Press Release

5th December 2012
Kadinche Corporation

Kadinche corp. in Japan starts to provide “Panoplaza for Portal” a virtual tour contents builder for portal website. As the first stage, Shanon Inc in Japan has adopted this Panoplaza as a “Virtual Event Platform”.

Background:

Panorama contents had been utilized as eye-catchers in websites especially in the field of real estates, hotels, and wedding venues. One of the problems in these panorama contents is that the panorama contents had not been integrated with other essential data and information on many portal websites. Panoplaza for Portal let our clients use panorama contents as a data platform and create attractive websites and applications.

Characteristics:

1, Utilizing Panorama Contents in Collaboration with Existing System

Panoplaza for Portal is designed and implemented so as to integrate with clients’ existing CRM and CMS using APIs. Our clients can utilize not only their users and contents management mechanism but also realize the access tracking and user analysis from panorama virtual contents.
– CRM: Customer Relation Management
– CMS: Contents Management System

2, Multimedia Contents on Panorama Virtual Tours

Panoplaza for Portal can handle multimedia contents such as movies, slides, and external html pages in the virtual contents. Since the system runs on the global and fast cloud service platform Heroku and Amazon Web Service, the viewers can expect light and quick response of virtual contents from various devices including PCs, mobiles, and tablets.

Introductuion Example: Shanon Inc.

Shanon Inc based in Tokyo Japan is a private company providing marketing management platform. They have adopted the Panoplaza for Portal to be integrated with their marketing platform and started to provide “Virtual Event Platform” on 4th December 2012. The visitors to the Virtual Event Platform can view and download contents in virtual booth of exhibition and trade show. Panoplaza for Portal has been integrated with Shanon’s system by using user management and analysis tracking mechanisms.

1 Year & 7 Months from Great East Japan Earthquake

This was my first visit to the great east Japan earthquake area after it happened on Mar. 11th 2011. 1 year and 7 months has passed. I felt sorry to be late but after the earthquake, Japan was in a unusual situation and we were busy keeping our life here in Tokyo area.

Kesennuma, Miyagi, Japan

I could visit Kesennuma because we could get a project creating panorama virtual shops here using Panoplaza. Before and after the virtual shop shooting I could stop by other spots which are affected by huge tsunami right after the earthquake. In Kesennuma city about 1500 people are killed or missed because of tsunami. I could even see the ground sinking in harbor area showing that this area is very near to ocean surface and it is really dangerous for tsunami and high tide.

Panorama Shooting in Kesennuma

Most of the harbor area was flattened by the earthquake and only about 5% of land space is utilized right now. Most of the rubble was already removed from the space and the area looks like a vacant site. Because all the street lamps were swept away by tsunami, it is completely dark in the night. This is the panorama photo taken in such area.

Panorama Shooting at No.18 Kyoutokumaru Ship

This big ship named No.18 Kyoutokumaru were carried by tsunami to land which is 500m away from the sea. The ship is about 60m long and 330 tons in weight. Since it is too huge to carry, it is still there. It now becomes a symbolic site and there are some tourist coming to this place.

Kesennuma Restoration Stall Village

I could have my dinner at Kesennuma Restoration Stall Village and could hear the story from one of the shop owner there.

Right After the Quake

– The blackout has occurred right after the quake and traffic signal was out of use.
– He avoided using the harbor road because of traffic jam occurred by blackout signal.
– When he drove down from the mountain side he could see tsunami coming from the ocean.
– All the family members were survived but his restaurant was swept away by tsunami.

Restoration Stage

– He could restart his restaurant here with many supporters.
– Gradually the sales is increasing thanks to word of mouth and other PR.
– These restaurants are not so much for locals but for tourists.
– Disaster area sightseeing is popular now and he thanks to that trend.
– You can visit Hiraizumi the world heritage sight after visiting Kesennuma.

Undergoing Economic Restoration

As you can see from the above report, hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops are trying to recover from the disaster. They are waiting for more tourists to come back to this area. And I could also find that it is high time helping them economically and technically. We will continue contacting them and would like to help them in any ways.

soko aoki

Panorama Virtual Shop

We have been working on panorama virtual shops by providing Panoplaza for last 1.5 years. Several department and retail stores have adopted Panoplaza in their online shops. Some stores got a lot of page views and appeared in media. Some others are utilizing the virtual shop as Online to Offline (O2O) tool. We are succeeding to show one style of next generation online commerce!

Let us share some functionalities which our clients most welcomed.

Linked to E-Commerce

Conventional virtual tours only let users go around the space. But virtual shops created by Panoplaza are integrated with online shop. Each item on the panorama photos is tagged and linked to its detail page on e-commerce website. Therefore viewers not only view the shops but also actually purchase the merchandise there.

Keyword Search

If a virtual store has large space some may feel difficulty finding their preferred items. So we are providing keyword search function. Once the user input keywords the shop return the list. Clicking on one of the list will let user visit the new spot where his/her item is located.

Share by Twitter

Yes we love to share our shopping experience or items to our friends and relative. During checking an item in the virtual shop you can find twitter button there. By clicking this button you can share both this item and item’s location in the virtual shop.

Demo Video: Panoplaza for E-Commerce

Here are some articles on Panoplaza in English. Please check them and let me know if you have any comments or questions.

“Ecommerce Meets Eye-Candy: Japan’s Panoplaza Produces Virtual Storefronts” on Tech in Asia

“Two New Virtual Shops Open in Japan Using Panoplaza” on Tech in Asia

“Panoplaza brings shopping to a whole new perspective with virtual panoramic online store views” on e27

“Panoplaza opens new virtual shop and enters the real estate and events market” on e27

Japanese loves trips. As you may notice in your country, Japanese is everywhere. Some people travel in a group and others travel by themselves. Recently young generation visits not only major destinations such as North America and Europre but also Asia, Africa, and South America.

Kadinche is helping Bhutan

Kadinche is helping Tourism Council of Bhutan in their tourism promotion in Japan. We especially working on maintenance of Japanese written website, social marketing, and event exhibition such as JATA (Japan Association of Travel Agents) JATA Tourism Forum & Travel Showcase. Since the opening of the website, it gets a lot of popularity among general viewers, travel agencies, and media related people. Japan visit by His & Her Majesty King of Bhutan also attracted Japanese to this country.

Web promotion & marketing of your country

More & more Japanese are tend to search for their next vacation destination by using the Internet. In this kind of occasion, Japanese written official website and friendly social media such as Facebook page and Twitter are useful. Especially for the local tour operators and optional tour providers, direct & mutual communiation with these potential customers would lead to the direct increase of your customers.

How do you appeal your country?

Of course the website and social media would be the main channel. And what will you write and show in these channel? Why don’t you put movies, sounds, and panorama virtual tours of your nature, hotel, and sightseeing spots! You can refer to some of the space expression contents in our blog. We are ready to help you. Please feel free to contact us from this form.

Space Expression Technology

Many of websites are dealing with spaces such as shops, hotels, restaurants, real estates, and sightseeing spots. However space expression technology has not been improved since the birth of world wide web and people are still using conventional pictures. Kadinche is conducting research and development of space expression technology such as 3D modeling and panorama virtual tour.

3D Scanning & 3D Modeling

Since the establishment of Kadinche, we were working on 3D modeling using a panorama camera and a laser scanner. At that time 3D metaverse such as Secondlife and Playstation Home were popular applications. Therefore we thought it would be better if we can create the 3D space based on the real space. But the problem was that the cost of building 3D model . It was not suitable for website market. So we halted the 3D modeling and changed to panorama virtual contents.

Panorama Virtual Tour： Panoplaza

Now are providing Panoplaza. Panoplaza is a web-based tool to create virtual tours using panorama photos. The users need to upload the panorama photos onto our cloud service and there they can create and edit the virtual tour. The service is good for shops, real estates, and other environment. There are already many cases who have applied Panoplaza in their websites and applications.

R&D on Space Expression Tech

These space expression contents are provided in the form of websites, applications, and e-books. Please feel free to contact us if there is anything we can help your business promoting your nice spaces.

soko aoki

Kadinche is conducting research & development on space expression technology. But to evaluate each tech, we need to compare the performance one by one. As a summer vacation home work, I have written a report on comparison of space expression techlonogy.

Picture

As for material of space expression, I selected Banyan Tree Phuket Hotel in Thailand. People enjoy this kind of resort hotel and space itself is so important. Therefore I believed this would be a great material to do the evaluation. We want to have more space expression contents in the official website or hotel portal site.

Regular pictures are easy to shoot, light volume, and easy to handle & edit. These are the reasons that pictures are major method to show how the hotel and resort looks like. But because the point of views is static, we can not see around the area. To express the atmosphere of the resort, we need many photos in higher resolution.

Video

A video is good because we can change the point of view and recognize the size & atmosphere of the resort. The demerit of video is that the data size would be quiet huge and a little bit difficult to edit.

Soundscape

I really liked the soundscape recorded by linear PCM recorder. In the same place the sound differs time to time. So I recorded the sound at one place at three different times. Yes, we prefer comfortable environment to noisy place. It would be interesting to choose the resort not only room and environment but also soundscape.

– Fine Morning (with singing of insects)

– Fine Evening (with singing of insects)

– Rain Evening (with rain sound and the thunderbolt)

Panorama Virtual Tour （Panoplaza）

And of course, panorama virtual tour is easy to understand the space because we can observe 360 degrees. Maybe we can add sound to our Panoplaza to re-create the real space.

We should have richer multimedia contents such as shown here in the hotel websites, real estate websites, and in other promotional materials. Richer contents conveys better impression to viewers.

soko aoki

We would like to thank all the visitors and guests who came to our booth at Echelon 2012 in Singapore. It was a great opportunity to discuss with various kinds of people from many different countries in Asia. Feel free to contact us if you are interested in installing Panorama Virtual Shop & Tours in your business. See you soon!

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Kadinche has been providing the panorama virtual shop service using Panoplaza. These panorama virtual shops had got so much attention especially in Japanese e-commerce and department store’s website. Since we opened the service in English, many online media had written articles on Panoplaza.

“Panoplaza brings shopping to a whole new perspective with virtual panoramic online store views” (e27)
“Two New Virtual Shops Open in Japan Using Panoplaza” (Tech in Asia)
“Panoplaza: turning a retail store into an online showroom” (Trusted Shops)

Now it is time to present and exhibit our service by ourselves. We are going to exhibit “Panoplaza” in Echelon 2012 in Singapore!

Echelon 2012
Date: 11th-12th June 2012
Venue: University Cultural Center, National University of Singapore, Singapore

We would be happy to show our latest panorama virtual shops including Tokyu, Nissen, and Isetan. We welcome not only these single shots virtual shop making but long term relation so that we can maintain and update the virtual shop every day to keep viewers and customers visit the online shops.

For more details about Panoplaza, please visit here. See you there!

We are pleased to announce that three new panorama virtual shops are opened in April 2012. To build these panorama virtual shops, we use Panoplaza an online virtual shop building tool. You can log-in to Panoplaza from here.

Tokyu: Shibuya ShinQs Virtual Switchroom

F
ShinQs is a new shopping mall opened on 26th April 2012 by Tokyu Department Store. In this shopping mall, restrooms called “Switchroom” are shown as virtual tour content using Panoplaza. The viewers not only can see inside of “Switchroom”, but also they can check the night scenery of Shibuya. The night scenery was shot from 33th floor of that building and you can find the giga-pixel panorama photo from 5th floor of virtual switchroom.
http://www.tokyu-dept.co.jp/shinqs/about/panorama.html/ (Japanese page)

Nissen: Smileland Virtual Shop

Smileland Virtual Shop is a panorama virtual shop based on Nissen’s Smileland store in Shibuya. The visitors can go around the virtual shops, check about 120 tagged items, and actually buy them online. It also enables user to do the keyword search using the “Call the sales person” button. It is good eye-catch tool for E-commerce and also effective O2O (Online to Offline) tool for real retail stores.
http://storage.panoplaza.com/publish/e303744b-1330-4ae1-b945-2ab60446d5fa/index.html (Contents are in Japanese)

Isetan: Virtual Isetan Haneda Store

Isetan Haneda Store is the Isetan’s new shop opened in the Haneda airport recently. Since this shop is located in the checked in area, regular customers are hard to visit unless they fly from that airport terminal. Therefore they have opened the virtual shop to enable viewers to watch inside of shops. This virtual shop is provided in two formats: website and Android application. Users can touch the virtual shop by using Android tablets located in Haneda airport and Isetan Shinjuku.
http://www.isetan.co.jp/icm2/jsp/others/haneda/index.html (Contents are in Japanese)

If you are interested for these virtual shops, please feel free to contact us. Contact page is here.

Kadinche received two awards for its web service “Panoplaza”!

Tablet Solution Award 2012

We could receive Tablet Solution Award 2012 （Android Tablet）Sponsor Corporation award (Sony Marketing). The award ceremony took place on 28th Feb 2012 at the Headquarter of NTT Docomo.

Microsoft Innovation Award 2011

We also received Microsoft Innovation Award 2011 Award for Excellence. The award ceremony took place on 7th Apr 2012 at the Headquarter of Microsoft Japan.

Thank you very much for giving us such opportunities!

Kadinche has been providing “Panoplaza” panorama virtual shop building tool in Japan for about a half year. Since launching of the service, about five business users officially utilized the panorama virtual shop in their E-commerce websites. Their page views and sales has been increasing tremendously.

Now we are ready to open the tool to international market with additional functionalities. We are going to present and exhibit “Panoplaza” international version in Startup Asia in Singapore.

Startup Asia
Date: 2nd-3rd February 2012
Venue: Singapore Post Centre, Singapore

In the brand new Panoplaza, “Search” function is enabled. When the user input their keyword in the search box, the panorama photo rotates and shows where the merchandise is. You can view the panorama virtual shops both from personal computers and tablet devices.

For more details, please visit here.