Tales of long lost twins captivate me. Here’s a great example: Samantha Futerman, an actress in California, discovers that she has a twin sister by the name of Anaïs Bordier, a French fashion design student. The pair reunite, and a DNA test confirms their twinhood.
The startup world works the same way. Identical ideas percolate in different places, and founders turn them into reality while being totally oblivious to one another.
Yo, a startup founded by an Israeli living in San Francisco, has gained fame (or notoriety, depending on your point of view) for doing one thing and one thing only: sending yos to people. The app has defied logic by going viral. Yo’s founder Or Arbel tells Tech in Asia that it now has over 2 million registered users. It recently raised US$1.5 million at a US$10 million valuation from Betaworks, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, the founders of China’s Tencent, and others.
Arbel calls Yo “context-specific” messaging. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen terms it “one-bit” communication. It’s where the meaning of the message is determined by the context in which it was received. That could be the identity of the sender, the time of the message, or the location of the receiver.
Turns out Yo wasn’t the first to use this sort of minimalist messaging. ZipDial, a startup in India, has been doing it for years.
Founded by Valerie Wagoner along with Sanjay Swamy and Amiya Pathak in 2010, ZipDial is a platform built on top of a unique phenomenon in India and other developing countries. Since prepaid mobile plans are the norm in these places, the missed call has become an essentially free method of communication.
“It’s an exceptionally prevalent peer-to-peer user behavior where users dial a friend’s number and then hang up on purpose in order to signal something such as ‘call me back’ or ‘I’m thinking of you’ or ‘I’ve arrived home safely’,” Wagoner tells TechCrunch in an interview.
Sounds familiar? Here’s Yo’s app description:
Wanna say “good morning”? just Yo.
Wanna say “Baby I’m thinking about you”? – Yo.
“I’ve finished my meeting, come by my office” – Yo.
“Are you up?” – Yo.
Both are examples of context-based communication. If you still think Yo is a ludicrous idea, consider this: ZipDial has turned missed calls into a legitimate business. It is effectively a call-to-action, the click of the developing world where majority of people use feature phones.
See: In India, you can respond to Facebook ads with a ‘missed call’
To date, the Bangalore-based startup has worked with over 300 brands and processed over 400 million missed calls. It partnered with Twitter and Facebook, the former to allow people in India to follow a Bollywood star by giving ZipDial a missed call, the latter to allow Facebook users to respond to a special ad unit by doing the same.
Just a toy, but so what?
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