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

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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…  ↩

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

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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

Japanese startup acquisitions: An interactive timeline

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As I mentioned in a recent article about Yahoo Japan’s acquisition of Dreampass, the startup eco-system is gradually taking shape here in Japan. Incubators play a big role in the eco-system and off the top of my head I can think of maybe ten incubators. Many provide a Y-combinator model three month program with five to ten startups in each class. Most acquisitions have happened in the past year or two, so it is still far too soon to predict the fate of such startups. However, we have witnessed some encouraging exits in the last couple of years, so we thought we’d present an overview. Note that it’s not comprehensive, but it is a good general overview. Check out our interactive timeline of acquisitions above (feel free to share with the embed code below), or read on for more details below! Cirius Technologies (August 2010) ¶ Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) acquired geo-location enabled mobile advertisement technology company Cirius Technologies for an undisclosed sum. At the time of, it was rumored to be an acqui-hire for Yahoo so that it could obtain patents for the ad-technology in hopes of optimize its local mobile advertisement products. Atlantis (January 2011) ¶ Gaming giant GREE…

As I mentioned in a recent article about Yahoo Japan’s acquisition of Dreampass, the startup eco-system is gradually taking shape here in Japan. Incubators play a big role in the eco-system and off the top of my head I can think of maybe ten incubators. Many provide a Y-combinator model three month program with five to ten startups in each class. Most acquisitions have happened in the past year or two, so it is still far too soon to predict the fate of such startups. However, we have witnessed some encouraging exits in the last couple of years, so we thought we’d present an overview. Note that it’s not comprehensive, but it is a good general overview. Check out our interactive timeline of acquisitions above (feel free to share with the embed code below), or read on for more details below!

Cirius Technologies (August 2010)

Yahoo Japan (TYO:4689) acquired geo-location enabled mobile advertisement technology company Cirius Technologies for an undisclosed sum. At the time of, it was rumored to be an acqui-hire for Yahoo so that it could obtain patents for the ad-technology in hopes of optimize its local mobile advertisement products.

Atlantis (January 2011)

Gaming giant GREE picked up ad-exchange platform Atlantis with an eye to winning an advantage over its competitors. Just a month after the acquisition, Gree began it’s own independent ad program. The acquisition price was rumored to be somewhere around two billion yen.

Nobot (July 2011)

Tokyo-based smartphone ad optimization and exchange platform Nobot was acquired by KDDI’s advertising unit Mediba for 1.5 billion yen (about $19.2 million). With this acquisition, KDDI became one of the largest local ad platforms, pitting it directly against Google’s AdMob.

Naked Technology (September 2011)

Mixi, one of the biggest and oldest social networks in Japan, acquired Naked Technology, a smartphone development company known for its talented engineers in hopes of enhancing its smartphone app development. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Conit (November 2011)

A few months later Mixi also picked up Conit, a startup that was founded in 2008 and focused on smartphone app development. It operated an in-app purchase platform for iOS and Android called Samurai Purchase.

Mars Ltd. (November 2011)

Gree acquired Tokyo-base startup Mars Ltd, a company known for its signature pet game ‘Megu.’

Pikkle (April 2012)

Online game and smartphone development studio KLab acquired social games Pikkle company for 175 million yen. This was an acqui-hire for the development team, also bringing in CEO David Collier, the current CTO at KLab America.

Decopic (September 2012)

Community Factory, the company behind this successful photo sharing app for girls, was acquired by Yahoo Japan for an estimated one billion yen. The six year-old startup (at the time) was the very first startup to be funded by a Mixi venture fund. Owning 40% of the total stocks, Mixi for the first time recorded a sizable chunk of income amounting to about 310.2 million yen(about $3,246,000).

Social Lunch (December 2012)

Social game company Donuts acquired lunch partner matching app Social Lunch for an undisclosed sum. Having operated for just a year and four months at the time of buyout, the app had 60,000 users. Social Lunch was a graduate of the KDDI Innovation Fund and the three members of the team joined Donuts to continue the operation of Social Lunch.

Kamado (December 2012)

Kamado was another Mixi acquisition. The company’s well-known CEO Yuichi Kawasaki was the former vice president of Japanese bookmarking site Hatena. Kamado runs a few web services including a social item exchanging website Livlis and a fashion photo curation site called Clipie.

Enter Crews (January 2013)

Mobile entertainment platform Mobcast went public in June of 2012 with over 2.7 million users (as of October 2012). It acquired online game development company Enter Crews (with 300,000 users in Japan) for roughly 600 million yen. Enter Crews was founded in September of 2009 and has opened offices in Korea and Indonesia as well. It’s a logical move by Mobcast who is eager to accelerate its expansion to other parts of Asia.

Dreampass (March 2013)

The most recent acquisition was made by Yahoo Japan for on-demand cinema service Dreampass, for an undisclosed amount. You can read more about the deal here.

This is not a complete list of startup exit stories from Japan, but you can get an idea that the money is moving around mobile ads and social gaming. Although the competition for talent (especially developers) is not as intense as Silicon Valley, social gaming companies are facing a talent acquisition war. I’m sure that these examples will only encourage and motivate creative young Japanese with their minds set on changing the world.


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Top 5: Japan’s Cutest Mobile Apps

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“Kawaii” is a word you’ll hear from young Japanese girls all too often. It can be roughly translated as ‘cute’ – but times ten or even a hundred. Japanese female youth culture can not be described without it. Anything can be kawaii, ranging from pets to behaviors to boys. So it’s no surprise that we can also find kawaii mobile apps in Japan. Here are just a few of the popular ones. Fril ¶ Fril is a fancy online flea market for female students in high school or college. Within a month of its release, the app was downloaded over 5,000 times and the number of items sold exceeded 10,000. Since most of the users are students, the average price of items is pretty low, at around 2,000 to 3,000 yen (or $22 to $34). Surprisingly Fril is an all-guy team and a graduate startup from Tokyo-based Open Network Lab incubator. Over 100 interviews with their target users have paid off, because Fril is definitely one of the most well-designed app for girls. It is currently available for iOS  and Android if you’d like to give it a try. Snapeee ¶ Snapeee is a purikura app, which means it lets…

tokyo-game-show-2012

Kawaii” is a word you’ll hear from young Japanese girls all too often. It can be roughly translated as ‘cute’ – but times ten or even a hundred. Japanese female youth culture can not be described without it. Anything can be kawaii, ranging from pets to behaviors to boys. So it’s no surprise that we can also find kawaii mobile apps in Japan. Here are just a few of the popular ones.

Fril

スクリーンショット 2013-01-24 15.30.31

Fril is a fancy online flea market for female students in high school or college. Within a month of its release, the app was downloaded over 5,000 times and the number of items sold exceeded 10,000. Since most of the users are students, the average price of items is pretty low, at around 2,000 to 3,000 yen (or $22 to $34). Surprisingly Fril is an all-guy team and a graduate startup from Tokyo-based Open Network Lab incubator. Over 100 interviews with their target users have paid off, because Fril is definitely one of the most well-designed app for girls. It is currently available for iOS  and Android if you’d like to give it a try.

Snapeee

スクリーンショット 2013-01-24 15.33.31

Snapeee is a purikura app, which means it lets you take photo booth style pictures with many decorative features. Released in May of 2011, the app has attracted users not just in Japan but all across Asia, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao. People in other parts of Asia really like “kawaii” things too, and half a year after its release, the app has been downloaded over 800,000 times with half of those from overseas. Snapeee adds decorative stamps, brushes, and frames to the app everyday. Decorated photos can be shared on different social network such as Facebook, Twitter, mixi, GREE, Ameba, Renren, and Sina Weibo. The application is available for both iOS and Android.

Decopic

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A product of Community Factory Inc, Decopic is another popular purikura app and is a competitor of the afore-mentioned Snapeee. It was recently announced that it had reached the lofty milestone of 12 million downloads, which is certainly an impressive mark for any mobile app. The company was bought by Yahoo Japan in September of last year, for an estimated price of one billion yen (about $11 million) [1]. Yahoo Japan was eager to get into mobile, and successfully obtained Decopic’s eight million users.

The app can be distinguished by its unique user interface, as it is not designed like a typical smartphone app. It’s more like the purikura machines to which its target users are accustomed. It’s available for both iOS and Android.

iQon

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iQon is a fashion community that allows users to create magazine-like collages of fashion styles, sort of the Japanese equivalent to Polyvore. iQon was originally a web service only, but it released an iPhone app in February of last year. With over one million visitors as of March, 2012, the number of collages posted on the service has increased by a factor of twenty. The main users are in their twenties, and they access the app nine times a day on average. It’s available for both iOS and Android.

Nameco

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The tweets and posts originating from within this app at one point practically filled my entire Twitter stream. Nameco is a game that requires users to grow and harvest mushrooms, and it has been downloaded over 13,000,000 times as of June, 2012, with a 4.5 star rating on the iTunes app store. The huge popularity of Nameco is due to its uber-cute mushroom character. There are over one hundred types of physical merchandise items for the character, and that certainly puts it in a lucrative space as we have seen from Rovio with Angry Birds. It has even managed to collaborate with Sanrio’s Hello Kitty. The app is currently available for both iOS and Android.

There are so many of these apps that it’s impossible to cover them all in just one article. But if you’re looking to reach Japanese or Asian girls in their twenties, these apps are certainly a good model to follow.

This is part of our cute Japanese apps series (RSS), examining a trend of ‘kawaii’ success stories emerging from Japan’s mobile space.


  1. That estimated price is according to TechCrunch Japan.  ↩