Japan’s best-known LBS (location-based service) app 30min.[J] (pronounced “san-zero minutes”) allocated new shares to Mitsui Ventures (MVC), and Mr. Yohei Nishikubo joined the company as the managing director today. Mr. Nishikubo is a venture partner of MVC and formerly served as the president of search ad agency and SEO (search engine optimization) consultancy J Listing[J].
30min. provides regional information services for PC, iPhone and Android handsets, and it shows you the listing of restaurants, shopping malls and must-see places located near you, based on a bunch of information collected from the blogosphere. The company has 830,000 unique PC users, and the accumulated number of downloading the iPhone app marks 110,000. By using the fund newly raised, the company plans to develop an app for non-smartphone cellphone handsets.
The company fundraised approx. USD275,000, and now its capital net worth is USD330,000. The company’s CEO Motoaki Tanigo[J](@tanigox) says, he wants to gain the software development workforce of the company, and to add new features to the app soon.
In addition to the company’s CTO Noriyuki Nonomura[J](@nonomura) who has been solely managing technical stuffs on the service, Mr. Noriyoshi Nambo[J](@nambon), who’s well known for having developed an iPhone app that shows you a list of the earthquakes happened in the day[J], also joined the company as a developer lead this month.
Via: CNET Japan[J] and Venture Now[J]
Masaru IKEDA