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Project Overview
Our vision at 1UP is to create the go-to forum where individuals can put their best foot forward in photo or video competitions that showcase talent, express creativity & humour or inspire us through humanitarianism efforts.
Our starting point has been to develop a slick iOS platform that facilitates this and offers a highly engaging user experience. The 1UP app encompasses most of the typical elements found in social media applications (which users have come to expect), but also lays the foundations for gamification of these interactions, appealing to the playful, competitive side that exists in most of us.
Project Commissioner
1UP - Capture. Create. Compete
Project Creator
Team
Nima Mehdian and Andy Worgan, the founders of 1UP, studied engineering at university together and currently pursue careers in the energy and media sectors respectively. They embarked on this mission in 2013 and spent some time developing and refining the idea. But without having the technical capabilities to bring the product to life themselves, a partnership was formed with hedgehog lab in 2014.
From hedgehog lab we had Craig Tweedy, Alex Smithson and David Miller work on the mobile app.
Project Brief
The project brief for 1UP was to allow users to share photos and videos in a new, fun and creative way by introducing a competitive context. Users would be able to:
- Create a competition by uploading an image or video, or taking a photo or stop-frame video on the app
- Set a time limit for the end of the competition
- Nominate friends and other users to post a response
- Allow all users to vote for their favourite posts to determine the winner
- Create public or private groups with friends or larger themes
- Receive notifications for voting, competing entries and groups
- View the leader board which shows the ranking of all users, based on scores that are calculated using the number of wins and votes received
The implementation would require the interface be fun, intuitive and visually engaging with videos autoplaying in each thread and floating UI.
Project Need
While other social media platforms allow users to post content, other users to like that content and in some cases post a response, no platform provides an environment in which one can create a self-contained forum to drive direct engagement in response to a post or an idea, with a quantifiable outcome based on number of votes within the set timeframe. 1UP provides this platform and will provide users, brands, charities and other groups a more interactive form of engagement with their friends and followers.
User Experience
Users are guided through a tutorial upon registration and then guided to the Global Stream, which hosts all the competitions which have been posted that are open to the public. Here users are provided with a few more tips and can either scroll down to roll through the open competitions (with autoplaying videos that loop) or they can use the filter search to look for more specific categories. Users can enter a competition thread in the Global Stream and view all the entries, and have the option to post a response by taking a photo or video or by uploading from their library. Users can also vote for an entry (but not their own) in the competition and users can nominate friends to post in the competition. The floating UI allows for quick access to the post function and nominate function in a competition, and in the Global Stream allows users to create a new competition themselves as well as view the leaderboard. Within the Global Stream, there is a second tab that shows all the completed competitions that have expired and declared a winner. Each competition tile in the Global Stream shows the originator’s post and below this the number of responses, total number of votes cast, total number of comments and the time left to the end of the competition.
Project Marketing
Given the challenge of any social media startup, i.e. that the value of the platform is somewhat proportional to the number of users, our approach is to engage specific communities that will be most likely to enjoy using a platform, even without all the benefits that some with scale. We are therefore targeting those who create and are interested in visually impressive photos and videos and who like sharing and commenting on such content (e.g. parkour groups). We are also currently in discussions with charities and other similar organisations that could use 1UP as a new and innovative way for engaging and expanding their communities and raising awareness.
1UP will aim to be a platform that promotes the engagement of users in a new and creative way through competition. To achieve this, social media, direct contact and sponsored ideas will be used.
Project Privacy
The 1UP app is built from the ground up keeping security as one of the priorities. The app's back-end database is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which already has industry standard security and over that the app also uses SSL to establish a secure connection.
The app uses Facebook API to register the users, giving them the ability to quickly and securely register and login to the app. The users Facebook details are only retrieved during registration and every other communication with Facebook involves only a token number being sent out for identification. The users details are not sent over again and again keeping the transaction secure.
The users have the ability to request for their account and related information to be deleted and the app does not keep or make a copy of those details. They are deleted immediately after the users request.
Best App Startup
Exactly as it states - we're looking for the best startup projects. Startup projects need to be newly emerging, less than 5 million users and less than 3 years old.
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