THE BRIDGE

tag photo printing

Japanese family photo service Kiddy now providing New Year’s cards

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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…

kiddy_newyearcard_screenshot

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 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.

Mixi tries again: New photo printing service ‘Nohana’ targets parents in Japan

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Japanese social network Mixi (TYO:2121) just launched a new photo service named Nohana (meaning ‘wild flowers’ in Japanese) targeting parents with small children. This move makes a lot of sense considering that the early users of the social network, which launched way back in 2000, are now a little older and likely to have children of their own. The app is surprisingly simple and is completely separate from Mixi proper. After signing up, you can invite your family members by entering their phone numbers. Once this is done, you can upload or take photos with the iOS app [1] and then every month users (in Japan) can receive a free (90 yen shipping fee not included) printed photo book. The first book of each month is always free, however each additional book costs 525 yen and there is free shipping for orders above 1,050 yen (about $11). Nohana is Mixi’s answer to our modern habit of frequent photo-taking, but never having enough time to organize and print them. With this solution, families can share their photos with grandparents or other relatives who may live far away. Mixi’s official total monthly active users was 14 million as of September 2012, with…

nohana_photobook

Japanese social network Mixi (TYO:2121) just launched a new photo service named Nohana (meaning ‘wild flowers’ in Japanese) targeting parents with small children. This move makes a lot of sense considering that the early users of the social network, which launched way back in 2000, are now a little older and likely to have children of their own.

The app is surprisingly simple and is completely separate from Mixi proper. After signing up, you can invite your family members by entering their phone numbers. Once this is done, you can upload or take photos with the iOS app [1] and then every month users (in Japan) can receive a free (90 yen shipping fee not included) printed photo book. The first book of each month is always free, however each additional book costs 525 yen and there is free shipping for orders above 1,050 yen (about $11).

Nohana

Nohana is Mixi’s answer to our modern habit of frequent photo-taking, but never having enough time to organize and print them. With this solution, families can share their photos with grandparents or other relatives who may live far away.

Mixi’s official total monthly active users was 14 million as of September 2012, with about 8.6 million of those on smartphones (see interactive chart below). And the most active users on the social network are people in the 20 to 24 demographic accounting for almost 30% of the total users. That’s followed by users ages 25 to 29 at 20%, and 30 to 35 at 14%. Ostensibly many users from these segments should benefit greatly from a service like Nohana.

Mixi currently runs two major business: its social network, plus the online job posting site, Find Job. The company recently shut down its short-lived subscription fashion commerce, Petite Jete, which was targeting young female users. Under what was likely the correct assumption that young female struggled to find casual work fashion, the company did succeed in gaining over a million users. However, the business was not as big as they expected.

In Japan, the photo book market is getting pretty crowded with competitors from Fujifilm and startups like Tolot. Lets stay tuned to see if this new venture, Nohana, will go as they hope — or suffer the same sad fate as Petite Jete.

Download image version of chart


  1. An Android version is coming later this spring  ↩