Cookpad Has 950,000 Premium Users / Venture Now

Cookpad announced financial result ending April 2013. The current earnings increased by 41.6% from last year to have 2.71 billion yen. Premium users increase steadily to surpass 950,000. The revenue from premium users is 3.01 billion yen, while advertising revenue increased 24.7% to reach 1.98 billion yen.

The number of monthly active users is 32.67 million. Particularly users from smartphone browsers are rapidly increasing to reach 16.4 million.

Venture Now 6/7/2013 [jp]

memo

• The recipe sharing service is growing steadily. Needless to say, its main target users are housewives who use Smartphone much more than PC and Smartphone allows them to see the recipe at the kitchen. So, Smartphone definitely contributes to the growth and it is expected the growth will continue along with the penetration of tablet which is even more suitable to use when cooking.
• http://cookpad.com/

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[Tech In Asia] Japan Overtakes US to Become Top Country for Google Play Revenues

The folks over at App Annie have released a pretty fascinating report that shows some interesting shifts that are happening in the mobile space. Perhaps the most surprising is the fact that Japan has overtaken the US in Google Play (Android’s app store) revenue, making this the first time that the US did not occupy the top spot in the country rankings. ...

Tech In Asia  11/30/2012 [en]

memo

• Mobile game developers in Japan have been successful to make money in feature phones. Japanese users are accustomed to pay for games on mobile more than in US. ARPU may be much higher. It is reasonable that along with the move that many of feature phone users switch to smartphone, Google Play apps in Japan starts to monetize very well. It is interesting to see if the growth is a specific trend only in Japan, or the revenue will go up like in Japan in other countries including US in the future.

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Venture Investment In 2011 Surpasses 100B Yen For The First Time In Three Years / Nikkei

Nikkei conducted survey for 20 major VCs in Japan. The total amount is 101.3 billion yen increasing 16% from the last year. 11 firms answered their plan in 2012, which shows 6% increase becoming nearly double of the amount in 2009 when it drastically decreased due to financial crisis. ...

IT related industry serves as an engine of the growth. In 2011, the amount became 29.1 billion yen, an increase of 30% from the previous year. Along with penetration of smartphone and tablet computer and user growth of social networking services, investment in related services such as ebooks and games development is increasing. IT shares 29% among the total amount, 4 points going up. ...

Nikkei 7/24/2012

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Social Fashion Site, iQON Surpasses 1M Monthly Users / Venture Now

VASILY revealed that its operating fashion site, iQON surpassed one million monthly active users. iQON was launched on April, 2010. It allows users to scrape images of fashion items sold on many EC sites like bookmarking to coordinate them and share with other users.

The service targets fashion-sensitive female of 20's and 30's. A number of fashion items is around 600,000. It released iPhone app in this February, which surpasses 10,000 coordinates posted within two weeks.

It had several hundreds of thousands unique visitors in January, which increased to over one million before the end of March. The smartphone app seems successful. ...

Venture Now 3/26/2012 [jp]

memo

• Along with penetration of smartphone, more and more users do not tend to use PC even at home. The trend seems especially prominent among target user segment of services like iQON.  
• VASILY raised 140M yen in May, 2011 from Itochu Technology Ventures and GMO Venture Partners.
• http://www.iqon.jp/ 

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LINE Surpasses 15M Downloads / TechCrunch Japan

According to announcement from NHN Japan, LINE achieved 15 million downloads. It  took seven months since its launch. It has 5.5 million users in Japan.

It is surprising that the app has around 1 million downloads a week this year. Outside of Japan, it was announced before that it has popularity in Middle East, but the app is also getting popular in Europe such as ranked for top in general ranking at AppStore in Switzerland and also highly ranked in Germany and Austria. ...

TechCrunch Japan 1/27/2011 [jp]

memo

• LINE is a free group chat and VoIP application for iPhone and Android.
• http://line.naver.jp/ja/

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Number Of New Venture Fund Gets Back But Size Becomes Smaller / Cnet Japan

Japan Venture Research released research report regarding venture fund established in 2011 in Japan. According to the report, a number of venture funds is 22, which has been increasing from the bottom of 8 in 2009 and is similar to 20 in 2008.

A total amount also increased to 45 billion yen but which is about 60% of 2008, 76 billion yen. An average size is 2 billion yen which is a half of that in 2008. ...

Cnet Japan 1/17/2011 [jp]

memo

• It is obvious that increasing seed accelerators contribute to the number and size. It would not be easy to predict if the trend continues in 2012. 

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Fashion community, Poupeegirl surpasses 1million members, 46% from overseas /Venture Now

Poupeegirl launched in February 2007 with both Japanese and English. Users enjoy dress-up of a character called Poupee or share photos of their own fashion items such as cloths or small items with friends. As of the end of March 2011, foreign users share around a half, 46%.

According to CyberAgent, a parent company of Poupeegirl, user share by language is as follows, English 20%, Portuguese 9%, Spanish 6% and Chinese 4%. The company says that foreign users are increasing mainly by word-of-mouth on local social networking services.

The basic business model is virtual goods sales. It provides fashion items to arouse users to dress-up Poupee.

Venture Now 4/13/2011

memo

• CyberAgent runs another avatar based community service Ameba Pico for global market, in which many of foreign users seem to be located in South East Asia. It is interesting that Poupeegirl looks like attracting users in other regions.

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