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New Japanese iPhone app ranks the world’s cutest photos

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Kawaiit is a fun, social application from Japan that lets you submit, browse, and vote on kawaii (cute) pictures. It was launched just yesterday from the folks over at Jig.jp, so we thought we’d take a look. In the same spirit as Hot or Not, the application presents you with a stream of photos that you can approve with the ‘Kawaii’ button, or vote against with the somewhat strangely named ‘dis-kawaii’ [1]. There is a ‘top ranking’ area too where you can see the cutest photos from around the world. With a predominantly pink and pastel color scheme, the app is most definitely targeting a female demographic, with user-submitted photos organized into categories like Fashion, Nails, Hair & Beauty, Make[up] & Cosmetics and more. A Jig.jp representative told us why they think this app will appeal to users all over the world: We think most girls like cute stuff. Our app is for them. Without any language, they can communicate on the app through kawaii photos. She added that the app is based on the team’s experience developing communication apps and apps about Japanese culture. Their jigbrowser+ was previously released internationally, so they will build on that experience in order…

Kawaiit is a fun, social application from Japan that lets you submit, browse, and vote on kawaii (cute) pictures. It was launched just yesterday from the folks over at Jig.jp, so we thought we’d take a look.

kawaiit

In the same spirit as Hot or Not, the application presents you with a stream of photos that you can approve with the ‘Kawaii’ button, or vote against with the somewhat strangely named ‘dis-kawaii’ [1]. There is a ‘top ranking’ area too where you can see the cutest photos from around the world.

With a predominantly pink and pastel color scheme, the app is most definitely targeting a female demographic, with user-submitted photos organized into categories like Fashion, Nails, Hair & Beauty, Make[up] & Cosmetics and more. A Jig.jp representative told us why they think this app will appeal to users all over the world:

We think most girls like cute stuff. Our app is for them. Without any language, they can communicate on the app through kawaii photos.

She added that the app is based on the team’s experience developing communication apps and apps about Japanese culture. Their jigbrowser+ was previously released internationally, so they will build on that experience in order to help push this one abroad.

Despite my aversion for so much pinkness, I gave the app a quick test run, which you can see in the video above [2]. I uploaded a picture and within a few minutes there were already a bunch of people who had given it some Kawaii votes. There are handy photo decoration and filter options available as well if you’d like to enhance your picture’s cuteness.

If you’d like to give Kawaiit a try for yourself, you can download it for free over on the App Store.

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

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  1. I motion that this button be renamed as ‘Not so Kawaii’  ↩

  2. I should point out that the initial sign -in process was somewhat difficult due to an invisible username field on the sign-in page (to the right of the pencil icon). But I’m told by a rep that they’re looking at it, and it may be addressed in a future update.  ↩