Mixi’s Nohana to donate photo books to local kindergarten schools

SHARE:

nohana_photobook

Back in February we wrote about a new service from Mixi’s (TYO:2121) innovation team called Nohana. Using the Nohana smartphone app, users can create a photo book using snapshots taken with their mobile, and then received that printed book via mail. Users in Japan can receive one free picture book per month (not including a 90 yen shipping fee), but for each one after that they need to pay 500 yen (or about $5).

According to the folks over at Venture Now, Nohana currently has 30,000 users, with over 8,000 photo books published since the February launch. And it was just announced a few days ago that Nohana would be donating pre-paid Nohana credit to selected nurseries and kindergartens.

The specific establishments will be selected by lottery, and Nohana will donate 1 percent of its published book total to these facilities. So in other words, based on their 8,000 total books published thus far, eight facilities will receive prepaid cards for 5,000 yen Nohana credit, good enough to buy 10 photo books (or 80 in total).

These child care establishments have expressed a need to share photos with parents, to give them a better indication of the child care environment and activities. And from Nohana’s perspective, this is a good way to introduce more parents to their photo printing service.

Personally, I’ve already printed a couple of books with Nohana. And so far the service has been great. If you do try out the service for yourself, do make sure that the photos you select for printing are nice and sharp, because paper is far less forgiving than your smartphone screen.

[Via Venture Now]