Japanese advertising giant Dentsu, D2C, and Bijutsu Shuppan Networks Co. Ltd have officially announced the release of the Dcloud platform [1] which will provide emoji for you to use on your Android smartphone.
You’re probably thinking that adding smiley faces to your phone isn’t a very big deal. But according to Dentsu, the emoji market has been worth a yearly $300 million in Japan. And indeed the Dcloud Base App, which delivers the emoji cloud service that can then be used in other Dcloud-enabled apps, will give the option for paid premium membership after downloading. Premium users get more emoji and are able to access 20 ‘palette’ of smileys from the portal site while regular members can only download two.
But what’s remarkable here is that Dentsu is targeting smartphone users worldwide, not just those in Japan. Just as GREE and DeNA are attempting to port Japanese mobile gaming monetization strategies overseas via the smartphone platform, it looks like Dentsu wants to make a similar move with emoji for mobile. They even have a Tokyo Emoji Girls blog and Sina Weibo account to assist with the marketing.
Besides the Dcloud Base App, there are two other apps being announced today: DecoMessage, which is a free Dcloud SMS application; and Decora, a free Dcloud email application. Both, of course will have emoji support thanks to the Dcloud Base App.
As a part of a special campaign, Dcloud premium membership will be available for free until July 31. So if you’d like to see what the full experience is like, you can try it out.
To learn more, check out their demo video below, or click on over to dcloud.jpn.com to find out more.
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Note that the name is actually written as ‘;Dcloud’ with a semi-colon at the front. For readability’s sake, I’ve left off the semi-colon, and will do so forevermore. Even if it does make a winky face. ↩
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