People

Sikh-Canadians Wow World of Electronics With New App:
uCiC - You’ve Got Questions?

RAJU MUDHAR

Is there a big lineup at Burger’s Priest? Are there any Frozen Lego kits at The Disney Store in the Eaton Centre? What’s the scene like at the Drake Hotel?

These are the kind of questions that the recently launched app uCiC (pronounced ‘You see, I see‘) hopes to answer.

Created by Toronto-based Snapwise Inc., which is co-founded by Sukhsagar Singh and Harleen Kaur, it is a location-based mobile app that allows people to make requests of each other, and get quick answers with a photo or short video back.

“It is for anything that is real-time that you can’t find anywhere else, and the only way you can get that information is if you ask somebody who happens to be there,” explains Sukhsagar Singh.

“Let’s say you are going to the gym this evening. There is currently no way for you to find out if at a given hour if the gym is packed or not. You could call the gym, they could go check, but no gym really does that. What you can do is ask a stranger. So if someone is using this app, it will show you their location in real-time and you can write them a quick question and if someone using the app is there, they can take a picture of what it is like right now.”

It is an idea that is already impressing people, as earlier this month uCiC won the Mobile Apps Showdown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which for this two-person start-up just coming out of stealth mode is a very auspicious beginning.

Harleen Kaur is currently in Germany speaking to potential investors and the company plans to expand and staff up right away.

Sukhsagar Singh says the idea for the app came through a slow evolution, but that he was partly inspired by seeing the news report a few years ago about a fire in his neighbourhood.

“There was no way I could find out if my home was okay or not, but it would be very easy for someone who was across the street or down the block to tell me,” he says. “So I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could reach out to another stranger who just happens to be at the location you are interested in? I was thinking about what tools you would need to do this, and basically everything you need would be contained in your average smartphone.”

Of course, this app needs a critical mass of people using and contributing to it for the concept to work. To that end, every user who signs up gets 50 Karma points, and they use 10 or more to make a request.

“What we want to balance out is people asking and answering questions. So if you are only asking questions, you’re not giving anything back, you are not really very helpful or contributing, and it is not helping the community or the ecosystem,” he says. “What we want ideally is everybody to be available and to help other people out, because it takes less than five seconds of your time and three taps.”

Sukhsagar Singh says the company wants to build by focusing on specific locations, such as college campuses, to get several users in a concentrated area. Other places he mentions it could work well are at festival settings such as South by Southwest and New York’s Fashion Week.

He also says that since the app was just launched, monetization is not a priority yet, but he does not want in-app advertising, and doesn’t want to compromise users’ private data.

“Advertising, at least what the team feels right now, would get in the way. We just think at least at the very start, it definitely hampers the user experience and one of the guiding principles is that there has to be a net benefit for the people using it,” he says. “Someone who is using this app and answering questions for other people, we don’t want to do anything that person won’t like that may turn him or her away from the app.”

He says they have several ideas for making money, such as working with brands to use the app for contests, and there is value in the location-based data users’ input.

“The users will obviously become more apparent as we launch this app, because we do believe they will make of this what they want to make of it,” he says. “We have already seen all kinds of uses, like people asking questions to a user in Eastern Ukraine when the war broke out. And he was like, ‘Hey, look this is a picture of my neighbourhood. Things are calm, this is how people are feeling.’ So everything from journalistic uses to fun, at-the-moment questions like, ‘Hey, I’m looking for the ice cream truck. Where is it right now?’ ”


[Courtesy: The Toronto Star. Edited for sikhchic.com]
January 20, 2015
 

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