THE BRIDGE

tag photo apps

Japan’s love affair with photo apps

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This morning I met with Canadian research student Laurel Hart who is currently in Tokyo studying mobile photography communities in Japan. Even though we’ve written about mobile photo apps significantly on this site (which is how she found me), I needed to take some time to think about what information I might be able to offer her. I thought I’d share some of those thoughts here, just in case it might be of interest to readers as well. While there has been some indication that Japanese mobile users love photo apps more than other regional markets (see this chart from Flurry Analytics) [1], it’s a little bit more difficult to identify what kinds of things they are doing and what sorts of photos they are taking. In a purely non-scientific exercise, I thought I’d review a few of the kinds of apps we see trending here in Japan, in an effort to dive deeper this area. Here a few genres of photo apps (and photo-related apps [2]), in no particular order: Collage apps (Petapic, Cameran Collage, Papelook) Photo decorations apps (DecoAlbum, Snapeee) Food apps (SnapDish, Miil) Fashion apps (Wear, Nailbook, Stulio, In My Bag ) Manga/Anime effects (Manga Camera, Otaku…

jpmobile

This morning I met with Canadian research student Laurel Hart who is currently in Tokyo studying mobile photography communities in Japan. Even though we’ve written about mobile photo apps significantly on this site (which is how she found me), I needed to take some time to think about what information I might be able to offer her. I thought I’d share some of those thoughts here, just in case it might be of interest to readers as well.

While there has been some indication that Japanese mobile users love photo apps more than other regional markets (see this chart from Flurry Analytics) [1], it’s a little bit more difficult to identify what kinds of things they are doing and what sorts of photos they are taking.

In a purely non-scientific exercise, I thought I’d review a few of the kinds of apps we see trending here in Japan, in an effort to dive deeper this area. Here a few genres of photo apps (and photo-related apps [2]), in no particular order:

These represent just a few of the more popular clusters of photos apps that we have seen here in Japan. Of course, everyone makes use of their mobile camera for different reasons, so we cannot claim that there is any sort of trend among consumers here. But perhaps we can assume that the apps that Japanese developers produce are at least partially indicative of the market’s demands.

As for mobile photography communities, I confess I’ve never seen such groups gathering offline [4]. But we often see people come together online around common ideas or themes. For example, the Nailbook app mentioned above is an intriguing community where people exchange pictures of nail art. And then their are mobile photographers who share photos around a suddenly viral meme, such as the ‘Cups Fuchiko-san’ meme where a tiny figure is posed on cups or glasses in strange ways, or the Makankosappo (literally translated as “Magic Penetrating Killing Ray”) meme, upon which the Kame-Camera app is based.

The world of smartphone photography obviously runs far deeper than what I’ve outlined above. If you there’s something that we’ve overlooked, don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments.


  1. This chart doesn’t seem to be on Flurry’s site any longer. But thankfully, we still have a version here.  ↩

  2. I say photo-related, because some photo apps might technically be classified by an App Store as a photography app, but it might have a different primary purpose. The mobile flea market app Fril is an example of this.  ↩

  3. These are interesting considering the aging demographic in Japan, giving you the ability to send prints to older folks who may not use smartphones.  ↩

  4. It seems rather silly to me to define a photography community by device.  ↩

Japan’s Zeppelin brings vibrant filters to your mobile video

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Tokyo-based design house Zeppelin was one of many Japanese companies that made the trip to SXSW in Austin, Texas last month. The company has previously done UI/UX work for many large clients in Japan and around Asia, but recently it is venturing to create some products of its own. The most notable of these is perhaps its VideoShader iOS app, which lets you apply photo filters on top of your mobile videos. What’s fun about this is that when you pick a filter, your viewfinder video is previewed in realtime, along with the option to increase or decrease the intensity with a slider tool. I particularly enjoyed the ‘red detector’ filter, which enables you to do some really creative stuff, as you can see in the rough test clip below. Note that I’m adjusting the effects slider as I record, which is making the effect do different things during video capture. There are a number of other attractive filters like ‘motion blur’ and ‘tilt shift’, although those are available as premium add-ons. There is also a VideoShader pro version available, which the company says enables users to create their custom filters without knowing any code, but I’ve not tested that…

videoshader

Tokyo-based design house Zeppelin was one of many Japanese companies that made the trip to SXSW in Austin, Texas last month. The company has previously done UI/UX work for many large clients in Japan and around Asia, but recently it is venturing to create some products of its own.

The most notable of these is perhaps its VideoShader iOS app, which lets you apply photo filters on top of your mobile videos. What’s fun about this is that when you pick a filter, your viewfinder video is previewed in realtime, along with the option to increase or decrease the intensity with a slider tool.

I particularly enjoyed the ‘red detector’ filter, which enables you to do some really creative stuff, as you can see in the rough test clip below. Note that I’m adjusting the effects slider as I record, which is making the effect do different things during video capture.

There are a number of other attractive filters like ‘motion blur’ and ‘tilt shift’, although those are available as premium add-ons. There is also a VideoShader pro version available, which the company says enables users to create their custom filters without knowing any code, but I’ve not tested that particular feature myself yet.

Zeppelin is planning to expand to the US soon, in an effort to increase their reach among global consumers with projects like VideoShader. CEO and founder Kohei Torigoe explained the rationale behind driving for such an expansion:

If VideoShader can reach one million or five million users in Japan for example, it would be difficult to expand beyond that. But if we can reach that same total from the US, then would be easier to reach out to the world.

I understand that an updated version of VideoShader is coming very soon, so we can look forward to a more simplified interface coming pretty soon.

The company has a few other fun projects in the works as well, including its voice-assistant app ‘Jarvis’ (think Iron Man), and I’m looking forward to seeing how that develops.

For more on Zeppelin check out their website, or watch founder Torigoe below as he gives a brief introduction to his company.

Moe the World: Add fun anime flavor to your mobile photos

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As we head into the weekend, here’s a fun photo app from Higher Bridge Inc. called ‘Moe the World’. I’m not going to try to accurately explain what the Japanese term ‘moe’ means (Wikipedia does a better job than I would), but rather I encourage you to try out this photo decoration app, which in a nutshell enables virtual cosplay. The application, which initially launched back in December, received a new update this month with more manga eyes and wigs to add to the existing decorative elements. So if you’re in the mood for adding some fun to your cherry blossom party photos this season, do check out Moe the World over on the App Store.

moe-the-world

As we head into the weekend, here’s a fun photo app from Higher Bridge Inc. called ‘Moe the World’. I’m not going to try to accurately explain what the Japanese term ‘moe’ means (Wikipedia does a better job than I would), but rather I encourage you to try out this photo decoration app, which in a nutshell enables virtual cosplay.

The application, which initially launched back in December, received a new update this month with more manga eyes and wigs to add to the existing decorative elements. So if you’re in the mood for adding some fun to your cherry blossom party photos this season, do check out Moe the World over on the App Store.

Japan’s SlideStory movie maker app off to a hot start

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SlideStory is a movie and slides how creation application from Japan-based nanameue [1]. That developer has previously done some photo application development for the likes of Line and WeChat, as well as the uber-strange Kenstagram photo app. Our readers may recall that the company raised funds from Skyland Ventures last year. According to an interview over on Typemag (in Japanese), the app has seen more than 800,000 downloads since its release back in October, which is a pretty good start for an application in this genre. In addition to its home market of Japan, SlideStory appears to be getting some downloads in Thailand and Taiwan as well. We have previously looked at similar apps like Honda’s RoadMovies or Glue-th Inc’s Mechika Boola which can be used to create similar kinds of short movies. SlideStory’s ability to create movies from still images on your camera roll or from your social network is really great though, and I hope to follow up with a full review once I’ve spent more time with it. If you’d like to try out SlideStory, it’s available as a free download for iOS. An example of one a video slideshow produced with the app can be found…

slidestory

SlideStory is a movie and slides how creation application from Japan-based nanameue [1]. That developer has previously done some photo application development for the likes of Line and WeChat, as well as the uber-strange Kenstagram photo app. Our readers may recall that the company raised funds from Skyland Ventures last year.

According to an interview over on Typemag (in Japanese), the app has seen more than 800,000 downloads since its release back in October, which is a pretty good start for an application in this genre. In addition to its home market of Japan, SlideStory appears to be getting some downloads in Thailand and Taiwan as well.

We have previously looked at similar apps like Honda’s RoadMovies or Glue-th Inc’s Mechika Boola which can be used to create similar kinds of short movies. SlideStory’s ability to create movies from still images on your camera roll or from your social network is really great though, and I hope to follow up with a full review once I’ve spent more time with it.

If you’d like to try out SlideStory, it’s available as a free download for iOS. An example of one a video slideshow produced with the app can be found below.


  1. Don’t ask me how to pronounce nanameue!  ↩

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…

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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 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

Aviary to host its Photo Hack Day in Tokyo, registration now open

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A few months back we wrote about New York-based Aviary, which at the time was making an effort to establish itself in Japan. And now this month, an upcoming event will be a big part of that effort, as Aviary’s recently announced hackathon, Photo Hack Day, is set to take place on the weekend of February 22/23. As we have noted previously, Japan is perhaps the most enthusiastic mobile photography nation, and we have covered an incredible amount of great photo applications that have been produced here. It’s not unlikely that many more fun apps will be created at this Japan version of Photo Hack Day, so if you are a developer that would like to participate, you can check out the Photo Hack Day site for more information on how to do that. Aviary’s previous Photo Hack Day took place at Facebook’s San Francisco headquarters, with over 300 developers and designers producing 63 mobile apps. The Japan event will take place at Mixi headquarters in Tokyo, with 300,000 yen as the first place award (about $3,000, out of $15,000 total in prizes). There are a number of API sponsors on board, with API demos taking place on the morning…

aviary-photo-hack-day

A few months back we wrote about New York-based Aviary, which at the time was making an effort to establish itself in Japan. And now this month, an upcoming event will be a big part of that effort, as Aviary’s recently announced hackathon, Photo Hack Day, is set to take place on the weekend of February 22/23.

As we have noted previously, Japan is perhaps the most enthusiastic mobile photography nation, and we have covered an incredible amount of great photo applications that have been produced here. It’s not unlikely that many more fun apps will be created at this Japan version of Photo Hack Day, so if you are a developer that would like to participate, you can check out the Photo Hack Day site for more information on how to do that.

Aviary’s previous Photo Hack Day took place at Facebook’s San Francisco headquarters, with over 300 developers and designers producing 63 mobile apps. The Japan event will take place at Mixi headquarters in Tokyo, with 300,000 yen as the first place award (about $3,000, out of $15,000 total in prizes).

There are a number of API sponsors on board, with API demos taking place on the morning of the 22nd before the actual hacking kicks off at 11:30am [1]. So if you’re a developer or designer who would like to get involved in what looks to be very interesting, and very focused hackathon, do drop over to the website for more information, or register here on Peatix.

Our readers may recall that Aviary recently launched the first international edition of its photo editor in Japan back in November. We briefly spoke with their CEO Tobais Peggs at that time, who gives a brief intro to his service in the video below.


  1. I should also note that I’ve agreed to volunteer at the event as one of the judges in an effort to help out. So if you’re in attendance, do come say hello!  ↩

Japan’s Yesterscape improves its time-machine app, enables web upload of old memories

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One of my favorite startups to write about last year was Kyoto-based Qooq Inc. As you may recall, this is the company that operates a so-called ‘time machine’ application, Yesterscape, which lets you view images of the past through your smartphone camera. So for example, you might take a picture of your parents in front of the Eiffel Tower in France this year, and then revisit it five years later and see the same picture through your camera thanks to this augmented reality app. While this process works great for images that you’ve taken on your smartphone, what about old images that you might have taken before you even had a smartphone? What about photos your parents or grandparents might have taken? How can we input those? Today Yesterscape has taken a step towards solving that problem, now providing a web interface that allows for the uploading of photos from your PC. The interface still needs some polishing, but I managed to upload a picture of my great-grandparents, and pin it in time and space as best I could using the Google Maps and Streetview interface. The latter was a bit tricky for me on a PC, determining the direction…

Yesterscape-app

One of my favorite startups to write about last year was Kyoto-based Qooq Inc. As you may recall, this is the company that operates a so-called ‘time machine’ application, Yesterscape, which lets you view images of the past through your smartphone camera.

So for example, you might take a picture of your parents in front of the Eiffel Tower in France this year, and then revisit it five years later and see the same picture through your camera thanks to this augmented reality app.

While this process works great for images that you’ve taken on your smartphone, what about old images that you might have taken before you even had a smartphone? What about photos your parents or grandparents might have taken? How can we input those?

Today Yesterscape has taken a step towards solving that problem, now providing a web interface that allows for the uploading of photos from your PC. The interface still needs some polishing, but I managed to upload a picture of my great-grandparents, and pin it in time and space as best I could using the Google Maps and Streetview interface. The latter was a bit tricky for me on a PC, determining the direction and angle of the photo, data that you don’t need to worry about when adding photos with the smartphone app. You can see a sample upload interface in the screenshot below:

yesterme-wide

The new interface enables users to bridge both space and time to pin a photo, something they can’t do with the app, as founder Hide Nu explains:

I have heard some users say that they want to upload picture taken somewhere far away, perhaps from an old trip or from a past home. The new interface will allow users to upload their pictures via the web instead of actually going to the location. With this they can easily place their important photographs in time and space. To make Yesterscape a common architecture in augmented reality for photograph in the near future, we have to have a convenient tool to [handle] old media.

He also explains that for some companies or organizations that have many historical photos, they will offer a special account with a customized interface for free.

sanjo

Interestingly, they have also added a function where users can import a Sekai Camera KMZ file to import their photos and data from that now defunct augmented reality application. Our readers may recall that Sekai Camera closed down last month, perhaps a service that consumers were not ready for when it launched five years back.

It may be possible that the world is still not yet ready for Yesterscape. My guess is that the app is not overwhelmed with users just yet. But now that smartphones have made (networked) photographers of just about everyone, maybe by the time the world is ready, Yesterscape will be prepared and can be waiting for them [1].

The idea of preserving our history is a notion that everyone should be enthusiastic about, and I hope that especially here in Japan, a place with such an incredibly rich history, that Yesterscape can find some support.

You can check out a brief intro to Yesterscape from the company’s CTO, Oscar Peredo, below.


  1. With more compact and DSLR cameras getting wireless capabilities, I’d say that there’s lots of long term potential for an idea like this.  ↩

Fun Chinese photo app boasts 70M users, all without any marketing

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MomentCam is one of the more unique photo effects applications that I’ve seen in a long time. Using just a photo of your face, it creates amazing faux hand-drawn portraits of you in a range of fun situations. The key to the process is the app’s facial recognition, which will usually place your eyes and mouth correctly before face-swapping your head onto many different designs. This process works best when you take the initial photo of your face from the front, because when you do so from the side, your ear or hair might get in the way of the processed composition. Currently there are are themed designs available including a set corresponding to the animals of the Chinese zodiac, but there are more available for download if you choose. The app also has a emoticon-creation function, turning your face into animated emoticons (like those below) that can be shared to various social networks or messaging apps (most based in China, since the company is based in Beijing). I managed to get a brief comment from the company’s co-founder Steven Huang about the success of their app so far. Amazingly, he claims that their progress to date has come without…

moment-cam

MomentCam is one of the more unique photo effects applications that I’ve seen in a long time. Using just a photo of your face, it creates amazing faux hand-drawn portraits of you in a range of fun situations.

The key to the process is the app’s facial recognition, which will usually place your eyes and mouth correctly before face-swapping your head onto many different designs. This process works best when you take the initial photo of your face from the front, because when you do so from the side, your ear or hair might get in the way of the processed composition.

Currently there are are themed designs available including a set corresponding to the animals of the Chinese zodiac, but there are more available for download if you choose.

The app also has a emoticon-creation function, turning your face into animated emoticons (like those below) that can be shared to various social networks or messaging apps (most based in China, since the company is based in Beijing).

momentcam

I managed to get a brief comment from the company’s co-founder Steven Huang about the success of their app so far. Amazingly, he claims that their progress to date has come without any active promotions on their part:

Our app [has grown] purely on word of mouth. No marketing at all. Our users have reached 70 million around the world since it was launched in the China market in early July and opened to world market on October 22. Our user base is 45% Chinese and 55% overseas users.

The company has reportedly raised 20 million RMB in series A funding, so it will be interesting to see where they take their app from here.

If you’re looking for a fun new avatar to start the year off fresh, I encourage you to check out MomentCam over on the App Store or on Google Play 1.


  1. I am a little puzzled as to why there are so many similar looking apps also by the name of MomentCam on Google Play. As far as I can tell from previous China-based reports, this one is the original. Although I’ve asked Steven about the duplicates and I await his reply.  ↩

ActShare: A mobile photo app based around everyday actions

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ActShare is an interesting photo sharing app that breaks photos into action-based categories. So where many vertical photo apps focus narrowly on things like eating or traveling, ActShare encourages you to share a wider range of actions, such as drink, buy, listen, read, or make. When browsing content in the app, you can follow all the actions of a certain user, or you can follow more granularly by action. You can also sort by ‘recent’, ‘popular’ or ‘nearby’. The app was developed by Tokyo based Cougar Inc. Couger Inc. [1], a four person team led by founder and CEO Atsushi Ishii. He explained a little more to me about why they wanted to make this app: One day I realized that most of the posts on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are related to actions. So ActShare has some common act categories, and the concept is to be an “ActLog”. This means next generation of the Blog. I want to have an app with a simple user interface. I really think anybody can use this app. This is a nice idea, although it would be great down the road if other forms of content could be shared besides photos. For example,…

actshare

ActShare is an interesting photo sharing app that breaks photos into action-based categories. So where many vertical photo apps focus narrowly on things like eating or traveling, ActShare encourages you to share a wider range of actions, such as drink, buy, listen, read, or make. When browsing content in the app, you can follow all the actions of a certain user, or you can follow more granularly by action. You can also sort by ‘recent’, ‘popular’ or ‘nearby’.

The app was developed by Tokyo based Cougar Inc. Couger Inc. [1], a four person team led by founder and CEO Atsushi Ishii. He explained a little more to me about why they wanted to make this app:

One day I realized that most of the posts on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are related to actions. So ActShare has some common act categories, and the concept is to be an “ActLog”. This means next generation of the Blog. I want to have an app with a simple user interface. I really think anybody can use this app.

This is a nice idea, although it would be great down the road if other forms of content could be shared besides photos. For example, an Amazon link to go with the ‘buy’ action, or even regular hyperlinks to connect followers to something you’ve read. Atsushi noted that this is something they would like to add in the future, and that would certainly be good to see.

There have been apps that have tried to do this sort of thing before. My colleague pointed me towards Impala, an app that uses image recognition technology to categorize images.

I think the app in its current form is a good start, but they might benefit by looking at the input method of some existing diary or logging apps, such as Day One or Notabli. The ability to search external content from within the app, perhaps using DuckDuckGo as Writing Kit does, might be a fun possibility to explore as well.

The app just launched last month, so there’s still lots of time to make improvements based on early feedback. But it’s a promising first step, and it will be interesting to see how the app evolves as it picks up more users.

If you’d like to try it out, you can get it for free over on the App Store.

all-assorted mint-kit-kat


  1. Couger informs us that a previous version of this article mistakenly correctly spelled the company’s name ‘Couger’ as ‘Cougar’. We have gone back and unfixed our non-mistake.  ↩

Best of 2013: Nohana finds opportunities printing photos from mobile

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As the year 2013 winds to a close, I thought I’d take a look back on some of the mobile apps and services that have really stood out. As a new parent, many of my favorite apps this year have been related to managing baby pictures. And here in Japan, Nohana is a must-have for any parent, letting them use pictures taken on their smartphones to create and print small photobooks, which are then delivered by mail. Users can order one free book per month, paying only a 90 yen shipping fee (or about $1). Additional books cost What’s perhaps most interesting about Nohana to me is how it can bridge the digital divide in families. It provides an option to send a second copy of your photo book to another address, which could be grandparents, or other relatives who might not be very adept with smartphone communication [1]. At the end of this year we saw Nohana roll out a Nengajo (or Japanese New Year’s card) creation app, representing another means of monetizing for the company. And I expect that it’s a far more lucrative stream than the regular Nohana photo service. Each new year card costs 88 yen,…

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As the year 2013 winds to a close, I thought I’d take a look back on some of the mobile apps and services that have really stood out. As a new parent, many of my favorite apps this year have been related to managing baby pictures. And here in Japan, Nohana is a must-have for any parent, letting them use pictures taken on their smartphones to create and print small photobooks, which are then delivered by mail. Users can order one free book per month, paying only a 90 yen shipping fee (or about $1). Additional books cost

What’s perhaps most interesting about Nohana to me is how it can bridge the digital divide in families. It provides an option to send a second copy of your photo book to another address, which could be grandparents, or other relatives who might not be very adept with smartphone communication [1].

At the end of this year we saw Nohana roll out a Nengajo (or Japanese New Year’s card) creation app, representing another means of monetizing for the company. And I expect that it’s a far more lucrative stream than the regular Nohana photo service. Each new year card costs 88 yen, with a minimum base fee of 1480 yen and then 525 yen for shipping.

It will be interesting to see if the company publishes other occasion specific apps in the coming year. I’m not sure if the folks at Nohana have any ambition to expand beyond Japan, but a Christmas card service would certainly come in handy in many countries.

In addition to Nohana, 2013 was a year that saw lots of fun photo apps emerge in Japan. This is proving to be an area of expertise for the country, with many startups innovating to compete for the country’s mobile photo market, and opportunities beyond.

nengajo-1 nengajo-2


  1. For me, I typically use an application called Notabli to share photos with my own parents.  ↩