By Anand
The crowdsourced Q&A routine is not a new concept. Google & Yahoo! Answers tried it on the Web with a debatable amount of success, followed by Quora & any number of such knockoffs. The evolution of crowdsourced answers has since moved on to smartphone apps trying to leverage the power of Big Data & social networks to provide answers to user-posed questions.
But none of them has really taken off big time. Now comes Jelly, a free app for iOS & Android that lets you ask a question or answer one. There’s a lot more of Twitter in it than you might think, not least because one of the co-founders is Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. For the record, San Francisco-based Jelly HQ was co-founded in April 2013 by Biz Stone & Ben Finkel. Jelly has closed a Series A round of VC funding led by Spark Capital. Another one of the investors & a member of the board is Bijan Sabet, who was an early investor in Twitter too.
Jelly changes how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks. It turns out that getting answers from people is very different from retrieving information with algorithms. Also, it has the added benefit of, well, being fun.
The way it works is that the user can pose a question along with an accompanying picture taken with the phone’s camera or found using the app’s built-in image search function. Other Jelly users who are in the user’s social network of connections on Twitter & Facebook will see it on their display, & may choose to read & answer it. The picture is required because, as Stone explains in a blog post on Jelly.co, “In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really is worth a thousand words…
Images are in the foreground of the Jelly experience because they add depth and context to any question.” Oh, by the way, these guys chose the name Jelly because they think of the app and its loosely distributed network of people as being similar to a jellyfish with a loose network of nerves that functions as its brain.
Click here to download Jelly on Android
Click here to download Jelly on iOS
Image/Video Credit: Jelly/Vimeo
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