Asiajin

Today, in Japan, it seems that there is a boom in launching a new business category called “Social Translation”.

Last week a Tokyo-based tech start-up Anydoor[J] launched a web-based new translation service, which is named Conyac, allowing participating members to do translation work.

Japanese translation industry has annually USD2B worth of its market volume. Basically, in order to translate from and to Japanese, we have two options of human translation by well-experienced professionals and computer-programmed translation such as Google Translation. But even with today’s most advanced technologies, computer translation cannot make enough result for practical use on business, therefore we are still forced to take human translation in spite of its higher cost.

According to Anydoor’s press release, the company introduced this new approach as a possible alternative option for human translation. On the website, you are allowed to ask the other members to translate your original script by paying some cost. Oppositely, you can be asked to do translation work by the other members in return for receiving some rewards from them.

The price of every translation fee can be set by those who offer the work. As of this writing, Anydoor’s website of Conyac can accept 13 languages and the company expects an even wider range of people to use it for the needs of writing a letter or an e-mail message to someone in foreign languages that they have not mastered yet. The website has English and Japanese menu now, and Chinese and Korean will be added shortly. It is expected to engage 100,000 members by the end of this year.

Anydoor was founded by two men who were previously working with an NTT group company. They were always requested to translate a number of documents by their boss and colleagues at the company, which triggered them to launch this new business. Anydoor won the best award of “Kigyo Challenge 2009[J]“, which is an annual business plan contest hosted by Skylight Consulting and encourages young businesspersons’ entrepreneurship in Japan.

Meanwhile, a unit of an American web designer and a Japanese PHP programmer, who are familiar with e-commerce business for SMEs and are based in Tokyo’s adjacent city of Kawasaki, launched a similar social translation service called MyGengo last April. (Gengo means language in Japanese) MyGengo is developed based on CodeIgniter, an open-source licensed framework for developing web app using PHP.

Translation fees are defined by the company in accordance with the required quality for each of the business scenes, and the company can provide Japanese/English and Japanese/Spanish translation services so far. (Chinese translation will be added to the menu shortly).

When we posted the first edition of this story, we stated a company called Geluk as the owner of MyGengo. On Sunday myGengo’s CEO Robert Laing e-mailed us its background, and we learned the company didn’t have much to do with MyGengo. We corrected some parts of the story in accordance with his correction request.   Our apology for your inconvenience it may cause.

Finally, next Monday’s edition of Tokyo2point0 is now planning to feature several companies and services with the theme of “the Web and Language”.   It contains the presentations by visionaries who are familiar with linguistic aspect of web services, including Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine a.k.a. “Mitcho” who assists Asiajin to polish its English-written texts and leads the development of a Firefox add-on called Ubiquity which provides an easy-to-use interface and enables several features including translating web contents into your mother tongue with Google Translation. MyGengo will also have a lightening talk at the event.

“GeeksOnAPlane“, which is the group tour of several dozens of the Bay Area-based geeks expecting meet with Japanese and Chinese tech start-ups and is co-organized by Dave McClure from the Founders Fund and George Godula from Web2Asia, will join this edition of Tokyo2point0. We truly recommend you to come to the event in Roppongi, if you have any interest.

Asiajin proudly serves as a media sponsor for GeeksOnAPlane.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Event Report, Japan, New Service, Service, Technology, Trend by Masaru IKEDA
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This month’s Tokyo2point0 event (our reports on former events) took place on Monday again at the Super Deluxe in Roppongi.

These two presentations were delivered.

UltraSuperNew’s Press Army

UltraSuperNew’s director Michael Sheetal delivered a presentation on “Press Army”, a bilingual web service, which is geared mainly towards companies. Press Army enables users to automatically monitor, analyze, visualize and summarize the impact a given brand, project or topic has in social media.

Michael used the term “Tokyo2point0″ as an example in his presentation and attendees could see how and to which extent users of services like Flickr, YouTube or Twitter have discussed the event right to the point in time he checked.

Press Army uses a point system, graphs, lists and other elements to break down the results for a quick yet detailed overview about the buzz the brand in question currently creates in social media.

Watch Michael’s presentation on Press Army here:
Stream videos at Ustream

Social learning platform iKnow!

The second presentation of the evening, about Cerego’s social learning site iKnow!, was delivered by Kirk McMurray (Head of Product Development) and Dominiek ter Heide, Web 2.5 Code Terrorist (self-description) and web developer at iKnow.

iKnow is in essence a social learning platform developed on the basis of a self-developed learning engine, which was one of the key points of the presentation. Initially launched as a Japanese-only service for people who want to learn English online (and collaborate with like-minded users), the site is in the process of going global. Currently it’s i.e. possible to take Japanese courses in English, extend one’s English vocabulary or prepare for the SAT.

Ultimately, iKnow is planned to develop into a platform on which any language can be learned, followed by the possibility to absorb any kind of fact-based information. In the presentation, Dominiek used Freebase as an example for a web site from which information can be pulled, sorted and then learned using the iKnow system.

Watch the iKnow presentation here:
Live video chat by Ustream

Note:
The videos are courtesy of Tokyo2point0’s main organizer, Andrew Shuttleworth (UltraSuperNew is the other organizer).

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
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Another month, another Tokyo2point0 event. Nearly 100 people showed up on July 15th at the Super Deluxe, the new venue to listen to two presentations from the Japanese web world.

Goo

My friend Masaki Sawamura from the made-in-Japan portal site Goo delivered the first presentation of the evening. Goo, which is run by IT and web powerhouse NTT Resonant, was launched as early as 1997 (1.5 years before a company called Google began American operations in 1998).

Goo is an acronym for “Gateway of Optics” but Masaki said he doesn’t know what this term actually means. He also introduced the company by saying the company’s favicon is not a copy of Google’s.

The portal gets 7.8 million users per month and ranks 10th in Alexa’s Japan list, “outperforming” big players such as Nico Nico Douga, Amazon Japan or 2chan. Goo boasts over 1 million blogs, 9 million web mail accounts and 3.5 questions asked in the Q&A section “Oshiete Goo”.

Masaki said Goo differentiates itself from other Japanese portals by offering nearly 70 services, such as Kids Goo, a community platform, a proprietary search engine and a site focused on ecological matters.

Goo is Japanese only. Goo Labs however, a dedicated page offering early versions of new idea from NTT Laboratory Group, is thankfully available in English and well worth checking out.

Twitter Japan

Rocky Eda from Digital Garage Incubation’s Strategic Investment and Business Development Division (there is no company or subsidiary called “Twitter Japan”) delivered the second presentation. Digital Garage Incubation Inc. is a subsidiary of Digital Garage, the company that invested in Twitter and introduced a Japanese version in April this year.

Rocky, who is responsible for the Twitter Japan project, said Digital Garage is focused on early stage investments. The company pumps money into services such as fon, Rapture or Technorati and brings them to Japan. Not bad at all. According to Rocky, Twitter seemed interesting because of the high access frequency and broad range of subjects covered by the users.

At the moment, traffic on Twitter from international destinations accounts for 60% of the volume worldwide (USA: 40%). 39% from the international traffic comes from Japan, with Tokyo being the most active “Twitter city” in the world.

Rocky went on saying that Twitter is running ads in Japan to monetize the site and currently collaborates with Japan’s national TV broadcaster NHK.

Watch the video of the presentation, made by Andrew Shuttleworth (the event’s main organizer):

Tags: Event Report, Japan, New Service, Video by Serkan Toto
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This month’s Tokyo2point0 event drew a huge crowd on Monday this week. Two main factors attracted over 100 people to come to the new venue in Azabu (an event space called SuperDeluxe): a very interesting speaker who came from the USA and the event’s 1st anniversary!

Cloud Computing the Amazon way

Jinesh Varia, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, delivered the presentation of the evening.

Jinesh, who is based out of Seattle, began by dubbing Amazon’s Web Services division (AWS) “the technology arm of Amazon”. He said Amazon began to understand the concept of scaling in 1999 and explained a single product page on amazon.com actually retrieves information from up to 300 different sources on the web.

AWS basically provides three different services:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Amazon SimpleDB for data bases

The main point Jinesh made was that cloud computing enables operators of web sites to structure the development process more efficiently. He acknowledged SaaS shortened development time enormously but went on saying that it provides no differentiated value to businesses. According to Jinesh, SaaS solutions suck up 70% of energy, time and money in the scaling process and only 30% are left for developers to create differentiated value.

Supposedly, Amazon’s way of cloud computing is able to flip this ratio. With the Internet becoming more and more ubiquitous and bandwith constantly getting cheaper, Jinesh said the cloud computing concept will become easier to use, more personalized and cheaper in the future.

The main principles of cloud computing according to the speaker are:

• elastic, umlimited capacity
• pay when you grow
• simple, reliable, fast

Jinesh said cloud computing enables every individual with a laptop and Internet connection to challenge even the biggest web companies. He closed his presentation with a few case studies, demonstrating which web services used AWS (most remarkably www.animoto.com).

You can watch his presentation here (video courtesy of event organizer Andrew Shuttleworth):

See also:
Another report on the event by Fumi-san [JP]

Tags: Event Report, Japan by Serkan Toto
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This month’s Tokyo2point0 event drew a huge crowd this week on Tuesday. Again, two presentations were held between and before networking sessions.

Venture Capital for Tech Startups

My friend Aki Ohashi from ngi capital, the investment arm of ngi group (an investor in and operator of -mostly Asian- Tech companies) spoke about the current state of affairs in Japan’s venture capital industry.

Aki and his 8 colleagues are investing in a whopping 60 companies at the moment. NGI capital is predominantly active in early phase and seed financing. The flagship investment is mixi, Japan’s uber social network which is valued at approximately two billion USD.

According to the presenter, early stage investments are shrinking in size and quantity at the moment as far as the Japanese VC industry as a whole is concerned. Aki evaluated this general trend as the market getting more conservative in an unstable economic environment.

I found it interesting that ngi capital as a genuine Japanese VC firm basically values the same factors when it comes to assessing a candidate company for investment as Western ones: human resources (background of the team), technology (differentiation and IP) and market potential. Also, Aki said personal introductions or connections within ngi capital’s network are most efficient when it comes to opening doors for startups. Again, the same is true for Western VCs. In sharp contrast to the USA however, Aki commented that in Japan NDA are used frequently during the following screening process.

As to why startups should cooperate with VCs, he listed the following main factors:
- outside validation
- assistance with business plan
- assistance with recruitment
- introductions to partners, other VCs, potential new clients etc.

In ngi capital’s philosophy, a good pitch from a startup should be centered on a good “overall story”. Aki said this point almost outshadows other elements such as the solution the candidate company provides, its competitive advantage or proprietary technologies.

As a person with a business background, I found this presentation particularly insightful and interesting!

LIMS: the Multi-level Blogging and Ecommerce Platform

Robert Cawte, Kiwi and fellow IT-blogger, delivered a presentation on a multi-level blogging and Ecommerce platform. Robert became CTO of the producer of the platform, Kojimachi-based web startup eSynapse, just one week ago and had to prepare his appearance at the event on short notice.

The service explained -which is called LIMS (Live Information Management System)- is eSynapse’s flagship product. In essence, LIMS is a commercial blog platform with integrated ecommerce functions and a mobile phone interface.

Click here for an actual site which was built using eSynapse’s technology.

As Robert decided to go for a “live” and hands-on presentation, it is recommended you watch the corresponding video (part 1 (starting at the 12:00 mark), part 2, part 3 – made by mover and shaker Andrew Shuttleworth, the event’s main organizer).

More info about the event and network can be found on the official Tokyo2point0 site, the Facebook group or on Mixi.

Tags: Community, Japan by Serkan Toto
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