Kapil Dev launches 'SloPho'

The former Indian cricket captain recently launched SloPho, a social gamified collaboration platform that facilitates two-way secure communication between consumers and brands.

SloPho, a social gamified collaboration platform, was launched by Kapil Dev, former Indian cricketer and captain. The 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 leader board 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 can be as much as Rs 25,000 and goes 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 to share text, pictures and video. Users can also monetise 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 - Apple users have to wait a bit more. The platform is targeted at all smartphone users across age groups, incomes and literacy levels initially. 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 promoter, said, "This social platform 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 internationally - by providing ease of use and accessibility. We believe that it will help us achieve our target of 5-6 million 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; options to follow or unfollow a corporate and posting information across other social networking sites from their SloPho page.

"We created a desktop version to beta test the concept among evolved Internet users. We tested it for over a year and were amazed to see that the daily average time spent by a user was an hour and 15 minutes," says Aman Sahani, co-founder and CEO, slopho.com. It was taken to a few corporates like Airtel Nigeria and Dhampur Sugar that ran promotions and were happy with the results. "Today, 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," he adds.

In 2015, SloPho will be launched in more Indian languages and also introduced internationally in the United Arab Emirates and Africa.

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