D2C Announces Launch of the “;Dcloud” Cloud Service for Users Worldwide

Back in March, I wrote an article about 5 Very Cool Japanese Mobile Technology Companies from Mobile World Congress and highlighted a company called DCloud. The company is the world’s first Emoji (animated emoticons) based cloud service developed by a consortium between Bijutsu Shuppan, d2c and Dentsu. Simply, it allows developers to embed an SDK into their app and let their users play with over 100k cute emoji’s. Especially for Japanese girls, emoji’s make their messages more cute and animated, wah!  In March the service was in beta; now it is fully public.

The service has just released the Dcloud platform to offer emoji (animated emoticons) to smartphone apps such as: e-mail, blog, SMS, social-networking, picture-editing, etc. on Android, and will be releasing an iOS version as well in the coming months.

To help spread the love of emoji’s, the company is freely offering the SDK to developers to integrate richer communication features into their own applications, such as the ability to access our library of emoji, rich text input, and more.

Surprisingly, the emoji market has been about a yearly 300 million USD market in Japan alone. With the increase in emoticon-related apps and popularity in various markets, DCloud sees an opportunity to offer the functionality that Japanese users have long enjoyed to people all over the world.

The ;DcloudBaseApp application enables users to access the ;Dcloud service, and download ;Dcloud apps such as the ;DecoMessage SMS (short message service) and ;Decora email service. All ;Dcloud applications can be used worldwide.

Since users can directly access the ;Dcloud emoji from the smartphone’s message creation screen, they no longer have to store a lot of emoji on their phones in advance. Furthermore, even if users change to a different smartphone model, all the cloud server emoji that they have used to date can easily be synchronized to the new phone.

To make it easier to find the perfect emoji, meaning and other text information tags have been appended to each one, allowing the user to find emoji through a text search. An offline service is also provided for occasions such as when the cloud server cannot be accessed due to the user being outside the network range.

In the coming months ;Dcloud will develop SNS, chat and blog applications for both the Android and iOS mobile operating systems.