When I was in Japan earlier this week, I ran into Tonchidot CEO Takahito Iguchi at the TechCrunch Tokyo conference and dragged him back to my makeshift studio for an impromptu interview about the state of augmented reality and mobile apps. Tonchidot launched its Sekai Camera app at TechCrunch50 in 2008 before anyone really believed that augmented reality apps were possible. They were the crowd favorite.
In the video above Iguchi tells me that Sekai Camera has been downloaded 3 million times (mostly in Japan). → Read More
Tokyo-based Tonchidot, legendary TechCrunch50 finalist and maker of the popular Sekai Camera augmented reality service, has released a new (free) app for iPhone and Android. But DOMO (Japanese for “nice to meet you” or “thank you”) isn’t an update or variation of Sekai Camera but another (ingenious) way to “augment” reality.
DOMO is being offered as a “pre-social” app, which makes use of your interest graph and location to make it easier to connect with people who are similar to you and physically near you (“pre-social”, because these people are initially strangers). → Read More
Tokyo-based augmented reality startup Tonchidot has raised $12 million in Series B funding from various Japanese companies, including the country’s second biggest telco KDDI, major media conglomerate Recruit, ad agency SPiRE and venture capital firms DCM, Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV), and JAFCO.
Tonchidot closed a $4 million series A funding round led by DCM and with ITV participating back in December 2008. The $16 million raised in two rounds is an impressive chunk of money in Japan’s startup scene.
Read how the mobile gaming platform will look like over on TechCrunch. → Read More
Tokyo-based augmented reality startup Tonchidot has raised $12 million in Series B funding from various Japanese companies, including the country’s second biggest telco KDDI, major media conglomerate Recruit, ad agency SPiRE and venture capital firms DCM, Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV), and JAFCO.
Tonchidot closed a $4 million series A funding round led by DCM and with ITV participating back in December 2008. The $16 million raised in two rounds is an impressive chunk of money in Japan’s startup scene. → Read More
Tokyo-based Tonchidot has come a long way since the spectacular launch of its augmented reality app Sekai Camera at TechCrunch50 back in 2008. We’ve spent quite a few articles on how the startup did since then, and the bottom line is that it did very well so far. Tonchidot is now offering up a lot more versions and features for its app (available for free on the iPhone with iOS4 support, iPad, and Android).
Here’s a quick rundown of what happened in the past few months and what more we can expect from Sekai Camera in the future. → Read More
More and more apps are stricken from the App Store as of late, for a variety of reasons. Today, the Apple hammer hit Tokyo-based Tonchidot whose augmented reality app Sekai Camera was removed without warning.
The free app, which made its – memorable – debut during TechCrunch 50 in 2008, intends to help users “tag the world” by imposing information (text, pictures, video and audio) over images in the iPhone camera. → Read More
More and more apps are stricken from the App Store as of late, for a variety of reasons. Today, the Apple hammer hit Tokyo-based Tonchidot whose augmented reality app Sekai Camera was removed without warning.
The free app, which made its – memorable – debut during TechCrunch 50 in 2008, intends to help users “tag the world” by imposing information (text, pictures, video and audio) over images in the iPhone camera. → Read More
The wait is finally over. Over a year after its memorable (and zany) debut at TechCrunch 50 2008, Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera iPhone application is now available worldwide. The augmented reality (AR) app has already established itself as a huge hit in Japan, and now Tonchidot is taking its shot at world domination. Or, at least, at getting everyone to start leaving each other geo-tagged virtual Post-It notes. You can grab Sekai Camera here, free of charge.
The premise behind the app is quite simple: as you go about your day, Sekai Camera invites you to leave text messages, photos, and audio recordings that will appear as floating bubbles wherever you created them. You can also fire up Sekai Camera to look at the world around you to see what kind of content has been left by other users. As you spin the camera around, you’ll see new messages pop up as floaty icons. Click one, and you’ll see the content that was shared previously. It’s a bit like Twitter in that everything is publicly available, but everything is built around location — if you aren’t near a message, you can’t see it. → Read More
There were quite a few memorable presentations during 2008′s TechCrunch50 (that’s the conference before last). But if you had to pick one, there’s a good chance you’d think of Tonchidot, the startup behind the Sekai Camera. Tonchidot captured the audience’s attention with a totally zany presentation and answered judges’ questions with non sequiturs like “Look up, don’t look down!” The result was hilarious, but there were some who wondered if the technology behind the company was the real deal. Rest assured, it is. And the company has closed a $4 million series A funding round led by DCM, with existing investor ITOCHU Technology Ventures (ITV) also participating.
The Sekai Camera service launched in Japan a few months ago, and has already become a national hit as the top app on the iPhone app store. The service leverages augmented reality and adds a social layer to it, allowing users to add virtual items in the real world (you hold the device up to your face as a viewfinder, then look at the world around you as tags pop up). → Read More
I attended the inaugural event of the AR Commons in Tokyo today, a new initiative that’s supposed to help set “standards of augmented reality as a public environment”. In other words, the symposium is an attempt to understand what augmented reality, the mixing of the real world with computer data, really is and what consequences the concept will have on the society.
And one part of the symposium was dedicated to one of TechCrunch’s favorite companies out there: Japan-based Tonchidot. CEO Takahito Iguchi, who delivered an unbelievable performance during his pitch at TechCrunch 50 (where his company was launched), presented an almost final version of Sekai Camera. → Read More
Does Android dream of Sekai Camera? The answer is yes. The augmented reality app, which was unveiled for the first time during TechCrunch 50 last September, isn’t iPhone-only anymore. Sekai Camera is supposed to make it possible for phone users to tag objects and locations in the real world by using their camera phones. → Read More
A total of 52 companies launched at last year’s TechCrunch50 conference. Five of them got jury selection prizes, there was one big winner and a very special crowd pleaser: Japan-based Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera, an iPhone app that presents tagged information in the form of a graphical layer over images in the iPhone camera.
Charismatic CEO Takahito Iguchi delivered a memorable demonstration, making the audience go crazy by fending off questions of TC50 judges such as Tim O’Reilly if Sekai Camera really works with the words “Join us!” or “We have a patent!”. The reason for the skepticism: Iguchi’s on-stage show mainly centered on a pre-produced video clip, not an actual product demo. This left people wondering if Sekai Camera isn’t just vaporware for almost half a year during which it seemed like nothing happened. But today I saw the app is real and working – on an iPhone. → Read More
By far, the biggest crowd pleaser at last week’s TechCrunch50 was a demo by the Japanese startup Tonchidot for a mobile social tagging product it is developing called Sekai Camera. The Japanese CEO Takahito Iguchi overcame a very noticeable language barrier and deflected serious questions from the judges through sheer will of character. He had the audience roaring in laughter and rooting for him, as he answered lengthy questions about how his service would actually work with brief responses such as “Imagination!” and “We have a patent.” When judge Rafe Needleman suggested that Google would buy Tonchidot, he objected: “Never!”
The original video portion of the demo has been watched more than 108,000 times on YouTube. But I’ve embedded the entire demo above, including the follow-up Q&A. The entire video is 17 minutes long and takes about a minute to get started, but it is captures how Iguchi had the audience, and even the skeptical judges, eating out of his hand, despite a limited grasp of English. The Q&A starts about 8 minutes in. Iguchi was particularly adept at exasperating judeg Tim O’Reilly. There is also a shorter edited video on YouTube of the judges’ Q&A with subtitles (embedded below). Anyone doing a demo can learn from this: keep your answers short, don’t drown in details, explain how you will change the world. → Read More
Sekai Camera (World Camera in Japanese) is an iPhone-exclusive social tagging service developed by Tokyo-based mobile application provider Tonchidot. The presentation (and following Q&A) was pretty hard to understand because of the language barrier but Sekai Camera turned out to be a crowd-pleaser nonetheless. → Read More
Sekai Camera (World Camera in Japanese) is an iPhone-exclusive social tagging service, developed by Tokyo-based mobile application provider Tonchidot. The presentation (and following Q&A) was pretty hard to understand because of the language barrier but Sekai Camera turned out to be a crowd-pleaser nonetheless. → Read More
