Throughout the year, at different locations around the world, Startup Weekend events are held. The participants have 54 hours to come up with an idea for a startup business and are given the resources, financial incentives and networking opportunity to help them do so. This past August, a Startup Weekend event was hosted by Microsoft on its Redmond, Washington campus. The winner was a mobile app for the iPhone and the Palm Pre called Learn That Name! The app is now available from the app store and I was eager to check it out because it is a great idea and was developed by (among others) two lawyers.
The initial idea for Learn That App came from Eric Koester, at attorney in the Seattle office of Cooley Godward Kronish. Eric was embarrassed to sometimes find himself in the situation where he cannot remember the name of a person he encounters even though he knows that he knows the person. (We’ve all been there before.) Thus, his idea was to have a mobile app that uses some kind of flashcards to help you learn the names of people who are your contacts on LinkedIn, a social network focused on business connections. Eric pitched his idea on Startup Weekend and put together a team to develop the mobile app. You can learn a lot more about all of this from this comprehensive post by Eric.
Eric is not a computer programmer, but others on his team were. In fact, one of them was both a computer programmer and a lawyer, Chad Kirby who practices IP law with AXIOS Law Group. Chad knows how to write apps for the iPhone, and he sells several calculators on the app store through his company Uplake Media LLC including Calc Zero. Chad and the rest of the team put together the Learn That Name! app, and by the end of the weekend, the app was voted the best product developed at Startup Weekend. It also got some publicity because it was humorous for an iPhone app to win the top award at an event sponsored by Microsoft. In fact, because the app was not developed using Microsoft technology, the team wasn’t eligible to win the $5,000 award; instead that money went to the team that came in second.
Learn That Name! is an app with an interesting background, but it also turns out to be a very useful app if you have a lot of LinkedIn contacts. When you first start the app you provide your LinkedIn username and password, and the app downloads your contacts. The game then starts and you see a picture of one of your contacts and four possible names. The faster you select the name that goes with the face, the more points you score. As the clock ticks down, incorrect names are removed to make it easier to guess. And if you get the name right, you get a “bonus question” to guess the company for which the person works. After five names the game ends, but you can keep playing again and again.
The concept is simple but it works. Using this app will improve your ability to match names (and companies) with faces in your LinkedIn contacts. Indeed, I suspect that all of us have used flashcards as a learning device at some point in our lives, so it is a proven educational method. The game aspect makes the learning fun.
I told Chad that this app would be even better if you could also pull contacts from other sources, such as your e-mail address book, Facebook, etc. Chad agrees that these are great ideas to expand the app in the future, and hopefully that will happen even though the team is scattered now that Startup Weekend is over. Indeed, the app only costs 99¢, and since it is the result of 14 developers who split the profits (after Apple takes its 30% cut), they each only get about a nickel for each sale, as Eric told TechFlash. It may take a lot of sales to have a financial incentive to add more features. But even in its current implementation, the app is great if you have a lot of LinkedIn contacts and you can use some help matching names and faces.
Click here to get Learn That Name! ($0.99): 