Masaru Ikeda · · 2 min readJapan’s Qlippy Pivots To Make E-book Readers Social, Raises Half Million Dollars
Spinning Works, a Tokyo-based start-up, has created Qlippy, an SDK for adding social functions to various e-book reader apps and platforms. It announced on Monday that it has fundraised 41 million yen (approximately $535,000).
This comes from several private investors including Nissei Capital (the investment arm of Japan’s second largest life insurance company), Sansei Capital (that of Japan’s Mitsui Life Insurance) and Project Ocean (a Tokyo-based independent pre-IPO consultancy).
Qlippy was released in August 2010 in its alpha version. It used to be a combination of a website and the iPad app which allows users to import EPUB-formatted content via iTunes and to share the text you’ve clipped with other users over the Internet. But the service appears to have pivoted to introduce an SDK for third-party e-book readers in an effort to acquire a critical mass of users.
Today Qlippy’s social function allows you to share reading experiences with other users by quoting your favorite part of a book and commenting on it via Twitter and Facebook. It is available with various e-book readers and content distribution platforms such as PurchasePlug from No 28. Inc. and Aero Browser from Clealink Technology. More e-book reading environments are expected to be compatible soon.
With these funds, the start-up expects to add more engineers to accelerate its service development further,this according to its founder and CEO Yoichi Shirakata. Mr. Shirakata is an almuni of Japan’s Y-combinator-like incubation program, Open Network Lab. He previously worked with German business management application vendor SAP.
For more on information, check out these links or the promo video below.
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