Posts Tagged ‘japan’

Dave McClure’s 500 Startups Fund Invests In Tokyo-Based P2P Lending Service AQUSH

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Dave McClure‘s 500 Startups fund has just made its fourth investment in Asia. Tokyo-based Exchange Corporation, which runs a peer-to-peer lending service called AQUSH in Japan, has raised an undisclosed sum from the Silicon Valley-based fund.

Much like Zopa in the UK, AQUSH connects people with extra money with those who want to borrow money. The site allows lenders to set their desired investment amount and interest rates from 4% to 15% for 5 classes of borrower credit risk, as denoted by AQUSH itself. Loan applicants are screened by AQUSH based on their credit histories, financial situation and FICO scores.

The service launched in December last year, with Exchange CEO Russell Cummer saying AQUSH has received more than 1.1 billion Yen (US$14.3 million) in loan applications so far (with an approval rate of less than 20%). The average size of AQUSH loans stands at more than 445,000 Yen (US$5,750) per borrower.

AQUSH and their new investor are looking at a huge market: the startup’s goal is to unlock some of the more than $7 trillion of retail cash and bank deposits by offering individual investors access to the $300 billion Japanese consumer loan market.

The Asia-based companies 500 Startups invested in before AQUSH include translation service myGengo (Japan/previous coverage), user-generated video editing/subtitling site ViiKii (South Korea/Singapore), and cloud computing service provider ChinaNetCloud (previous coverage).

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Dave McClure’s 500 Startups Fund Invests In Tokyo-Based P2P Lending Service AQUSH

Sharp to Launch Two 3D Android Handsets

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How do you feel about the idea of a 3D display on a phone? Having to wear a pair of special glasses to be able to enjoy 3D content on a mobile phone doesn’t sound very practical, but Sharp has a solution in the way of two glasses-free 3D Android handsets.

Bearing the names Galapagos 003SH and 005SH, both handsets sport 1GHz Snapdragon CPUs, Android 2.2, and a 3.8-inch 3D-capable display with 800 x 480 pixel resolution. The main difference between the two phones is the full QWERTY keyboard on the 005SH, but 003SH makes up for it with a slightly better camera, a 9.6 megapixel model capable of recording 720p video, while 005SH sports a (still formidable) 8-megapixel camera.

With 3D currently being all the rage in the world of video entertainment, the technology will inevitably start spilling into the world of smartphones, which – in today’s world of handsets with large touch screens – are just as much mobile entertainment platforms as they are phones. While we don’t know much about the 3D capabilities of Sharp’s upcoming devices, a glasses-free 3D display sounds like the right path in the context of smartphones.

And if you’re wondering about the lack of 3D content for these devices, Capcom has announced the 3D versions of their games Mega Man, Ghosts ‘n Goblins: Gold Knights, and Resident Evil: Degeneration for Android, and the first smartphones to feature these games will be the 003SH and 005SH from Sharp.

The 003SH is coming to Japan’s Softbank this December, and the 005SH is due February next year.

[via Engadget]

More About: 3D, android, Mobile 2.0, Sharp, smartphone

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Sharp to Launch Two 3D Android Handsets