 800 million mobile users – these numbers have the power to change the global standard, which sometimes badly affects our business and scares us, but they mean the country has a great potential.

 

Author’s note: The event’s official media sponsor Tech163 has a great special coverage[C] which are filled with transcripts of keynote speakers and a bunch of interviews with celebrities in the industry.

See Also:

Tags: China, Event Report by Masaru IKEDA
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NCC 2011 Spring: How The Net Behaves When The Earthquake Hit Japan?


Digital Garage, Japan’s Internet conglomerate known for operating price comparison portal Kakaku.com and helping Twitter’s business operation, held a semiyearly conference event last week, which is called the New Context Conference 2011 Spring, where Japanese well-known tech investor Joi Ito and the world’s Internet authorities came together, most of whom have expertise in social media, radiation measurement and disaster prevention.


Dr. Chowdhury of Twitter started his speech with the first slide of Namazu, a giant catfish which causes earthquakes in Japanese mythology.

Starting with a keynote speech by Abdur Chowdhury (@abdur), the chief scientist of Twitter Inc., he explained how Twitter work had worked efficiently to communicate among people when the massive earthquake had hit the Tohoku Region on March 11, by showing us some animated infographics of how many tweets being exchanged across the globe during the time.

In the first session, five panelists from Japanese and foreign media discussed how mass media should tell the society what happened in the disaster while Twitter and other social media succeeded to deliver up-to-the-minute voices from the devastated areas. Hiroyuki Tsuruta[J], a student entrepreneur who had developed a website collecting tweets supporting our relief efforts, Pray for Japan[J], also joined the panel.


From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Abdur Chowdhury (Twitter), Hiroyuki Tsuruta (Pray for Japan), Hiroko Tabuchi (New York Times Tokyo Correspondent), Tomoya Sasaki (Digital Garage) and Tatehiko Koyanagi (Nikkei Inc.)

In the second session, which was titled hardware and sensor network, four experts from radiation measurement device development and crisis response, they talked about how we can obtain parameters to protect ourselves from the invisible enemy when the government and a power company don’t disclose everything on the nuclear powerhouse accident. They introduced RDTN as a web mash-up that helps us learn a lot about what’s happening.


From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Jun Murai (Keio Univ.), Ray Ozzie (ex-Chief Software Architect, Microsoft), Aaron Huslage (Crisis Response ICT Specialist) and Dan Sythe (CEO, Iospectra)

The third session, which is about speed and agile software development. In the crisis time of disaster, web apps helping people are needed to developed as rapidly as possible. Joi concluded that a variety of open source resources and cloud services made it easier to launch a web service very quickly, which contributed a lot to providing disaster-related information to the people having no chance to check out news updates on TV.

From left to right: Joi Ito (Digital Garage), Paul Campbell (HyperTiny), Michelle Levesque (ex-Social Product Manager, Google), Phil Libin (Evernote CEO)

Following more than a dozen of unconferences arranged by the attendees, there was an opportunity for four start-ups being incubated at Open Network Lab[J] to present what they had made for the last several months. Open Network Lab is a seed acceleration program by Digital Garage and intends to be Tokyo’s version of Y-Combinator. All services introduced are currently under development, and I will try to let you figure out what they are, but no details are available at the moment.


GroupeLago by Yuta Okazaki (@kenzan100)

Groupelago is a web service that allows you to aggregate social feeds of people you are interested in. Two guys developing the service graduated from Keio University, and they believe it can be used to encourage freshers to join a school club, because it can show them what kind of people the club consists of prior to joining it. The service is currently running in beta and available only among Keio students.

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Frenzee by Masaru Murata (@m_murata[J])

Frenzee is a social web app that allows you to discover new digital content. It helps you connect to someone having the same interest with you by choosing pictures that have been posted on the service. The following video helps you learn how it will work.

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Compath.me by Hiromichi Ando[J] (@hirorimet[J])

Compath.me is a location-based smartphone app that allows you to find discoveries near-by that the other users have posted and you may be interested in.

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Wondershake by Satoshi Suzuki (@Doubles9124)

Satoshi has grown up in Nigeria and London and is currently attending the International Christian University in Tokyo. His app Wondershake is a location-based smartphone app that visualizes your inner taste and connect you with like-minded people around you in the real world. He plans to launch the service at the end of this month, not in Japan but in the US. A judge asked him why he would launch it in the US before Japan, and he answered he believed this app would fit the US market despite average Japanese are considered to be shy and it’s hard for them to make friends with someone else. His answer called a big laugh from an audience.


Finally, Joi proposed a toast to the successful event and expecting more entrepreneurial challenges to come. DJ Amiga started playing music to entertain the gathering crowd.

See Also:

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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