Japan’s Midokura, a startup with offices in SF, Tokyo, Lausanne and Barcelona, today announced a $17.3 million Series A funding round, led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, along with NTT Group’s DOCOMO Innovations, Inc., and Innovative Ventures Fund Investment, the investment arm of NEC Group. The funding will be used to hire and grow the team in preparation for future deployment and… → Read More
Two years after the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Google has launched Street View images of Namie-machi in the Fukushima exclusion zone. The area encompasses Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Plant, which after the disaster was the scene of the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The 360-degree panoramic imagery, showing ruined buildings on empty streets, is both eerie and… → Read More
For many travelers, their sense of adventure is only stymied by language barriers. With its roster of offbeat activities, however, travel site Voyagin seeks to give visitors a more intimate look at five Asian countries-Japan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Tokyo-based startup, which launched its site last December, plans to add more countries this year. → Read More
Japanese group coupon buying site Luxa just closed its Series B funding of $5.3 million (500 million Yen) from JAFCO. The Japanese VC also backed Luxa’s Series A round in November 2010, when it put in the same amount. This brings Luxa’s total funding to $10.6 million since operations started in August 2010. Luxa is a daily-deals site like Groupon, but it positions itself towards the… → Read More
Thanks to its complicated regulatory structure and the continuing popularity of web-enabled feature phones, Japan’s mobile market is difficult for foreign companies to penetrate. But Apple has finally managed to work its way to the top, according to a report by Counterpoint Research (h/t TNW). → Read More
4K TV, the 3840 x 2160 pixel technology that blew everyone away at CES this year, is still a glimmer in most of the world’s collective eye. Japan, however, could get 4K broadcasts via satellite as soon as 2014, thereby pushing the state-of-the-art forward at a speed nearly unprecedented in the TV industry. → Read More
Path’s growth trajectory is leading it to Asia: CEO Dave Morin said that people in Japan and Korea were behind the mobile social network’s second wave of new users after the release of Path 2.0, that China is the app’s second-largest market after the U.S. and that it’s adding more users in Asia than it is in Western markets. Now Path is capitalizing on all that by building out its operation in… → Read More
In October Amazon added Japan for the first time to the list of markets where it sells its Kindle and Kindle Fire tablets, which will go on sale December 19. Today, it’s giving those products a bit of services support: the Cloud Drive is now live in Japan, too. → Read More
The Japanese consumer electronics industry continues to feel the squeeze in the economy, with mass layoffs of workers representing one of the more painful effects. In the latest development, Panasonic Corp. says it will reduce its workforce by 10,000 employees by the end of this fiscal year, which completes in March 2013. The company had already warned that it will post losses of $10 billion for… → Read More
Good news for Japanese startups: Japan’s largest mobile carrier, NTT Docomo, has announced a $125 million investment fund and incubator program for smartphone and tablet related startups — to be called the Docomo Innovation Fund and the Docomo Innovation Village — both due to kick off at the end of March 2013. → Read More
Today, at Y Combinator’s Startup School at Stanford University, Rakuten Founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani took the stage to talk about the company’s culture, acquisitions and its crazy growth over the last year.
Mikitani said that Rakuten was currently seeing about $5 billion/year in revenues and that 25 percent of that revenue was coming from mobile mobile phones, both feature and smartphones. → Read More
Aggressive demonstrations in and near Panasonic’s and Canon’s Chinese factories have forced the companies to temporarily suspend operations. According to the French news agency AFP, demonstrators are motivated by nationalistic reasons and events that occurred over the past few days.
The Japanese Government bought a private yet critical archipelago in the East China Sea: the Japanese call it the… → Read More
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expanding in Japan through the opening of a new availability zone. The move means that AWS will most likely be adding more data centers to keep up with the steady demand it has had since it first began offering its service in Tokyo 18 months ago.
AWS breaks its regions into availability zones. Each availability zone can encompass multiple data centers. For example… → Read More
It’s been a long time coming — plans for a mobile content partnership between NTT Docomo and China’s search giant Baidu were announced a year ago — but today it’s finally happened: the Japanese telco has announced the completion of their $22.5 million (¥1.78 billion) investment in a joint venture in China, Baidu Yi Xin. Docomo becomes a 20 percent shareholder in the new mobile content… → Read More
App store analytics firm Distimo is announcing a strategic partnership with Tokyo-based digital marketing and internet data provider interarrows in order to launch a version of Distimo’s service in Japan. The new service, live now at Distimo.jp, aims to target what the company called a “hotbed of developer activity” in Japan. Citing several top Japanese players… → Read More
Social magazine Flipboard may have to think up a new tagline for itself, as tonight the company is rolling out an update which greatly expands its focus beyond text-based content to also include audio. The rollout features integrations from NPR, PRI (Public Radio International) and social sound platform, SoundCloud.
Also of note, Flipboard is launching its third localized edition with the… → Read More
As Erick wrote in September, over the course of the last year, Fotopedia has been hard at work at trying to reinvent the photo book for the iPad. To date, the so-called “Wikipedia for photos” has launched seven apps, two of which have been in partnership with National Geographic, and has racked up 5.2 million downloads since August of last year.
In September, as part of turning its attention… → Read More
Fresh from Japan we have the Eye Slack Haruka, a $131 skin toner designed to reduce unsightly bags under your apparently pre-teen eyes. The kit is powered by two CR2032 cells and runs in two modes – “hard” and “soft.” “Hard” mode sends tiny jolts of electricity into your eyes, ensuring your eyes will get a sufficient amount of energy while soft vibrates your eyes gently, which sounds like a real… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Brenden Mulligan, entrepreneur and creator of Onesheet, who is currently traveling around the world meeting startups with his wife and IDEO designer Elle Luna. You can follow him on Twitter here: @bmull.
Before coming to Japan, we asked everyone we knew for advice on how to connect with the startup community in Tokyo. Every recommendation pointed at the… → Read More
In what marks its first expansion abroad, Hulu is now available in Japan. As expected, the video streaming service will offer both TV shows and movies across various devices for a subscription of about $20 a month (1,480 Yen).
Unlike in the U.S., where there are both free and premium versions, in Japan the service will be subscription-only. And it will cost more than twice as much as Hulu… → Read More
The Japanese version of iOS 5 will have a special notifications widget: a setting to turn on instant messages from Japan’s earthquake early warning system. The system is so sensitive that it could reduce your battery life as it polls the warning servers constantly. → Read More
Danny Choo, culture hound based in Tokyo, visited a service called CloneFactory where he had his head scanned, printed, and stuck onto the body of a Storm Trooper.
The service uses multiple DSLRs to take snapshots of your head, render it in 3D, and then print it out in plaster using a 3D printer. Hair, make-up, and coloring are added and then your head is stuck on a little plastic doll. You can… → Read More
Sony is discontinuing yet another format: after killing the cassette Walkman last year and deciding to stop producing MiniDisc Walkmans just 2 weeks ago, the company today announced [JP] in Japan they won’t be supporting the 8mm video format anymore. Sony was one of the several Japanese and American (i.e. Polaroid) tech powerhouses that established the format format back in the 1980s. → Read More
Japan’s mobile carriers are currently releasing a number of interesting handsets, which are all part of their summer 2011 line-up. While smartphones, the iPhone and Android in particular, are taking over the Japanese market, there are still some cool feature phones coming out, too. → Read More
Michael Jackson may have passed away two years ago, but he has always been especially big in Japan. So big, in fact, that he now gets his own social game. Dubbed “Michael’s King Of Pop” [JP], the title is exclusively available on Japanese mobile social gaming platform Mobage.
The goal of the game is to make Michael Jackson the No. 1 entertainer on the planet. Players manage Jacko’s career, but… → Read More
The idea of translating spoken language from cell phone to cell phone isn’t exactly new, but the mobile simultaneous translation system NTT Docomo is currently working on looks really impressive. Japan’s biggest mobile carrier says it uses the “best technologies” for voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis out there for its solution. → Read More
The world’s most advanced mobile nation, Japan, sees more than 100 different cell phones each year. Market research firm Gfk Japan [JP] has analyzed which the best-selling models in the first quarter of this year were and recently published its findings in the form of a top 10 chart. → Read More
It turns out the leak we blogged last month is true: Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo today officially introduced the Fujitsu LOOX F-07C as part of its summer line-up, and the device actually does dual-boot to Symbian and Windows 7 OS (not Windows Phone). Hardware-wise, the LOOX is pretty interesting, too. → Read More
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