Archive for Andy Subramanium

Bitstrips’ Bitmoji app for making personalized emoji

Posted on October 30, 2014 by

Bitmoji is a new app that allows you to create & include personalized emoji for use in messaging or as an avatar.

The app’s developer Bitsrips already has the Bitstrips app that allows users to create cartoon versions of themselves for use in comics, avatars & social media sharing. So clearly, it was not a big leap from there to using the same cartoon version to create a range of personalized emoji that are perfect for different situations.

new emoji appUsing the Bitmoji app, you can create a custom avatar with billions of possible combinations. The app offers a library of “Bitmojis” for every mood, comic scene or sticker – every one of which will include your comic version.

LOL is no longer a generic yellow face laughing. It’s your face peeking out of the “O” in the middle of the letters LOL. If someone sends you a cute kitten picture or video, you an respond back with a “meow” where your face is the O.

You can choose from all kinds of personalized emoji & stickers, including facial expressions for different moods to visual statements & full-body poses.

It’s definitely a whole lot more fun than your generic emoji, which is less cool & trendy now with Vine & other such tools that allow you to create & share instant mini-videos & jpegs that say a whole lot more as a graphic response on social networks.

Putting a stamp of personalization on the emoji makes it fun again, & there’s all kinds of possibilities for further developments.

Using it is exceedingly simple if you are already a user of the original Bitstrips app. You just need to fire up the Bitmoji app & sign in with you Facebook login. You’ll have your comic avatar waiting for you.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based Bitstrips Inc. was founded in Oct 2007 by Jacob Blackstock & Shahan Panth. Blackstock is the company’s CEO & Panth is the VP Marketing. Bitstrips has raised $11 in funding to-date, include $3 million in Series A funding in Dec 2013 & another $8 million in Series B in Oct 2014.

Click here to download the Bitmoji personalized emoji app on your iOS device.

Click here to download the Bitmoji personalized app on your Android device.

Image Credit: Bitmoji

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Yik Yak social networking app users can now peek into other communities

Posted on October 21, 2014 by

Once upon a time, Yik Yak was a social networking app that allowed people to make anonymous posts that could be seen by others around them.

This worked fine for people in the same general zone like college campuses & office complexes, helping them post insider jokes & “wise” observations anonymously that would be interesting to others in the same campus or building. In the words of the app’s developers, Yik Yak was a “live feed of what everyone’s saying around you.” It’s easy to understand the appeal of the “yaks.”

Here are a few examples:

“To the kid who cheated off me in calculus: we both failed.” — Texas A&M

“Imagine how scary snails would be if they were fast.” — Harvard

“When bald people wash their face, how far up do they go?” — Columbia University

But let’s get back to Yik Yak & what’s new. The geographic limitation was shackling this social networking app’s growth & limiting it to being just a “college campus app.” Playing somewhere at the back of their mind was the fact that rival Facebook also took off initially as a big-time network on individual campuses, but the lack of geographic limitation was what allowed the social network to grow fast after that.

So now Yik Yak has now launched a feature called “Peek” that slows you to stick a pin in the map & get a peek into what people are saying in a 1.5-mile radius around the location you picked.

new social appThis makes Yik Yak something more than a place to post college humor. It could actually serve as a way to share news fast, just like Twitter became the social network for getting live updates from disaster zones & other locations where something huge was going on live.

If you know there’s something going on at Harvard or Texas A&M, you could just see their live feed & know that every single yak was coming from people there. It’s an authentic source of information that could prove to be a valuable journalistic resource.

Yik Yak is now also offering topical Peeks offering a curated feed of featured content like Freshman Tips, Sports HQ, etc.

You can upvote what’s good & downvote what you don’t like. If you post an awesome yak that gets upvoted a lot, you earn Yakarma points.

Atlanta, GA-based Yik Yak, LLC was launched in Oct 2013, founded by Tyler Droll & Brooks Buffington. Droll is the company’s CEO & Buffington the COO. Yik Yak has raised US $11.5 million in funding, including a US $1.5 million seed funding round in April 2014 & another US $10 million in Series A funding in June 2014.

Click here to download the Yik Yak app on your iOS device.

Click here to download the Yik Yak app on your Android device.

Image Credit: Yik Yak

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