New Context Announces Name Change To Neo Innovation To Accelerate Global Business Development Under “Neo”

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Nov. 29, 2012 – New Context, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tokyo-based Digital Garage (JASDAQ: 4819), today announced that it has changed its name to Neo Innovation, Inc. and will be trading under the mark of Neo. Neo helps startups, enterprises and governments bring better products to market faster through agile software development* and lean design*.

“The first phase of Neo was focused on acquisitions. We hand-picked the best talent in the lean development and design world, and created a global footprint,” said Ian McFarland, founder and president of Neo. “Our energies have now turned to operational growth.”

Launched in March 2012, Neo employs more than 80 people in six offices worldwide. The company grew rapidly through a series of acquisitions, bringing together the teams from EdgeCase (UK and Ohio), the Singapore unit of Pivotal Labs, Cubox (Uruguay) and Proof (New York). EdgeCase, Pivotal Labs Singapore and Cubox were all agile development, Ruby on Rails and mobile development firms, while Proof specialized in Lean UX* and Lean Startup* execution.

Eric Ries, general partner at Neo and author of bestselling book “The Lean Startup”, said, “For a long time, Neo was just a shared vision, grounded in delivering lean startup software development and design services at scale. Fast forward to today, and this vision has become a reality.”

Across the globe, Neo teams are: helping clients design and deliver innovative mobile and Web products; working with large enterprises to make them more lean and agile; and building out the internal innovation practices at Fortune 500 companies. Neo remains at the forefront of best-practice Ruby on Rails* and iOS software development.

[ABOUT NEO]
Headquartered in San Francisco, Neo Innovation, Inc. (www.neo.com) has offices in North and South America, Asia and Europe. Neo provides agile software development and lean design* as an “on-demand” service to enterprises, startups and governments. Clients include American Express OPEN, Adaptive Path, AppFog, PayPal, Sunlight Foundation, Viki and Luxola.

In collaboration with Eric Ries, Neo will be presenting “The Lean Startup Conference” (http://leanstartup.co) on December 3-4, 2012, in San Francisco.

[ABOUT DIGITAL GARAGE]
Tokyo-based Digital Garage (JASDAQ: 4819) focuses mainly on 3 business domains: Incubation of Internet Startups, Marketing business and Online Payment Platform business. Since its inception in 1995, the company has pioneered various domains of Internet businesses in Japan, including portals, media representation, e-commerce, mobile communication and blogging. An investor in Twitter and Path, Digital Garage has created partnerships to customize the Japanese versions of Twitter and LinkedIn.

Agile Software Development – A method of software creation designed to improve efficiency, with requirements and solutions evolving through collaboration. Characterized by short development cycles, agile development allows teams to shift direction quickly, to foresee interactions throughout the cycle, and to be highly responsive to changes in business requirements.

Lean Startup – A set of practices for helping both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs increase the odds of building a successful new business. Lean Startup methodologies rely on validated learning direct from the market, scientific experimentation, and iterative product releases to shorten product development cycles, measure progress, and gain valuable customer feedback.

Lean Design/Lean UX – Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean Design and Lean UX are the practices of bringing the true nature of user experience (UX) work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on results.

Ruby on Rails – An open-source, web application framework for the Ruby programming language. More than 235,000 web sites run Ruby on Rails, including: Github, Scribd, Groupon, Shopify and Basecamp.