Sorry for late... this is the second post about Tech Venture 2008.
aucfan.com
japanese site
aucfan.com offers integrated auction information service based on 9 big
net auction sites like Yahoo!, Bitters and etc. User can investiage
market price & statistics in net auction and bulk submission to
multiple net auctions. 1.2M unique users/month and over 40M PV/month.
Community Engine
english site
Community Engine offers networked development middleware environment
for online which can port to multiple gaming devices like Wii, PSP.
Communcation middleware realize syncronized virtual
environment for any gaming devices including web browsers.
Cirius Technologies
japanese site
Cirius Technologies offers mobile ad services named "AdLocal". AdLocal
provides local online advertisement to mobile phone users based
on GPS information. Cirius Tech is building up "click"
information by GPS mobile phone and now can provide mobile ad "heat"
map for customers.
Niwango
Nico Nico
Douga(japanese)
Niwango is very famous as a hosting company of "
Nico-Nico
Douga". Nico dou is supposed to be a kind of "Geeky service",
but has over 3 million free users and 86,000 premium users. Staying
time of Nico dou is longer than youtube.
PTP
japanese site
PTP offers unique digital video recorder named "SPIDERpro" which
records all digital TV programs in a week including TV commercial.
Noteworthy difference from general video recorders is how
spider pro handles and stores tons digital contents. SPIDERpro has
cool, powerful and unique search functions and interfaces which can
find news items in news programs by identifying TV caption and title
images.
My personal comment:
All companies are really excellent, but I'd like to comment on from my
personal point of view.
Japanese start up companies still have strong capability to develop and
provide unique and strong service for mobile network world based on
their deep knowledge and experience in japanese mobile business, though
I thought japanese strength of rich fanctoinality of mobile
devide was declining compared to in the past. I think high literacy of
mobile consumer in japan make them at higher stage.Key factors for
future and global growth is, I think, "Unified Network service" and
"Cool japan culture". How can PTP fight against network TV?
What does i-Broadcast take next step after full
browser on mobile phones. Can AdLocal fight against Google's
service? Japanese companies have to consider more about Unified network
servce for future growth.
CEO of teamlab which is also an excellent venture company in Japan
mentioned same thing before about Cool japan culture. "If you want to
drink a good tea, western way is simple and good. That can
tell you the best temperature of water and timing to put tea leaf in in
a straightforward manner. But japanese and Asians cultivate different
aspects at the same time (just for drinking good tea!). Sadou,
japanese
tea ceremony, creates rich culture not only for tea, but also
for manners, tea bowl, flower arrangement and so on. It's important for
people to enjoy not only just the expected information but also the
processes/operations itself to get that. It's not like google's way." Actface(
1,
2)
by AU/Teamlab shows this and Nico Nico Douga might be a good example of
those, I think.
I believe we can see global start-ups from japan in the near future.