VNG’s former CEO starts Klamr, a mobile app to schedule meetings with friends

If you’re in Ho Chi Minh city, you may remember the small controversy over at Skunkworks in January. Earlier this year, the team downsized to just eight core members from over 40 members. Skunkworks was a startup, funded and CEO’ed by Bryan Pelz, who was CEO of VNG for several years in its early days. Skunkworks’ main goal was to create a mobile app called Klamr. Klamr’s is a mobile app to help people schedule meetups with their friends.

Now, Klamr is back. It’s fully released on the Google Playstore and iOS store and it’s an evolution over the project that was completely scratched in January. According to Bryan:

We put aside all the work we did for the last two years and focused on building a new streamlined product with a new direction. The way Klamr looks today is a result of that.

And I have to say, the app has come a long way from a year ago. I met up with Bryan at TechCrunch Disrupt and we played around with Klamr a bit. Klamr, at first glance, appears to be just a messaging app, but it’s much more subtle than that. If you click on the button on the right, you’ll see that you can suggest meetings to your friends.

So, if I want to hang out with Bryan tonight, I could suggest we have coffee. Then Bryan, in the app, could suggest that we meet at Starbucks, and suggest a time. Then, I would accept, and the app will send me all the data I need. It cuts down on all the tedious emails that people send back and forth trying to figure out where to go and when.

Notable features

The nice thing with Klamr is that it allows multiple users to get on one “Klamr” or chat box where people can chat together about where to go and use the scheduling function to explore and finalize options. But as Bryan notes:

The beauty of it is that we can also send an SMS to people who are not in the platform, thus keeping them in on the loop without having to download the app.

This is a feature that Klamr was working on back when it was Skunkworks. It makes the app inclusive. It gets them more potential users.

The implications