There’s gold in them thar mobile hills. And a rare few developers have been able to mine it, with The Angry Birds brand estimated to
be worth over $1 billion, and OMGPOP, the makers of the hugely popular Draw Something app, bought by Zynga earlier this year for
US$185 million (it’s a fickle world, however, and, as is often the case, both Zynga and OMGPOP have failed to rediscover the magic recently). And now, inspired by the gameplay of Draw Something, Kiwi entrepreneurs Tristan Holman, who runs a consultancy called Flashgun in the UK, and Brett Hancock, who heads up Born Digital, are hoping they might follow in their footsteps with their own game called Act a Word.
Like Draw Something, Act A Word, which is the second app in the Appyly family after it released a taxi fare checker, is a social
game that lets you play ‘video charades’ against your friends. The app uses
Facebook to populate your friends list, and you have seven seconds to act out your
chosen word using the front or rear camera, which then gets sent to your friend
to guess. The other unique aspect to the game is that
you actually get to see your friends face every time you play, so for people
playing across the world, Hancock says it’s a fun way to virtually catch up.
He says they spent three months of their spare time developing the app and the free version was made live in the app
store on 12 November. And while downloads are still pretty low at this early stage, it already has users in more than 25 countries, so, with a bit of Facebook advertising, he’s hoping it will start to spread organically now.
To find out more, visit actaword.com.
