This disruptive tech started with a dance move - a podcast by Tim Romero: Serial startup founder in Japan and indomitable innovator

It's hard to get paid to do what you love.

Perhaps no one understands this better than dancers, but Taku Kodaira and his team at Mikro Entertainment are on a mission to fix that.But this conversation, and Mikro Entertainment itself, is about much more than dance. Mikro's marketplace for dance moves is just the first application of Mikro's new motion-capture technology, and things are just getting started. Today, Taku and I talk about the surprising economics of dance moves, the adoption curve of disruptive technology, dance-move lawsuits. and one very important law that looks like it is about to change.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.


Show NotesHow you sell a dance moveMaking a market - who is buying dance movesWhy growing up international made it easier to start a startupHow copyright law needs to expand
One danger in allowing dance moves to be copyrightedLawsuits against Epic Games over Fortnight dancesHow big is the motion capture industryThe adoption curve for  disruptive technologyWhy it is impossible for any startup ecosystem to have enough engineersLinks from the Founder

Everything you ever wanted to know Mikro and GesRecFriend Taku on Facebook
Mikro coverage in Wired (in Japanese)How to use GesRec models in Unity

 Transcript
Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.
Truly disruptive technology is usually hard to spot when it first shows up. Sure, after the IPOs and the mass market success, everyone claims that they knew it all along. But in the early days, disruptive technology is usually shrugged off as being too simplistic or unprofitable or most often, just a solution looking for a problem. When Kodak invented the digital camera, they dismissed it as a toy with no real commercial applications. LED light bulbs were first written off as impractical. And in 1911, the military brass dismissed the airplane as, quote,"a scientific toy with no military value."All of these seemed like, well, solutions looking for problems. 
We'll pick up that thread later. But I want you to keep it in mind as we sit down today and we talk with Taku Kodaira, the founder of Mikro Entertainment, who's developed technology that can create full 3D motion capture models for mobile phone videos. 
Now, Taku's initial and current application of this technology is the world's first global marketplace in dance moves, and he has some of the world's most famous dancers signed up on the platform. 
But this is a conversation that will take us on a journey of how digital dancing is already being monetized in gaming and social media, about copyrights in dance and plagiarism and choreography. And we'll also explore the new uses and new markets that this technology will open up in the future. 
But you know, Taku tells that story much better than I can, so let's get right to the interview.

InterviewTim: So I'm sitting here with Taku Kodaira, the founder of Mikro Entertainment and GesRec motion capture marketplace. And thanks for sitting down with us.
Taku: Thank you very much, Tim.Tim: Now, what you guys are doing, it's really amazing tech, but you know, you can probably explain it a lot better than I can. So what does it do and what are you selling?
Taku: Right. So just starting about the name GesRec, we tried to combine two words gesture and recognition and tried to create like a one word. My wife is a dancer, and I've been talking to her and she told me all the difficulty dancers are facing, and we just realized, okay, these people are doing so much stuff out there. Is there any way we can try to support them? Right now we are utilizing our technology to capture 3D motion and turn it into the data from the 2D video. And we are creating a marketplace that we sell and trade those 3D motions that's actually coming from a lot of people,

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