Kapil Dev launches social app ‘SloPho’; a new social gamified platform

SloPho, a ‘Made in India’ social gamified collaboration platform was launched by Kapil Dev, former Indian cricketer and captain.

The unique yet simple social platform engages users by allowing them to win prizes daily by participating in exciting games, contests, polls and quizzes. Participants also earn points that accumulate on a leaderboard and can eventually be redeemed or transferred/gifted as prizes or bartered for advertising space on the platform. The cumulative average daily prize money to be won ranges as much as Rs 25,000 and will go up significantly during special promotions’ and festivals. Additionally, users have their own page where they can segment their followers into different customisable categories such as friends, family and colleagues among others; to share text, pictures and video. Users can also monetize their page by allowing advertising on it, a first in the world.

SloPho also allows businesses to target campaigns by region and language and drive greater RoI by providing two way communications. Registered businesses (corporate, SME, self-employed entrepreneurs and professionals) will be able to put up gamified promotions directly and engage users around their brand and proposition to build long term communities. The business can either put up contests on the main games feed page or create their own corporate/professional corner, which can be tailored to their specifications and managed directly. This also provides access to data and the benefit of analytics dashboard for their corner to get regular information around their campaigns.

The SloPho mobile application is available for Android users in the Play Store and will be available for Apple users in its App Store shortly. The platform is targeted to all smartphone users across age groups, incomes and literacy levels initially across India. It is currently available in English. Over the next three months, it will be made available in Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil to get on board users from tier 2 and tier 3 cities as well.

Speaking at the launch, Kapil Dev, co-owner and  pomoter said, “With SloPho, we want to give users, corporates and professionals, a social platform that not only fulfils their need to connect and collaborate, but also earn rewards for it in a way that matters most to them.”

He added, “This social platform is truly for everyone and is our contribution to the prime minister’s Make in India initiative. Our aim is to take it to every smartphone user, corporate and professional in the country and then internationally by providing ease of use, accessibility on smartphone OS platform as well as availability in different languages. Since mobile is fast becoming the preferred mode of internet access, we built the final product as a mobile application. We believe the mobile application will help us achieve our target of atleast 5-6 mn users and 25 large corporates in the first year.”

SloPho is simple to use. It is designed around photo, video and text, things all smartphone users are comfortable with today. Its features include bucketing people into categories and sharing information accordingly; option to follow and unfollow a corporate; and posting information across other social networking sites from their SloPho page among others.

“We created a desktop version to beta test the concept first among evolved Internet users. We tested it for over a year and the results were amazing. The daily average time spent by a user was an hour and 15 minutes. We took it to a few corporates like Airtel Nigeria and Dhampur Sugar that ran promotions and were happy with the results. With the launch of mobile app we believe not only will time spent by users increase significantly but it will also allow corporates and professionals to reach out and engage a much larger connected base of users,” said Aman Sahani, co-founder and CEO, SloPho.com.

In 2015, SloPho will be launched in more scheduled Indian languages and will also be introduced internationally in United Arab Emirates and Africa. Outside of India, it will launched in partnership with the telecom ecosystem players like operators and handset vendors.