What is the Zipper Local News and Local Gossip
App?
So many of
today's apps and sites are based around relationships...established
relationships with friends, family, and even the
occasional object of our romantic crushes which is a
great source of information about their local news
but that's a small canvas of all the local news we
would like to know about. You could hear a large
explosion in the building next door and none of your
"friends" will probably have any idea what it's all
about. There's still a powerful need for real
"Local" news and by local, it might be that wreck
right in front of you. The problem is that our
current idea of local news is old and funneled down
to the public based on what a few people think is
newsworthy or worse yet, what the large mass of
people think is important. With more and more
financial pressure on both local newspapers and
local tv station affiliates, they have less
resources on the street to catch news when it's
happening. By the time you hear it from them, it's
old news. That's why we created the zipper.
It was a simple idea stemming from a simple need as
are most useful innovations. We were heading on a
highway to an Oakland Warriors game. We're about 1
hour into the trip when traffic just stops on a
Sunday afternoon. We still had a good 1/2 (with no
traffic) to go and I didn't know if the wreck was
over the next hill or miles away. I quickly brought
out the Ipad and Iphone. Yes, I had detailed maps
down to the street view as my beckon call and
traffic apps that would show general traffic in real
time but it still didn't answer my question. Where
was the wreck? Eventually, one of the traffic
systems would report the wreck and eventually, it
might get 5 seconds on some news report but none of
that helped me determine if we should still try to
make our came or just call it (since we might miss
quite a bit). That's where the Zipper started but
it definitely didn't end there. As a baseline, we
realized that
the best source
of local news is you and the thousand's of you's in
the area.
Everyone has smart phones and even embedded cameras
so what if we have a quick and easy network to
empower all those eyes and ears with the ability to
report newsworthy items in real time. We got
excited. I was use something that. Real local news
in real time. We also realized that gossip in
itself is form of news albeit less serious in nature
and more importantly, we didn't want this lighter
fare to interfere with the real local news that
someone might use the zipper to get so we just
carved out a special channel for local gossip and
even allowed anonymous posts for that section.
Again, this protect the relevant local news that the
Zipper app becomes the perfect vehicle for.
Once we started building how we would want the
zipper to function if we used it, we realized that
we could essentially offer the ability to text for
free over the network. We could even create private
channels that are accessed through a passcode that
the creator originates as a mobile, private message
board. Let's face it, text messages can easily be
found and read and sometimes, we just want a private
channel for information. The Zipper does that too.
So hopefully, we've done our due diligence and have
created the
Local News and
Local Gossip app to end all need for others
with a little side bonus of free and private text
messaging for good measure. Go ahead and give it a
shot...or better yet, a Zip! |
