12 Pitches from Start-up Weekend Tokyo at Mixi

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You may remember last May when we covered Start-up Weekend Tokyo, and the many great ideas that sprung forth from the three-day event. This weekend saw 2011’s second Start-up Weekend in Tokyo, this time at Mixi HQ in Shibuya.

QLive, the winner of the previous SWT event, was put to good use as a way to gather and vote up the best questions in real-time to ask those pitching. And there were indeed some great ideas put together over these three days. I dropped by on the final day to catch the final pitches. Here are the groups that presented, as well as the select few that won awards

Start-up Intern

‘Let our start-up help your start-up.’ This was the call of the first group to pitch at SWT this past weekend. This group proposed that many young graduates in Japan when trying to enter the work force only know about large internet companies like Gree or Mixi. Many of them are not aware of the opportunities that exist in smaller start-up ventures.

Paul of Start-up Intern presenting

What Start-up intern proposed was a solution to connect interns with start-ups. In order to educate potential interns/employees about their start-ups, founders would create a video to explain what they are about. There would be user testimonials as well so that an element of peer-evaluation would come into play when deciding whether a start-up was a good place to work or not.

As for the revenue model, start-ups would be charged an annual fee to get listed on the website.

Website: StartUpIntern.org

Cooking DJ

cooking dj

Cooking DJ is a service that attempts to make cooking fun again. The team calculated that many of us could spend as many as 22 days per year cooking. That’s almost a month, so we should do our best to make that time fun. How do you make cooking fun? The Cooking DJ team proposes that we do that with music.

The application will take a recipe for a certain dish and break it up into smaller mini-processes (e.g. boil the water, or sautee the onions). Cooking DJ provides songs that are the same length of time, so that when the song is finished, you know that you can move to the next step. The team mentioned the possibility of product advertising (food products specifically) as a part of the business model.

The team was the winner of the ‘One to watch’ prize as voted by other participants, as well as the overall prize as voted by a panel of judges.

RemembAR.me

The winner of the ‘Most Innovative’ prize this weekend, RemembAR.me (the AR = Augmented Reality) is an app that aims to help you in the unfortunate event that you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Say you’re in a crowded room, and you see a face you recognize, but you just can’t put your finger on where you know them from. By holding up your phone’s camera and viewing the room through the app, RemembAR.me will scan the faces and compare them against people in your network (Facebook, in particular). If all goes well, it will tell you who that mystery person is. You’ll ‘never be embarraseed again,’ it proclaims.

As for monetization, as I understand it, is the ‘freemium’ model that the group compared to that of Dropbox. Larger networks and more people to scan would cost more than for example, if you only had 100 people.

Website: RemembAR.me

I'm being scannned!

MyLive

The MyLive team proposed an interesting concept for the concert industry, with its service measuring demand from fans about which bands they’d like to see. Targeting indie music fans, and people outside of major cities, MyLive would give music lovers a chance to vote for their favorite bands. When an artist emerges as ‘popular,’ then a live event is arranged and tickets are sold using a Groupon style system.

StartZaps

StartZaps is a website that catalogues start-ups, allows you to compare similar services. The group said that StartZaps would be a third-party objective review, and from the looks of the site design, each startup listing would show a number of similar services underneath (much like alternativeto.net). When a user finds a start-up they like, they can ‘zap’ it, thus adding it to their ‘My Zaps’ page.

The mock-up that we saw showed that start-ups could be tagged (e.g. music, business, Tokyo) and you could also view how many times they had been shared on Twitter, or how many times they had been ‘Zapped’ on StartZaps.

2kenme

Everyone has a favorite date restaurant. But finding a venue for a second date is more difficult. 2kenme (read Nikenme) helps you find one by sharing evaluations for restaurants, diners or bars with other people, it aspires to give you lots of great options to entertain your companion

Nikenme was the winner of the ‘biggest surprise award’ for SWT.

Plastee

Plastee was unique out of all groups that presented in that it managed to swing a profit over the course of the weekend. The T-shirt creation service managed to sell team shirts to practically half of the other participating groups, as you can see in our photos. What Plastee aims to do is to combine great design with a social, on-demand service.

Targeting amateur designers on platforms like Pixiv or DeviantArt, Plastee would serve as a way to aggregate and rank what users deem as the best designs to go on a shirt — and when a certain design reaches the right threshold of votes, then it would be printed. The service would allow for login from other social services, encouraging users to share their designs among friends.

Jamap

Jamap uses a sort of flash marketing concept that helps restaurants to call potential customers during slack hours. This service is very similar to that of 2kenme.

In hierarchical Japanese work culture, when office workers are drinking with their bosses and colleagues, it’s often the youngest guy among them that has to find a second diner after the first one. Of course on such short notice, there is no reservation and no planning. To remedy this sort of problem, Jamap helps communicate the location of a nearby restaurant along with the number of seats available.

Website: jamap

amigoo

The service allows users to share what they want to do, and then come together in groups and do that activity with others who share your interest. Similar to meetup.com and its Japanese equivalent ATND.

Famemo

Famemo is a social networking site for families. The name is a combination of ‘family’ and ‘memo.’ Younger, more savvy Twitter users can add a specific hashtag to their tweets to determine what messages are visible to their parents. Since some seniors might have some difficulty with smartphone applications, there are plans for a feature phone interface as well.

Mazeuta

This is a service for creating original music from the contributed lyrics of multiple users. One person posts some lyrics, and a notification is sent to Twitter. Then another user posts the next phrase in the sequence, and so on until the song is complete. (Note: I don’t completely get this one, so if anyone can explain further please let us know).

Train-i

Train-i (or Train eye) is a service that helps users see ads on the walls of crowded trains when their field of vision might be blocked by fellow passengers. I’m not exactly sure how this works. It appears to be a sort of AR application, though I don’t know where they would be pulling ad information from. But the function of letting you see the train map (or how close you are to your stop) seems useful.

Website: train-i

[Written with contributions from Masaru Ikeda who was emcee for the event]

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