What if sharing from a Smartphone was more like Show & Tell?
An Introduction to Tipcasting
Remember Show and Tell from Kindergarten? It was just you and that thing you cared about, and when it came time for you to share, you had an audience and their attention. The setting was intimate and your classmates would learn as much about you as what you shared. Tipcast, is a mobile app to Show & Tell on a Smartphone. Our goal is to make sharing a more personal, more intimate experience, inspired by Show and Tell from Kindergarten.
What Problems Would Tipcast Solve?
How many times have you used a great app and then said to someone you’re with, “Hey, check out this app I just downloaded!” Apps get traction when people show and tell their friends. The problem is that unless you’re physically with someone to show and tell them in person, it’s easy for the message to get lost in all the noise on social networks.
A More Human Way to Share on Mobile
Just adding video to a sharing experience wasn’t enough for us. For the behaviour to become habitual, it would need to be as fast as other sharing platforms, but even more natural, and more human. Share a photo plus a description on Twitter and that might require 145 taps. With Tipcast, you can tell the story in as little as 3 taps. Tipcast is less about the keyboard to communicate, and more about simple gestures to trigger cameras.
We use a simple mechanic where you hold your finger on a photo to record a video message and then release your finger when done. The subject matter blurs, and the story teller quickly becomes the focus. When you release your finger, the subject matter then come back into focus and we generate a picture-in-a-picture message. Users can get creative with a Tipcast too. They can zoom, or pan through the photo to focus on details, overlay text captions, add a soundtrack, and even link out to external websites and apps for more details, but these are secondary features which we provided to appeal to more creative types.
Possible Use Cases for Tipcast
In our earliest iterations of Tipcast, we focused on broadcasting game news. As we put the app in front of more people, we started to discover other use cases:
