FlutterScape Official Launch and Nikkei Feature
The greatest news from FlutterScape, as the most appropriate one to kick off our year 2010 with!
We, FlutterScape officially launched our service on January 29th, 2010, and the first press release was from Nikkei MJ, the most powerful newspaper of all time in Japan! How lucky we were - we were featured way bigger than expected. This is all thanks to our users and supporters! Arigato-!!We are committed to become even more user-obsessed by diligently listening to users' feedback and ideas and improving the service, fundamentally because users should be protagonists at FlutterScape, while we are merely a platform provider behind. So here it is: the article from Nikkei MJ!!
http://it.nikkei.co.jp/internet/news/release.aspx?i=242395 The article started with a bold big title - 在日外国人が商材「目利き」- meaning in English, foreign residents of Japan become connoisseur of products (in a broad translation, this simply means that Japanese products are filtered and discovered by the "eyes" of foreign residents of Japan and they are most likely to be interesting to consumers abroad.) Why did Nikkei initiate the article in this sense?Because selling Japanese products and expanding markets abroad have been the biggest challenge for local merchants and retailers in Japan over decades due to the language and marketing barriers. FlutterScape's point of view on social commerce happens to overcome these two international barriers, language and marketing, in a purely natural manner by means of English as default language and a community of foreign residents of Japan. Our users from Japan are really keen about finding and sharing their favorite Japanese goodies to users overseas, just like these moments when we travel overseas and cannot help telling our friends or families about your discovery like "Hey dude, this is epic! Check this out!" - the reason behind it is simple: you cannot find these items back home. Therefore, action of sharing goodies to overseas is very natural and "social." There are, in fact, many websites falling into arena of social commerce nowadays, including Amazon's product review, Kaboodle, or Stylehive, etc.. Whenever information shared by individual users facilitates the buyer's decision-making, they are called social commerce because the E-commerce is helped by the power of Social Media. In the conventional social commerce, we had two major players: 1) Retailer and 2) Individual users. How FlutterScape takes social commerce is a bit different - we only have one player: Individual users who become not only information channel but also a retailer. Our "social" indicates user's passionate and impulsive action of sharing goodies from Japan to overseas because products are so surprising that users could not hold "it." Well, that is very natural. Meanwhile, these users who share goodies can also be empowered by FlutterScape to sell to overseas: i.e. "commerce." The overall flow from sharing goodies socially to selling them to overseas is a mere outcome of pure discovery and surprise that users experienced in Japan.
Finally, as Nikkei implies on the article, we believe that our social commerce platform should be an ultimate way to bridge the gap between countries. Selling is no longer "selling." Buying is no longer "buying." It is the way to connect people and their values from countries to countries.
Customers abroad may find their own professional buyers who can always suggest them products that best fit customers' taste and value. Users in Japan may be able to earn enough cash to return to their home country and see their friends and families more often or to start a new business that would provide the society with more employment both in Japan and foreign countries. What's so ever, FlutterScape's social commerce platform connects Japan to the rest of the world. Since there are huge gap between countries, culturally, politically or religiously, it is definitely worth of trying. Nobody knows what is beyond the result of our challenge but we will surely keep delivering extra happiness to your lives.
Once again, thank you so much for your continuous support and passion. Arigato gozaimasu ^^
Takehiro Kakiyama
FlutterScape Team
