Japanese firm Line launches Selfie Sticker iPhone app
Selfie smartphone photos were seemingly everywhere last year, while digital "stickers" have also been growing fast within social apps. Now Japanese firm Line is combining the two.
Selfie smartphone photos were seemingly everywhere last year, while digital "stickers" have also been growing fast within social apps. Now Japanese firm Line is combining the two.
Line, which has more than 400 million registered users, has launched a new standalone iPhone app: Line Selfie Sticker.
The app gets people to take a photo of their own or somebody else's face, then maps it onto one of 130 character templates, applying a cartoon-like filter to ensure it blends in.
The resulting stickers can be customised with speech bubbles and shared with friends on Line, but also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - making the app a viral marketing tool for Line itself.
"From the cute and cuddly Line characters to a career-driven independent women, this app has it all,"explains its App Store listing. "Cheerleaders, Weddings, Pirates, Monsters, and more."
Stickers are already a sizeable business for Line, which reported US$338m of revenues in 2013. While the lion's share of those came from in-app purchases in its catalogue of mobile games, around 20 per cent came from sales of stickers created by its own designers, as well as brands like Disney, Marvel, Sanrio and MTV.