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Japanese collage app lets users mail New Year’s greeting cards

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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Back in September we wrote about Decopic’s impressive milestone of 30 million downloads. Community Factory, the maker of the photo sharing app, has lots of other great apps, including Decopic’s sister app Petapic. Petapic was launched back in December of 2012 and has been downloaded over six million times to date. Users of the app can create cute collages with their own photos, and can draw on photos or decorate them with over 90 stamps. The app provides more than 80 different templates for collages, so its easy for first-time users to make a good one. Starting in November, Petapic added a new feature where users can make their collage into a ‘Nengajo’ or Japanese New Year’s greeting cards. The nengajo postcards can then be mailed out for 128 yen (a little over a dollar). Although nengajo are traditionally postcards sent to homes, digital natives are more accustomed to simply sending text messages to friends. So this gesture will likely be seen as a thoughtful surprise. The new feature is available on Android for now, but an update will bring the feature to iOS sometime in mid-November. Community Factory launched yet another ‘kawaii’ app called CunPic on October 24th [1]….

petapic-wide

Back in September we wrote about Decopic’s impressive milestone of 30 million downloads. Community Factory, the maker of the photo sharing app, has lots of other great apps, including Decopic’s sister app Petapic.

Petapic was launched back in December of 2012 and has been downloaded over six million times to date. Users of the app can create cute collages with their own photos, and can draw on photos or decorate them with over 90 stamps. The app provides more than 80 different templates for collages, so its easy for first-time users to make a good one.

Starting in November, Petapic added a new feature where users can make their collage into a ‘Nengajo’ or Japanese New Year’s greeting cards. The nengajo postcards can then be mailed out for 128 yen (a little over a dollar). Although nengajo are traditionally postcards sent to homes, digital natives are more accustomed to simply sending text messages to friends. So this gesture will likely be seen as a thoughtful surprise. The new feature is available on Android for now, but an update will bring the feature to iOS sometime in mid-November.

Community Factory launched yet another ‘kawaii’ app called CunPic on October 24th [1]. Within three days of its release, the app ranked second on App Store among all free camera apps. CunPic differentiates itself from other cute apps with its skin-smoothening and whitening features, common to most purikura photo booths. It’s available on iOS for now, but expect an Android version soon.

If you’re in the market for a cute reminder app, Community Factory also makes Petatto Memo, which we featured back in October.

Petapic-nengajo1 Petapic-nengajo

  1. Editor’s note: Cunpic is such an unfortunate name…  ↩

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Japan’s Petatto Memo pins cute reminders to your phone’s home screen

SCORE 1,165 Rick Martin Rick Martin
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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…

petatto memo

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.

petatto-memo-1 petatto-memo-1

  1. 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.  ↩

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Gateway to a ‘kawaii’ ecosystem: Japan’s Decopic has 30M downloads worldwide

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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The purikura photo app ‘Decopic’ is one of the many apps that has won hearts of young ‘kawaii-hunters’ in Japan (‘kawaii’ meaning ‘cute’ in Japanese). Readers may recall that we previously put this app on our popular list of Japan’s Cutest Mobile Apps. Community Factory, the company behind the app, has just announced that it has reached the impressive milestone of 30 million downloads worldwide. That’s a whopping 20 million downloads in the span of about a year, since it was acquired by Yahoo Japan back in last September. In addition to Decopic, the company released six more apps this year alone. Our ultimate goal is to take over our user’s homescreen with our apps. Community factory describes Decopic (available on both iOS and Android) as “so cute that it makes you happy just to have it.” It’s super easy to use with no need for instructions. Many users of the app are from Asia such as Korea, Taiwan, China, and Thailand. There is a growing fan base in these countries, especially a strong community in Taiwan. According to Ryosuke Matusmoto, the CEO of Community Factory, many of their apps are downloaded by users outside of Japan even when only…

community-factory-team
The Community Factory team, creators of Decopic (photo appropriately decorated with Decopic!)

The purikura photo app ‘Decopic’ is one of the many apps that has won hearts of young ‘kawaii-hunters’ in Japan (‘kawaii’ meaning ‘cute’ in Japanese). Readers may recall that we previously put this app on our popular list of Japan’s Cutest Mobile Apps. Community Factory, the company behind the app, has just announced that it has reached the impressive milestone of 30 million downloads worldwide. That’s a whopping 20 million downloads in the span of about a year, since it was acquired by Yahoo Japan back in last September. In addition to Decopic, the company released six more apps this year alone.

Our ultimate goal is to take over our user’s homescreen with our apps.

Community factory describes Decopic (available on both iOS and Android) as “so cute that it makes you happy just to have it.” It’s super easy to use with no need for instructions.

Many users of the app are from Asia such as Korea, Taiwan, China, and Thailand. There is a growing fan base in these countries, especially a strong community in Taiwan.

According to Ryosuke Matusmoto, the CEO of Community Factory, many of their apps are downloaded by users outside of Japan even when only provided in Japanese. This is likely due to their simple user interface which effectively removes the language barrier. All the apps share the common qualities of being cute as well as offering many fun designs within one application, so users of one app by Community Factory are likely to download another.

Ryosuke elaborates on the recent milestone:

In addition to our growing user base in Asia, we saw younger Japanese girls, as young as middle school downloading our app. They probably got their first mobile phone, which is now almost always a smartphone and not a feature phone. We continue to focus on girls, and how much of their mobile time we can take up. We released six new apps this year, and plan to develop more in different categories. Our ultimate goal is to take over our user’s homescreen with our apps.

Decopic reaches out to many female users, and then other apps such as calendar or battery-efficiency apps provide utilities that enhances the app’s retention. Their collage app Petapic had five million downloads after eight months of its release, and Petat Calendar had one million downloads as of May of this year.

Decopic-screenshots

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Widgely: Community Factory and Yahoo Japan team up on multi-purpose girlie app

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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Community Factory, the company behind the popular purikura app Decopic, and its parent company Yahoo [1] have released their first joint widget app on the Android platform. It’s called Widgely. The theme of the app is is “Kawaii, Easy, Useful,” and as you may have guessed by now, it’s targeting young women. The app includes what are (supposedly) all the features necessary for a girl’s daily life including a clock, weather, horoscope, a camera, and a mirror (i.e. an inward-facing camera). The visual theme of the widget app can be switched between four types, allowing users to dress up their smartphone according to their mood. Users are able to start searching right from the homescreen, and they can check a variety of articles from Yahoo News within the app, integrating well with one of Yahoo Japan’s prime services. From Widgely, users can also access Decopic directly and easily. The Decopic app has over 12 million downloads and is available for both iOS and Android. This project is likely only the beginning of more collaborative efforts between Yahoo and Community Factory, and we can certainly hope to see more Kawaii apps from the team in the future. Community Factory was acquired by…

Widgely-app

Community Factory, the company behind the popular purikura app Decopic, and its parent company Yahoo [1] have released their first joint widget app on the Android platform. It’s called Widgely.

The theme of the app is is “Kawaii, Easy, Useful,” and as you may have guessed by now, it’s targeting young women. The app includes what are (supposedly) all the features necessary for a girl’s daily life including a clock, weather, horoscope, a camera, and a mirror (i.e. an inward-facing camera). The visual theme of the widget app can be switched between four types, allowing users to dress up their smartphone according to their mood.

Users are able to start searching right from the homescreen, and they can check a variety of articles from Yahoo News within the app, integrating well with one of Yahoo Japan’s prime services. From Widgely, users can also access Decopic directly and easily. The Decopic app has over 12 million downloads and is available for both iOS and Android.

This project is likely only the beginning of more collaborative efforts between Yahoo and Community Factory, and we can certainly hope to see more Kawaii apps from the team in the future.

  1. Community Factory was acquired by Yahoo! in September of last year  ↩

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