Which celebrity do you look like?: 15 million Japanese go crazy about mobile face check

Even in Japan, mobile services that they become an instant hit with almost no promotion are rare. But some are so simple and so clever that they do. Just one month ago, content provider J-Magic, established in 2005, launched a free service called kaocheki.jp (Face Check” in Japanese) that is so simple and fun to use and addictive that a whopping 15 million people – that’s almost 20% of all mobile internet users in Japan – have used it already. How it works: Snap a picture of your own or someone else’s face, and we’ll tell you which celebrity it resembles most.”

Simply email a picture of your face, your friend’s or whoever else’s from your mobile to male@kaocheki.jp (for men), female@kaocheki.jp (for women) or mix@kaocheki.jp (if you don’t really know) a few seconds later, you’ll receive an email with a link to a page that lists your similarity to three celebrities expressed in percentages (which you can, of course, immediately share with your friends). For example, I look 23% like Japanese actor called Eiji Wentz, who is a quarter German (which I found a bit creepy…how can this thing tell I’m German??). The whole thing is based on a face recognition engine developed by OKI Electric Co., which is usually employed for less prosaic purposes (read: security applications).

Of course, results will be different depending on the angle you shoot at and sometimes deliver different results. Among some people, this has led to a sort of contest along the lines of, can I make this thing somehow tell me that I look like George Clooney?”

Now, why is J-Magic doing all this? For one, having 15 million users’ email addresses and the kind of traffic kaocheki.jp has is a very nice base to run an advertising business model on. Secondly and more importantly, J-Magic also runs eyenowa.jp, a mobile search engine running on image analysis technology (think: send in a picture of anything and we’ll link you to more information on that), which they cross-promote on kaocheki.jp: By leveraging the gimmicky Face Check service, J-Magic is able to drive users to a more advanced product. Clearly, there is a lot of potential in eyenowa for mobile marketing purposes, and J-Magic says they have already signed up two big clients for campaigns.

J-Magic is planning to expand kaocheki.jp by adding more celebrities (from additional categories such as comedy and sports) to the database, as well as launching SNS features, such as rankings and communities of all the people that look like a certain celebrity. So mixi and mobagetown, the other two big success stories in SNS in Japan, may have a new competitor coming their way.

Having said that, there’s a big differences between having registered users with profiles and massive repeat usage (mixi: more than 10 million users, mobagetown: more than 5 million users) and just people’s email adresses. Also, the three approaches are very different: mixi is more of a classic SNS/blog site, while mobagetown is focused on connecting people through free games, avatars and entertainment and both can sustain repeat usage for a long time, while it’s unclear to doubtful whether kaocheki.jp will be able to do this.

Nonetheless, the service will be one to watch in the next few months.

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