Remenis

This is the story of Remenis, a social web app that helped people write, share, and collect all their life stories. Well, at least it did when it was live and running back in 2012. I am unfortunately starting this blog a few years late.

Remenis was a Twitter Bootstrapped, Facebook-like, web app that was written in Python using Django, hosted on Heroku, and used Facebook Connect for authentication. The site's goal was to encourage users to write the stories of their life and share them with their friends. The way it worked was: 

The user would log in using Facebook so we could learn who was in their social network. The user would receive suggestions of stories they could write - such as "What was the most embarrassing thing you did in college?" "Tell us about your wedding reception." "What was a lesson your father taught you?" After the user wrote their story, they would tag everyone who was in the story. Those tagged would receive a notification, and not only have the story for their records, they would also add to the story things they remembered or their own perspective. These stories could also be shared with other friends, or with the public. People could like the story, make comments, and like comments. They could even share the story on Facebook. 

Sounds like Facebook you say? Here is how we were different:

Facebook	Remenis
Current. All about the current stuff – what’s happening now.	We are all about the good ole days. We want to hear your best stories from the past.
Brevity. Pictures and one sentence comment on what the picture is highlighting.	We want details, lots and lots of details! Tell us everything you can about the story. Make it vivid.
Busy. Dozens and dozens of things to do – games, chat, videos, and the list goes on.	We are about one thing and one thing only – Stories! We know the power of stories, especially those of your friends and loved ones. They will inspire us, teach us, help us appreciate life and others more.
Garbage. Lots and lots of garbage. I mean really who cares if you are about to use the toilet right now, if you have entered in a home makeover contest, if you just listened to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” what you just bought online, or if you like weird and often offensive quotes.	All you are ever going to get here is stories! Really. Nothing else. It’s like having your own personal Reader’s Digest.
Superficial. It’s about superficial relationships -- seeing how many friends you can add, saying hello once you are friends with them, wishing them happy birthday once a year, reading their weird posts for a few weeks before finally unsubscribing from their feed.	Remenis is about celebrating and deepening the powerful relationships we already have through stories. By writing stories about your friends and family you will be reminded of the great life you have. By reading their stories or stories others have written about them, you will learn new things about them that will make you appreciate them more.

There were three of us working on this project - two developers and me - I was in charge of PMing, UX, and UI. Nathan, Aswath and I met at a Startup Weekend on February 17, 2012. Nathan and I were working on Volunteer Around Me, a mobile app that was going to revolutionize service projects, that is until the judges sank our ship. Aswath was romancing an idea that would allow people to share hotel rooms, even with warning of it being against the law and all. After the event, since we all worked for the same Tech company and we got along pretty well, we decided to team up and work on our own idea.

We brainstormed a few Saturday mornings and discussed over a hundred ideas. We eventually landed on three that we liked - a collaborative journal, a wiki for the average Joe, and an app for inspiring people. Because we couldn't choose one we decided to combine them all and make Remenis. 

Quite frankly, we didn't create Remenis after doing tons of research. We built it because it was something we really wanted. Something we believed would help people keep their history/legacy, bring people together, and inspire them to joy, success, love, etc. We realize that our life and our characters are mainly built upon our memories. As we make decisions we don’t just think about the consequences. We look back in our life and remember that one-liner our dad used to say or the vow we made to love and cherish someone. When we are asked if we are happy, we don’t think about our feelings that very minute. We think back at that time in high school when our team won the championship, when we traveled to Rome with a special person, when we held our child in our arms for the first time.

Life and character is what Remenis was about. We wanted to help everyone and ourselves write, share and collect all our life stories.

Unfortunately, soon after we built the site and started getting users, our lives got a bit too hectic and the project went unattended. Nathan went to Asia for several months to do service work, Aswath got a new job at another software company, and my wife had twins. I'm sure we all have awesome stories to write about; if only Remenis was still around... :(

Here is some of the work I did. Unfortunately, since it was so long ago the site is now broken so it would take too long to fix it in order to take some screenshots, so you'll just have to do with the few design drafts I created and that I still have left. Most of these were tweaked in the end, but they'll give you an idea of what we did.

These are a couple pictures of the first landing page, home screen, and the first logo I created.

After realizing the logo was too busy and the look and feel wasn't quite what we wanted, we came up with a different logo and look.

Here are some screenshots of our site:

The top had a carousel and here are some more of the pictures featured on it.

Once you entered the site, you saw the following instructions:

Inside the site, you would see the following tool to help you think of stories. We had a list of these questions on a database that we could add to and the tool randomly pulled from it:

And that's all I can find. :(

It was an excellent project. We had an excellent team. Man, those were some good ole days!

Call-it

In September of 2012 I attended Startup Weekend, an excellent crash-course on product development. The event began with a “Pitchfire," where everyone was encouraged to pitch a product idea. I was given 60 seconds and a mic to pitch my idea for Call-it, a Klout for predictions - an app that would measure your ability to make predictions and give you a score so that you can pit yourself against your friends and the pundits, journalists, and forecasters of the world. After all the pitches were delivered, all attendees voted on their favorite ideas and the top 8-10 ideas were picked to move on to the next step. My idea was one of the finalists and ChiBuzor and Santoshkumar  decided to join my team and work on this idea for the next 3 days. Together we researched the topic, developed the idea further, and put some wireframes together. Lastly, we put together a presentation and I delivered our concept to a judge panel of four leaders.

Here is the presentation we put together:

We predict because that is what we are programmed to do. Our frontal lobe is dedicated to the function of forecasting what our actions will lead us to. And because it’s fun to be right. Whenever you predict something like who will win a basketball game it’s fun to say to your friends – booyah! I called it!

The problem is that there is no way to track our predictions, which means we can’t measure how amazing we are at predicting or how often we are right. This means we can’t get recognized for our brilliance. And on the flip side of that. There are plenty of pundits, journalists, and forecasters who make predictions every day that affect the lives of millions and there is no one to check them on their predictions! If they are wrong, nobody brings it up again or holds them accountable.

Introducing Call-it! A Klout for predictions. Call-it is an app that will measure your ability to make accurate predictions. Once it calculates an accurate rating of your ability, this will enable you to pit yourself against your friends, experts, and the world.

We learned that most of the time people like to make predictions about the media they are consuming. This is why we think our concept would work well with Bing because it’s a major hub for media.

This is how it would work. The first thing people will do is go to Bing and most likely they will click on the popular now links. Which will take them to a search. For example, let's pretend you click on the Donald Trump link below.

You are then taken to results page, where the results are on the left hand and Call-it activity on the right. The Call-it activity will show you the popular people or companies that have made calls around the search topic you’ve chosen. It may show your friends who have made calls and the calls of others like celebrities. It could show you which calls have been closed (by the green square) and have either been fulfilled or not. Each call could give you an option to easily make a prediction or not by highlighting the appropriate call-it button.

If you highlight a name or a picture it would give you a summary of the person’s Call-it score and other social media information. 

If you highlight a call-it button, it could show your call it score, perhaps other stats like how many calls you’ve made, how many people are following you. It would also allow you to make a prediction as well.

If you click on the link it could take you to the Call-it site. 

The Call-it site would basically be a media hub; it could be it’s own site or it could be tied to another MS product such as the Bing News App or MSN.

It would cover all major topics including technology and business. If you click on a story it would take you to the story and show you all of the call details.

Once you are at the story, it will show you all the calls and comments that have been made. You will be able to make a new call or add new comments. And if you click on a person’s photo or name it will take you to their profiles

Rahul Sood profile picture, with statistics, calls made, and flunk’d. It would also show other relevant data like friends, followers, following, etc. This platform has huge potential for gamifying the scores and predictions. We could give people a certain status for making a certain amount of predictions and averaging a certain score. Think Gold, Silver, Bronze. They could also get a hot streak status if they make a certain amount of correct predictions in a row. Or we could partner with companies and make a challenge – Warner Bros is making another Harry Potter movie! Predict how many people will watch it on opening weekend!

Prediction isn't new; there are plenty of people predicting already and it has proven that it is a fun and engaging activity. For example, it is estimated that Fantasy Football had 35 million people involved and American Idol had over 122 million votes! This would be another fun way they could get into the game of predicting.

We put together a Business Canvas. As you can see there are a few ways to make money here.

As we took a look at the evolution of media, from cave drawings, to social media. We can honestly see a predicting platform like Call-it to be the next step because as media evolves, consumers want to become more and more involved. Regular people like you and I are becoming the stars and experts. Call-it would be a common equalizer, one that enables you to go up against the so called experts of the world and allows you show them that you are smarter than they are!