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Japanese photo collage app Papelook raises $1.1 million from Jafco

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Papelook, the company behind a photo collage app under the same name, announced today that it has raised 120 million yen (or $1.12 million) from Japanese investment firm Jafco. Since its launch of an iOS app in 2011 followed by an Android version in march of 2013, the company has acquired 13 million downloads in total to date worldwide. See also: With 10M downloads, Japan’s Papelook app knows how to get the girls With 4 million downloads for iPhone, popular Japanese collage app hits Android [Video] In our recent interview with Papelook CEO Ichiro Ozawa, he told us about their user demographics: We understand 96% of our users are female. we had no ideas about user demographics because our app require no user sign-up process. But our recent survey showed us “moms” account for 35% of our entire user base, so we are providing more stickers designed for moms. While there are only about 6.6 million downloads in Japan alone, they are trying to increase active users rather than downloads in country. Ozawa continued: Looking at the overseas markets, we have many downloads from Thailand and Korea in addition to North America. We’ll…

papelook_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Papelook, the company behind a photo collage app under the same name, announced today that it has raised 120 million yen (or $1.12 million) from Japanese investment firm Jafco.

Since its launch of an iOS app in 2011 followed by an Android version in march of 2013, the company has acquired 13 million downloads in total to date worldwide.

See also:

In our recent interview with Papelook CEO Ichiro Ozawa, he told us about their user demographics:

Papelook's CEO Ichiro Ozawa
Papelook’s CEO Ichiro Ozawa

We understand 96% of our users are female. we had no ideas about user demographics because our app require no user sign-up process. But our recent survey showed us “moms” account for 35% of our entire user base, so we are providing more stickers designed for moms.

While there are only about 6.6 million downloads in Japan alone, they are trying to increase active users rather than downloads in country. Ozawa continued:

Looking at the overseas markets, we have many downloads from Thailand and Korea in addition to North America. We’ll be more focused on increasing downloads in the overseas market. We’ll be targeting the Chinese market next. […] Our localization efforts are yet limited in translating user interface. But because it will be difficult for Japanese designers to create stickers so that overseas users are willing to use them, we’ll be trying to encourage global designers to create their stickers for Papelook. We are thinking to launch a service where global designers can sell their stickers as well as real products.

Papelook's geographical distribution of users
Papelook’s geographical distribution in terms of users

Evernote has an e-commerce outlet called Evernote Market selling their products. Similarly, Papelook wants to gain a brand value by building a user community and developing analog products. Ozawa explained:

We will start an online printing service. If you create a photo collage using our app, you will be able to print it out via photocopiers at convenience stores around the country, such as Seven Eleven, Lawson, Family Mart, and Sunkus. New year’s card prints using photo collages will be also available in year-end. […] We will try to have our users see we can provide more than just an app through organizing user events focused on moms.

While Papelook will be more focused on adverting sales and service planning from now, we understand that they will use the funds raised at this time to strengthen sales forces rather than an engineering team.

With 10M downloads, Japan’s Papelook app knows how to get the girls

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It has been a while since we looked in on the Japanese photo collage app Papelook. So recently when the company made an announcement that its app would be preinstalled on Aquos Pad tablets (at the suggestion of KDDI) we thought we’d get back in touch to see how they’re doing. Interestingly, we found that the Japanese telco au/KDDI has featured Papelook heavily as a selling point on the tablet’s product page and in their promotional video (about 18 seconds in). As we have pointed out before, the app’s popularity among Japanese girls and young women cannot be understated. And while girls here in Japan especially love this collage app, the Android version of Papelook is doing fairly well in a number of Asian regions too. In fact, the company claims that their app has been downloaded more than 10 million times in total as of this past January. That puts it in the same category as Cocoppa, which has leveraged Japan’s unique ‘kawaii’ style to become a sort of international hit among women. In Japan mobile companies really make an extra effort to go after specific demographics when selling mobile products (for example, girls, seniors, young kids), so it’s…

papelook-620x302-1

It has been a while since we looked in on the Japanese photo collage app Papelook. So recently when the company made an announcement that its app would be preinstalled on Aquos Pad tablets (at the suggestion of KDDI) we thought we’d get back in touch to see how they’re doing.

Interestingly, we found that the Japanese telco au/KDDI has featured Papelook heavily as a selling point on the tablet’s product page and in their promotional video (about 18 seconds in). As we have pointed out before, the app’s popularity among Japanese girls and young women cannot be understated.

And while girls here in Japan especially love this collage app, the Android version of Papelook is doing fairly well in a number of Asian regions too. In fact, the company claims that their app has been downloaded more than 10 million times in total as of this past January. That puts it in the same category as Cocoppa, which has leveraged Japan’s unique ‘kawaii’ style to become a sort of international hit among women.

In Japan mobile companies really make an extra effort to go after specific demographics when selling mobile products (for example, girls, seniors, young kids), so it’s interesting to see that an app like Papelook can ride such specialization to achieve this pre-installed status. In fact, Japan has an abundance of cute mobile apps that could be used in this way.

A representative from Papelook tells me that they will try to go after the young mothers demographic this year, although I understand that they are working on some other photo apps as well.

If you’d like a video overview of how Papelook works, you can check that out here. The crop/clip tool has been greatly improved, and other adjustments have been made since that last video, so I encourage you to give it a try and experience the app for yourself.

papelook

Downloaded by half of Japan’s iPhone girls, Papelook attracts more investment

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Two Japanese mobile trends that we have been following closely over the past few months are high-quality Japanese photo apps, and the evolution of cute culture into an exportable mobile commodity. Popular made-in-Japan collage app Papelook lies at the intersection of these two trends, and that means it has lots of potential to grow, even beyond Japan’s borders. Today Digital Garage announced that it would be investing in Papelook, though the exact sum was not disclosed, the company will take 5% of the startup’s outstanding shares. The announcement also noted that Papelook has surpassed the 6 million downloads milestone (see chart below), boasting that among teenage girl iPhone users in Japan (specifically, those aged 10 to 20) it’s estimated that one in every two have downloaded Papelook. But the app has proven popular in overseas markets, currently ranking as a top 25 iOS photo app in South Korea, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Australia. On Android, It’s performing well in South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Papelook is an Open Network Lab startup, and our readers may recall that it took the top prize at the accelerator’s Demo Day back in May. The parent company of ONL is Digital Garage. For those…

papelook

Two Japanese mobile trends that we have been following closely over the past few months are high-quality Japanese photo apps, and the evolution of cute culture into an exportable mobile commodity. Popular made-in-Japan collage app Papelook lies at the intersection of these two trends, and that means it has lots of potential to grow, even beyond Japan’s borders.

Today Digital Garage announced that it would be investing in Papelook, though the exact sum was not disclosed, the company will take 5% of the startup’s outstanding shares.

The announcement also noted that Papelook has surpassed the 6 million downloads milestone (see chart below), boasting that among teenage girl iPhone users in Japan (specifically, those aged 10 to 20) it’s estimated that one in every two have downloaded Papelook.

papelook-growth
Papelook’s journey to 6 million downloads

But the app has proven popular in overseas markets, currently ranking as a top 25 iOS photo app in South Korea, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Australia. On Android, It’s performing well in South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

Papelook is an Open Network Lab startup, and our readers may recall that it took the top prize at the accelerator’s Demo Day back in May. The parent company of ONL is Digital Garage.

For those not familiar with Papelook, check out our demo video below from a few months back.

Meet the startups from Open Network Lab’s latest Demo Day in Tokyo

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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.

From the sixth batch

1. Zenclerk

zenclerk_logo

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

papelook_logo

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 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.

papelook_onstage

3. Lang-8

lang-8_logo

Website: lang-8.com
Pitched by: Yangyang Xi

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.

lang-8_onstage

From previous batches

1. Kiddy

kiddy_logo

Website: kiddy-photo.com
Pitched by: Hiromichi Ando, Compath.me

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.

kiddy_onstage

2. Voyagin

voyagin_logo

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.

voyagin_onstage

3. SpathSchool

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Website: spath.jp
Picthed by: Koichiro Sumi

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.

spathschool_onstage


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.

Meet 5 of Japan’s top photo apps

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In comparison to other countries around the world, Japan has a special affinity for camera apps. In fact, according to a recent report from Flurry Japanese mobile users are more likely to use photo apps than mobile users in any other country. We’ve written about a number of them over the past couple of months, and I thought we take her to expect look at a few of the best [1] ones today. So here they are, in no particular order: FX Camera ¶ One of the earliest entries in the Japan photo app space was FX Camera which launched way back in 2009. This app isn’t very flashy, but it has a solid repertoire of filters and effects would certainly come in handy on any mobile device. Since its launch a few years back it has accumulated more than 25 million downloads, certainly an impressive feat for its parent company Bit Cellar. See our recent review of FX Camera for more information. Download: iOS | Android Otaku Camera ¶ This app doesn’t have the sort of download counts that other apps on this list have achieved, but it was developed by one of Japan’s hottest startups, Tokyu Otaku Mode….

In comparison to other countries around the world, Japan has a special affinity for camera apps. In fact, according to a recent report from Flurry Japanese mobile users are more likely to use photo apps than mobile users in any other country.

We’ve written about a number of them over the past couple of months, and I thought we take her to expect look at a few of the best [1] ones today. So here they are, in no particular order:

FX Camera

fx-camera

One of the earliest entries in the Japan photo app space was FX Camera which launched way back in 2009. This app isn’t very flashy, but it has a solid repertoire of filters and effects would certainly come in handy on any mobile device. Since its launch a few years back it has accumulated more than 25 million downloads, certainly an impressive feat for its parent company Bit Cellar. See our recent review of FX Camera for more information.

Download: iOS | Android

Otaku Camera

otaku-camera

This app doesn’t have the sort of download counts that other apps on this list have achieved, but it was developed by one of Japan’s hottest startups, Tokyu Otaku Mode. What Otaku Camera does is turn your pictures into an anime/manga style graphic. Last month the application surpassed the 1 million downloads mark, and we expect that with the company’s vast fan base that Otaku Camera will continue to grow. Check out our video demo below for more info about it how it works.

Download: iOS | Android

SnapDish

snapdish

Just like in the West, Japan has more than a few food photography apps. Perhaps the most notable foodie photo app is SnapDish. The application was launched way back in May 2011, and since then it has catalogued more than 1.7 million pictures of food. Interestingly, it primarily encourages users to share pictures of food they’ve cooked themselves, as opposed to just snaps taken in a restaurant.

The company has aspirations on global markets too, and is already available in a variety of languages in addition to Japanese and English. For more information about the startup check out out interview with them from back in February.

Download: iOS | Android

Papelook

papelook

Just a few weeks ago the Japanese photo application Papelook surpassed the 4 million downloads mark on iOS, launching a new Android app at that time as well. Papelook is not your typical photo application insofar as you’re not really going to be taking photos with it. But rather you can use it to combine and repurpose a lot of the photos that you’ve taken with other apps to build collages. I had a lot of fun testing this one, as you can see in the video demo below. The application is very much targeted at girls and it definitely falls into ‘Kawaii apps’ application category.

Download: iOS | Android

Line Camera

line-camera

Line Camera took off very quickly since it was first released nearly a year ago. And with more than 20 million downloads since then, largely thanks to the wildly popular Line chat app as a distribution platform, this camera application hit number one in the photo category in 28 countries, mostly around Asia. The application allows for lots of fun photo decoration, following the same style as the popular stamps/stickers for which Line Corporation has become famous.

Download: iOS | Android

Honorable mention:

See also: 5 photo apps with fantastic skin filters that Japanese women prefer


  1. Like any list of this sort, this is a subjective ranking and I’m sure that there are many great camera apps from Japan that we have missed. If so, let us know! We’d be happy to hear from you.  ↩

With 4 million downloads for iPhone, popular Japanese collage app hits Android [Video]

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Japanese photo application Papelook has just announced that it has surpassed 4 million downloads on iOS. The application, which very much falls in the ‘kawaii’ apps category, is a very handy way to repurpose your photos in a stylish collage which can then be shared with friends. And for those of you not on iOS, the company has announced that an Android version is being released today as well. Check out our video demo above for a general idea of how the service works. Currently the majority of its users are young women (80%), and the feminine style of the photo decorations certainly reflects that. Nonetheless, I put together a collage of baby pictures just now, and I expect I’ll make a few more like this to share with family in the future. The application has been around for a long time (since mid 2011), but it wasn’t until its 2.0 release last May that it saw some real momentum. The company says that it has about 1.2 million active users currently, which is certainly an impressive total for an app in this genre. Papelook also publishes its pape.me girls fashion magazine app for iOS which itself has 250,000 downloads….

Japanese photo application Papelook has just announced that it has surpassed 4 million downloads on iOS. The application, which very much falls in the ‘kawaii’ apps category, is a very handy way to repurpose your photos in a stylish collage which can then be shared with friends. And for those of you not on iOS, the company has announced that an Android version is being released today as well. Check out our video demo above for a general idea of how the service works.

papelookCurrently the majority of its users are young women (80%), and the feminine style of the photo decorations certainly reflects that. Nonetheless, I put together a collage of baby pictures just now, and I expect I’ll make a few more like this to share with family in the future.

The application has been around for a long time (since mid 2011), but it wasn’t until its 2.0 release last May that it saw some real momentum. The company says that it has about 1.2 million active users currently, which is certainly an impressive total for an app in this genre. Papelook also publishes its pape.me girls fashion magazine app for iOS which itself has 250,000 downloads.

Geographically, 71.6% of its users come from its home market of Japan, with 10.7% and 6.5% from Thailand and Taiwan respectively.

As for its future business, Papelook may offer print services since many people make such collages for birthdays or weddings. And given the focused audience, advertising tie-ups are possible as well.

papelook-growth