Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.QLL Co-founder, Lulu Yeh
Author and Editor: Yunchieh Tsou, Translator: Kevin Wang
Strictly speaking, QLL is not a new “startup” company, since it has already been operating for nine years since its founding in 2007. Yet QLL is a “new” company in that it constantly adapts to market needs with new products. Leading a team to improve education through ever newer technology: this is the mission of cofounder Lulu Yeh.
QLL’s products are centered on technological education, and the company has always sought to be at the cutting edge of the latest trends and technologies.
QLL began with apps for preschool education and language learning, with over 200 apps under its name, before establishing the app social platform QLand. However, Yeh saw that the fad for apps had begun to wane, and future challenges would lie in software services. She accordingly re-pivoted the company again, to produce their current presentation streaming service QLecture.
QLecture solves a very simple problem: with the multitude of lectures and meetings around the world every year, lecturers often lack a suitable solution to share their PPT files, and if their audiences want to keep PPT content in their notes, they need to take pictures of every slide with their smartphones, which distracts their attention.
QLecture lets lecturers upload their PPT files, which are then synced to the audiences’ devices during the lecture: audiences only need to connect their smartphones or internet browsers via a specialized link for the presentation to play out on their devices. In just two months, QLecture has drawn over 10,000 users and 130 schools to its service, with users spread across Taiwan, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
“Going international on day one”: QLL’s rich experience in international competitions
In addition to a keen sense for the latest trends, the international experience is also a key part of QLL’s corporate culture, a result of Yeh’s extrovert nature. Having worked in the fashion industry for many years, Yeh often needed to negotiation with foreign companies, and it was Yeh’s cross-cultural experiences that has led QLL to constantly take part in international competitions.
As Yeh describes her experience, “When I attended my first international meeting, I knew nobody in the room, but I had the chutzpah to go around and give everyone my name card, and introduce our services. This naturally leaves a strong impression on everybody.”
Knocking on Japan’s door at 2013 B Dash
Living up to their motto of “going international on day one”, in 2011 QLL was picked as one of the hundred best Asian technology companies by the international technology magazine Red Herring. In 2013 the company participated in the leading Japanese startup competition B Cash Camp, and received a special award by the jury panel.
This award opened up channels for QLL to cooperate with Japanese investors. With its large selection of high quality apps, and its marked impact in the realm of technological education, in 2014 QLL received joint pre-A round funding from the Japanese startup investors B Dash, Incubate Fund, and Viling Ventures, allowing QLL a chance to strike it in the Japanese market.
Yeh notes that Japan is a country with a deep-rooted sense of culture; investors will often focus on how complete a product is, how much impact it will bring, and—most importantly—the “people”. This is especially important in crossing culture barriers: even though Yeh could only communicate with Japanese investors in English, they could nevertheless feel if the person they are talking to is a good, sensible and righteous person.
Personal connections a must in Japanese market
Yeh stresses that interpersonal connections are crucial for Japan: “The Japanese are incredibly cautious; foreigners will face insurmountable hurdles if they don’t have someone to guide them through the Japanese market. If you have just one person who’s willing to introduce you to others, you basically know everyone else, from investors to other corporations to distributors.
Since QLL received investment from B Dash and Incubate Fund, they had already solved the problem of personal connections. Other Taiwanese companies, however, often forget a key issue they must face in Japan: the country is highly insulated with immense internal demand, and consumer demographics and habits are vastly different from those in Taiwan; companies will often need to adjust their products and services to cater to the special requirements of the Japanese market.
Partnerships speed up market penetration
With a population of 120 million that is aging rapidly in the world’s third largest economy, Japan’s software ecosystem has taken on a distinct look. Yeh points to the example of Evernote: to adjust to the habits of the elderly, Evernote sells its software services in physical packages much like video games, allowing the company to retain a large number of highly loyal paying subsrcibers.
Battling it out on a virtual in-app platform will not cut it in Japan: based on QLL’s own experience, Yeh recommends assistance through Japanese distributors and partners, since they understand local consumer habits better and can help eliminate problems when communicating across cultures.
As for communicating with Japanese investors, Yeh acknowledges that even she is constantly learning about cross-cultural differences and learning from her experiences. In any case, regardless of whether hail from the same country with those seeking investment, companies will always need to keep their investors updated with the latest developments, a part of maintaining good relations between investors and investees.
Furthermore, the cross-cultural aspect is not something that one should fear too much: no matter in Taiwan or in Japan, startups will always need to partner with investors.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Charles Chin (third from right), founder of WritePath, has reshaped online translation with his unique AI technology.
Author: Yolanda Wang, Translator: Kevin Wang, Editor: Yunchieh Tsou
By beating the human brain at a game previously thought to be beyond machine comprehension, Google’s AlphaGo serves as a testament to the enormous leaps and bounds by which artificial intelligence has advanced.
Indeed, AI technology has found its way into a wide range of business applications, and has been one of the key instruments for startup companies to set themselves apart from the rest.
WritePath, one of Taiwan’s earlier startup companies, has within the past year incorporated big data and its own AI technology into its online translation service. In addition to seeing revenues soar, the company’s unique technological solution has attracted strategic investment from Taiwan’s United Daily News, as they seek to claim a slice of the US$50 billion global translation market.
WritePath is Taiwan’s largest B2B cloud-based translation service, using an army of nearly 10,000 crowdsourced translators across 35 languages to translate financial, business, and technological documents. Translating nearly two million words each month, WritePath counts more than 400 influential companies among its clients, including Oracle, Cisco, Adobe, Ogilvy & Mather, Leo Burnett, Asus, and HTC. Profits are split 50-50 with translators, which still allows them to maintain gross profit margins of at least 40%.
With a full-time staff of less than 20, how has WritePath managed to hold its own against larger competitors worldwide? The Taiwan-based company holds a secret weapon in its arsenal: their proprietary Translation-booster (T-booster).
By actively translating pre-translated phrases, T-booster cuts costs by 16-30%
WritePath founder and CEO Charles Chin describes the company’s translation services: “After a client uploads a document that needs translation, T-booster will first compare and analyze words and phrases in the document with a large database, and automatically translate phrases and sentences that have been translated before. After reducing the number of words that need to be manually translated, T-booster will then pass the document on to a human translator.
Not only does this cut down costs by 16-30% for the client, it also vastly improves the efficiency of human translators. Because T-booster has memory and learning abilities, the more our clients use our service, the cheaper it gets, which results in increased client retention rates.
With loyal clients passing on WritePath’s translation services through word-of-mouth, the company has seen revenues soar, accompanied by increased load for the T-booster software. Improving efficiency thus became a critical issue.
Chin continues, “The first version of T-booster would compare and analyze the second sentence after it had finished handling the first, which was just too slow in terms of our increased working load. We looked at synchronous messaging technologies in chat rooms, and found that by increasing synchronous computation abilities, we could have T-booster compare more than 10 sentences at the same time.
A 100-page financial report from a publicly-traded company, for example, might have required one hour for the earlier T-booster to parse through. Our current version only requires five minutes, after which the software will pass any untranslated parts on to human translators, thus dramatically reducing time and cost.”
Chin compares T-booster to a jet engine on a car. The company is currently developing advanced technologies to enable AI in phrase and sentence prediction and machine pre-translation, with the goal of having 70-80% of texts pre-translated. Freed from the monotony of rote substitution, professional translators can turn their efforts instead to polishing and error checking.
Legal grey areas in China caused early failures for Chin
The company’s current bright prospects belie Chin’s earlier setbacks; like all startup companies, Chin did not walk on a gold-paved road from the start.
In 2009, Top Admit was Chin’s first attempt at establishing his own brand. Focusing primarily on translating application documents for students wishing to study abroad, in 2011 Chin saw the increasing need, poor quality, and lack of competition for such services in China, and moved his entire family over as he tried to gain a foothold in the Chinese market. However, the murky legal situation in China, as well as substantial cultural differences, caused much difficulty in both Beijing and Shanghai, and Chin was forced to return and cut his losses less than a year later.
WritePath selects professional translators with financial and technological tests
After returning to Taiwan, Chin began to reorient his direction. Since most students wishing to study abroad will only use translation services once, Top Admit would be limited in its scope. To expand his clientele, Chin set up TopSCIedit as a service to translate medical papers, and in 2014 set up WritePath for corporate clients.
Chin notes that the hardest part of setting up a new company is talent and capital. To ensure the quality of translations, translators must pass a highly selective online test before joining WritePath. The test looks for correct grammar and high precision in wording, as well as knowledge of the vocabulary used in finance, information technology, marketing, and other fields of expertise. Such comprehensive talent is, of course, never easy to come by, and even though WritePath has recruited more than 10,000 translators from hundreds of online translation communities, professional talent is something the company continues to seek.
In search of funding? Take part in competitions and exhibitions; seek recommendations from earlier trailblazers
As for funding and capital, Chin says that he knew from an early stage that this would be a hurdle for any startup: why would anyone give you money when they don’t know why you are?
To increase recognition for his company, Chin took his team to startup innovation competitions around the world; their achievements include being selected by Tehnode as one of the top 6 internet startups of 2011, finishing at first place in the 2013 Echelon Japan Satellite in Tokyo international competition, receiving the Taiwan Venture Capital Association’s grand prize, and being selected into China’s leading startup incubator Kr Space, which brought funding from angel investors in Japan and Taiwan, as well as investment from United Daily News.
Chin’s suggestions for attracting funding? Take part in competitions and exhibitions, and talk to startup teams who have been successful in getting funding for their projects; getting a recommendation from people who have been down the same path before may save you substantial time and effort. Investors are also constantly on the lookout for good investments, and will often privately ask trusted investees for suggestions. Foster a good reputation and interpersonal connections, and these might help you out some day.
With funding from United Daily News, and expertise in translating financial documents, WritePath has targeted Shanghai and Hong Kong for expansion next year, both through digital means and on-the-ground personnel. Chin anticipates revenue to increase by three to four times next year, and looks eagerly toward the day that WritePath, with its unique AI technology, becomes the Asian leader in cloud-based translation.
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With the growth of budget travel, low-cost airline carriers have contributed to 30 percent of global markets in 2015, jetting more than 1 billion passengers through the sky. This upward trend shows no sign of stopping in 2016. In a move to disrupt the booming travel website market, Taiwan startup Outland Inc launched the world’s largest low-cost flight search website HelloWings.
After a massive website upgrade this November, HelloWings now provides flight options from 107 countries globally, featuring more than a hundred airlines, and 30 million real-time flight prices online.
Apart from this, a new offering of traditional airline flight prices, and the launch of HybridConnect– the world’s first combination flight comparison service, which looks to provide you with the lowest price options of different airlines combined, looks to target the ever-growing community of backpacking travellers.
Two years since its launch, HelloWings has since risen through the startup ranks, first as the winner of TechCrunch Taipei in 2015 and finalist in the 2016 Echelon Asia Summit. They have also been the only Taiwan startup to enter the top 4 of this year’s BDash Fukuoka and was chosen for this year’s Web Summit Top 200 Startups. Back in May of this year, a $10 million NTD seed round was closed with Taiwan’s Pinehurst Advisors– an early stage angel and seed investment fund (whose portfolio includes cacafly, pal+, GoodLife, WritePath, Viscovery) as lead investors, and both Singapore Venture Capital Firm KKfund and COENT Venture Partners on board as well.
Price Comparisons Visualized: Easy to Identify Dates for Lowest Prices
While most flight search sites work by pulling data from airline and travel agency sources once the search is queried by the user, HelloWings secret weapon is the more than 100 web crawlers that the team has written to retrieve data from low-cost carrier websites. “We differ from our competitors in that we directly update the annual daily flight prices of the low-cost carriers worldwide, and then create a detailed graph of yearlong flight price trends in real-time on our site,” HelloWings Co-founder Mark Hsu explains, “With the graphs, you can easily spot the days with the lowest prices and plan your trip accordingly. We use our own machine-learning algorithms, which emphasizes the refreshing of popular dates and airlines to ensure pricing is up to date and accurate.”
Apart from this, the most anticipated, however, is HelloWings’ flagship feature– the new HybridConnect search function.
Mark Hsu tells TechOrange, “In general, customers usually choose low-cost carriers if the total flight time is less than 6 hours, and choose traditional airlines for longhaul flights. What our HybridConnect does is that it calculates the top ten flight combinations with the lowest price out of the 100 thousand possible airline combos. From our calculations, we recently found out that on a trip from Taiwan to Nice, France, you can save up to 30 – 40% on plane tickets, with a combined flight of low-cost and traditional airlines. This also helps expand the journey of the HelloWings customer from just short haul flights to longer distance backpacking trips.”
The combination flight search results of HybridConnect not only recommends the lowest price combos but also has the option of shortest flight times for customers to choose from.
Automated Marketing Bot Brings On the Hype
The idea for HelloWings was born out of a mutual love of travelling among the four co-founders. When it came to planning a 20-day graduation trip amongst them, they realized the numerous difficulties they came across when finding flights online was an overlooked opportunity, and decided to start a company together shortly after.
With most of the team coming from a computer science background, they have applied their programming skills to their marketing mix as well. “In order to get a higher ranking on Google search, both the name of the site and the web address need to appear at a high frequency on other websites, for Google’s search engine to deem it worth of “information value”. What we have done is written our own marketing program, that searches for terms related to low-cost carries in social media groups, and an automated messaging robot will paste an intro and link to HelloWings, introducing it to these backpacker communities to getting more exposure, ” said Mark Hsu.
Currently, more than 30 percent of HelloWings user base comes from Southeast Asian countries. Taiwan’s neighbouring countries, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have a large number of travellers who frequents low-cost carriers when travelling to Taiwan. HelloWings have also made an effort to post Taiwan travel tips on Southeast Asian travel forums and online communities. Since closing their seed round, they have opened offices in Singapore, with plans to base their marketing and business development teams here, as part of their strategy to further grow their presence in the Southeast Asia market, whereas the Taipei office will stay focused on technological product development.
Building Up a Profitable Business Model Through Travel Agency Services
Though steadily gaining traction, the next big step for HelloWings proves to be finding a sustainable and profitable business model.
“We have founded a travel agency subsidiary in October this year, and in the next six months, we plan to focus on building the customer experience around the actual booking of flights, after comparing prices. We hope to achieve a fully automated and speedy Hybrid Connect flight booking service, expanding it to beyond to being just a useful tool, but becoming an integral part of a good flight booking experience, that would also become profitable for us,” Mark Hsu said,
“When we first started out, it was very hard to gain access to flight tickets from traditional airlines, as they did not think we were up to scale compared to other agencies, and did not want to work with us. Luckily, we had an agency that we were friendly with help us pull some strings, and finally were we able to get inside those ironclad doors to do business.”
Not going the route of traditional travel agencies which is intensive in human capital, HelloWings will rely on software programs to fully automate their services, keeping operating costs low. New Year’s resolution for them is to continue their momentum in gaining traction, along with rolling out their ticket booking services to effectively gain market share and move towards profitability.
資料來源：
INSIDE【硬塞科技字典】什麼是 A/B testing
The Daily Egg Your Step-by-Step Guide to A/B Testing with Google Analytics
kissmetrics How to Run an A/B Test in Google Analytics
（首圖來源：futureshape, CC licensed，本文開放合作夥伴轉載。）
Author: Julia Lin, Translator: Athena Chen, Editor: Yunchieh Tsou
Since 2014, there has been an influx of low cost carriers into the Taiwan market, resulting in the cost of a flight abroad being lower than taking a trip down South from Northern Taipei on the high-speed railway!
According to numbers from the Ministry of Transportation, low-cost carriers have flown more than 3 million travellers in the year 2015, and growing at an annual rate of 41.2 percent. Low cost carriers are now a new option for those in Taiwan, heralding a new era in leisure travelling and fundamentally changing the way we travel.
Ming Ming Chen has been in the online travel agency business for 17 years, since 1999, and has managed Taiwan’s top travel sites EzTravel, , garnering an unique outlook and insight to Taiwan’s developing tourism industry.
Chen explains that for a traveller hack in the days, their “flight, hotel, and itinerary” were the three key elements that relied wholly on the travel agency to book and plan. As convenient as it was, there was little flexibility and customization to it.
When low cost carriers came to Taiwan, the Taiwanese realized how amazingly cheap a plane ticket could be, plus you could also conveniently book hotel rooms on international booking sites such as agoda, booking, and airbnb, “so once the consumer had dealt with their flight and hotel, all they needed was to plan an itinerary,” Ming says.
And because of this insight, Ming has since founded KKday in late 2014, officially launching the site in early 2015. The main service of the site is to provide travellers with a variety of “destination tours”, giving them full control over their travel plans as independent travellers.
Since its’ launch in 2015, KKday now has a total of more than 6,000 travel experiences for more than 35 countries and 174 cities. These include car rental and airport pickup services, local tours, tourist spot tickets, cultural experiences, unique dining, all available to shop at one stop online at KKday. Most importantly, many of these packages come at a cheaper price than the official websites.
Apart from lowers costs of KKday, it also runs giving back to consumers the commission offering from the suppliers. This also plays an important part in lowering the prices of the tour packages featured on KKday.
Ming explains that “Travelling is something that is very personal, and I can see the demand for ‘tailored travel experiences’. Through our e-commerce service we can meet the demand, and by taking out the middleman (travel agencies), we save our customers even more on the costs of travelling.”
Looking Overseas and Positioning as a Global Platform
KKday has quickly become Asia’s largest destination travel site, since it went online less than two years ago. Boasting close to 500 thousand likes on Facebook, its revenues having been steadily growing month after month. Its overseas revenue takes up almost half of total sales number, with Japan and Korea taking the top spots.
KKday has offices in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. It plans to open up new locations in Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam.
It is part of Chen’s mission to “put up local tours of all parts of the world on our site, and sell to a global audience” as the travel business is already a transaction that crosses borders. Keeping this in mind, KKday has always positioned itself globally, and vowed to move beyond just servicing the local Taiwan market since the day it was founded. It has been signing contracts with suppliers all over the world, providing local travel experiences, and also collaborates with large local brands as well, in an effort to gain recognition for the KKday brand as well.
“The funding we secured was a big boost for us to expand overseas,” Ming explains. With an initial startup capital of 1,680,000 USD, they have recently managed to close an A round funding of 4,500,000 USD at the beginning of 2016. They plan to continue their conquest of the overseas market.
Looking to Japan as an example, where the local travel industry is quite conservative, the Japanese tend to stick to local brand names that are familiar, so it has been quite a challenge for KKday to try and enter the Japanese market. KKday hopes to find a strategic partner in Japan willing to invest and work together, to better their chances.
For the moment, KKday will still focus on Southeast Asian countries, as there is a higher penetration rate of low cost carriers among Southeast Asia travel routes, coupled with a higher percentage of English and Chinese speaking population, thus making it a top priority for the team.
After that, they hope to expand heavily into Japan, and after taking Northeast Asia, they will set their sight on the China market. “China is a huge opportunity, but we will not make any brash moves to enter, before understanding what the market is like there,” Chen also adds that with Google and Facebook as two of their primary driving forces of business, which are both not available in China, it will be a while before they can understand the working mechanisms of WeChat and Baidu.
Since its inception less than 2 years ago, KKday has successfully become Asia’s largest “Destination Travel Site”, rewriting the local travel industry in this process. This proves that Chen’s initial outlook and insight of focusing on planning the “itinerary” and not the traditional route of flight and hotel bookings was a strategy that paid off, fulfilling the demands consumers at large.
The next step for KKday is to continue to branch out to other countries and travel experiences, signing on even more unique and distinctive “themed tours”, such as: travelling Japan in an RV, Hokkaido on Motorcycles; specially themed “experience travels” such as: visiting Korea as a Kpop “trainee”, or touring Japan’s “Ninja School”.
Chen has ventured into places that many of his competitors would not dare to, whether it’s setting up a site dedicated to selling tour packages, or allowing customers to rate their tours directly on site. Chen also aspires to touchdown in the States and going public on NASDAQ. If that were to happen someday, this would definitely mark an incredible milestone for them.
Author: Julia Lin, Translator: Kevin Wang, Editor: Yunchieh Tsou
This is an all-too-common scenario: You walk into a store, spend hours trying on clothes and shoes, yet leave empty handed. As you walk out the door, you feel the cold stare of the staff on your back, and you decide never to walk in again even if you see something you like.
Says SkyREC co-founder Catie Xie: “If customers stay in a store for a long time but don’t buy anything, staff service is one crucial aspect to improve on, but this also shows that the products on the shelf just aren’t attractive enough.” As Xie notes, many factors come into play when customers decide whether to make a purchase: how near or far away an employee stands, how and what the employee says about the product… All these aspects are challenges any retailer faces in this shopper-driven age. Growth only comes for brands that know what customers want.
Xie says, “In a brick-and-mortar store, customers spend nearly 80% of their time browsing and experiencing different products before they check out at the counter, and consumer behavior serves as a key index into their needs.”
“Goddess” of Taiwanese startups takes lead in foreign expansion.
SkyREC was founded in September 2013 by KS Mooi, JW Liao, and Catie Xie, to assist retailers with a physical presence in accurately determining consumer habits. After two years of research and development, the company officially launched its services in late 2015.
The three co-founders share a clear division of labor: SkyREC’s core technology is in the charge of Mooi, a graduate of the Department of Civil Engineering at National Taiwan Unviersity, and Liao, who holds a master’s degree in computer science and information engineering from National Pingtung University. Xie, with her impeccable verbal skills, oversees business and expansion abroad by taking part in trade shows and visiting clients.
Says Xie, “In this consumer-driven age, physical retailers need to grasp a deeper knowledge of their customers’ potential habits and behavior.”
SkyREC boosts clients’ customer flow and revenue by 20-25%
SkyREC has received considerable attention with its business intelligence analytical system for retailers. By using proprietary algorithms to conduct image and wifi analysis, the company can produce an accurate picture of what’s hot and what’s not on a store’s shelves, customers’ movements inside a store, and which places they tend to stay longer. The data is then presented in an easy-to-understand visual format, allowing stores to accurately grasp customer habits. Daily reports enable quick adjustments in the placement of products, which helps boost store revenue.
Visual reports present all aspects of customer behavior that retailers care about: the flow of passersby outside the store, the flow of customers inside the store, hotspots within the store, customer movements, popular and not-so-popular products, and checkout service efficiency. Offered daily, these reports allow each store to fine tune how they stock their shelves on the fly.
SkyREC has sold 600 service packages in 2016, with more than 500 clients in the Asia-Pacific region, of which nearly a third are stores in Taiwan. Their clients include A.S.O. Shoes, Life8, and VF Corporation, the owner of clothing and footwear brands including Timberland and Kipling.
According to Xie, “Most of our clients are in the fashion and clothing industry, with wholesale retailers and hypermarkets forming another substantial segment. After adopting SkyREC’s solutions for three to six months, our clients have seen customer flow and revenue rise by an average of 20-25%.”
“Many of our clients are amazed at how precisely our products suit their needs, and even think that we began in retail ourselves.” Xie stresses that they hired people “knowledgeable in the retail business” from the very beginning to focus entirely on business analysis for retailers, and it was their feedback that allowed the company to offer services that closely matched the needs of their clients.
Currently SkyREC centers exclusively on analysis for physical stores through collection of big data and market information; plans are for a further “professional system” within the next three years to help predict consumer behavior through artificial intelligence.
Think of SkyREC as a Siri for retailers. If you ask, “Hey SkyREC, how do I grow my revenue?” The automated voice might say something like, “According to my analysis, the temperature will drop by 10 degrees next week, and because red sweaters are the products most touched by your customers, I suggest having more red sweaters in stock for the upcoming year-end sale. I anticipate 800,000 customer visits in the first three days of the year-end sale, with 75% of these visits from loyalty card holders.”
International competitions as stepping stones to global stage
Having aimed its crosshairs on the global market from the very beginning, SkyREC has been an active participant in trade shows and competitions abroad as a means of gaining worldwide exposure. Global recognition has included winning the Slush Asia startup competition in Japan, special awards from Asia Beat and CES Asia, and first prize at GMIC G-Startup, as well as invitations to visit companies in Silicon Valley.
“We enter competitions not just to win awards; every competition is an opportunity for more exposure. This is especially the case when reaching the finalist stage, which helps bring more recognition to our brand.” Xie cherishes every opportunity in participating in large competitions, since these mean potential exposure for SkyREC, and with it future partners or target clients.
For example, winning the Japanese competition gave SkyREC the keys to the Japanese market, but as Xie notes, “The award was merely the first step in gaining Japanese partnerships. You also need time to cultivate a relationship with Japanese companies and gain their trust before you can begin any further collaboration.”
Companies wishing to enter the Japanese market must place a strong emphasis on the quality of their products, their reputation, and their after-sales service. They must also anticipate dedicating at least six months to one year to their efforts before seeing any results, since the Japanese value trustworthiness in their business partnerships, which requires foreign companies to devote dedicated effort in their ventures. SkyREC’s Japanese contacts include a large, distinctive chain bookstore and a noted railway company, with official partnership set for early 2017.
Xie stresses that the quickest way into any foreign market is local capital and connections. SkyREC is currently in its A-round of funding; but as Xie explains, “Funding in itself is not our main goal. More important is seeking out strategic investment that can assist us in expanding into China, Japan, and Southeast Asia.” Xie says that the company is currently in talks with both domestic and foreign investors, and expects to secure A-round funding within the next six months.
As for the future, SkyREC hopes to become the leading business analysis system provider in the Asia-Pacific region. Furthermore, with more than a decade of experience in startups, Xie personally hopes to one day become an investor or advisor for new and upcoming startups.
Author and Editor: Yunchieh Tsou, Translator: Athena Chen
Even as the world’s third largest economy with a domestic market population of 125 million, Japan has to maintain an international outlook, and take into consideration language and cultural barriers when growing their digital economy. And for the Japanese, it is not Silicon Valley or China– but the 1 billion people market in Southeast Asia, where smart devices are currently experiencing a surge of popularity. Taiwan startups can become the strategic ally the Japanese need to expand to SouthEast Asia.
Coming just behind the economies of United States and China, however, economic growth has not fared well in recent years for Japan. With distinct cultural and historical factors at play, the Japanese market has always been characterized as incestuous compared to their Western counterparts. After the economic bubble burst in 1987, though the Japanese transnational corporations could not relive their past glory, with a domestic market of 125 million, they at least maintained a facade of stable prosperity.
However, with the following long stagnation, ageing labor workforce, and high youth unemployment, a critical crisis looms large ahead for Japan. Japan’s stagnant economy has led to politicians bringing to the table all sorts of economic reforms and liberalization policies imaginable. In the past 10 years, Japan’s innovative entrepreneurship policies have grown alongside global trends of software innovations. Since prime minister Shinzō Abe was elected, in face of rising global forces of digital economies, Japan’s policies have all pointed to the inevitable move of pressing the “reset button”, in order to achieve new heights for the Japanese economy.
Japan’s internet startups, with their eyes set on expansion abroad and rising with the tide of digital economies, are the ones who wield the power to press the reset button. To support local startups and encouraging Japanese corporations to grow business overseas, are the the main focus of Japan’s digital economy policies.
The Japanese “edge” in SouthEast Asia Expansion
In the past 10 years, Japan has certainly nurtured a batch of digital native entrepreneurs, who are looking to become the seeds that the Japanese startup scene will sow globally.
“Instead of growing within the local market and then rolling out overseas, why not position to serve the global market on day one of starting your company? ” asks Taizo Son, serial entrepreneur and founder of online gaming company GungHo and Softbank.
The frequent moves overseas that Japan is making, has created a new opportunity for Taiwanese entrepreneurs. “Taiwan’s opportunities lie in going down South with the Japanese, ” says Mark Hsu, general partner of Pinehurst Advisors. Japan’s presence and partnerships in Southeast Asia have been expanding swiftly, and Hsu’s advice to Taiwan startups is to leverage that force as going it alone is a less effective than strategic alliances.
Mark Hsu tells us that, “The two largest economies in the world, China and the US all have a sizeable domestic market. The US have beat everyone in terms of industry development, but the focus has been solely on their domestic market needs; China has leaped and bounded forward, but with a population of 1.3 billion they have also created a domestic economy and market unique to themselves. What Japan differs from them, is that in face of a rapidly ageing society and shrinking economy, Japanese entrepreneurs face the reality of having to go abroad in order to survive and sustain. If you visit Vietnam, you will find that most investors there are Japanese.”
Mark Hsu thinks that Japanese companies are quite international in outlook, and have a strong advantage to expand overseas, the Japanese auto industry and consumer electronics have all begun their quest of international expansion early on, and have invested heavily in SouthEast Asian factories. “Now the internet companies have come to realize the need to expand internationally. But the Japanese, like the Americans, do not have an international frame of mind. This is evident in their uniform language and culture. In the past, it was traditional corporations that have gone overseas, and now the internet startups need to go abroad as well. ”
Why Not Head to SouthEast Asia, Since Taiwan Startups Have Needed to Go Global Since Day One?
From government policies, market size, to capital funding, the fundamental conditions that bolster the startup economy are lacking in Taiwan, stunting the growth and developments of Taiwanese startups. So looking for opportunities and resources beyond the border should be top of the list, and most importantly to enlarge the outlook of one’s entrepreneurship.
Jamie Lin of AppWorks thinks that, “SouthEast Asia might be Taiwan’s last golden opportunity. Only by redefining the role of Taiwan regarding SouthEast Asia, can there be a chance of growing a digital giant, standing a chance against China and the US.”
Compared to other Asian countries, Taiwan and Japan are culturally quite similar, which gives it great potential for collaboration between the two countries. “Taiwan will be a great testing ground for the Japanese if they want to go down South. With similarities in history and culture, Taiwan is the go to for testing products they want to take to SouthEast Asia. If a Japanese product doesn’t work in Taiwan, then it won’t stand a chance in SouthEast Asia.”
A great example of Taiwan and Japan alliance is the low-cost carrier search engine HelloWings, who have just closed a seed round funding with Pinehurst leading, and Singapore’s KK Fund and COENT Venture Partners onboard as well– their focus is set on SouthEast Asia’s low-cost carrier market.
Taking a closer look at HelloWings’ investors, the latter two are all Japanese founded venture firms. Koichi Saito, founder of KK fund, has worked within the Japanese venture capital industry in the past, and founded this venture fund to focus on SouthEast Asian startups two years ago. COENT VEnture Partners is also managed by Japanese, and has funded innovative startups all over Asia.
The current case of HelloWings points to a promising start of strategic partnerships between Taiwan and Japan in terms of resources and capital, but the real question at hand is– does Taiwan entrepreneurs have what it takes to scale globally and expand into the international market?
要提高台灣動畫業者的國際競爭力，實際參與國際級動畫電影製作，獲得國際大廠認同是最快途徑。舉例來說，台灣動畫業者砌禾動畫，就成功地以這樣的方式多次獲得日本遊戲公司史克威爾艾尼克斯（Square Enix）的合作機會；他們最近一次合作的動畫電影《最終幻想15 王者之劍》（KINGSGLAIVE FINAL FANTASY XV）在技術層次與全球票房都獲得高度肯定。
