I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you're having a great time now with family members and/or friends.
In recent years I've mentioned on various occasions that I was working on an app. Now, at long last and on the occasion of this holiday post, I'll be more specific about it.
This is one of only two posts you'll ever find here about my app. Promised. The only other one will be a single paragraph once it can be downloaded from the U.S. App Store, just to tell you that and where you can find it in case you're interested. Other than that, I'll keep my app and this blog completely separate, recognizing that only some--but presumably not most--of the professionals following patent and antitrust cases play trivia game apps. I've set up a separate blog and several separate social media accounts for my app.
Most of you presumably hadn't heard of me before I wrote about the "smartphone patent wars." That's why it may come as a surprise to some of you that my primary focus is a game app. Actually, in the mid to late 1990s--long before I started this blog (and even before I ran a campaign against a proposed piece of EU software patent legislation)--I was already in the computer games business: I was a consultant to Blizzard Entertainment, now best-known for World of Warcraft; and I founded an online gaming network, which was acquired by a large multinational telecommunications company. So I'm back to my roots now, as counterintuitive as it may seem.
In 2014, I founded a company, Quizista, to develop a revolutionary trivia game, Quizcover. It's revolutionary in the sense that it puts an end to the monotony of traditional trivia games and innovates the most fundamental aspects of trivia gaming: the way the game presents questions, the way players enter their answers, the way the answers are evaluated, and the kinds of hints (also called "boosters") players can get. It also has other advantages, several of which are shown on this feature comparison table (which, by the way, we're not going to use in communications with consumers).
Just like all other trivia game apps, Quizcover comes with the traditional trivia game question type (one option is right while three are wrong), which I call "Pick One" and which still makes sense for a lot of purposes. But on top of that, it has a couple of more interactive question types, Pick Some (multiple answers are correct) and Match Two (where players have to form correct pairs). The conventional Pick One trivia question type would also have worked on a 1990s Nokia phone. The Pick Some and especially Make Two types are very easy to learn, but they make much better use of touchscreens, they're more engaging, and they're more informative. They make all the difference, and I'm deeply convinced that the days of conventional trivia games are numbered. Once someone has experienced the diversity of Quizcover, why settle for monotony?
For a long time I have wanted to make knowledge more playable and trivia gaming more interesting and, at the same time, more informative. I've been fortunate to be working with a group of great software developers and content authors who share my vision. That vision has turned into a reality. Last month, Apple approved the first release of my app for distribution via the App Store and we made it available in a number of markets, but without any promotional efforts so far. In recent weeks we've made further UX improvements, some of which we consider very significant, and we're soon going to conduct our final test of a new version before publishing the app in the United States (the market for which its content was mostly created), which may already happen next week. And then we'll make more noise but, as I said, not on this particular blog.
If you have an iPhone or iPad running on iOS 10 or 11, and if you're interested in joining that final beta test, please email me at info@quizista.com and I'll be glad to make sure you receive a test version soon via TestFlight. There's no obligation attached to participating in such a beta test.
I would also like to invite you to follow Quizcover on Instagram. We recently started posting some facts and questions from our game there on a purely experimental basis and we like the platform, so once we've launched the app in the U.S. market, we'll be more active here, too.
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