Friday evening started with some excellent speakers before the teams began the application design phase. Dave Westwood was one of the featured speakers that evening. Dave created Buddy Poke, an OpenSocial application with over 30 million downloads. If you look at Buddy Poke, it has several things going for it. For one, it is delightful and cute, instantly appealing to the MySpace demographic. A second important feature is that it is social. You can send a virtual hug to a friend. If the friend had never seen Buddy Poke before, the 1st thing they’ll do is install the app and send a hug to one of their friends … and on… and on. Now you see how you get to 30 million users in less than a year. It spreads virally (in a good way).
Challenge (from previous post): Develop a product that will appeal to the target market. We picked our target market, the “Under 25″ demographic.
Action: Develop something that is cute, fun to use, and that you share with friends.
