Hairdresser matching service raises seed capital from Samurai Fund /Venture Now

Axelworks announced to conduct allocation of new shares to Samurai Incubate Fund II in the middle of July. A total amount of capital is to be 7.8 million yen after the investment.

Along with the fundraising, it will change a name of company to FlyBridGe. The company aims for global expansion with the world's first hairdresser specialized Online-to-Offline service connecting hairdressers and consumers, Hiarcuttin, which is now in development.
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Venture Now 6/30/2011

memo

• O2O (Online-to-Offline) is one of the keywords in this year. It is expected that a trend in web and mobile such as real-time and location are to be monetized with O2O. Also a rapid growth of smartphone accelerates the move.

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UEI provides middleware for docomo Palette UI /ITmedia

Ubiquitous Entertainment (UEI) announced that its middleware, microZEKE, is adopted by NTT Docomo for its application for Android smartphone, docomo Palette UI.

microZEKE is a middlware for Android enabling to link applications based on database framework using ZEKE Technology.

docomo Palette UI is an original application allowing users to customize home screen with application. Users can group applications on home screen and also change color or name of group bar.

docomo Palette UI will be pre-installed on current smart phones such as MEIDA WP N-06C and Galaxy S II SC-02C as well as AQUIS PHONE f SH-13C and P-07C which are planned to be released from July to August.

ITmedia 6/29/2011

memo

• UEI won an award at Launch Pad of Infinity Venture Summit 2011 Spring with enchant.js, HTML5/JavaScript based game development engine for smartphone.

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Japanese startup, Power Technology goes IPO on Korean stock market /Nikkei

Korean stock market operator, KRX, announced that it accepted preexamination of IPO on KOSDAQ market for Power Technology, SEO service provider of Japan. The company is predicted to go public in the middle of August. It does not get listed on Japanese stock market and aims to expand its business in Korea.

KRX strengthens to attract foreign companies such as Japan and China and this is the second IPO from Japan. Power Technology provides a service to advise improvement of web site so that it appears higher up.

Nikkei 6/27/2011

memo

• Power Technology was founded in 2003. It has many shareholders including advertising agencies such as Septeni and Opt, and venture capitals such as NIFSMBC, ngi, Jafco, Dentsu.com, GMO VenturePartnes, and Biglobe Capital.

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Starttoday opens store in Korea's largest shopping site /Fashionsnap.com

A fashion shopping site, ZOZOTOWN operator, Starttoday announced to conclude an agreement of partnership with the Korea's largest shopping site operator, eBay Gmarket and eBay Auction. Within August 2011, it plans to open a shop for each shopping site.

eBay Gmarket was founded in 2000, and became a subsidiary of eBay in 2009. The shopping site offers various items from the latest trendy fashion to cosmetics, digital devices, and food for bargain price. In 2010, it established local office in Japan and Singapore. ...

Starttoday opened ZOZOTOWN.com on May 18, which lets users to deliver to 82 countries and five languages are available. In June, it also establishes ZOZOTOWN HONGKONG jointly with SoftBank.

Fashionsnap.com 6/23/2011

memo

• Exporting Japanese fashion to Asia will become a great opportunity for Japanese EC related services.  

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MicroAd goes into ad network in Indonesia /MarketZine

MicroAd together with Indonesian local companies, PT Rizki Bukit Abadi and PT Corfina Mitrakreasi, establishes PT MicroAd Indonesia to launch ad network business in Indonesia.

PT Rizki Bukit Abadi is a major share holder of Global Mediacom, a media conglomerate operating broadcasting station, newspaper, and portal site. PT Corfina Mitrakreasi is a boutique advisory firm doing venture investment and incubation for IT startups. ...

MarkeZine 6/23/2011

memo

• Indonesia is becoming a popular market for Japanese Internet companies. Rakuten launched online shopping mall recently and CyberAgent invested in also local shopping mall in April.

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[TechCrunch] MyGengo Raises $1 Million To “Own” Translation

Translation service MyGengo has raised one million in seed financing from Point Nine, Mitch Kapor and Wenceslao Casares. Prior to today’s investment, the platform had raised $750k from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. Along with the funding MyGengo is also announcing the hiring of Kenji Yamamoto as Chief Revenue Officer and Jeff Binstock as Chief Operating Officer.
MyGengo is like Mechanical Turk for translation supplementing automated techniques with over 2,500 translators in every time zone. Using a combination of machine and human processes, service has translated over 5 million words in the first three months of 2011, more than the past two years combined.
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TechCrunch 6/21/2011

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Axelmark and Froute are merged /Cnet Japan

Axelmark, a subsidiary of Septeni Hodings providing contents for mobile phones and a listed company on TSE Mothers, announced to merge Froute, mobile search service operator, at October 1. As a contents market for feature phones is hitting a wall, it aims to become a total contents distributor for mobile combining know-how of both companies.

Axelmark is a surviving company and Froute will be dissolved.

ITmedia 6/16/2011

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KDDI forms a capital alliance with Colopl to expand location-based service /Nikkei

KDDI takes 5% of shares to become the third largest share holder of Colopl. The amount is not disclosed but considered to be around 500 million yen. The telecom operator jointly provides contents business based on location information to acquire new customers.

Both companies announced an alliance in location-based game at the last November. With the capital alliance, they strengthen the partnership. From August, they launch service using location information for about 300 restaurants, offering loyalty points or benefits based on a number of visit of customers. ...

Colony na Seikatsu Plus, Colopl's location based game, allows users get virtual money based on length they move for commute or business trip. Partnering with local souvenir shops or others, it gives items linked with a game if the user buy something at the shops. A number of users is 1.95 million as of June 20.

Nikkei 6/21/2011

memo

• KDDI has been very active to collaborate with startups in mobile applications such as GREE, Tonchidot, and Groupon Japan.
• It also starts incubation program targeting for Android application developers from this summer.

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CAMPFIRE raises 25M yen /japan.internet.com

Hyper Internets announced to conduct allocation of new shares of 25 million yen in total.

Investors include Kronos Fund, Taiga Matsuyama, Insprout, Shintaro Yamada, Ken Honda, and several other individual investors. The fundraise aims to recruit staffs for its micro patron platform, CAMPFIRE, released in June 2nd.

japan.internet.com 6/14/2011

memo

• CAMPFIRE is a crowd funding platform similar to Kickstarter, which allows creators to raise fund . Patrons can invest from 500 yen.

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Nobot partners with Airpush in push notification ads for Android /Cnet Japan

Nobot announced that it starts providing airpush, push notification ads for Android devices. airpush is an advertising distribution service to show ads in push notification such as missed call or download status.

Nobot operates AdMaker, ad network for smartphone. Airpush runs push notification ad network distributing advertisement for 150 countries.

With this partnership, Nobot sells and distributes ads in Japan and Airpush provides its push notification ads platform.

Cnet Japan 6/16/2011

memo

• Nobot has been aggressively expands partnerships in US including Smaato and Mojiva, Asia including BuzzCity, and Japan including mediva and MicroAd. 

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Livlis Android app installed on amadana's smartphone /Cnet Japan

Kamado announced that "amadana social classified", which is developed based on Android app of its operating classified service, Livlis, is pre-installed on a smartphone, MEDIA WP N-06C amadana collaboration model to be sold from NTT Docomo.

Livlis is a classified site allowing users to give goods through Twitter. It was launched on 2010 December and currently 30,000 users place 15,000 items.

amadana social classified is an Android application which lets users to post items they want to share and enjoy communication with other users. Users can see items that other users post as "want", "have", or "give" including items and comments of Livlis users ...

Cent Japan 6/17/2011

memo

• Kamado raised 20M yen in April from several investors. 

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Realglove, cloud platform provider, raised 30M yen from VC /Venture Now

Realglobe raised 30 million yen from Global Brain, an independent venture capital.

Realglobe provides C4SA, a cloud platform offering the best developing environment for social application developers. C4SA allows to automatically scale depending on a number of access to servers. It uses an original developed middleware controlling virtualization software which allows application developers to use limited resources effectively without configuration of servers.

It adopts pay-as-you-go charge based on HTTP/HTTPS accesses.

Venture Now 6/19/2011

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Ubiquitous partners with Sassor to visualize electricity consumption /Cnet Japan

Ubiquitous provides embedded software such as Ubiquitous Network Framework which has been adopted in Nintendo DS. The company marks its 10 years anniversary in May 2011. Along with the anniversary, it aims to a global leader for "Internet of Things" to provide service platform connecting things each other and people and things.

As the first project, it starts visualization of electricity saving. For the project, it announced to partner with Sassor, which is a startup to develop Energy Literacy Platform allowing users to see consumption of electronic appliances by setting module between appliances and outlet. ...

Cnet Japan 6/20/2011

memo

• Sassor is one of the seven teams from Open Network Labo's seed accelerator program.

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Image processing technology, Morpho goes IPO at July 21 on Mothers /Venture Now

Morpho, developing products based on image processing technologies, was approved by Tokyo Stock Exchange for new listing on Mothers, a stock market targeting for emerging companies.

Major shareholders include UTEC (21.7%), Masaki Hiraga (12.09%), Nokia Growth Partners (7.05%), Docomo.com (4.68%), NTT Docomo (4.23%) and others.

Morpho was founded in 2004 May by mainly engineers of University of Tokyo specialized in digital image processing technology. It develops technologies like image stabilization, face recognition, and frame interpolation of video.

It has 1.4 billion yen of revenue and 307 million yen of pretax profit in 2010 ending October.

Venture Now 6/16/2011

memo

• The image stabilization technology has been adopted by many feature phones from most of Japanese mobile device makers.

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Social EC, Glocal Stylebook allows to purchase fashion items looking at snapshots /Venture Now

F.F.B. launched fashion dedicated social commerce service, Global Stylebook, which lets shops/brands propose/sell items based on fashion snapshots posted by fashionable people.

Generally fashionable people tend to buy items watching someone in snapshots of fashion magazines who is more similar to themselves , Hirata, a director of F.F.B. said. F.F.B. duplicates the process on Web site to provide system allowing users to purchase items.

In addition to user generated snapshots, it accepts from partnered fashion sites and photographers around the world.

At the launch, it partners with about 70 shops and brands to have 1000 items placed. The web site also places 1300 snapshots from affiliated photographers in 7 regions overseas and 8 prefectures of Japan.
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Venture Now 6/8/2011

memo

• A combination of user generated contents, social media and E-commerce is appearing recently. One of the kind of services, iQON, a fashion coordinate sharing, just succeeded to have fundraising round of 140 million yen in May.

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CyberAgent Ventures invests in CleverAds, Vietnam's largest listing ads agency /asahi.com

CyberAgent Ventures takes 20% of shares of Clever Advertising Corporation with the investment. CleverAds has the largest market share as an ad agency focused on listing advertisement.

asahi.com 6/8/2011

memo

• This is the fifth investment in Vietnam for CyberAgent Ventures. It also invests in an Indonesian E-commerce startup. 

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[TechCrunch] Japanese Online Retail Giant Rakuten Buys Brazilian E-Commerce Company Ikeda

Japanese online retail juggernaut Rakuten is expanding its reach to South America with the acquisition of a 75% stake in Ikeda, a provider of e-commerce services to many of Brazil’s largest retailers.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 1996 and headquartered in São Paulo, Ikeda provides retailers with a SaaS e-commerce platform, enabling its customers to help build their desired features and provides advisory services to support their online retail operations.

Ikeda currently provides services to over 100 major retailers located all over Brazil.
... 

The company recently teamed up with Baidu to invest $50 million in an online ‘B2B2C’ shopping mall for Chinese Internet users, acquired Buy.com for $250 million and subsequently spent the exact same amount purchasing France’s PriceMinister.

memo

• Rakuten launched Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia a few days ago jointly with Indonesian largest media conglomerate, PT Global Mediacom Tbk.  

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C2C E-commerce selling Japanese goods to overseas, FlutterScape raised 60M yen /TechCrunch Japan

FlutterScpae conducted its second seed round fundraising. Investors for the 60 million yen include Nippon Venture Capital (lead investor), ngi group, and Innovation Engine. In the last August, the startup raised 25 million yen from Digital Garage, Netprice, and Aucfan.

FlutterScape lets sellers in Japan sell Japanese goods to buyers in foreign countries. Currently it has 1500 sellers and 7000 buyers. Surprisingly, it has 230,000 fans of its Facebook Pages.

According to CEO, Mr. Kakiyama, the company will add communication service to allow users to share photos of goods they are interested in like Tumblr, on which sellers can place Buy button. Other new functions are also planned. ...

TechCrunch Japan 6/7/2011

memo

• FlutterScape was founded on 2010 March. It has four employees now.

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