Yo, Flare me!
In an increasingly real-time driven, “get it while it’s hot” world, Flares provides insight into one’s life at a very specific point in time — right now.
“Flares, while absolutely steeped in modern-day engineering, hopes to bring a similar type of stripped-down communication to our mobile-driven, instant-gratification lives.” — Heather Somerville, SiliconBeat
The team at FlareWorks is passionate about reinventing the way people communicate by making available a suite of mobile signals, called Flares, that replaces the need to text.
By nature, real-life flares are visual cues that universally share a specific set of characteristics. Physical flares are ephemeral, urgent and hyper-relevant which is what makes their communicative power explosive in nature. It is virtually impossible to ignore a flare in the sky or on the road without a natural reaction to act on it.
Everything about Flares is optimized toward engendering the same communicative authority in a mobile, “always on” context. This is why the payload of a flare, be it a location map, caption, video, photo, etc., will always vanish in a very short period of time.
And when we say vanish, we mean gone forever. By way of comparison, Snapchats don’t vanish since they can be viewed at a recipient’s convenience days later and remain on the company’s servers for prolonged periods of time. They only disappear from that specific mobile device once the recipient has viewed the image. We keep none of this information on our servers beyond the max viewing time of 1 hour. If you get a location flare update and view it seconds later, it’s gone for good at that moment in time. All of our flare types work in this way.
So while our transactional approach to media consumption has the added benefit of protecting user privacy, the core rationale for the protocol is relevance. If I shoot you a flare (map) letting you know I’ve picked up the kids at school, getting that information two hours later is useless. If I shoot you a flare (video) of our friends having a blast at a nearby club and imploring you to bail on your studies and join, it’s useless if you see it the next morning.
With these use cases in mind, we hope you see that Flares is about communicating specific moments in real-time with those whom you care most about, specifically family, friends and work associates.
Flares: The Next Big Thing
FlareWorks is one of several nascent companies pioneering the visual messaging space, an area we refer to internally as “mobile signals”. While we’ve seen comparisons to companies ranging from Glympse to Taptalk to WhatsApp, none of these really focuses on changing the way people communicate globally, across all cultures and demographics, in the same way that we have set out to do. Closer to the mark is a simple app like Yo.
“Think of the MVP version of Flares as Yo for geolocation. And if you’re wondering what that could be useful for, then its possibilities really are in your hands. It’s up to you to provide the context.” — Ben Woods, TheNextWeb
Though rudimentary in its execution and intended to accommodate different use cases, Yo best exposes what we believe to be the next big market opportunity in mobile messaging. While mimicking a text, Yo suggests the immense communicative power laden in visual cues shared between people with shared context. Without context, Yo doesn’t mean anything. In fact, it’s more likely to be annoying if an associate “Yo’d” you out of context. Assuming there is a shared context, however, it can actually be quite powerful, particularly when it comes to message flexibility, privacy and secrecy. This is because a “Yo”, like a flare, can mean whatever people choose it to mean.
For example, a wife might say to her husband, “Send me a ‘Yo’ when you pick up the kids.” While the value of this simplified message format may be debatable as compared to a text, sending and receiving a message quickly and discretely is of utmost importance in the event of an emergency, or when signaling your friend to help bail you out of a bad first date.
Nowadays, sometimes you want and need to know quickly, and without a lot of drama or texting. Enter ‘Flares.’” —TasteTV Blog
Understanding Flares
A common misunderstanding regarding the current, basic version of Flares is that it’s about locating friends and family. There are countless apps that do that already. In actuality, Flares is not about “where you or your friends are” but “what your location says to someone with whom you share a context.” It isn’t about a pin drop but rather what the user’s location communicates. Think about the first thing most often discussed between friends and family when they’re apart and speaking on the phone or texting. “Where are you?” It’s this powerful context-setting question that then sets the nature and tone of the conversation that follows. Flares visualizes and expedites the foundation for familiar communication.
Using the example cited above, if a husband shoots his wife a flare when he picks up the kids from school, she knows just by hearing the unique “boom” sound that accompanies a flare notification that the kids have been picked up. She can also confirm, if she prefers, by quickly viewing the location data. What if the kids are at a new friend’s house? The flare will indicate where that new pickup location is.
If a flare is indeed both hyper-relevant to the recipient and core to a communication volley, then one might see it taking organizational preference over a voicemail, a text, or a Snapchat. In contrast to Snapchat, which generally carries a payload of silly, fun photos with no critical time or relevance factor, Flares’ payload contains information that is intended to be consumed at that very moment in time. The longer you wait to view a flare, the less “hyper-relevant” it becomes, causing the flare to quickly devolve into expendable content.
In an increasingly real-time driven, “get it while it’s hot” world, Flares provides insight into one’s life at a very specific point in time — right now.
“If someone needs to know you’ve just gotten off a plane, you’re stuck in traffic, or you simply want to share your location, Flares soars where other apps fizzle out.” –Wesley Dyson, KillerAppReview
What’s Next
While skipping over what’s immediately next on the horizon (we’ll share that with everyone soon enough) we do envision a world with skies painted multi-colored by flares carrying emotions and experiences that are hyper-real, hyper-relevant and hyper-engaging on all mobile devices (that includes you Apple Watch).
Over time, we’ll build a cross-platform, global telecommunications mesh on which both businesses and consumers can communicate more directly, rapidly and efficiently. Soon, your dry cleaner will pop you a flare when your shirts are ready for pickup, or your package delivery driver will flare you when he’s 10 minutes away, or the cable company will automatically trigger a flare when the cable guy is en route to your scheduled service.
Ultimately, Flares represents a more powerful and relevant way to communicate in an “always-on,” super-connected, intrinsically mobile world.
