当蠢笨且表情夸张的日本动漫人物遇上免费短信和语音通话技术，两者的结晶就是日本唯一一款在海外大热的应用——连我（Line）。目前，它的下载量已经突破了1亿次。

    “它的速度超过电子邮件，比短信更有创意，比打电话还便宜，叫人怎能不爱它，”一位西班牙粉丝在该公司的宣传视频中说道。连我应用的支持者还有很多。它设计精巧，已经获得多个奖项，其中包括著名的2012年日经优秀产品服务奖（Nikkei Superior Products Service Award 2012）。到目前为止，连我仅在日本就拥有了约4,150万用户，其中大部分在30岁以下。

    与微软（Microsoft）的Skype等全球性产品相比，连我最特别的一点是它出自有些与世隔绝的日本科技业——产品在国外极少有粉丝。位于东京的技术顾问塞尔坎•托托称：“连我最不同寻常的地方在于，它是首款在国际上获得成功的日本网络服务。它在短短19个月内就吸引到了6,000万名海外用户，可谓前无古人。”它的用户增速甚至超过了当年的Facebook。

    这款应用在日本大获成功，覆盖了该国约三分之一的移动用户，甚至开始威胁日本人信赖了十多年的移动电子邮件。

    连我流行的主要基础是日本拥有绝对优势的一个领域，也就是设计和使用表情符号。在连我中，这些表情符号已经发展成完整的角色形象，例如神秘的月亮意味着“你永远不知道接下来会发生什么”。这些表情符号被称为“贴图”，目的是帮助用户以诙谐的方式传达信息。

    虽然许多贴图都是免费的，但据知情人士透露，这项业务每月能为连我的开发商NHN日本（NHN Japan）带来高达400万美元的利润。不过NHN日本并没有发布官方的数据。NHN日本每月还能进账数百万日元的广告费，目前有30多家公司在连我上发布优惠券等类型的广告信息。除此之外，程序内购买也是连我的稳定收入来源。

    不过，连我的其它服务目前发展不甚顺畅。据托托透露，时间线功能（类似于Facebook的动态信息）已宣告失败。“NHN日本正在大力推广星座、优惠券、虚拟世界、儿童平台等服务，不过它们到底是能吸引到更多用户，还是会起到反作用，目前仍是个未知数。 ”

    What do you get if you cross emoting, goofy manga characters with free messaging and calls? Japan's only export app hit—called Line—which recently hit its 100 millionth download.

    "Faster than email, more creative than text and cheaper than calling, what's not to love," says one Spanish fan on the company promotional video. He's not the app's only booster. Line is a slickly designed product that has garnered awards, including a prestigious Nikkei Superior Products Service Award 2012. So far, Line has some 41.5 million subscribers, mostly under 30 years old, in Japan alone.

    What really sets Line apart from other globalised formats such as Microsoft's (MSFT) Skype is that it has come out of the Galapagos-like conditions of the Japanese tech scene: its wares rarely find fans abroad. "What's remarkable about Line is that is the first online service coming from Japan ever to become an international success," says Serkan Toto a technology consultant based in Tokyo. "Racking up 60 million non-Japanese users in just 19 months is a historic accomplishment." That is at a faster pace than even Facebook (FB) found subscribers.

    The app is so wildly popular in Japan, covering about a third of all mobile users, that it is killing use of communication sworn by Japanese for over a decade now—mobile email.

    Much of the app's popularity rides on one area where Japan has an unassailable lead, the design and playful use of emoji or Japanese emoticons. On the Line app they have grown into fully delineated characters such as the enigmatic Moon "You never know next what will be happing with this one". They are called "stickers," and are intended to help users get their message across in amusing ways.

    Sales of such stickers, though many are free, are earning Line's creators NHN Japan healthy profits of about $4 million a month, according to sources familiar with the company. NHN does not share such figures. While other revenue comes from about 30 companies who pay several million yen a month for advertising on the service, such as distributing coupons. There is also steady earnings from an in-app game service.

    Other services have not been so successful. Features such as a timeline, which essentially works like Facebook's news feed, have flopped says Toto. "It remains to be see if other functions NHN Japan keeps baking into the platform like horoscopes, coupons, a virtual world, a platform for kids, etc. will attract more users or alienate them."

    喜欢收集虚拟贴图的用户大多位于亚洲，这些地区多年以来一直深受“Hello Kitty”等日本动漫文化的影响。但与GREE和DeNA等成功突围的日本企业一样，NHN日本的韩国母公司Naver也希望连我能在全球和美国市场取得更大成功。

    Naver最近聘请了美国说唱歌手史诺普•道格为代言人，向美国儿童宣传用日本风格的动漫形象发送信息是多么潮。由此可见，Naver正在花费重金吸引美国用户。Naver美国的首席执行官简妮•韩称：“我们实现了飞速增长，最初是依靠吸引与日本和韩国有关系的用户。现在，我们的产品在全世界都获得了更广泛的参与。”

    “我们现有的很多贴图都已在美国流行开来，尤其是拿手的动漫形象。我们还计划在今后几个月向欧美市场推出更多更加本地化的内容，”韩还补充说。“连我的主要优势之一在于，我们承诺不会像其他应用程序开发商那样通过挖掘用户数据赚钱。”

    日本创业大师威廉•齐藤称，连我要想在美国市场取得成功，需要克服一些挑战。他指出，连我要求用户用手机号码注册，存在滥用的风险。“首次安装时，连我就根据你的手机号码建立索引。这种做法存在极大的安全隐患。一旦NHN的数据库泄露（这只是时间早晚的问题），即便非连我用户，其联络信息也可能被泄露，”齐藤说道。“假如有一天比尔•盖茨或日本首相（连我的用户）接到骚扰电话，那么很可能是连我出现了信息泄露。”

    齐藤认可贴图功能的吸引力，也承认发送贴图和创建群组都很简单。但他同时指出，要在欧美市场推销可爱的卡通动漫形象，恐怕没有在亚洲容易，而且群聊功能对美国人来说也并不陌生。不过，Naver似乎正在非常卖力地向亚洲以外的市场推广连我，期望它能风行全球。

    齐藤说：“连我面临的挑战在于，从地域上讲，全球流行的聊天应用都有各自的势力范围。目前几乎没有什么‘溢出效应’，也不清楚最终是否会出现一个全球性的赢家。而假如有的话，又会是哪一款应用。我个人认为，一家韩国公司的日本子公司很难打造出一款在全球获得成功的社交应用，不过我希望自己是错的。”（财富中文网）

    译者：项航

    Users driven to collect virtual stickers reside in Asia for the most part, where for years they have lapped up Japanese exports such as manga, and "Hello Kitty" characters culture more readily than elsewhere. But like other Japanese successes such as GREE and DeNA the app maker's parent company Naver, of South Korea, wants to make a bigger impact globally and on the US now.

    With newly acquired pitchman Snoop Dogg in tow in the US to tell the kids how cool it is to message with Japanese-style characters, Naver is investing heavily in acquiring new users here. "We have had a tremendous organic take up initially by users with a connection to Japan and Korea but more recently we've seen broader engagement with the product," says Jeanie Han Naver USA's CEO.

    "Many of our existing stickers have proved popular with users in the US particularly our flagship characters however, in addition over the coming months we will be producing more and more localized content for users in the US and Europe." One of Line's strong suits is that it promises not to mine personal data to make money, unlike some similar app makers, she adds.

    Rhere are some challenges to the success of Line in US says Japan start-up guru William Saito. He points out that the requirement from users to register with their cell phone number is open to abuse. "From the first install, it indexes you based on your cell phone number. Thus, in this use case, I see an incredible security risk where, when (it's just a matter of time) the database at NHN is compromised, it could potentially release contact information of people who aren't even Line users," he says. "The day Bill Gates or the Japanese Prime Minister [a Line user] gets random calls from people, you can guess it was a Line leak."

    He sees the attraction of the stickers, the ease of sending them and how creating a group chat is relatively easy but points out the selling of "cute" characters may not be as portable as it is in Asia. Nor is group chatting foreign to US residents. Nonetheless, Naver appears to putting as much effort, if not more, into making Line a hit outside Asia as it did on that continent. The hope is to make Line a worldwide hit.

    "The challenge for Line will be that the chat apps that are popular worldwide are each used in different geographical silos," says Toto. "There is hardly any spill-over at the moment, and it's unclear if there will be a global winner in this race and if at all, which service that will be. "Personally, I have my doubts that the Japanese subsidiary of a Korean company can operate a globally successful social app, but I hope I will be proven wrong."