Cicalo

» see cicalo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In June 2021 a hashtag won. Oshi Matsuri 2021 ran for three weeks and drew 391,530 posts, and it finished first on Twitter's trending list in Japan and then first worldwide. What everybody was voting for did not exist yet: the ballot decided which thirteen series an unreleased phone app would carry when it opened.

The app was Cicalo, and NTT Solmare shipped it on 16 August 2021, about seven weeks after the date it had announced. The problem it was built around is a real one. If you follow a Japanese media franchise seriously, the information you need is scattered across a publisher's site, an anime studio's site, a record label's site and a dozen retailers, and it is time-sensitive in a way that punishes you for looking away. Preorder windows close. Advance screening applications close.

Cicalo's answer was to do the gathering for you. You picked the series you cared about and the app produced a calendar, because NTT Solmare employed curators whose job was to read the official announcements and type the dates in. The launch release was careful to promise that the company collected this information itself, and equally careful to add a footnote saying it did not guarantee the coverage was complete.

~ the dossier ~

~ what was actually on the calendar ~

The media filter is the giveaway. You could view the calendar by series or switch it to show only one kind of thing, and the kinds were anime, games, books, discs, merchandise, events and anniversaries. Character birthdays were a first-class entry type, which tells you what sort of user this was for. So were store-specific purchase bonuses, the Japanese retail mechanic where the identical Blu-ray ships with a different bonus disc depending on which chain took your preorder, and missing the window means missing the object for good. Cicalo had a filter for that.

There was a log built into the other half of it, called Cicalog, where one tap recorded that you had played the game or celebrated the birthday, sold as a way to look back on a year of it later. There was no feed and there were no friends. For a product aimed at fandom in 2021 that is an odd choice, and it meant the app lived or died on whether the curators kept up.

~ forty-seven ~

They did not keep up, or rather they kept up at human speed. Thirteen series at launch in August 2021, forty-five by the first anniversary, forty-seven by May 2023. The vote ran a second time on the first anniversary in 2022, to choose twenty more titles, with the manga artist Tsuzui fronting it again. The catalog went from forty-five to forty-seven. Set that against everything running in Japan in any given season and you have the shape of the business problem: a hand-built index that took on thirty-two series in its first year and two in its second, in a market that produces hundreds.

Money was never the user's problem. The app was free with no paid tier at any point, and NTT Solmare went looking for revenue on the other side, advertising inside the app and selling schedule placement to companies. The demographic named in the advertiser pitch was women in their twenties and thirties who spend. By July 2022 it had passed fifty thousand Android installs and by April 2023 a hundred thousand, with 664 ratings on the App Store averaging 3.7.

~ thirty days, and the word they used ~

The last update shipped on 8 May 2023. Version 2.4.3, and the entire changelog is a dialog box explaining the app's Twitter integration, written during the months when Twitter was pulling its API out from under everyone who had built on it.

Three weeks after that, on 31 May at ten past six in the evening, NTT Solmare published the end. The release gives thanks and gives the dates, and then apologizes for what it calls a sudden announcement, which is its own small admission: the company's word for thirty days of notice is sudden. It gives no reason. Installs stopped at noon on 30 June when the app left the stores, and the service itself stopped at three that afternoon. After 15:00 the app still opened. It just no longer knew anything.

cicalo.jp belongs to somebody else now. The domain carries a WordPress affiliate site about otaku marriage hunting, with its own uploads directory running into 2025, and nothing on it has ever had anything to do with a calendar.

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