On the opening day of the ‘Tech in Asia’ conference we walked around the start-up booths and tried to speak with as many exhibiting companies as possible even though a lot were very busy. What follows is a brief introduction to some of the start-ups that we were able to talk with.
TANREN provides a monitoring service to shop stores that enables you to record and evaluate your storefront staff’s communication with customers and share via the Cloud. These recordings can be used by company management to improve staff ability and for training. This company has received a certification from Microsoft’s BizSpark Plus programme.
Next we spoke with QUIPPY, they offer an online search service where people can view numerous pictures of food linked from Instagram. You can search on the area around you, and by selecting the pictures you can receive information on the restaurant. The service can also be used overseas, where knowledge of that local language isn’t required.
‘NOGYO JOHO SEKKEISHA’ from Obihiro in Hokkaido were providing information regarding their AGRIBUS-NAVI service in their booth. Using GPS they provide positioning information for Tractors, which helps to lower fuel usage and reduce agricultural chemical waste.
KIRIROM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY will provide a service where they will establish a contract with a sponsor who will arrange the develop of an outsourcing and human resources system.
A company called NAIN are offering a service called APLAY which delivers smartphone notifications via earphones. As this allows people to listen to, instead of read their SNS notifications, they hope this will remove some problems related to using smartphones while on the move.
JELLYWARE operate the Hackathon business which develops a number of commodity ideas.
We met Mr Noor, PR Director for TERAPI.MY, who are a Malaysian company providing delivery massage services, they are planning on soon entering the local market in Japan.
AKIRA EDUCATION is a Japanese language institution with offices in Vietnam and Japan, they manage PERA PERA which is a Japanese language application for foreigners. Users can learn foreign languages via daily conversations, words and phrases to be used in emergencies, games and via images. Apparently it can be used instead of a dictionary. At the moment they offer services for learning Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese languages.
MEALTHY is a health management service application for eating out and delivery meals where you can search restaurant meals by their calorie count. You can post your own meals on the website and request advice from professional nutritionists to help manage your health and diet.
NODOKA is a company that sells organic Japanese tea, sourced from local farmers. They turn the organic tea such as Macha, Sencha, Brown Tea etc into powder which can be mixed with water, or even added to smoothies. Currently it’s available in the American market, but only sold online in Japan.
BLINCAM is an ultra-compact camera that can be added to a pair of glasses, photos can be taken with a blink so various moments can be easily captured such as when they are preparing food, they can take a picture of the recipe, or when they move to embrace their child. There are receiving many inquiries from overseas.
Hopefully this provides an International flavour of the booths and ideas on display, with domestic participants ranging from Northern Hokkaido to Fukuoka in the south of Japan, as well as many foreign visitors from South East Asia.
We really felt the power from the domestic and foreign start-ups that came to Tokyo for this exhibition, going forwards I want to cheer on the regional start-ups in Japan.
Finally we would like to express our gratitude to all the start-ups who took their time to describe their services, always with politeness, in the short period of time that was available to us.
