LiiHo IM App: A New Way to Chat as You Draw Something and Doodle With Friends

A Taiwanese-made messaging app looks set to cash in on the craze for doodling that was stirred up by the OMGpop/Zynga game Draw Something. The app, LiiHo Handwriting Messenger, is free and out now for iPad, and has an English and Chinese interface. But anyone in the world can use it in any language since it’s all about chatting with your friends using handwriting, drawing, and even scribbling on photos.

Actually, the LiiHo app predates Draw Something by a whole six months, having launched back in August of last year.

Despite being way ahead of the zeitgeist in doodling apps, LiiHo doesn’t seem to have quite taken off yet – with only 27 ‘likes’ on Facebook. But this week it’s finally getting some coverage in local media in Taiwan. To find out more, we talked to David Lai, the marketing manager at LinkTel, the startup behind the app. He explains how they came up with the idea:

We simply want iPad users to skip the inconvenience of typing and switching keyboards for different languages, and regain the fun of conversation by handwriting and drawing.

It’s a nice example of the very bilingual tendencies of Taiwanese youngsters – using a mix of Chinese and English – bringing about a new twist in the familiar instant-messaging (IM) genre. It’s also a challenger to group messaging apps like WhatsApp or Line, even though it doesn’t require being tied to a phone number and there isn’t yet a version for iPhone. LiiHo users can add friends and chat with them either via their iOS Contacts app, username, or by logging-in with Facebook.

Once you’ve got some IM buddies on board, you can have fun doing three main things:

• Make handwritten message using your fingertip in the large white box (which shows as a preview on the yellow Post-It note area).
• Graffiti and scribble all over photos.
• Create full-size doodles using four size and colours of digital markers.

As for LinkTel as a startup, David says that it currently has capital of NT$125 million ($4.24 million), although it’s not divulged if that involves some seed funding. For now, he adds, they are “focusing on how to expend the user base, monetization is not a high priority.”

See more screenshots on the LiiHo homepage, or go straight to iTunes to download the LiiHo iPad app.

On a semi-related note: For a more business-minded approach to handwriting apps, check out the video demo of the Japanese-made 7notes app that we filmed last year.