User Interface of The Crowd Voice BlackBerry App

The social news app developed by two Indonesians, Jonni Gani and his brother Hendrik, won the Mobile Monday Australia BlackBerry Messenger Developer Competition held December last year in Sydney. The fun app which was intended to be the place where users purposely discover and share interesting posts, texts, images and links to rescue bored people on the road. Since it is integrated with other social networks, users can share their updates on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Basically TheCrowdVoice is not a place for status updates. They are quite similar to forums, but different from “mainstream” forum such as Kaskus. The members, already numbering at 4000, are encouraged to post informative, humorous, entertaining and cool contents for other members’ perusal (not for themselves). A special discussion section has also been set up for soccer fans.

“It’s not a social networking app or site because in the current form, TheCrowdVoice satisfies the first half of “social network” but not the second. In other words, it’s social but the network element is missing,” says Jonni Gani. He adds “It falls under Social Networking category on BlackBerry AppWorld because that was the closest category we could find.”

At the moment, their team, Gani Software, has been making necessary adjustments to the app in order to maximize user traction, enjoyment and engagement. They have learnt from previous projects not to dream up features too much. That’s why they have been driving features from user feedback and observation, pretty much from Day One.

More specific, they are going to fulfill two common requests from their members: first, private messaging and chat, and second, the Android app. This plan will boost users’ engagement and gaining new users.

Jonni continues “We validated our idea last year. Naturally we want to grow as strongly as possible this year, possibly expanding into other countries. We will look for like-minded investors to help us grow our team”.