My new adventure: Whazzer

As I love challenges and code I decided with 3 friends of mine to start a new adventure: Whazzer.

What is Whazzer?

Whazzer is a web service (web and mobile) we have been working on during our spare time during the last 4 months. The idea is quite simple: a geo-localized Q&A service.

How does it work?

The main idea is to allow people to ask questions about anything that is around (buildings, shops, real estate and more…) and get answers from other users.

When designing the service we decided to focus on realtime (like Twitter): a user can follow other users, questions, topics and cities and everything is stacked in a timeline.

The other feature we wanted to focus on was the multi-lingual support: as a matter of fact Q&A service are often designed for engish speaking users so we decided to take in account the languages a user speak to gives him/her the most accurate information.

For the moment an iPhone App is planned for the end of the summer (a geo-location needs a mobile app!) and a standard web interface will be released during fall.

After that, if we get enough success we will dive into an Android App and other new features (we have a lot of ideas, but not enough time…).

If you speak french and want to get more information about the features, you can read the official blog.

Why Whazzer?

I know we are not the only ones to do that kind of service, but we are pretty sure, that there is enough room for us…

It’s also a challenge for us: bringing a reliable and original service by ourselves without money, just as a hobby.

What about the technical stuff?

I cannot end this post without mentionning some tools we used for the developement:

• Grails / Spring Tools Suite: the whole API and web app is based on it. We decided to choose it be cause it is fast, reliable and the large community already has a lot of plugins.
• XCode: for an iPhone native App, there are no other tools…

Want to know more, to become beta tester for the iPhone App?

Leave me a message anywhere (a Twitter DM is a good choice)

Originally published at https://blog.grousset.fr on July 25, 2011.