The founding team behind the notoriously simple — and oddly popular — Yo app are hoping to create another viral hit, this time by taking on Snapchat.
Mirage is a new ephemeral messaging service that incorporates its founders’ new obsession with simplicity. Its split-screen interface makes it possible to send someone a self-destructing photo or video with just one tap, instead of the four (or five with scrolling) taps it takes to send a Snapchat image. “That’s three taps you could be sending with your children,” says Or Arbel, the creator of Yo who has seen Stephen Colbert’s parody of his app's modus operandi.
To take and send a photo with Mirage, users simply press a contact's photo in the bottom half of the screen, while the top half of shows the live camera image. The user interface is similar to TapTalk, another Snapchat rival that Facebook has reportedly being eyeing.
But Mirage’s founding team say they’re not fussed about moving into what is fast becoming a crowded market, and say there’s room to grow outside the U.S. “Snapchat is a successful app but most people outside of U.S. don’t have Snapchat,” says Ido Sadeh, chief operating officer at Mirage’s parent company, Mobli. “[Mirage] is inspired in its simplicity by Yo, in the sense we wanted to create a visual messaging tool that is simple to use, minimalist and does not cause any friction to the user.”
Mirage’s selling point, says Sadeh, is that you can also send photos directly to cell phone numbers as SMS messages.
Mobli started life in 2010 as an Instagram clone that has since received $86 million in funding from celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio and Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim Helu. It’s gone on to invest in and create other mobile products, including Yo earlier this year.
Yo was the offhand, 8-hour creation of Mobli’s lead iOS developer, Arbel, and has raised $1.5 million from investors that include Betaworks and Mashable founder Pete Cashmore. Mobli’s founding team is also preparing to launch a market-trading website and have invested in StoreDot, a startup that makes batteries that allegedly charge in 30 seconds.
“There is no dull moment in the group in terms of what we do and in the ideas we constantly discuss,” says Sadeh. “We didn’t think Yo would blow up this quickly, but we knew it would succeed because internally, everyone started using it and giving it to their friends. The same thing happened here with Mirage.”
The difference between Yo and Mirage of course, is that nobody had anything like Yo before and Mirage is a far more familiar beast. Facebook also infused its Snapchat competitor, Slingshot, with the mechanics that should have made it go viral -- but that app hasn’t yet. It’s clearly a tough space to be in.
