An app that makes chat more democratic has entered into the competitive chat app space.
Votechat combines free instant messaging with a voting system that allows groups of chat users to vote on virtually anything from what to do on a Saturday to who they think will win the next big sports game.
“Research has shown that people are drawn to competitive structures,” says Stewart Co-Founder Stewart Alsopp, “As a result, we’re seeing gamification principles being applied all over, sometimes in settings that makes sense, and sometimes simply because.”
“These days, there are a million different ways for people to communicate. Facebook for private chats and Twitter for quick updates and Instagram and Skype and Facetime and all the rest. What doesn’t exist yet is a platform built specifically to get things done, to encourage conversation, not for conversation’s sake, but to achieve an actual fixed goal.”
Steve Vachani, who recently invested $250k in Votechat, was one of the internet’s early pioneers, co-founding Qool and Freelotto — at their peaks, the 11th largest internet brand in the world in terms of global reach and users and the third largest auction site on the Internet, respectively. Since then, he has been involved in fostering Brazil’s now burgeoning tech growth, and developed various web concepts later adopted by Apple and Facebook. As an investor, Vachani was also instrumental in developing four fully branded web companies with combined revenues of over $500 million and collective valuation of over $1.5 billion.
