Rick Martin
A few weeks back we mentioned Japan’s Community Factory, a company acquired by Yahoo Japan a year ago, which produces a number of cute/kawaii apps for smartphones. The most notable of these apps is its Decopic app, but the company aspires to overrun your entire homescreen with uber-pink cuteness.
Community Factory’s latest hit is Petatto Memo, a memo application that lets you pin cute little notes (in the form of web shortcut icons) to your homescreen as visible reminders of things you have to do.
This is admittedly a somewhat crude approach to task management, with so many great to-do and reminder apps out there. But for people out there who want something that stays in their face, these homescreen reminders will certainly do the trick.
Even after you type the text into your memo and pit it, you can edit it at a later date if you choose. There are over 300 varieties of cute memos to choose from, so there’s lots of room for creativity. Personally, I think the adding/editing process is maybe a little clumsy, but I guess that’s the sacrifice you make for getting a visible note pinned to your homescreen [1].
Currently Petatto Memo is the third ranked free app in the Japanese app store, and is number one in the Lifestyle category. It’s sister app, Petatto Calendar, is number four in the Lifestyle Calender, and ladies who enjoy the memo app might want to try that as well.
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I tend to scoff at these super cute apps sometimes. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that they are pretty big business here in Japan, and are turning out to be a very exportable part of Japan’s mobile content industry. ↩
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Masaru Ikeda
Junya Mori
