Tag Archive for social networks

Watcha Doin’? iOS mobile game app combines gaming with social networking

Posted on December 22, 2014 by

whatchyadoinglogoWatcha Doin’? is a mobile game app for iOS that allows a group of friends to share photos & guess who took each photo.

The photo guessing game app therefore helps you discover how well you know your friends, & also find out more about them. It’s obviously also an addictive multi-user mobile gaming experience. The way it works is pretty simple. You create games with a group of up to five people per game.

You can then write in a question, or the app will provide one. All the players send in a photo in response to the question, & everyone has to guess which friend took which photo.  The scores tell you which of your friends knows you best, & how well you know your friends.

The good thing about it is that it allows you to share personal information safely, since you’re among a group of known friends & family members.

The mobile gaming experience & novelty of combining social networking with an iOS game app apart, another reason this game is getting a lot of attention (featured by Apple as best new iOS game) is that Watcha Doin’? is the first app from Palo Alto, CA-based mobile gaming startup Xoo.

The strong pedigree of the Xoo founders & their experience makes it a slam-dunk, so to speak. XOO Inc. was founded in Jan 2014 by Glen Wong, Philip Yun, Steve Lawrence & Wilson Li.

Philip Yun is the company’s CEO, & formerly at Sony & as stints as CEO of Naver USA & Outspark. Glen Wong is Xoo’s director of Engineering, & has worked at Microsoft, Google, & Red Robot Labs.

Steve Lawrence is the company’s CTO, with a background in Ph.D. Machine Learning at Google. Wilson Li is the Product Lead at Xoo, & has previously worked at Outspark & WeMade.

Click here to download the Watcha Doin’? iOS mobile game app from the App Store.

Image Credit: iTunes/Xoo

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A single key computer keyboard with only # on it. Any takers?

Posted on November 28, 2014 by

By: Sorab Ghaswalla

Sometimes, crowdfunding projects like those on the Kickstarter platform for example, tend to catch us by surprise. But this one takes the cake.

Some bright spark has decided to introduce a single key keyboard for the computer, but wait, that’s not the only news. Guess which key it is? The hashtag #.

Undoubtedly, the hashtag has moved up the Internet social ladder in recent times, no thanks to Online social networks, especially Twitter, but to have someone make a “pluggable” keyboard out of it, & seek funds for mass producing it, is amusing, to say the least.

hashtag

But the creator of this London-based project started by former community manager Ben Gomori, too, seems to have been carried away by the moment. (Trust a social media guy to have come up with the idea). As Ben himself has put it, “he knows how annoying it can be not having a hashtag key.”

The gadget is called HashKey, & plugs into the port of your PC/laptop with a USB cable. At the other end is the single key with the hashtag symbol on it. That’s it.

Already, out of the £15,000 sought, £1,748 have been pldged for this project. The Kickstarter project has also been covered in mainline publications such as TIME.com, The Independent, & others like Gizmodo, Business Insider, SlashGear & The Gadget Show.

What the HashKey project promises is to do away with the hassle of having to press 2 keys to make # appear on your screens (at least for those who do not have a standalone key on their boards, yet, or have to use the “Shift”key to reach one). “We want to save social media nerds around the world valuable seconds and celebrate the mighty hashtag’s contribution to digital communication!”, writes Ben, while explaining about his project.

Right now, Ben has developed a prototype & completed a feasibility study on the design for HashKey. Listing it on Kickstarter is to raise funds to get HashKey into production & bring it to early-adopter social media addicts around the world, with a view to producing it in greater quantities and taking to retail if it proves a success. There’s also talk of the single key board coming out in various colors, if everything goes well.

As for me, thanks but no thanks, Ben. My laptop keyboard already has an inbuilt # key but sure lacks one for £.

Image Credit: Kickstarter/HashKey

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