Japanese Tech Business Week Wrap-Up – Part 2

In Part 1 of the Japanese Tech Business Week Wrap-Up,  we summarized the front end of the week featuring Fukuoka start-ups. In Part 2, we will focus on SFNewTech Japan Night which featured start-ups from around Japan.  The event sold out on-line and had room for 40 more lining up at the door.  Enduring a little jet-lag and some tech culture shock, six start-ups from Japan successfully completed their introduction to the SF Tech community on Octorber 13, 2010.  Here is a wrap-up of the SFNewTech Japan Night presenters:

SFNewTech Japan Night

Spysee – CTO Hironori Tomobe demonstrated how Spysee’s people search engine extracts information about people from the web and provides links that are related to the person organized in a visual search results page with items like their network connections and a summary of articles written by or about the them.  Spysee’s revenue model is advertising based and will offer premium subscription services in the future.

Lang-8 – Founder Yangyang Xi demonstrated his new social networking service for learning a language.  Basically, one can meet people and learn a language all in one site.  A person posts an entry that they want corrected and a native speaker then interacts with you–correcting your writing on-line. Very simple.  Their mission is to help learners with the written nuances of a language, something you can’t totally get from formal classes.  Lang-8 currently has users from 200 countries, representing 80 languages.

Gazo-Pa –  Hideki Kobayashi introduced a unique image search engine which is more of a semantic search using image features like colors, shapes, objects to complete its search to give one a more relevant way of searching for the images you want. The image search feature allows you to look for a similar image or drawing.  Kobayashi said that this product is not only useful for images but can be applied to other typical searches like shopping.  Their project was developed by funds from Hitachi Corporation.  Launched just 2 months ago, the service has about 70K visitors a month.

Coopa – Tsutomu Sasaki, President & Yashuhiro Yamada of i3Systems presented an enterprise application development engine using HTML or Java script. The Yubizo engine allows for quick development of custom applications to enterprise software like Oracle or SAP.  Their development engine also allows for quick development of iPhone/iPad to Enterprise Software applications for viewing, accessing enterprise software data or using the iPhone/iPad as part of an in-line business process.

Drrop – Founder Takuro Yoshida and Hiro Kobyashi describes their newly launched social communications site as a new way to say “Hi”.  A “Drrop”, as they call it, is a random message from around the world, that the user chooses to reply to, let it “evaporate” in 24 hour or “wipe” it immediately to move onto the next “Drrop”.   They feel this is a more efficient way to manage the social clutter that a twitter or Facebook can bring to us.  Launched just last month, they are in the testing phase with over 150 users and exploring their company’s growth strategy.

My Gengo – Robert Laing and Matthew Romaine presented a concept which will transform the translation service, called My Gengo.   With My Gengo, you have access to certified translators for as little as 5 cents a word for basic translations which is about 70% less than standard translation services and faster. A plug-in API, launched in early 2010,  can be plugged into a site so that users don’t need to go to My Gengo to get access to their services.  They have experienced non-linear year-over-year user growth over its few years of existence and have received seed funding and exploring the next stage of funding.

Brandon K. Hill, CEO of btrax, Inc, the co-organizer of the SFNewTech Japan Night event, said “I am glad we were able to give some Japanese start-ups a feel for the San Francisco tech culture.   We felt this event was a great success and hope to do this event with SFNewTech twice a year.”  All in all, it was a great introduction of Japanese web technology to the SF tech community.

btrax and the Japanese start-ups want to thank SFNewTech,  our sponsors and our supporters that helped make this event successful.