Mobile app Fruit Ninja With 700 million downloads helps Taiwan’s farmers get an extra slice

August 22, 2013 Leave a comment

Fruit Ninja helps Taiwan’s farmers get an extra slice

CNA

2013-08-22

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One of the developers of the popular app Fruit Ninja gives a speech at the Global Mobile Internet Conference held in Beijing on May 10, 2012. (Photo/Xinhua)

Players of mobile app Fruit Ninja are now just a click and tap away from boosting produce sales and farmers’ income in Taiwan, a local marketing company said on Wednesday. “Working with a world-renowned, popular and free game app, we would like to use a new approach to help market local produce,” the Taipei-based CrossMedia Group said in a statement. Players of Fruit Ninja, which has 700 million downloads worldwide, can now order all kinds of in-season produce directly from farmers in Taiwan while having fun slicing fruit in half, the company said.The campaign involves an advertising banner on the app, visible only to players in Taiwan, that connects users to a website where they can order locally grown produce or have the chance to win a month’s supply of fruit and vegetables.

If the model proves successful, the company said, it will duplicate it to market Taiwanese produce to the whole world.

Shally Hou, the company’s marketing manager, said that her company chose Fruit Ninja because the game’s theme matches the campaign, and it has 700 million downloads worldwide.

In Taiwan alone, she said, the game has 1.78 million downloads and 168,000 monthly active users cross-platform.

The company hopes that the model will help increase farmers’ incomes, Hou said, adding that her company is working with 74 local farmers at the moment and is looking to expand the network.

Local farmers only make about NT$22,000 (US$735) a month, because the bulk of the revenue from sales of fruit and vegetables ends up in the pockets of middlemen, according to iLohas, a Taiwanese social enterprise that helps farmers and is involved in this project.

Baggio Chang, co-founder of iLohas, said that directly buying produce from farmers can as much as triple their revenues.

“We welcome all kinds of approaches to help local farmers and look forward to good results,” he said.

Fruit Ninja developer HalfBrick Studios of Australia also expressed excitement over the good cause, saying that it will give out free Fruit Ninja-themed souvenirs to those who place orders.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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