It provides powerful support for "management of childcare information! POSTREE" (COSORAL Co., Ltd.)

This is an application that allows users to take pictures of distributed prints with their smartphones and freely tag and organize them. This allows users to check the contents of distributed prints on the go without having to carry them with them, and allows both parents to share information about the prints they have taken. According to users' comments, the app is used not only to organize the printouts handed out, but also to photograph, organize, and share various information related to childcare. BabyTech.jp editorial staff interviewed Ms. Asuka Saito (hereinafter honorifics omitted), representative director of cosoral, Inc, We asked her about the application, its development process, and future plans.

(We spoke to...)
COSORAL Corporationrepresentative director (i.e. someone chosen by the board of directors from among the directors to actually represent the company)
Asuka Saito

The power of information technology can organize and share "analog information" smoothly.

Editorial:Can you tell us what kind of application "Posley" is?

Saito:This application allows users to organize and share the various prints they receive at daycare centers, schools, lessons, etc., by taking pictures of them with their smartphone camera. Instead of simply organizing print images by file name, the title of each print can be cut off to create a visual "heading" so that you can find the desired print intuitively.

You can also attach "keywords" related to prints as "tags" to saved image files and search by those tags. You can also organize the images into folders, where you can change the color and attach a photo of each parent, mother, and child. In addition, information can be shared between moms and dads in Posley.

Editorial:No more worries about storing bulky printouts or losing them, and the ability to view them immediately on your smartphone without having to carry around a paper copy each time. And, mom and dad can share the printouts (information) with each other.

Saito:That is correct. There are several apps that manage the same prints as Posley, but they are either "paid" even if they are easy to use, or "free" but not so easy to use because they are adapted from business apps for "childcare". Posely" is free and specialized for "childcare," with the concept of being an app that is easy to use for parents raising children.

For working moms and dads, "print" is a very difficult "media" to handle.

Editorial:Can you tell us about the benefits that people who use Posley feel?

Saito:Many of the feedback we receive from users is that it is very helpful to be able to look at printouts while they are away from home. Working mothers are busy and do not have time to read prints at home. Therefore, they use ...... to just take a picture of the prints and check the contents on the train to work or during their lunch break at the office. Another comment we receive, regardless of whether they work outside the home or not, is that they put the printouts of their day-care center or school menu in the Posley and check them when they go shopping at the supermarket. Not only do they feel bad if today's school lunch and dinner are the same, but some of them also use the school lunch menu as a reference for their dinner menu.

Editorial: So you can do that with your phone because it is something you carry with you all the time. With prints, this is not the case.

Saito: The fact that the printouts can be shared between mom and dad has also been appreciated. I once saw a child at a daycare center who forgot to turn in something, and the child's father told the teacher that he had left the printout on the living room table for his wife to see.

The "push notification" function is also frequently used. There are many things to submit at daycare centers and schools, and when you have two or three children, it is hard to remember them all. So, if you set various "submission dates" in POSTLEY, your smartphone will notify you the day before or the day of the submission. This can be communicated to both mom and dad, who share the information.

Until now, parents have probably used "organizers" or "calendars" to manage such information, but there is no space in an ordinary organizer or calendar to write down all the contents of a printout. This eventually leads to the problem of "having to look at the printout to see the details. To solve this problem, Posley has made "images of prints" the axis of information management.

Editorial: Recently, some preschools have started to computerize some of their "tidbits/correspondence", can you handle those?

Saito: My child's daycare center has also gone to email for some communications. Therefore, I take screenshots of necessary e-mails with my smartphone and put them in my Poslee. I also take screenshots of childcare-related information on local government websites and save them in my Posley. I also take screenshots of detailed information on leisure facilities on the web, such as their opening days, and organize them in Posley. Almost everything I want to remember that can be captured in an image can be stored in Posley.

Ideas born from a combination of career (work) and personal life (childcare)

Editorial: What was the impetus behind the development of the "Posley" application?

Saito: I originally spent about 10 years of my career as a web director and application director at VOYAGE GROUP Corporation, the parent company of cosoral, Inc. which developed "Posley". I also had three children during that time and took maternity leave three times.

Editorial:So you already had experience in application development.

Saito:Yes, I did. After working like that, it was just in April 2017, when I returned from my third maternity leave, that I began to think about changing jobs and taking on other challenges. This was also the time when my oldest child entered the first grade of elementary school, and once he entered elementary school, the amount of handouts distributed by the school increased dramatically.

These printed materials contained information such as "bring newspaper by when," "urinalysis test," "photo collection," etc. In addition, the nursery school would send printed materials to the two children under them, so the amount of information that had to be grasped was enormous. This is a huge amount of information for working mothers and fathers. This is too much for working moms and dads to handle. ......

My career to date, my desire to "try something new," and my experience in raising three children led me to the idea of "child-rearing x IT," which led to the development of the "Posley" application. It was right around this time that VOYAGE GROUP held an idea contest for new business plans, and when I applied for the "Posley" idea, it was decided to commercialize it, and I established the subsidiary "cosoral" in February 2018.

We released Posley on March 26, 2018, and because we wanted to target the April entrance and promotion period, the app was developed by five people, including myself, in a short period of two months. We wanted to release the app by April because we thought many mothers would be aware of the problem of "managing large amounts of prints" at this time.

Editorial: Wasn't it difficult to develop in such a short period of time?

Saito: Yes, ...... so for the first release, I kept the app as simple as possible and limited it to the minimum necessary functions. Also, I was working shortened hours, so right before the release, I asked my husband to pick up the children for me. My husband also works for the same group company, so he was able to help me out in that regard.

Family information sharing" was the greatest need among families raising children today.

Editorial: You said that at first, only simple functions were available. What kind of functions have been added since then?

Saito: After its release in April 2018, we received a variety of requests from our users. The most common request was for a feature that would allow family members to share information from the app. We originally created the app for moms, but it is essential for families these days to share information about childcare with dads as well.

For example, if a family entrusts a father to take a child to and from soccer or other lessons, the father is the one who receives the relevant communication printouts. This can lead to misunderstandings between moms and dads, such as "I left the printout in the living room," or "I didn't see it! This can lead to misunderstandings between the father and mother. Also, when a couple wants to take a combined paid leave to attend a daycare or elementary school event, if the information on the prints is registered on the smartphone that they always carry with them, each can quickly make adjustments at the office. For this reason, we received very strong requests for this feature, but it was difficult to implement, and we were only able to upgrade the version in September 2018. We are also working on improving the usability of the application in detail by having not only our users but also the parenting fathers and mothers within our affiliated companies use the application.

Editorial: Can you give us an example of an improvement?

Saito: For example, we added "How to use" and "Family Sharing" buttons on the top page. At first, there were only three buttons, "Home," "Shooting," and "Others," but many people said they did not know how to use them or how to share with family members.

The use of "Posley" is expanding rapidly with the ideas of users.

Editorial: How are users actually using the system?

Saito:This is my case, but I organize my children-related printouts into folders separated by their respective face pictures and colors. I also create a folder called "Mom" to manage information that may or may not be related to my children, such as "PTA communication printouts. I then create a folder called "Shopping" to store the image data of "barcodes that can be used to earn points. Normally, I would have to open the web page of the store each time I visit it, but this has become a little easier because I no longer have to do that. The "Dad" folder contains information related to the children's soccer school to which my husband is in charge of picking up the children.

Another use I learned from one of the app's users is to store the image data of a "hospital ticket" in Posley. Recently, an increasing number of hospitals require that you make an appointment in advance online using your "consultation ticket number." If you save the image of your consultation ticket in this way, you can make an appointment during your lunch break at work or during your commute. If you save an image of your medical ticket, you can make an appointment during your lunch break at work or during your commute to work. There are a large number of medical, ENT, dermatology, and ophthalmology tickets ......, and it is very difficult to carry them around all the time, so it is very convenient to take a picture of them and store them in the Posley. Since the data in Posley can be shared with family members, you can even ask your father to make a hospital appointment for you.

Editorial:This is a unique use of Posley because it is difficult to find the desired image or share it with family members if you just take a normal picture of a medical examination ticket with your smartphone.

Saito:You may also see posters of events held at neighborhood associations or nearby shrines on bulletin boards around town, but such information may be announced only on a paper basis and not on the web. If you take a picture of such "information that is only posted here" with your smartphone and put it in your Posley, you can easily discuss with your family, "Why don't we go here this coming weekend? It is easy to talk about it with family members. In my house, I have a folder in the Posley called "Local Events" where I keep such information.

Another interesting use we heard from a user was to take pictures of children's drawings and crafts with a smartphone and store them in the Posley. If you leave such drawings and crafts behind, they will clutter up the house, so we are sorry to have to throw away the originals, but instead they are stored neatly in the POSTALLY. Except for large works that have been entered in competitions and the like, "drawing of the day" is to be kept in the posry. Parents like to keep "the first drawing of ____" even if it is just a small drawing, and later on, when they scroll through the remaining drawings in the posry, they can feel their child's growth very much. They would say, "Oh, at first it was just lines, but since then I can draw 'faces' on it! One of the users told us that there was a fresh surprise such as "I was able to draw a 'face' from then on!

Posely" aims to be a "secretary for moms

Editorial: Can you tell us about the future development of Posley?

Saito: First of all, we are planning to further improve the application called Posley by listening to the users' feedback. I believe that the use of IT, such as "apps" and "e-mail," will continue to advance in preschools in the future. This will lead to a situation where "various apps" and "analog printouts" will be mixed together, so we would like to link data with other apps as well. We would like to link data with other apps as well. We envision a situation where information from the various apps used at daycare centers, elementary schools, and lessons can be aggregated and viewed at Posley.

To begin with, the name of the application "Postly" is a combination of the words "mailbox" and "secretary". It means that it is a "post" that receives communications sent to Mom, and it is Mom's secretary. In other words, Postly aims to be a secretary that receives information from various sources, organizes it, and tells you when it is needed. In the future, it could automatically analyze text and add "titles" and "tags," send "notifications" at the right time, or even work with smart speakers and tell you by voice that "today is the day to submit XXX". I have always believed that "moms" who are busy and have a lot to think about should have a "secretary".

<After the interview

The two key features, "images can be organized by folder" and "images can be tagged," gave us the possibility that Posley could be used to consolidate more and more information related to child-rearing on a smartphone. Incidentally, according to Mr. Saito, according to interviews conducted prior to development, smartphone applications that "take a picture + add tags" such as Instagram and Twitter are the most frequently used applications among recent mothers, so the design and operability of the Posley were designed with Instagram in mind. He says. Combined with the future vision of Posley "evolving to become an excellent secretary for moms," we felt that this app is likely to become increasingly popular.

Posley Official Website
https://info.posly.jp/