Japan-headquartered food photo sharing service Snapdish has signaled its intention to grow its presence overseas with the introduction of seven new languages and an app for the Amazon Kindle Fire.
The service lets user share photos of food and provide further related information, such as recipe instructions or ingredient details. It has a cumulative 700,000 downloads for iOS and Android and already supports English, Japanese, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified) and Korea. Now, users can navigate the app in Thai, Indonesian, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese.
The service has been a hit in Japan, which accounts for 70 percent of all content posted to it, and it has generated some initial traction across Asia. With the new language support, Vuzz — the company behind Snapdish — is aiming to build a presence in new markets and further its footprint in Asia, as Hidetaka Fukushima, its international business development lead, explains:
Although SnapDish has been popular in Asian countries such as Thailand, it was not available in the local language. We’ve also had some users in Europe and South America, mainly using the English version, [so]we’ve always felt the need to have the app available in these local languages.
Fukushima previously told TNW that the company would also increase its overseas marketing efforts in conjunction with the expanded language support.
The introduction of Kindle Fire support is interesting since the Amazon tablet launched in Japan in October, but it isn’t widespread in the rest of Asia. Research from Localytics published yesterday showed that the Kindle Fire is the most-used Android tablet by some margin, but almost all owners are based in the US. Indeed, the number of Kindle Fires in the US accounts for a third of all tablets that run the Google-owned operating system worldwide.
Snapdish competes with Evernote Food, Foodspotting, Burpple, among others. Since its launch in May 2011, 1.9 million photos have been shared by users, that’s up from 1.5 million in November 2012. Fukushima tells TNW that the current run rate is about 7,000 uploads per day and typically 30-40 percent of its registered users are active each month.
Vuzz landed undisclosed funding from early Twitter investor Digital Garage last year.
Image via Shutterstock
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