Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo service Kiddy, announced on Monday that it had been recently acquired by Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121). Financial terms regarding the deal have not been disclosed but Compath.me’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando plus his some colleagues will join Mixi upon the acquisition. Mixi’s ‘Vantage Studio’ department, the new business development team directly led by Mixi co-founder and chairman Shinji Kasahara, has been offering a family photo service called Mitene (meaning ‘Check out this!’ in Japanese) since 2015. The company announced earlier this month that the app has acquired over 1 million users. According to the statement from Compath.me, the Kiddy app is expected to be merged into the Mitene app soon with the user migration. The Kiddy app will be completely shutting down in late April. Meanwhile, Mixi recently started broadcasting TV commercials across Japan to boost user acquisition for the Mitene app (see video below). Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011,…
Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo service Kiddy, announced on Monday that it had been recently acquired by Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121). Financial terms regarding the deal have not been disclosed but Compath.me’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando plus his some colleagues will join Mixi upon the acquisition.
Mixi’s ‘Vantage Studio’ department, the new business development team directly led by Mixi co-founder and chairman Shinji Kasahara, has been offering a family photo service called Mitene (meaning ‘Check out this!’ in Japanese) since 2015. The company announced earlier this month that the app has acquired over 1 million users. According to the statement from Compath.me, the Kiddy app is expected to be merged into the Mitene app soon with the user migration. The Kiddy app will be completely shutting down in late April.
Meanwhile, Mixi recently started broadcasting TV commercials across Japan to boost user acquisition for the Mitene app (see video below).
Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.
Compath.me has fundraised an undisclosed sum in a seed round from DG Incubation (the company operating Open Network Lab as well as the investment arm subsidiary of Digital Garage), Architype and Netprice.com (now known as Beenos, TSE:3328). Subsequently the startup raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United (TSE:2497) in May of 2014.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Compath Me, the startup best known for its family-centric photo-based social network service Kiddy, announced today that Ryo Sato, former COO of Tokyo-based Tab (previously known as Tonchidot, the startup that had been providing legendary augmented reality app Sekai Camera), has joined Compath Me as COO and CTO. With Sato on the team, Compath Me aims to improve product development and service design around the Kiddy platform. Sato had been serving Japanese internet company Netage (now known as United) as CTO and executive vice president, as well as devoting himself to overseas business development at Tab. Compath Me’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando explains why they hired Sato: Kiddy is still a family-centric social network platform but will be a hub for various information usages, such as home automation products in the future. We may let it handle videos as well, so we need to boost our technical skills. We initially thought to appoint Sato as COO, but later decided to appoint him as CTO as well because of his engineering background. Compath Me will restructure the engineering team under Sato to transform the company from a service operator into a technology-oriented company….
Tokyo-based Compath Me, the startup best known for its family-centric photo-based social network service Kiddy, announced today that Ryo Sato, former COO of Tokyo-based Tab (previously known as Tonchidot, the startup that had been providing legendary augmented reality app Sekai Camera), has joined Compath Me as COO and CTO. With Sato on the team, Compath Me aims to improve product development and service design around the Kiddy platform.
Sato had been serving Japanese internet company Netage (now known as United) as CTO and executive vice president, as well as devoting himself to overseas business development at Tab. Compath Me’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando explains why they hired Sato:
Kiddy is still a family-centric social network platform but will be a hub for various information usages, such as home automation products in the future. We may let it handle videos as well, so we need to boost our technical skills. We initially thought to appoint Sato as COO, but later decided to appoint him as CTO as well because of his engineering background.
Compath Me will restructure the engineering team under Sato to transform the company from a service operator into a technology-oriented company.
Sato will be appointed COO and CTO at Compath Me’s shareholder meeting later this month. Sato explains his aims for the company:
By combining forces of a person like me who has experienced working at several startups and young people who have great passion, we’ll grow the company better. We should be a company with strengths in software technology. We’ll focus on hiring interns and client-side engineers like iOS or Android app developers.
Since graduating from Tokyo-based incubator Open Network Lab in 2011, Compath Me had been operating without a fixed office space and team members worked remotely or at a co-working space for about three years. However, upon Sato’s joining the team, the company established an office in Yoyogi, Tokyo, to improve productivity and to better attract talented human resources. They will also set up a remote work environment to allow engineers to work from home.
iddy is a social network platform for families that allows photo sharing of kids. The Kiddy user base is a big asset for Compath Me. But as the kids of users grow up Compath Me will need to transfer the user base into another service in order to convert that asset into a new business. They have not yet decided whether to scale up the Kiddy platform or scale out to another service, but their team led by Sato will open up a new vista for the company.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo sharing platform Kiddy, announced today that it has raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United. The company was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. This latest news follows its previous seed funding from DG Incubation, Architype, and Netprice.com [1]. Low birth rate, high potential business The company launched its photo sharing platform in December of 2012, and subsequently started printing and delivering photo postcards and photobooks last year. So far Kiddy has acquired 50,000 households (or families) as users and over 3 million photo and comment entries on the platform. The company’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando explained a little more about the funding this time around: Our service allows users to deliver printed postcards or photobooks to as many as three different locations. We learned that many customers chose three locations, typically printing photos of their children and delivering them to both sets of grandparents. As for the photobooks, we are providing a premium version (3,100 yen per photo book, excluding shipping) using silver-halide prints in addition to the lower priced offering (1,550 yen per…
Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo sharing platform Kiddy, announced today that it has raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United.
The company was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. This latest news follows its previous seed funding from DG Incubation, Architype, and Netprice.com[1].
Low birth rate, high potential business
The company launched its photo sharing platform in December of 2012, and subsequently started printing and delivering photo postcards and photobooks last year. So far Kiddy has acquired 50,000 households (or families) as users and over 3 million photo and comment entries on the platform. The company’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando explained a little more about the funding this time around:
CEO Hiromichi Ando
Our service allows users to deliver printed postcards or photobooks to as many as three different locations. We learned that many customers chose three locations, typically printing photos of their children and delivering them to both sets of grandparents. As for the photobooks, we are providing a premium version (3,100 yen per photo book, excluding shipping) using silver-halide prints in addition to the lower priced offering (1,550 yen per book). The premium option is costly, but it’s selling well. Grandparents want to see how their grandchildren are growing even if they live far away. This motivation helps us increase our sales per customer.
In a low-birth rate society like Japan, it is said that every child has six money streams, if you count parents and grandparents. This concept helps the company be more profitable despite the fact that its user base is not as much as is typically needed for monetization.
Becoming an information platform
The startup intends to shift its platform from family photo storage to a comprehensive information platform where users learn what others family members are doing in their daily lives. Ando explained:
Three or four family members are typically connected to each other on our platform. A couple may divorce or remarry after having their child, so we’ll add a feature that allows users to control privacy about their photo or messages.
He plans to use these latest funds to hire new people and enhance the platform’s features. They are currently a four-person team, but they’ll add a COO and several engineers to accelerate system development efforts.
Global expansion
So far the company has about 20% of users, or about 10,000 families, accessing Kiddy from outside Japan. Considering this demand, they have to think about the internationalization of the platform. Ando explained how they will address the problem:
International shipping has been available only for postcards but not for our photo album products. But considering that as many as 20% of users are from outside Japan, we asked our printing and shipping companies to enable international shipping of photo album products, starting in the first week of June. Shipping charges will be higher than domestic delivery, but I think there’s a huge demand from users out there.
The service is currently available in English and Japanese. But in order to better serve its global user base, they will add French and German interfaces this July. The company has already exhibited and presented at several startup conferences in Europe, such as LeWeb in Paris and WebSummit in Dublin. Ando feels that these promotional activities has helped them build brand awareness in those regions.
In this space we’ve already seen many competitors, including Kazoc, Nicori, BabyDays, Ikumemo, and Wellnote (See this article for details). But Kiddy fares better than these competitors on the App Store in terms of number of reviews and average rating.
Moving forward Kiddy will focus on improving user satisfaction, with the end goal of having the top market share in Japan and the rest of the world. They hope to surpass a million households worldwide by the end of 2015.
Open Network Lab is the incubation arm of Japanese internet company Digital Garage. DG Incubation is the startup-focused investment arm of Digital Garage. The investment arm of NetPrice.com has been rebranded to Beenos. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind the mobile family photo service Kiddy, recently announced it has started accepting orders to print and deliver New Year’s cards from their users. Kiddy is designed to help families share photos securely (see our previous review of the app) and since its launch back in December, the startup has acquired 35,000 households from Japan and the rest of the world. Together those users have uploaded over 1.4 million family photos, and that’s without any aggressive promotional efforts from Compath.me. According to the company’s CEO, Hiromichi Ando, there are few secure ways to share photos with other family members, such as grandparents who might live far away. Facebook or Twitter might show them to an unintended audience, and services like DropBox and Flickr may be too complicated for some grandparents. Of course, sharing pictures over e-mail is troublesome. With that in mind, Kiddy works as a photo-sharing cloud for families rather than a social network platform. It allows users to order printed pictures which can then be delivered in a physical form like postcards or photobooks. In other words, you can easily deliver pictures of your kids to grandparents who…
Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind the mobile family photo service Kiddy, recently announced it has started accepting orders to print and deliver New Year’s cards from their users.
Kiddy is designed to help families share photos securely (see our previous review of the app) and since its launch back in December, the startup has acquired 35,000 households from Japan and the rest of the world. Together those users have uploaded over 1.4 million family photos, and that’s without any aggressive promotional efforts from Compath.me.
According to the company’s CEO, Hiromichi Ando, there are few secure ways to share photos with other family members, such as grandparents who might live far away. Facebook or Twitter might show them to an unintended audience, and services like DropBox and Flickr may be too complicated for some grandparents. Of course, sharing pictures over e-mail is troublesome.
With that in mind, Kiddy works as a photo-sharing cloud for families rather than a social network platform. It allows users to order printed pictures which can then be delivered in a physical form like postcards or photobooks. In other words, you can easily deliver pictures of your kids to grandparents who might be unfamiliar with most digital tools.
Taking their service one step further, Kiddy now allows you to create and order a New Year’s card. In addition to the many designs available to choose from, they also provide Pensta style templates, a set of stickers especially popular among young women.
Nohana, a subsidiary of Japanese social giant Mixi, which offers its own photo printing service, also recently launched a New Year’s card print and delivery service.
While many social interactions are adapting to digital, seasons greetings using your own mobile photos is the niche where analog media can still offer some value.
Update: Kiddy was chosen today as a finalist for the startup competition at LeWeb 2013, a tech event happening in Paris this December.
Tokyo startup accelerator Open Network Lab, led by MIT Media Lab’s director Joi Ito, held its demo day event today. We had a chance to check out a wide range of startups, not only from this latest batch, but also from the program’s previous five batches. Here’s a quick overview below. From the sixth batch 1. Zenclerk ¶ Website: zenclerk.com We can’t disclose much about their business because they’re in stealth mode, expected to launch next month. But you can infer what they’re working on from their website, as well as this short introductory video (in Japanese). They did not pitch at the event. 2. Papelook / Pape.mu girls ¶ Website: papelook.co.jp Pitched by: Ichiro Ozawa As some of our readers may remember that we previously featured Papelook, a photo collage/cropping app that allows users to share your fashion snapshots with others. It has now passed 5 million downloads since its initial launch back in March of 2012, growing at the impressive rate of 500,000 downloads a month. Almost 50% of all Japanese female smartphone users aged from 15 to 29 are using the app. In terms of differentiation from competing photo apps like Decopic and Snapeee, Papelook makes it…
Tokyo startup accelerator Open Network Lab, led by MIT Media Lab’s director Joi Ito, held its demo day event today. We had a chance to check out a wide range of startups, not only from this latest batch, but also from the program’s previous five batches. Here’s a quick overview below.
We can’t disclose much about their business because they’re in stealth mode, expected to launch next month. But you can infer what they’re working on from their website, as well as this short introductory video (in Japanese). They did not pitch at the event.
As some of our readers may remember that we previously featured Papelook, a photo collage/cropping app that allows users to share your fashion snapshots with others. It has now passed 5 million downloads since its initial launch back in March of 2012, growing at the impressive rate of 500,000 downloads a month. Almost 50% of all Japanese female smartphone users aged from 15 to 29 are using the app.
In terms of differentiation from competing photo apps like Decopic and Snapeee, Papelook makes it easier to sort good pictures from bad ones, which should keep your camera roll from being filled with unnecessary pictures.
Papelook alone does not make much money, but it transfers users to Pape.mu girls, their cash cow. Pape.mu girls is a fashion app that presents a variety of pictures and updates curated from models’ blogs or fashion brands. The app has 250,000 downloads so far, with 500,000 active users generating six million page views a month. What’s most impressive is the retention time of their users, logging an astounding 50 minutes per visit on average.
In this way, the photo collage app brings users on board, which then creates opportunities for brands to promote products with the fashion app. The startup has already managed to partner with Fashionwalker.com, one of Japan’s largest fashion e-commerce sites. The company is planning business expansion to the US and Mainland China soon.
Some of our readers may remember we featured Yangyang Xi, the founder and CEO of language learning platform Lang-8 in an exclusive interview back in February. The startup launched back in 2007 but since then has been operated by the founder on his own.
Mr. Xi was allowed to participate in the last batch of the acceleration program, hiring a CTO who previously worked at recipe sharing site Cookpad, as well as a designer.
With these fresh faces, Lang-8 has been seeing improvements in its access metrics. The growth rate of paid users is twice what it was a year ago, and revenue has almost doubled compared to a year ago. Business is finally in the black, and they can now begin developing a mobile app.
There’s no CGM-based language learning service using a mobile app, so that they expect to be on top of this space soon.
Back in December of 2011, Companth.me’s co-founder/CEO Hiromichi Ando explained his first app to me in an interview. They’ve been developing a number of apps since then, and the newest one is Kiddy.
Parents typically want to record the growth of their children with pictures, but most would prefer not to share all those snapshots with people on social network platforms who they might not be very close to. To address this problem, Kiddy is a photo sharing app that lets parents to share snapshots of their kids within a family group.
The app was launched last January, and more than 1,000 households have signed up for it so far. Comparing to other photo sharing apps, the Kiddy app is showing good user retention, and the ratio of weekly active users among its entire user base is between 40% to 50%, meaning that about one in every two users makes use of the app at least once a week.
With the potential to generate a great lifetime value, the startup expects to enhance the app as a platform for sharing pictures among family members. They have several monetization ideas including photo printing, or new e-commerce services that propose that you buy something that fits the specific occasion/time of your photo.
Website:govoyagin.com Pitched by: Masashi Takahashi, Entertainment Kick
This service initially set out to create a travel experience marketplace for tourists visiting Japan. But subsequently they enhanced their ideas to cover five Asian countries: Japan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. They are focusing on the Asian market because there are about 42 million travelers that hit region each year, with the market estimated to be worth over $4.2 billion.
Voyagin is planning to move its headquarters to Singapore by the end of this year.
This service is being operated a pair of developer co-founders. They are often asked by other developers to create smartphone apps, and were wondering why developers outsource development work to other developers. Finally they reached a conclusion. System developers in their 20s are familiar with programming languages like Objective-C or Ruby on Rails, but those in their 30s are better versed in conventional technologies like MySQL or Java.
With this insight the startup identified a sort of technology generation gap in the developer community. And it’s a gap that they aim to fill.
They’ve established set up a 20 to 60 hour lecture program for less experienced developers to learn about app development, and a range of related topics. They are also planning to providing some new courses for IT companies to train their employees.
After all the presentations were made, Kaoru Hayashi, the CEO of the accelerator’s parent company Digital Garage, announced that the top prize at the Demo Day event was awarded to the aforementioned Papelook.
The Open Network Lab accelerator is now accepting applications for the next batch of its acceleration program. The deadline is May 31st at noon.
Compath.me 
Masaru Ikeda
Tokyo startup accelerator 
