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Japan’s Freco Lets You Share and Discover Interesting Places with Like-minded People

Earlier this week, Tokyo-based startup Kaditt introduced an iPhone app (available in English and Japanese) that allows users to discover places to visit based on your friends’ recommendation. It’s called Freco, which is a combination of the two words, friends and recommend. The app allows you to disocover places to visit from a selection of sight-seeing and dining spots recommended by like-minded people you know on Facebook, Twitter, and Mixi. The startup calls it a “location-focused social bookmarking service.” You can save sites and shops that you fancy as a “card” with their geographical profiles and pictures, and then share them with your followers. As you discover posts about interesting places on the app, you can express your enthusiasm by pressing one of four buttons: cute, cool, tasty and nice. Your choice is collected by the app’s server in the background, generating a relationship map with you and the people you follow called a Trust Graph. This gives you a feed from like-minded people and serves up more accurate recommendations. The startup expects to monetize by partnering with street retailers and merchants, giving discount coupons to users depending on location, which is detected by the app. The startup’s CEO Naoki Kadouchi explains that the app is targeting the ‘F1 layer,’ which are women in their early 20′s. With the launch of the app, they set up a showcase introducing a variety of places to visit recommended by female university students in Tokyo.

The startup focused on making the coolest user interface to attract that particular demographic. In accordance with how much you are attracted by a post, you may press a ‘like” button up to seven times, and animated music notes will come up on the app when you tap the button. Naoki Kadouchi used to work with Proctor and Gamble and has been running a social network business using video distribution and e-commerce while attending university.

The company was commended with high honors at CyberAgent Ventures’ bi-annual startup competition event Startups 2011 Spring, winning the right to receive financial and physical support from the firm.

They plan to introduce an Android app sometime soon, and are hoping to expand the service from Japan to North America and Taiwan, targeting one million users in six months.