{"id":9641,"date":"2017-10-17T21:09:20","date_gmt":"2017-10-17T21:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/vines-founders-are-back-with-hq-a-live-trivia-game-show-app.html"},"modified":"2017-10-17T21:09:20","modified_gmt":"2017-10-17T21:09:20","slug":"vines-founders-are-back-with-hq-a-live-trivia-game-show-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/vines-founders-are-back-with-hq-a-live-trivia-game-show-app.html","title":{"rendered":"Vine\u2019s founders are back with HQ, a live trivia game show app"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a way to give people a chance to have fun, maybe win, maybe learn something new.\u201d That\u2019s how former Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov describes his new trivia game show app HQ<\/a>, which feels like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire meets Facebook Live.<\/p>\n

At 3pm and 9pm Eastern, thousands of people open up HQ\u2019s iOS app<\/a> and play along as excitable host\u00a0Scott\u00a0Rogowsky asks around a dozen multiple choice questions one at a time. Guess right within 10 seconds, and you move on to the next question \u2014 after Scott finishes joking about the answers. Guess wrong, and you can still comment and watch to see which players nail them all and split prize money they cash out on PayPal.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s simple, but feels extraordinarily fresh and urgent. I\u2019ve played just once and it\u2019s already\u00a0craveable. Both when I missed the show yesterday afternoon and when I got eliminated in the evening, I immediately wanted to play more. By combining the interactivity of gaming, the allure of live video and the production value of Hollywood, HQ feels more alive than most anything on your phone or TV.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Establishing HQ<\/h2>\n

\u201cWe all grew up watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. That\u2019s our basis for this kind of stuff,\u201d\u00a0 Yusupov tells me about his and fellow former Vine co-founder Colin Kroll\u2019s new project. This reimagination of a classic entertainment staple has drawn a seed round of a few million dollars from Lightspeed via partner Jeremy Liew. He\u2019s been having his own game show fun as a judge of Apple\u2019s Shark Tankish \u201cPlanet of the Apps.\u201d Liew and Yusupov declined to share the exact size of the funding round.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cWe really believed in the technical and design capability of Rus and Colin and their broad thinking about the future of mobile video being far more interactive than just hearts,\u201d says Liew.<\/p>\n

Yusupov and Kroll left Twitter in late 2015 after watching their baby Vine get depriortized by the struggling social giant. A year later, when Vine was shut down despite protests across the internet, Yusupov infamously tweeted, \u201cDon\u2019t sell your company!\u201d Soon the duo were at work on Intermedia Labs, an app studio that launched Hype<\/a> in late 2016. The product lets you broadcast a live stream, meshing recorded video clips<\/a> and other media with your real-time camera feed.<\/p>\n

But Hype never got much hype, and neither did Intermedia\u2019s follow-up, Bounce, which let you make music videos by recording your dance moves that are then auto-synced to a song. That\u2019s when\u00a0Yusupov and Kroll came up with HQ. \u201cWe love working in video. That\u2019s our thing. We just wanted to make something that people play . . . with their friends and family,\u201d Yusupov tells me.<\/p>\n

Mobile made thrilling<\/h2>\n

HQ has been slowly climbing the trivia app charts since its launch in late August. It had about 3,300 concurrent players last night vying for a $150 jackpot. Yet\u00a0surprisingly, it hasn\u2019t drawn any media attention until now. Perhaps its gradual ascent and lack of coverage is due to the fact that you can\u2019t play whenever you want like almost every other mobile game.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s also the thrill of it. You feel like there\u2019s actually consequences as you nervously play, because no one wants to be eliminated. The smooth difficulty curve from easy questions like \u201cWhat could you buy on Amazon.com when it first launched? Cars, plants, or books?\u201d at the start of the game to tougher ones like \u201cWhich of these foods is NOT made from corn? Polenta, Grits, or Gruel?\u201d at the end makes you sure you\u2019ll do better if you play tomorrow.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As HQ grows, there will be plenty of paths to monetization. It\u2019s easy to imagine ad breaks between questions, product placement prize giveaways or sponsored questions about brands. \u201cWe\u2019ve been playing around with options,\u201d says Yusupov. \u201cThis Sunday we did a sponsored game that let us give away the biggest prize,\u201d allowing brands to win players\u2019 favor by boosting the money awarded to winners. With a little more traction, I\u2019d bet HQ could easily raise a bigger funding round to boost production and marketing.<\/p>\n

Hopefully HQ will spice things up with image, audio and other media-based questions, celebrity guests, in-chat badges for past winners or special lightning rounds. There\u2019s plenty of inspiration on which to draw, from old black-and-white TV trivia shows to edgier computer games like \u201cYou Don\u2019t Know Jack.\u201d HQ also could use an Android app, as well as better comment filtering that shows your friends first since they\u2019re currently a mess of spam that don\u2019t add much beyond the sense of bustling competition.<\/p>\n

As long as the founders don\u2019t drown the brisk games in commercials, I expect HQ\u2019s viewership to build by the day. \u201cThe players and audience experience is always going to be the most important to us.\u201d For now there\u2019s nothing really like HQ<\/a>, proving that fast-loading video is unlocking all new opportunities on mobile despite our iPhones turning 10 this year.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/ar2QnfhIjvU\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt\u2019s a way to give people a chance to have fun, maybe win, maybe learn something new.\u201d That\u2019s how former Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov describes his new trivia game show <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-9641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t