[Cnet] Telepathy raises $5 million to develop Google Glass rival

Telepathy, a Silicon Valley startup, has raised $5 million in a first round of funding to develop wearable computing technology that rivals Google Glass. 

"Wearable technology will enable the next wave in social networking," Telepathy CEO Takahito Iguchi said in a statement. "The $5 million funding will enable us to enrich the user experience of Telepathy One, which we expect to bring to market in 2014."... 

The Telepathy One headset prototype, demonstrated earlier this year, is a hands-free communications device that wraps around the back of a wearer's head. It has a small screen, earplugs for playing sound, and this fall will get a software developer kit so programmers can write apps for it. ...

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Cnet 8/21/2013 [en]

memo

• The CEO of Telepathy founded Tonchidot which develops AR mobile app, Sekai Camera. The AR app made a sensation at TechCrunch50 in 2008. He left Tonchidot late 2012 to start the new challenge. It is very exciting to see how Telepathy will be received in consumers next year.
• http://tele-pathy.org/

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[Sd] Japanese UI improvement platform planBCD raises $800,000

PlanBCD is a platform that helps developers to improve the user interface on their web services. Kaizen Platform Inc., the Tokyo-based startup behind the service, announced today that it has raised seed funding worth $800,000 from Gree Ventures, GMO Venture Partners, and CyberAgent Ventures. With these funds, the company plans to intensify its system development and marketing efforts. 

The service provides developers with an A/B testing environment, especially useful for improving web content and interfaces, comparing the performance of multiple available options. It helps you test and optimize processes like sign-ups, purchases, or landing pages. Unlike other conventional services, planBCD allows you to conduct this time-consuming, trial-and-error process by only embedding a single-line of JavaScript on your website. ... 

The most remarkable part of the service is that PlanBCD gives you ways to crowdsource the UI and UX improvement process, something which is often difficult to assign someone in your company. ...

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Sd 8/20/2013 [en]

memo

• The service is quite interesting to combine A/B testing tool and crowdsourcing allowing customers to outsource analyzing by technology and improving by human power at once. Crowdsourcing is becoming a big trend recently, but the combination would be indicating the next step for the crowdsourcing business.
• https://planb.cd/ 

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Volare Raises 175M Yen To Strengthen Appliv, Apps Review Site / Cnet Japan

Volare revealed that it raised 175 million yen from Nippon Venture Capital (170 million) and an individual investor.

Volare was founded in 2007 to start education business. And then it changed its business domain to SEO and web consulting. Currently, it operates Appliv, an iOS apps review site from August 2012 based on knowledge acquired through the SEO consulting service. ...

The company runs advertising service, Appliv AD, which shows app review as a performance-based advertising charging a fee when the ad is clicked. Advertisers can automatically tender a bid in real-time by just setting a budget and CPC. ...

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Cnet Japan 8/20/2013 [jp]

memo

• There are many app review sites. It seems not easy to differentiate from others. The advantage of Appliv is that it has directory categorized even smaller than AppStore, which works well for SEO. As apps search still has a large room to be improved on AppStore or Google Play, Appliv may have opportunity to grow much more.
• http://app-liv.jp/

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Gocro Raises 420M Yen From Globis / PR Wire

Gocro, a developer of SmartNews, news app for smartphone, announced fundraising from Globis Capital Partners to finance 420 million yen.

Gocro plans to accelerate hiring engineers and data scientists with the capital aiming to provide optimized news reading experience to users around the world. It targets to increase employees from current six to 40 within a year. ...

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PR Wire 8/14/2013 [jp]

memo

• SmartNews provides news based on analyzing web sites tweeted on Twitter. The company has partnered with 43 media of 25 publishing companies. News curation service is becoming a hot field for startups recently. Other major players include Gunosy and Vingow. And not only startups, but also big players like LINE and Gree entered the competition recently. 
• https://www.smartnews.be/

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[Sd] Japanese flea market app secures investment of $3M just 6 weeks after launch

Tokyo-based United, the company behind homescreen decoration app CocoPPa, announced today that it has partnered with Kouzoh. You may recall that Kouzoh is the mobile commerce company which recently developed a flea market app called Mercari. 

As part of this partnership, United will invest 300 million yen (approximately $3 million) in the flea market company, thus taking a 14.5% stake in the company. ...

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Sd 8/13/2013 [en]

memo

• CocoPPa is growing rapidly to reach 12 million users, among whom 83% are located outside of Japan. Kouzoh can expect CocoPPa's user base to expand to global market. 
• http://united.jp/
• http://mercari.jp/

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JTOWER, Indoor Communication Equipment Vendor, Raises 1B Yen / TechCrunch Japan

JTOWER provides infrastructure equipment such as antenna or cable for base stations to telecom operators. In concrete terms, it will launch a business to allow multi cellular operators to share infrastructure of JTOWER equipped at commercial facilities, office buildings, and apartment houses. In the US, there are the same business like American Tower which went IPO and has became a large company. JTOWER fundraised 1 billion yen from INCJ, JA Mitsui Leasing, and IT Farm. ...

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TechCrunch Japan 8/12/2013 [jp]

memo

• As smartphones are more and more used, investment in network infrastructure is becoming a big issue for any mobile operators. It is also benefit for owners of buildings. The business seem to have a huge potential.
• http://www.jtower.co.jp/

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Glider Associates Raises 2B Yen To Grow Curation Magazine, Antenna / PR TIMES

Glider Associates agreed on allocation of new shares of 2 billion yen to Macromill and Singpore-based Scentan Ventures. ...

In addition, it is decided that Takahumi Horie will become a service adviser for the company. ...

PR TIMES 8/8/2013 [jp]

memo

• Macromill is a listed Internet research company, which invests 1.5 billion yen to take 25.6% of voting rights of Glider Associates. The company was established in February 2012. The CEO of Macromill concurrently served as a CEO of the company when launched, but now it is changed. Antenna is a Flipboard-like app with over 500,000 downloads. It is surprisingly huge amount of investment for the status.
• http://antenna.jp/web/

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[Sd] User-generated travel plan startup Trippiece raises $2M

Tokyo-based travel startup Trippiece announced today that it has raised 200 million yen (approximately $2 million) from Draper Nexus Venture Partners and other investors. With the funds, the startup plans to start developing smartphone apps. 

The company also invited Fumiaki Koizumi to the board of directors. He previously worked with Mixi and DeNA where he helped them IPO. At Trippiece, his main role will be to strengthen the management. ...

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Sd 8/6/2013 [en]

memo

• Trippiece allows users to create a travel plan which will be actually arranged by a travel agency if the plan has more than five users applying it. It is a kind of a crowd sourcing of travel plan. Currently it has 50,000 users who may be mainly heavy travelers. It would be a key to acquire average users to accelerate the growth.
• http://trippiece.com/

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[Sd] Star Festival raises $10M to expand innovative bento box business

Star Festival, the Japanese startup behind Bento box delivery and catering service, Gochikuru.com, announced today it has raised 1 billion yen (or about $10 million) from Jafco, one of Japan’s leading VC firms. With these funds, the company will expand its service to areas all around the country. Currently their service is available only in the five urban areas of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, and Fukuoka. 

Since its launch back in 2009, Gochikuru has been providing a variety of meals from its partner lunch vendors. To date they have partnered with more than 210 lunch-box brands and served more than 3.2 million users. ...

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Sd 8/5/2013 [en]

memo

• Star Festival raised 250 million yen in August 2012 from Globis and Gree Ventures. Different from other catering portal sites like Rakuten Delivery or Gurunavi Delivery, Gochikuru has its own deliver network which allows them to have restaurants or food manufactures without delivery functions as a partner. It seems the differentiation works well.
• http://gochikuru.com/

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[Sd] Yahoo Japan acquires e-commerce portal provider Venture Republic

Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) announced recently that it has taken over leading Japanese e-commerce portal provider Venture Republic. Financial details were not disclosed. 

Since its launch back in 2001, the latter has been a provider of price comparison sites and commerce-focused vertical media such as Travel.jp, Hotel.jp, and Coneco.net to Japanese online consumers. The company is also known to have invested in Indonesian price comparison site Telunjuk and Singapore’s travel metasearch service Flocations. 

Upon the acquisition, the company was split into two companies corresponding to different business fields. One company rebranded as Osenikku and will continue operating Coneco.net. And the CEO formed a new company called Venture Republic, which take care of the travel-related media. As a result, the comparison site business has been entirely handed over to Yahoo Japan. ...

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Sd 8/3/2013 [en]

memo

• Coneco.net provides price comparison of goods in various categories searching many e-commerce sites including Yahoo's rivlas, Rakuten and Amazon. It is interesting to see if Yahoo integrates the service in Yahoo Shopping or leaves it as separate service.
• http://www.coneco.net/company/
• http://www.vrg.jp/en/

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KDDI'ｓ Subsidiary, mediba Acquires ScaleOut / Cnet Japan

According to an industry insider, the price of the acquisition is over 1 billion yen. ScaleOut provides an integrated advertising distribution platform, ScaleOut Ad Platform which includes DSP, DMP, tag management, ad server, third party ad serving and others. mediba acquired Nobot, ad network for smartphone in 2011.

Cnet Japan 8/5/2013 [jp]

memo

• A competition of ad tech centered around RTB is getting fierce among ad companies and startups. We will probably see more acquisitions or IPOs in the next few years in this field.
• http://www.scaleout.jp/

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