TripBox Ltd. is a company that manages a website called “Tastime” which allow users to search restaurants via pictures (Instagram) of food. It’s easy to find the store’s information with attractive pictures of the food on offer that makes you want to immediately indulge.
We poke to Mr. Atsushi Nemoto, who was chosen as the youngest entrepreneur by Ashoka (a program held by the social entrepreneurship association ASHOKA in collaboration with Waseda University), to give us further details of the business.
Originally, the business was opened in April last year with a focus on hotels, tourist places, and food & drink, but we swiftly came to realise that the desired information for our web visitors is actually “food”. Wherever we go for a trip, we always need to eat 3 times a day. Most people when going away on a break have not planned their restaurants in advance. Also we have found that many foreigners visiting Japan feel that the information in Japanese is not enough for them, so we shifted our target focus to “food”.
Also the objective of overseas trips for Japanese have changed compared to before. A major point for People when using SMS is to “show” and “visually appeal”. Gourmet sites can seem too personal or not universal enough, while many people now would prefer to obtain immediate information through pictures (Instagram). It is possible to search something like “Now, I want to eat this” and receive quick responses.
With putting foreign users in mind, we would like to spread the strength of food culture and the stability of tourism to other countries such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. Our expectation is to develop the site with an increasing number of local Japanese restaurants that can satisfy the needs of speakers of any language.
