Startups

Half a century has passed since the first humans landed on the moon and today, the space industry has hit a major tipping point. One after another, private companies have entered the space business, in which countries used to compete by staking their national prestige.

Twenty-nine-year-old venture capitalist James Riney has some ideas on who may be the nation’s next Mercari Inc.

The thawing relationship between Japan and China is creating new investment opportunities, particularly in startup-related areas that have been overlooked by traditional lenders, said veteran Hong Kong investor Victor Chu at a conference in Tokyo Tuesday.

Across most of Asia, people pay for taxi rides, restaurant meals and merchandise with smartphone-readable barcodes — except in Japan, where cash is still king.

Now, as the country’s biggest web companies race to capture the payments market, one Tokyo-based startup says it has a fighting chance to win with its QR app.

By the age of 34, Akiko Naka has already experienced more career-wise than most people do in a lifetime.She started by getting hired by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where she worked as an equity saleswoman. When she left that job, she tried to make it as a professional manga artist. When that didn’t work out, she landed a job at Facebook Inc.

Kyoto University is combining venture capital with that from a peer in the Chinese city of Guangzhou to help startups from the university do business in China and other Asian markets.

Within five years, consumers will enjoy an all-purpose household robot that will help them make dinner, brings dishes to the sink and tidies up while they are out. That's the goal of Toru Nishikawa, 35-year-old founder CEO of Preferred Networks, a Tokyo-based technology startup.

Old-fashioned underpants and turning insects into fish feed might not be the first things that come to mind when someone mentions Panasonic, but these are just some of the ideas being developed at 100banch, a shared work space set up by the Japanese electronics maker.

Japanese electric vehicle startup FOMM will spend 1 billion baht ($30.4 million) to set up in Thailand its first-ever production site, the company said Tuesday at a news conference here.

Japan will make it easier for startups and other technology companies to gain access to medical records as part of an effort to drive innovation and spur investments in the health care sector. To ensure that businesses handle personal health information appropriately, a certification program will be set up by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which has requested 1.1 billion yen ($9.62 million) as part of its fiscal 2019 budget to help fund the program.  A panel of experts will hammer out rules governing privacy, ethics and other considerations.