A while back we featured the fun photo application Otaku Camera, developed by the folks over at Tokyo Otaku Mode. When last we checked in on this app, it had just surpassed a million downloads having been featured on Google Play, with the iPhone version also doing pretty well. For those not familiar with Otaku Camera, the app transforms your smartphone pictures into manga style images that you can then share with friends. Now the company has just announced that the app has surpassed 3 million downloads as of May 20th. As we mentioned recently in our feature highlighting Japanese startups doing well abroad, Tokyo Otaku Mode has been pretty successful in reaching overseas audiences. Its Otaku Camera app seems to be no exception, with the Android version doing especially well in Europe, currently a top 25 photo app in Germany (18) and Austria (23), and a top 100 photo app in 33 countries in total. On the iOS side, the app’s success seems to be largely in Asia, as it is a top 50 photo app in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as its home market of Japan. But the company is making improvements, adding new photo…
A while back we featured the fun photo application Otaku Camera, developed by the folks over at Tokyo Otaku Mode. When last we checked in on this app, it had just surpassed a million downloads having been featured on Google Play, with the iPhone version also doing pretty well. For those not familiar with Otaku Camera, the app transforms your smartphone pictures into manga style images that you can then share with friends.
Now the company has just announced that the app has surpassed 3 million downloads as of May 20th. As we mentioned recently in our feature highlighting Japanese startups doing well abroad, Tokyo Otaku Mode has been pretty successful in reaching overseas audiences. Its Otaku Camera app seems to be no exception, with the Android version doing especially well in Europe, currently a top 25 photo app in Germany (18) and Austria (23), and a top 100 photo app in 33 countries in total.
On the iOS side, the app’s success seems to be largely in Asia, as it is a top 50 photo app in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as its home market of Japan.
But the company is making improvements, adding new photo frames to the app that will hopefully resonate with users. They just announced new special frames for the app in collaboration with singer Namie Amuro and MTV Japan’s animated short Usavich. These frames will be free until July 31st. In total, the app has over 100 frames in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish.
I find it pretty interesting that some of Japan’s most successful startup exports are proving to be photo apps. The decoration app Snapeee has 80% of its users overseas, and for many apps in the decoration or collage categories, reaching audiences abroad appears not so hard. Other examples of Japanese companies peddling photo apps to global audiences include the veteran startup SnapDish, which had the goal of going global from the very start, and Cinnamon, which is targeting the Southeast Asian market with its Seconds app.
If you’d like to get a better idea for the the camera app works, do check out our demo video below.
Back in February we wrote about a new service from Mixi’s (TYO:2121) innovation team called Nohana. Using the Nohana smartphone app, users can create a photo book using snapshots taken with their mobile, and then received that printed book via mail. Users in Japan can receive one free picture book per month (not including a 90 yen shipping fee), but for each one after that they need to pay 500 yen (or about $5). According to the folks over at Venture Now, Nohana currently has 30,000 users, with over 8,000 photo books published since the February launch. And it was just announced a few days ago that Nohana would be donating pre-paid Nohana credit to selected nurseries and kindergartens. The specific establishments will be selected by lottery, and Nohana will donate 1 percent of its published book total to these facilities. So in other words, based on their 8,000 total books published thus far, eight facilities will receive prepaid cards for 5,000 yen Nohana credit, good enough to buy 10 photo books (or 80 in total). These child care establishments have expressed a need to share photos with parents, to give them a better indication of the child care environment…
Back in February we wrote about a new service from Mixi’s (TYO:2121) innovation team called Nohana. Using the Nohana smartphone app, users can create a photo book using snapshots taken with their mobile, and then received that printed book via mail. Users in Japan can receive one free picture book per month (not including a 90 yen shipping fee), but for each one after that they need to pay 500 yen (or about $5).
According to the folks over at Venture Now, Nohana currently has 30,000 users, with over 8,000 photo books published since the February launch. And it was just announced a few days ago that Nohana would be donating pre-paid Nohana credit to selected nurseries and kindergartens.
The specific establishments will be selected by lottery, and Nohana will donate 1 percent of its published book total to these facilities. So in other words, based on their 8,000 total books published thus far, eight facilities will receive prepaid cards for 5,000 yen Nohana credit, good enough to buy 10 photo books (or 80 in total).
These child care establishments have expressed a need to share photos with parents, to give them a better indication of the child care environment and activities. And from Nohana’s perspective, this is a good way to introduce more parents to their photo printing service.
Personally, I’ve already printed a couple of books with Nohana. And so far the service has been great. If you do try out the service for yourself, do make sure that the photos you select for printing are nice and sharp, because paper is far less forgiving than your smartphone screen.
Tokyo-based startup Mind Pallete, known for developing the very popular photo sharing app Snapeee, announced today that it has raised a round of series B funding from six Japanese VC firms: SMBC Venture Capital, Dentsu Digital Holdings, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, PSC, Sun Eight Investment, and Itochu Technology Ventures. Detailed figures were not disclosed but I assume the total is a multi-million dollar figure at least. The startup was launched with seed investment from CyberAgent Ventures in November of 2010, and subsequently the Snapeee photo app was launched in May of 2011. They previously fundraised an unknown amount of investment from GREE and Itochu Technology Ventures. The service has reached the top spot in the AppStore’s free photo category in 13 Asian countries including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and mainland China. The app has 80% of its 4 million strong user base outside its home market of Japan, with its core users being females in their teens and 20s. The startup has partnered with many apparel and music labels, helping them promote their products using the photo sharing platform. With the new funding, the startup expects to intensify this advertising partnership business, which has been showing good results thus far….
Tokyo-based startup Mind Pallete, known for developing the very popular photo sharing app Snapeee, announced today that it has raised a round of series B funding from six Japanese VC firms: SMBC Venture Capital, Dentsu Digital Holdings, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, PSC, Sun Eight Investment, and Itochu Technology Ventures. Detailed figures were not disclosed but I assume the total is a multi-million dollar figure at least.
The startup was launched with seed investment from CyberAgent Ventures in November of 2010, and subsequently the Snapeee photo app was launched in May of 2011. They previously fundraised an unknown amount of investment from GREE and Itochu Technology Ventures. The service has reached the top spot in the AppStore’s free photo category in 13 Asian countries including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and mainland China.
The app has 80% of its 4 million strong user base outside its home market of Japan, with its core users being females in their teens and 20s. The startup has partnered with many apparel and music labels, helping them promote their products using the photo sharing platform. With the new funding, the startup expects to intensify this advertising partnership business, which has been showing good results thus far.
For our readers not yet familiar with how the Snapeee app works, we encourage you to check out our previous story featuring Japan’s cutest mobile apps, which mentioned Snapeee.
Manga Camera is a popular camera app that cleverly turns your photos into manga style pictures. The app had an impressive 2 million downloads within a month of its release, and has so far nabbed 5.8 million downloads in total, with 4.5 star rating on the app store. Manga Camera has just updated its app to add a chat feature. You can send friends message that consists of a photo and a dialogue in a fun manga style. Chatting back and forth with others in this way automatically creates a sort of live manga story. This ‘Manga Talk’ feature is currently available on iOS but will soon be released on Android as well. The app even has a sort of artificial intelligence built into it. By sending messages to Manga Camera’s official account, the app interprets the content of the text and gives appropriate replies, again in a manga style. Another interesting – and perhaps very Japanese – feature is the ‘talking to yourself’ Bocchi function (bocchi means ‘alone’ in Japanese). The picture you create with this process can then be shared on Facebook or Twitter For those of you unfamiliar with the basics of the popular photo app, the…
Manga Camera is a popular camera app that cleverly turns your photos into manga style pictures. The app had an impressive 2 million downloads within a month of its release, and has so far nabbed 5.8 million downloads in total, with 4.5 star rating on the app store.
Manga Camera has just updated its app to add a chat feature. You can send friends message that consists of a photo and a dialogue in a fun manga style. Chatting back and forth with others in this way automatically creates a sort of live manga story. This ‘Manga Talk’ feature is currently available on iOS but will soon be released on Android as well.
The app even has a sort of artificial intelligence built into it. By sending messages to Manga Camera’s official account, the app interprets the content of the text and gives appropriate replies, again in a manga style. Another interesting – and perhaps very Japanese – feature is the ‘talking to yourself’ Bocchi function (bocchi means ‘alone’ in Japanese). The picture you create with this process can then be shared on Facebook or Twitter
For those of you unfamiliar with the basics of the popular photo app, the operaton is fairly simple. Users can select their preferred effects frame from over 32 choices. After you have chosen your frame, just take a photo or choose one from the photo gallery. The photo is instantly turned into a unique manga, and the quality is pretty impressive. The resulting photo can be saved to your camera roll or can be shared on Twitter and Facebook.
Manga Camera has recently been used by Coca-Cola Japan to promote their new flavored tea. The beverage giant has even provided special background frames for this new tea, encouraging people post their photos.
For all you old school gamers out there, here’s a fun new photo app from Tokyo-based Mfro that will take you back to the early days of console gaming. It’s called Famikon Camera, an allusion to Nintendo’s first game system released in Japan in the early 80s [1]. What’s fun about this camera app is that parts of it actually feel like a game, taking on a faux Mario Bros look, with a choice of four pipes – each one corresponding to different kinds of photo framing options: nomikai (or drinking party), meals, going out, and other. From there you’ll be presented with a variety of photo frames and overlays that you can apply, with looks corresponding to many of your favorite classic games. When you add your own photo (it can be a picture taken live with your camera, or one from your album), you can then apply one of many pixelating filters so that it blends well with the 8-bit style. For example, below you can see a street scene with the fun Mario Bros frame applied. If you’d like to check out Famikon Camera, you can get it over on the App Store. The company has also…
For all you old school gamers out there, here’s a fun new photo app from Tokyo-based Mfro that will take you back to the early days of console gaming. It’s called Famikon Camera, an allusion to Nintendo’s first game system released in Japan in the early 80s [1].
What’s fun about this camera app is that parts of it actually feel like a game, taking on a faux Mario Bros look, with a choice of four pipes – each one corresponding to different kinds of photo framing options: nomikai (or drinking party), meals, going out, and other.
From there you’ll be presented with a variety of photo frames and overlays that you can apply, with looks corresponding to many of your favorite classic games. When you add your own photo (it can be a picture taken live with your camera, or one from your album), you can then apply one of many pixelating filters so that it blends well with the 8-bit style. For example, below you can see a street scene with the fun Mario Bros frame applied.
If you’d like to check out Famikon Camera, you can get it over on the App Store. The company has also recently released its HadoukenCamera camera app, which is somewhat similar to the Kame Camera app that we featured last week.
Or Famicom, as it’s usually referred to in English. ↩
When I first met up with the folks behind DecoAlbum, I thought maybe it was just another photo app. Japanese startups have developed so many photo sharing apps, and most of them hope to hit the South East Asian market. So I was wondering if this space hasn’t already been saturated. However DecoAlbum was one of the standouts at the recent Echelon Tokyo satellite event, and it was also chosen to be included in the first batch of NTT Docomo’s incubation program. So what’s so special about DecoAlbum? We sought out the app’s developer, Prime Again, to find out more. We spoke with the company’s CEO Nobuhiro Abe and his right hand Maiko Kojima. Tell us about you and your team? Nobuhiro: We were teamed up in 2010 when we developed a cloud-based contact sharing app at Breakthrough Camp, a two-month app and business development camp for university students and aspiring entrepreneurs. Then we were incorporated in December of 2010, and subsequently developed the app with students from Waseda University and Digital Hollywood University. We’ve seen many similar photo sharing apps. What makes DecoAlbum different? Maiko: We’re a team of students, and that’s our target user base. That’s why we’ve…
When I first met up with the folks behind DecoAlbum, I thought maybe it was just another photo app. Japanese startups have developed so many photo sharing apps, and most of them hope to hit the South East Asian market. So I was wondering if this space hasn’t already been saturated.
So what’s so special about DecoAlbum? We sought out the app’s developer, Prime Again, to find out more. We spoke with the company’s CEO Nobuhiro Abe and his right hand Maiko Kojima.
Tell us about you and your team?
Nobuhiro: We were teamed up in 2010 when we developed a cloud-based contact sharing app at Breakthrough Camp, a two-month app and business development camp for university students and aspiring entrepreneurs. Then we were incorporated in December of 2010, and subsequently developed the app with students from Waseda University and Digital Hollywood University.
We’ve seen many similar photo sharing apps. What makes DecoAlbum different?
PrimeAgain’s Maiko Kojima pitches at Echelon Tokyo Satellite. (April, 2013)
Maiko: We’re a team of students, and that’s our target user base. That’s why we’ve learned so much about what our users really want to have. When we’re observing our friends using photo apps, they typically use one app for photo collage and another for decoration. So before uploading photos to their walls or timelines, they typically use two photo apps at least. The number of apps capable of both collage and decoration is very few, maybe even zero, because it’s difficult to manage and optimize memory usage for handling photos on smartphones. But we made it.
DecoAlbum allows users to both create collages and decorate with a single app. In terms of differentiation, there is also a storage function. Our app is not only a photo decoration and collage app but features storage on its backend. […] You can create as many albums as you want, and share anything stored photos with your friends or family members via Facebook, Line, or other social media.
Do you have any metrics to share about how your app has performed so far?
Nobuhiro: The app was launched in late June of 2012, and we’ve seen more than 1.2 million downloads in 8 months.
Is your user base different from other photo sharing apps?
Maiko: Our user base ranges from junior high school girls to housewives, especially those who prefer cute or elegant fashions. We’ve been acquiring users from the Southeast Asian market as well, mainly from housewives in their 20s. Our app is now available in Japanese, English, Mandarin, Korean, and Thai.
So are you making any specific marketing efforts elsewhere in Asia?
PrimeAgain CEO Nobuhiro Abe
Nobuhiro: We have never done any paid promotions. So we’re honored to have seen such positive results. The usual acquisition of our user base has been entirely word-of-month, and we will partner with other mobile app developers to take things a step further. One of our strength is providing cute stickers designed from our awesome designers, and that has been very popular with our users, and it can be also used when messaging in other apps. We’ll be providing our specially designed stickers to some partner mobile apps, including Korea’s Between, a mobile photo sharing app for couples. We’re in talks with some other developers about providing stickers, an arrangement we feel benefits both parties.
How will you monetize? Do you have any exit strategy?
Nobuhiro: We’re partnering with Foglio (a photo processing platform run by Fujifilm) and mobile photo-processing company Tolot so that our users can print their pictures [1]. We’re also in talks with Photobook Thailand to give our users a better experience in Southeast Asian regions. Regarding the exit, we have no concrete plan at this moment beyond increasing our user base. We recently fundraised 10 million yen (approximately $100,000) from East Ventures, which might be sufficient to survive for the time being. We don’t want to [target] acquisition by another party, but expect to go straight ahead to an IPO exit.
DecoAlbum is certainly a very powerful app in terms of functions. Combining photo collage and decoration is not an issue that we hear many people complaining about, but based on DecoAlbum’s download numbers it looks to be a surprisingly significant problem. Will DecoAlbum remain the only real solution in this space? Let’s wait and see.
The DecoAlbum development team
Tolot recently fundraised 500 million yen from KDDI Open Innovation Fund. ↩
Adding to our growing list of fun Japanese photo apps, here’s one for all your guys who have joined the mobile chat app craze. It’s called StickerMe, and it comes from the folks at Motion Portrait, an app publisher well known for its face-altering technology. One of the biggest attractions of mobile chat applications like Line or Kakaotalk is that you can use fun stickers to express yourself. And now with StickerMe, you can take a picture of yourself or any of your friends, and make it into a cute sticker that you can send with your favorite mobile chat application. After taking your initial photo, you can then choose from a pretty wide array of stamps, many of them closely resembling those you’d find on Line (see pictures below). But given the growing popularity of these chat apps in Asia and around the world, this certainly looks like it could be a popular photo utility. Check it out over the Apple App Store, or see how it works in the video above.
Adding to our growing list of fun Japanese photo apps, here’s one for all your guys who have joined the mobile chat app craze. It’s called StickerMe, and it comes from the folks at Motion Portrait, an app publisher well known for its face-altering technology.
One of the biggest attractions of mobile chat applications like Line or Kakaotalk is that you can use fun stickers to express yourself. And now with StickerMe, you can take a picture of yourself or any of your friends, and make it into a cute sticker that you can send with your favorite mobile chat application.
After taking your initial photo, you can then choose from a pretty wide array of stamps, many of them closely resembling those you’d find on Line (see pictures below). But given the growing popularity of these chat apps in Asia and around the world, this certainly looks like it could be a popular photo utility.
Check it out over the Apple App Store, or see how it works in the video above.
About a month ago, an internet meme called Makankosappo (literally translated as “Magic Penetrating Killing Ray”) spread around the world pretty fast. It all began when Japanese schoolgirls were photographing themselves as if they were hit by a special attack from Dragon Ball. And from there it took off, even spawning a ‘Quidditching‘ spin-off. But Tokyo startup Nagisa, which is well known for having developed the Balloon messaging app, has taken the meme one step further. The company recently introduced a photo effects app that allows users to easily create pictures with that sort of effects. It’s called Kame Camera and today it became the top ranked application in the free photo & video category on the Japanese App Store, also reaching the 20th position overall. The app is available in both English and Japanese, and can be downloaded for iOS and Android platforms. It has multiple photo effects including Kamehameha (from Dragon Ball), Hadoken (from Street Fighter), and the Force (Star Wars) as well. In their announcement, the startup noted that it aspires to create more apps to bring fun Japanese culture to the world. If you don’t want to miss out on the fun, now is the time…
About a month ago, an internet meme called Makankosappo (literally translated as “Magic Penetrating Killing Ray”) spread around the world pretty fast. It all began when Japanese schoolgirls were photographing themselves as if they were hit by a special attack from Dragon Ball. And from there it took off, even spawning a ‘Quidditching‘ spin-off.
But Tokyo startup Nagisa, which is well known for having developed the Balloon messaging app, has taken the meme one step further. The company recently introduced a photo effects app that allows users to easily create pictures with that sort of effects. It’s called Kame Camera and today it became the top ranked application in the free photo & video category on the Japanese App Store, also reaching the 20th position overall.
The app is available in both English and Japanese, and can be downloaded for iOS and Android platforms. It has multiple photo effects including Kamehameha (from Dragon Ball), Hadoken (from Street Fighter), and the Force (Star Wars) as well. In their announcement, the startup noted that it aspires to create more apps to bring fun Japanese culture to the world. If you don’t want to miss out on the fun, now is the time to give it a try.
Of course, Japan has no shortage of other great photo apps if you’d like to check out some more. Regrettably, they aren’t all quite as much fun as Kame Camera!
At e27’s Echelon satellite event in Tokyo today, Hidetaka Fukushima of Snapdish presented a little background about how his startup set out to take on a global market from the very start. This is certainly unique for any startup, but it’s especially unique in Japan where not too many startups venture beyond the domestic market – and even few startups succeed in their efforts. Hidetaka explained that the majority of posts to Snapdish are of homemade food, specifically 70% – so it’s not just restaurant pictures. They have about 8000 posts per day, and about 2 million in total to date. Currently they’re available in 11 languages, but the process of localizing their service went beyond just simple translation. Hidetake noted that when translating their ‘yummy’ button into other languages requires consideration of what will work in other cultures. So for Japanese that meant using ‘mogumogu’ (which means something like ‘nom nom’). But he explains that they even create food categories based on regional preferences, so for example, China has different categories than Japan. Eventually they came to the realization that taking pictures of food was something that was particular to Asia, and they figured that Asia was going to…
At e27’s Echelon satellite event in Tokyo today, Hidetaka Fukushima of Snapdish presented a little background about how his startup set out to take on a global market from the very start. This is certainly unique for any startup, but it’s especially unique in Japan where not too many startups venture beyond the domestic market – and even few startups succeed in their efforts.
Hidetaka explained that the majority of posts to Snapdish are of homemade food, specifically 70% – so it’s not just restaurant pictures. They have about 8000 posts per day, and about 2 million in total to date.
Currently they’re available in 11 languages, but the process of localizing their service went beyond just simple translation. Hidetake noted that when translating their ‘yummy’ button into other languages requires consideration of what will work in other cultures. So for Japanese that meant using ‘mogumogu’ (which means something like ‘nom nom’). But he explains that they even create food categories based on regional preferences, so for example, China has different categories than Japan.
Eventually they came to the realization that taking pictures of food was something that was particular to Asia, and they figured that Asia was going to be a big market for them. Nevertheless, their team is a very international one, with members from Japan, German, the US, Taiwan, and Denmark.
Snapdish’s Hidetaka Fukushima
The global reach of the smartphone platform let them have significant reach upon launch, becoming the number one photo app in Japan, number eight in Taiwan, seventh in Singapore, and 11th in China. Eventually Chinese social network Renren approached them about a partnership, and they also established cooperation with SK Telecom. They’ve had some good media coverage too, with a mention in Travel + Leisure, as well as a mention on ABCNews.com as one of the top five food photo apps.
During the Q&A session, someone asked about Snapdish monetization strategy, and Hidetaka explained that they have official accounts for companies. Currently those accounts are free, but they will be charged later on. They plan to do paid campaigns eventually as well.
Hidetaka is a pretty sharp founder, so it will be interesting to see if they can make that jump from a large user base to profitability.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. ↩
photo apps 
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
Yukari Mitsuhashi
