Japan’s Bravesoft Enlists Phroni to Enhance News Reading Experience

Readers may recall Japanese startup Phroni from our Startup Asia conference in Singapore last February. The service, from Studio Ousia, facilitates smartphone browsing by converting certain notable words that a user might want to search, and converts them into useful links.

Today Studio Ousia is announcing that Phroni is being used by Bravesoft Corporation in its News Agent service, which currently has more than 500,000 users. We’re not sure of the exact terms of the partnership, but we understand there will be some revenue shared between the two.

In addition, Bravesoft is also launching a reader for Google News content called News Plus, which is available from the Apple App Store and the Google Play store today. Currently the app is just in Japanese. But this is the first trial of the Phroni API, and we’re told that the startup aspires to spread it to more reading apps moving forward.

The opportunities for Phroni on the Japanese web might be relatively larger than on the English-speaking internet, as Japanese users seem to like services that dish up the news all in one place. In addition, most major news organizations in Japan are typically devoid of hyperlinks, with print content more or less copied and pasted to the web [1]. I wonder if Phroni might have similar opportunities if it looked to China, where articles from major news orgs are also mainly plain text.

It was just back in February when Phroni received 70 million yen ($864,000) in funding from Nissay Capital. It’s good to see the startup making good progress since then.