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The story
“POPOPO,” a 3D avatar calling service fully funded by Nobuo Kawakami and featuring Hideaki Anno, GACKT, and Hiroyuki Nishimura (Hiroyuki) as board members, has shut down just six months after its March launch. The service was marketed on the appeal of letting users talk without showing their face or appearance on camera, but on 5ch, commenters kept raising the basic question of “isn’t that just a phone call?” and pointed out that despite running ads at Shibuya and Shinjuku stations, the service never really gained name recognition. The gap between the star-studded management lineup and the service’s short life also became a talking point.
POPOPO, fully funded by Nobuo Kawakami, ended its “POPOPO” communication service on September 17. That puts its run at roughly six months after its March launch.
POPOPO was a smartphone service that let users make calls through 3D avatars. One of its selling points was that users could talk without showing their own face or appearance on camera.
Besides Kawakami, the operating company’s board of directors included Hideaki Anno, GACKT, and Hiroyuki Nishimura (Hiroyuki).
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
they still can't get anything new off the ground.
That's basically describing 5ch itself, isn't it?
Though the geezers here never even had their moment in the sun to begin with.
lol
I respect that!
Isn't that just… called a phone call?
Wow, a service that groundbreaking exists? Tell me more.
They actually advertised it pretty hard though.
"POPOPO ran ads at Shibuya and Shinjuku stations featuring Kuruma Takahira of comedy duo Reiwa Roman"
https://space-media.jp/news/detail/6913/
Why on earth did they pick Kuruma for a service like this lol
> One of its selling points was that users could talk without showing their own face or appearance on camera
Sorry, I genuinely don't get it.
I can't tell how this is any different from a regular phone call lol
Obviously it'd suck if some stalker on the other end knows everything about you one-sidedly while you know nothing about them.
Just like phone calls or remote meetings, it eats up your time in real time
Going back to review it later is a pain since it's all audio
Even the celebrities get stuck behind a mask, so it turns into basically a radio show
Watching a low-quality avatar move around is fun for maybe 5 minutes
And on top of all that, it chews through your battery like crazy
Didn't Clubhouse already try the exact same thing lol
Marketing budget really matters, huh.
Getting noticed only because you're shutting down… what are you even doing.
There were threads about it and it was in the news for a while, so it's kind of wild how many people never heard of it.
POPOPO's gooone♪ (playing on 5ch slang "abone," meaning a post that's been deleted/vanished)
But the second the actual details came out, watching that hype deflate was something else.
They probably can't build anything better than mixi at this point.
Talk to Gackt
Talk to Hiroyuki
If it had actually been THAT, it would've lasted.
(;゜Д゜) The day has finally come where you can talk to Shinji's dad…!? (referencing Gendo Ikari from Evangelion, directed by Anno)
Background and Key Points of This Topic
POPOPO was a domestically developed service built around letting users make calls through 3D avatars without showing their face or appearance. It launched in March 2026, with ads at Shibuya and Shinjuku stations featuring Kuruma Takahira of comedy duo Reiwa Roman. Even so, it shut down after just six months, and one thing that stood out in the thread was how often commenters raised the basic question of what a “call with the camera off” actually offers over existing phone calls, remote meetings, or voice-based social apps. At the same time, the gap between the star-studded management team — Nobuo Kawakami, Hideaki Anno, GACKT, and Hiroyuki — and the service’s actual name recognition and adoption also became a point of discussion. Posts came both from people who remembered seeing the ads and from people who only learned the service existed when its shutdown was reported, suggesting that despite the scale of the marketing push, it may never have truly caught on.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread ““POPOPO” Service Ends After About Six Months — Fully Funded by Nobuo Kawakami, with Hideaki Anno, GACKT, and Hiroyuki Serving as Board Members.”
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