Gahbunga Launch
I saw info of the Gahbunga launch over at Techcrunch. Sounds very much like the Fotochatter app we saw during the Mobile Monday demo day. Not that I’m complaining, two companies working in largely the same direction normally means there’s some validity to the model they’re trying to fulfill on. Overall the mobile communications options are largely person to person. The applications that open up the communication to a larger group normally do it with a set of known friends and help you stay connected to them. They’re introverted for the most part. There’s a bunch of interest these days in extroverted mobile applications. Mobile social software (Nokia Sensor, 6th Sense, Bluedar) seem to be popping up all over the place. The Fotochatter method is interesting in that it lets you form a community with whom you share your images, rather than sending to one person. And it facilitates an ongoing discussion of that image. The Gahbunga app is more goal oriented however. It’s not just “images from friends” that you’ll be getting, but images of people that someone else is looking for help rating. It’s voyeuristic, the people doing the voting get to look at some hotties, and it’s instant. Sure has the makings of a great app there.
However they don’t seem to have put any thought into the starting problem. The problem with most social applications is that it’s hard to get a whole group of people in at once, and when people sign up one at a time they quickly get bored cause they have no friends in the system. I signed up and there was nothing, I don’t have any friends in there (not that I know of at least). Give folks an easier way to start out. When then first show up there should be interesting stuff for them right off the bat. I signed up. There were two checkboxes I could use: “I wish to get rated by the whole gahbunga community” and “I wish to help others rate their dates”. I toggled both of them, as far as I could tell nothing happened in the interface. I have no messages on my phone. Apparently I don’t even have a notification email at the address I signed up with. More more more! I like your idea, reward me for looking into it. I’m out of time now though, and I don’t have a positive association built up yet. Oops.
August 31st, 2005 at 2:21 am
have you seen this from the guys at futurice?
http://www.futurice.com/photostofriends.html
check out their other stuff. they work on the whole starting up thing, too. in a way.
September 1st, 2005 at 7:20 am
So, did you send a picture to your contacts? You have to enter your contacts first and then send them a picture to rate. If you selected a community rating for your picture the community will rate. 1500 people are receiving public ratings now. Submit bugs on the comments section - there are a few we are working on now.
October 21st, 2005 at 3:11 am
[...] So how much do we think it’s going to end up going for? Jeff Clavier had a pretty kick ass bit of commentary in his first ZDNet article about companies reaching escape velocity by attracting millions of users with an effectively zero acquisition cost. That lays down the model we’ve seen so far pretty well. Gahbunga definitely isn’t at that stage, but it might be in a position to grow that way in the right hands. The folks selling it are starting out pretty cheap, and they seem to be really flexible. I like the idea (I’ve written about it before), but the problems faced in taking the service on could be pretty drastic. The website is up, the technology problems seem to have been solved. However there are the ongoing issues of dealing with carrier networks, messaging, and trying to monetize in the mobile arena. Tough problems, but for the person who’s able to crack them mobile is currently a goldmine. Hot or Not is a cash cow online, raking in money. If Gahbunga could pull together something even vaguely like that it could be quite a profitable site. I’m gonna be keeping my eye on this one. Good luck to the Weblogs Work team, I hope this goes well for you! [...]
February 9th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[...] Architel was going to conduct a marketing campaign and they wanted a superhero team to represent the various services that the company performed. It was my first gig for them and it was followed by several other comic-themed projects such as Gahbunga. [...]