A Happy New Year everyone!

During the holidays, Tabata-san and I visited Taipei. One of the main purposes of our visit was to research how Cacoo is used and recognized in Taiwan, as the number of users in Taiwan has been growing rapidly. (Other than that, I wanted to visit my friend in Taipei, be spoiled by yummy foods in Tawain and run away from the cold weather in Japan.)

We scheduled to meet one of our reliable Traditional Chinese translators, Planetoid, and his friends who are famous bloggers/editors in Taipei.

Our meeting was held at Hiiir Space near MRT Zhongxiao Dunhua station. It was kind of hidden café in the area but we really liked the atmosphere.

One of the people we were introduced to was Vista. He told us that he just introduced Cacoo in “雲端服務大閱兵，十大新秀亮相 (10 new good cloud services)” article on Business Next, a very popular magazine in Taipei.

Though he hasn’t used Cacoo much prior to our meeting, he started to use more and soon he became an expert and shown his diagram in his blog post.

Esor came in later after his work. He is an editor at P CuSER and has been using Cacoo for a while. He wrote a blog post a while ago about Cacoo and we were so happy to meet him finally as his post triggered Cacoo to be popular in Taiwan.

It was a very meaningful meeting for us. We now know how Taiwanese people expect Japanese products be. Thank you Vista, Esor and Planetoid!

The next day, we visited Fox‘s office. He owns a company that provides iCook, a Taiwanese cooking site and app. As iCook and Cacoo are both new services, we discussed more about startups in Taiwan and Japan. It was a good opportunity for us as it gave us good ideas how we can improve our service in Taiwan and in the world.

After the meeting with Fox, we had a dinner meeting with Jeremy from TechOrange Global. Being raised by Taiwanese and American parents, his opinion was a bit different from other people we met in Taiwan. He told us, for example, Taiwanese people like cute designs, while American people would prefer more professional-looking sharp designs. We also discussed about how startups in Taiwan are working to grow in and beyond Asia over good Dim Sum. (I really enjoyed the meeting and food and totally forgot about taking a picture with him…)

Through walking around the city of Taipei, I recognized that people in Taiwan are open to services and products from other parts of the world. Also, people are kind to each another and happy to share information and willing to listen other people’s opinion. These might be reasons that Cacoo has been accepted by people in Taiwan.

Now we are planning to hold a CacooUp in Taiwan and are hoping to see more users in Taiwan. More details will be announced soon. Please stay tuned!