9/22/2023 0 Comments Talk to you later gif“In the early days of the iPhone and smartphone apps, we thought it’s going to mature, just like the PC… But it turns out people don’t actually use their smartphones that way. “We actually tried to build a big, monolithic app twice over the last few years,” says Pinger co-founder Joe Sipher. Making a series of standalone messaging apps - each focused on a single standout messaging feature, rather than adding more features to a single app - is a very deliberate strategy for Pinger. The basic idea being that people actually like having a pick and mix of apps on their smartphone, rather than a single platform that tries to do everything itself. “That platform of users is there, there’s a promotional platform built in… We show four billion mobile messages a month - we have revenue, we have profit - so we’ve got a very scalable model, so that as people use these applications there’s a built in way to monetise,” Woock adds. Pinger still has a network of up to 12 million monthly users from this messaging 1.0 play which it plans to use to help its new experimental apps phase take off. The company is a long time player in the messaging space - having ridden the first wave of messaging services by creating a system that allowed people to have a phone number for free without a cell plan. Growing its mostly U.S.-based network of users internationally is a focus, Woock tells TechCrunch, so experimentation and creative mash-ups are the order of the day. GIF Chat is just the first of a swathe of standalone messaging apps Pinger’s got planned - which will mess around with audio, video and other multimedia components, plus things like location, say the co-founders. It’s not giving out specific details of all the other apps yet but two incoming over the next few days are JukeVox: a voice messaging app that lets users record voice messages and add sound effects and FreeStyle: a texting app that lets users customise fonts, colours, background and more.Įxpect Pinger to fire forth a whole barrage of iterated messaging ideas to see which ones stick. “It’s about exploring what new things can we do?” “Messaging 1.0 was about replicating the function of my native application with different economics but what’s clear is now that everyone’s got a smartphone - now that I can assume I own the client on both sides - there’s all sorts of stuff you can do,” says Pinger co-founder Greg Woock. market anyway, thanks to local carrier economics. Pinger’s thesis is this second wave of over-the-top messaging apps is all about making communicating fun, rather than just focusing on making it free vs metered carrier talk and text plans - arguing that free OTT messaging was never that disruptive to the U.S. Sending goofy video messages of your facial features doing silly things in slow-motion is part of what Pinger is dubbing “messaging 2.0” - a moniker for the rise of social messaging platforms such as Japan’s Line and China’s WeChat. GIF Chatters set the lifespan of a message, from one or a handful of loops - or limitless loops if you really want your gurning face to leave a more lasting legacy. The app also lets you choose the number of loops the recipient gets to see before the message vanishes into the cyber ether, a la Snapchat. GIF Chat lets people turn a video snippet into a looped, animated GIF, offering the ability to speed up or slow down the snippet for comic effect, and/or add text on top (or not). If you thought stickers were the pinnacle of human digital communications then you obviously haven’t seen enough animated GIFs. Messaging app network Pinger has launched a new standalone iOS app - the first of many it plans to cook up - that combines Vine-esque video loops with Snapchat-style ephemera so you can communicate in goofy gestures that disappear faster than your hangover.
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