If you love selfies and like showing off your stuff, we’ve found the perfect app for you. In fact, we’ve found two of them. Both apps are made in China and are sort of like Instagram with tags for brands.
Last year was the year of the selfie and it is clear that many people like to show what they have in photos – and so these two apps integrate these trends into social networks for most Show-off of phone owners. One of them is Pinco, which is designed only for users in China; the other, Nice, hopes to attract new users from all over the world.
Both show-off apps have the same concept: Take a photo, add filters, then tag the designer brands around you — your MacBook, your Starbucks coffee, your Calvin Klein t-shirt, your Bose speakers, whatever you have. The tags appear above the photo. The two apps also allow users to follow streams related to their favorite brands.
Peacock hunting with Pinco
This is what it looks like inside Pinco when I took a photo:
Since the app is only for users in China, the images can only be shared on Sina Weibo or WeChat. Here is a random user and also a brand page (not officially run by the fashion company) within the app:
Pinco spices things up with some fun themed sections, like one where people can showcase their workspace. The app looks clean and minimalistic, as we’d expect from the startup app development company that makes Weico, a very good-looking third-party app for Weibo.
(See: Weibo’s content gap: Only 5% of users publish almost exclusively original content)
Show off with Nice
Nice supports Facebook (in addition to Weibo) and operates entirely in English, so it’s targeting a global audience for this new social network. Here’s what it looks like when you take a photo:
And browse the app:
Nice lets you tag anything you want, not just brands. You can tag “work,” “car,” your city, or anything you like. This makes the app a little more cluttered than Pinco, but could be useful for those who want to find people nearby.
With a strong focus on brands – and on users who are a brand’s holy grail: China’s emerging middle class – these apps could monetize through social media marketing and other clever promotional moves. For now, these young apps are ad-free and without any advertising.
Instagram allows people to tag brands and other things, but it’s an often-overlooked feature that was quietly added about a year ago; I’ve yet to see anyone I follow tag a designer brand. Some fashion apps do it too, such as WearToday. But there’s still room for social/photo apps that make this their specialty. We’ve seen Chinese startups take the lead in niche photo apps before — even though the rest of the world chose not to follow. Remember the photo app that lets you add sound snippets? No? Well, it’s still very popular in China, but that trend hasn’t gone viral among app makers around the world. Perhaps this latest idea will succeed.
The post “Want a photo app for taking selfies and showing off your stuff? China is way ahead of you?” appeared first on Tech in Asia.
