Hi Cacoo users in Taiwan!

CacooUp is an event where Cacoo users gather to discuss your use of the tool, share knowledge and experience, take in your ideas and requests, and talk about future plans. We are going to hold this CacooUp in Taipei.

Program:

People welcomed to this meeting:

• People who use Cacoo and like Cacoo
• People who are interested in a Japanese company, Nulab, and hoping to talk to us
• People who are willing to spread around about Cacoo volunterlily and help us to provide a greater service

* No limit in how or where Cacoo is used. People who use Cacoo at work and at school are both welcomed.

Attend CacooUp in Taipei

We are looking for the following volunteers to make the event successful.

Please allow us to choose some of you if we get many applications.

• Speakers – show how you are using Cacoo

  - Please send us your name, the URL of your diagram, and what you can talk about (if you have a plan already)

• Supporters – take videos/pictures during the event, reception, MC, etc.

  - Please send us your name and how you can help us

• Interviewees – your interview will be listed on http://tour.cacoo.com/voices/

  - Even if you cannot come to the event but are available for the interview during our stay in Taipei (between March 6 and 8), please let us know the following:

Your name:
Your company name (if you use Cacoo at work):
Industry/major:
Place we can meet:
Date and time we can take your interview:
How long have you been using Cacoo?:
What kind of diagrams do you create?:
Please send us the URL of your diagram if available:

See you in Taipei in March!

Seeing ideas, instructions and flows visually is much easier to understand than seeing them in text. It’s the same for younger students.

Also, it’s always a good idea to insert images when students in higher education are creating presentation slides or doing their assignments to explain their points better. (The same thing for websites as you see on Cacoo.)

With these reasons, Cacoo has been widely used in classrooms. We believe students can benefit a lot by using Cacoo, too, and we started to offer the Academic plan about 3 months ago.

In the first 8 weeks, we have received applications from almost 500 users in 38 countries and the numbers are still growing. The distribution of the applied users seems the similar to the number of Cacoo users overall.

(You see it looks more interesting when you see these information in a graphic )

If you are interested in using Cacoo in your classrooms or for your homework and essays, apply for the Cacoo Academic plan from here. Students, teachers and staff working at schools are eligible to use Cacoo for free until June 30!

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!

We’ve heard that a lot of you have already sent and received cards using Cacoo Greetings. If you haven’t done so yet, send warm wishes to your friends and family.

1. Go to Cacoo page on Facebook. Select Cacoo Greeting in the left menu. Press “Create a card” button.

2. Allow Cacoo to access your information.

3. If you already have a Cacoo account, connect to the existing account.

4. Select friends you’d like to send a card.

5. Select a card.

6. Customize the card on Cacoo.

7. Set when you want to send the card.

Wishing everyone a very happy holiday season!

The Cacoo Team

We upgraded Cacoo earlier today and we would tell you about the changes that are a part of this update.

Vector formats, such as SVG and PDF, were added as export options earlier. Now Cacoo supports PowerPoint exports. It’ll be very useful to do your presentation with your diagrams created on Cacoo.

Please download and check the sample PPT file below:
http://bit.ly/w2zH3R

When exporting to Power Point, you can set the aspect ratio (4:3 or 16:9), the orientation, and select sheets to export.

This feature is available for users who have subscribed the Plus plan or Team plan. If you haven’t upgraded your Cacoo account, we hope this feature would encourage you to upgrade your plan.

2. Misc.

• Thai is added as the 20th supported languages on Cacoo. We are still looking for more good translators. If you are interested in helping translate Cacoo, please apply from here.
• Ownership of diagrams and Shared Folders can be transfered to other users.
• Users can now leave shared diagrams and Shared Folders.
• Horizontal, vertical, and 45-degree lines can be drawn by holding Shift key.
• A sheet can be selected from the dropdown list on the editor. You can go to other sheets very quickly.
• If you are using Cacoo on Mac, Command+[ and Command+] switch to other sheets.

We are going to add features requested by our users and improve Cacoo even more in the upcoming updates. Please enjoy using Cacoo and we hope you look forward to seeing continued updates.

Among the emails we receive to our Support account, “Sign in” issue has been the number one.  We have improved the Sign in panel several times to make it easier for all users.

Currently there are 4 sections in the Sign in panel.

A. Sign in with other services’s account information

If you have signed up using other service’s account information, you don’t need to enter your email address and password to sign in to Cacoo.   Simply clicking one of the button in Sign in panel that you used to sign up will let you sign in to Cacoo.

If you have a Cacoo account and if you want to connect other services to your account, press one of these buttons and click “Connect to existing Cacoo account” tab on the directed page. Once your account has been connected to other services, you’ll see them as connected on your Settings page.

B. Sign in with your email address and password

As orthodox as other services, you can sign in with your email address and password. Please note that the email and password fields are case sensitive. Please make sure to enter it exactly how you entered when you signed up.

C. Forgot your password?

If you don’t remember your password, please click this link. You’ll receive an email to reset your password after you enter your email address in the following page.

D. Sign up

This is where you can get your free account if you don’t have one yet.

Summary:

When you cannot sign in, don’t panic. We are always here to help you. Please feel free to contact us from here. Also, if you have any suggestions to improve Cacoo’s sign in steps, please let us hear!

Lately we added Finnish, Hungarian, and Thai. This means 20 languages all together!

Thanks to all translators, the number of Cacoo users are growing. At this moment, we only can answer your questions in Japanese or in English. But please look around and you might be able to find Cacoo experts and Cacoo power users around you.

Here are some places to look for help in your language:
- Facebook – Turkey, Spain, France, China, Brazil
- meetup

If you plan to hold any Cacoo user group meetings or if you know any meetings are planned, please let us know from here or announce on Facebook. One of our team might pop in and share our knowledge with you.

We are still looking for more good translators! If you are interested, please contact us from here.

And the winner of this competition is…
OS character icons by monja415 !

Congratulations! We’ll contact you shortly and send you the prizes.

We really appreciated designers who submitted your designs for this competition. Looking forward to seeing more of your nice stencils and templates applied to the Cacoo Store.

Thanks to everyone who visited our counter and tried out what we are currently developing with Google technology.

We were happy to see that people get excited to draw while they chat on Hangouts. Also, many people have heard of Cacoo but never tried it before. This event gave us a good chance to let these people try Cacoo.

We also received many requests and feedback. We’ll consider adding those functionalities.

We planned how we’ll set up the Cacoo counter before we headed to the venue.

And this is how we set up the counter:

Cacoo can be used in many different purposes. Keep enjoying Cacoo!

It is coming to Tokyo, Japan this week.
When: November 1, 2011
Where: Pacifico Yokohama

Cacoo will be at the “Developer Sandbox” area and demonstrating the application that we are currently developing with Google technology.

If you are around the area, please come and say “Hi” to our engineers!