Listen to this articleMyLaddr is the app that turns your social life into the game! It is designed to bring out the competitive nature in all of us. The more social you are – the higher you will score!
Here is recent interview with Andrew Westacott Co-Founder of MyLaddr:
Q: Tell us your story and something more about MyLaddr?
A: MyLaddr is a new take on social gaming, it takes your social life and turns it into the game. To compete you just enter your normal everyday social activities into the app which will then calculate a score form them. So that you can’t cheat you need to take photographic evidence which is stored alongside the activity details as well as tagging your friends that were also involved. As your fellow attendee’s confirm, you will receive a portion of the total points and these will take you up your social ladder. Along with points, you can earn achievements for activities in a similar way to achievements that you may earn on something like the Xbox.
You can think of MyLaddr as being FourSquare++. It is designed to bring out the competitive nature in all of us whilst actually promoting a healthy and active social life. The more social you are, then the higher you will score.
MyLaddr is heavily integrated into Facebook and makes use of your Facebook login, friends list and Facebook’s database of locations to provide a seamless social experience as well as an accurate and confirmed set of data.
MyLaddr currently consists of three people. Tony Harper (A serial entrepreneur who is the business brains behind MyLaddr) and Rob Andrews (The brains behind the entire idea and also handles the graphical design side of things) and me (Andrew Westacott – a software engineer in the financial sector for 25+ years).
Q: How did you come up with the idea for MyLaddr and what made you start it?
A: I would like to hand this question over to Rob:
“I basically had the idea after watching a UK television documentary, Charlie Brooker’s How Video Games Changed the World. It featured the 25 most significant video games. The most recent entry on his list was Twitter. The program talked about how gamification has infiltrated everyday lives with social networks relying on the same reward system as video games. Peoples ‘scores’ have become how many followers or likes they receive.”
“The next day I had a 4 hour drive back home, I started wondering about taking that idea one step further and give social media users points and rewards based on their everyday social interactions. I preferred the idea of using people’s real social activities (in the old sense of the word), rather then online interaction. I thought it was important to encourage people to not just sit in front of computers to engage with other people, but to meet up with them face to face. ”
Q: Are you looking for partnership opportunities or VC funding?
A: We are a very early stage startup so would certainly be interested in talking to people that maybe interested in pushing this idea further. We have various thoughts in how we could integrate with the right partners and start giving some more value to being a MyLaddr user. We truly believe MyLaddr has a lot of potential and we have only just scratched the surface.
Q: How long did it take to put together MyLaddr and what was the most challenging part?
A: The original rough plans for MyLaddr were formed towards the end of 2013. After various market research and prototyping phases we started work on the actual application at the start of February 2014 and we finally were approved for the AppStore on the 1st of May. We chose iOS for the initial version due to having some experience on this platform already which meant a faster turnaround for development.
One of the more challenging aspects of building the app is part we do not normally have to do, Marketing. It’s been a bit of baptism of fire trying to learn how to spread the MyLaddr word. Also trying to develop the app at the same time as having a normal 9-to-5 day job has, at times, been tiring.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We are currently heavily into developing the Android version and hope to have this released in the near future. Once this has been developed we plan on integrating a whole host of new ideas that will really push MyLaddr into new areas that we don’t believe have been explored before….
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