Tokyo Startonomics: Japanese startup lightning round

J-Magic

- mobile service provider, started in China.
- not yet in US.  30 employees.
- many patents in image recognition technology
- his previous company was sold to Google and now powers facial recognition technology of Picasa (wow!)
- Product:  Kao-cheki - kind of a game.  Take your own picture, it scans its database of celebs, etc, etc and comes back with who you look like.
  - 10mm unique users in Japan and China (combined)
  - Take a picture, the system morphs your picture to make you look like a Zombie.  2mm people ues that every month (wow)
  -  monetizing via ecommerce 
- Product: Portrait Maker
  - creates digital avatar from a real still photo
  - used for SNS, games, mail, etc
  - done in real time using facial recognition technologies 

AdLocal

- mobile advertising platform
- display/deliver mobile ads to customers (using lat/long)
- advertisers can setup a target range (geographically) – up to 1 mile radius
  - demographics to target:  carrier, publisher category, time of day (hours),
- Locallally targeted ads deliver 4x the CTR
- 4th generation product now launching in the US market
  - allows broadcast of 1 creative to multiple locations
  - allows businesses to target specific businesses / buildings / campuses with certain content/offers
  - platform provides a heatmap that shows where advertisers are earning their impressions (what is converting best, real-time) – very cool
  

 Japanese Mascots - communicate different emotions / trust levels to Japanese society.  Helps build brands and products.

- Mona 
- Amoeba from ameba.jp
- Bear from so-net.ne.jp
- Nico-nico-douga (video sharing website)
- Yume Lion from Toky MX (television)
- Gnome from lolipop
- Fukui, Chiba, Tokyo, Yamanashi (from the local police)

- Mascots lowers the level of intimidation – makes difficult things seem more simple/friendly

Scigineer (science and engineering) 

- not “search”, but “discover”
- community mining (“deqwas”)
- providing the service to ecommerce and mobile sites
- showing us some porn slides right now, not sure why.  Spoof movies.
- meant to pick up “very long tale” items – even “plays on words” – (hence the porn titles, I guess)
- algorithm is based on complex network theory 
- they power CNet Japan’s recommendation engine (content)
- starting an adnetwork on top of the recommendation engine

Cerevo

- photo share fraud eliminator 
- when your friends don’t send you the pictures that they promised they’d send you! 
-  soltuion: 2 products
  - DSC : the world’s easiest way to sync photos to the web
  -  it’s actually a camera.   camera automatically emails you (the owner of the camera) the photos.  Or you can send them to flickr.