MashApp — A new category of mobile apps are about to be unleashed
‘ The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg’
The first mobile telephone system for commercial purpose arrived in the year 1949 with about 5000 users placing 30000 calls per week and the equipment weighing 36Kgs. Contrast this with the few hundred grams weighing metallic (or plastic) glass bar in your pocket that you use to stay in touch with people around you. You can, not only call or text but stay abreast with whats happening in other side of world, play games with friends, watch movie, measure your basic health parameters and what not. Evolution of mobile phone has resulted in it being a phone, pager, broadcast tool, TV, radio, barometer, health monitor and many more gadgets rolled into one.
Now a similar evolution is happening on the software side of the mobile story. For example, Uber (and its rival Ola back home in India) isn’t just restricting itself to be aggregator of cabs, but has diversified into avenues like food & grocery delivery, restaurants, insurance providers. Such an act of finding a partner completely outside one’s business is called as ‘unholy alliance’ by renowned thinker Peter Diamandis. In India and around the world, amidst the millions of dollars poured into the next Uber, the next whatsapp, next airbnb (i.e., either the second in market or localized version) there are a some app’s that are showing the ability to revolutionize the way the market functions.
An old app in this space is Zite. Zite is a news or content aggregator app that understands a user’s preferences and then gets news from various online sources and organizes it in a fashion that the user wants to consume. It’s like you get the ability to pick and chose the newspaper sections you want to read and how much of it you want to read. So if you want to read more about cricket, android or the latest in game theory or for that matter if it’s on Higg’s boson particle, Zite will bring all of these to you. Zite avoids a problem where you had to rely on ESPN app for sports news, NDTV app for latest India News, Mint app for India Business news etc.
Another app in a completely different category of travel is Trip38, that has set out to revolutionize the travel experience once your journey starts. Landing in a strange city and not sure how to locate a cab, hotel, get upgrades on your hotels, local sightseeing info, maps, emergency numbers and also your country’s consulate information? Trip38 organizes all these and much more for you and all you would need to do is to feed it your flight itinerary and it will take care to customize the rest for you on your smartphone. Trip38 simply replaces travel info guide apps, maps, local taxi apps, hotel apps, local weather apps etc
I see a pattern here.
1> Optimizing the phone screen real estate has become an important thing that new set of apps that let you do many things in a single app are being created and preferred by users more than before.
2> Web Mashups, the technology of mashing up web functions from various sources into one portal, that sprang up before the smartphone revolution began has taken rebirth into the smartphone space.
As an ode to the web mashups, I would call these swiss army knife kind of apps that could help you do multiple things as MashApps (even though the name’s already used for a dating website/app in one context and for process centric cloud app for SME’s in another). As a co-creator of Whenda, I would say that Whenda intends to grow as a MashApp that will help you with everything ‘post the purchase of a gadget or home appliance’. So if you happen to have multiple apps to manage warranty, receipts, service center info, brand apps, local service information etc, throw them out of your smartphone and try out Whenda today.
Disclosure: The team at Whenda is being mentored by Trip38 C0-Founder and CTO (now ex).
As of Jul 2017, Whenda App remains on the Android playstore. Meanwhile Whenda has transformed to a B2B business and enticing Small and Medium Enterprises with our Next Gen Asset Management SaaS. You could signup to know more.
