News and Features
Q&A: How Smartphones Are Changing the World
By John Burns published May 1, 2011
Digital Entrepreneur Lynda Brown-Ganzert
Two years making video games with Electronic Arts, five years running the industry association New Media B.C.--it's surprising this is your first mobile app. How did your work on ZuluMe start? I was chairing a big meeting, not in the tech sector, and I wanted to check on a family member going through a medical procedure. But I couldn't pull out my device-I didn't want to immerse myself in that full social conversation. Which got me thinking: these smartphones are actually a lot smarter than we're giving them credit for. At the time we thought: I send you 140 characters, a Tweet of what I'm doing; you read it, send something back. It's a sporadic, binary form of communication. But the people who are closest to you, you want to know what they're doing, how they're feeling, all the time.
So how will your app work? ZuluMe is a hybrid social network for your mobile friends. What that means is that it's for you and at most 10 friends. It's based on the idea of a mood ring. So if you send out an update to notify your 10 friends that you're feeling sad, I could respond by sending you your favourite game shirt, different objects that you can play with, silly things like that. I can even dedicate a song to you. It's almost the opposite of Facebook. Facebook has done us a huge service in introducing the world to social networking, but it's like going from elementary school to high school: now that we have our network of friends, let's have deeper relationships.
