The initial spark that showed Calm co-founders Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith there was a market for meditation was rather simple. Tew, who had become a minor internet celebrity for the Million Dollar Homepage, built a website in 2011 called ‘do nothing for two minutes’, in which a user would stare at a screen and listen to waves on a beach for two minutes without touching their mouse. At the end of two minutes, an email prompt would appear asking people to sign up. In two weeks, over 1...| Business of Apps
Tinder is a dating app that matches users to others based on geographic proximity. It designed (and patented) the swipe interface, in which a user swipes right to ‘like’ or left to ‘pass’. If two users both like each other it’s a match, and they are then able to chat through the app. While deciding, Tinder users are able to view selected pictures of their potential match, alongside a short bio and linked Spotify and Instagram accounts if connected. With its basis on physical proximi...| Business of Apps
With the apparent self-implosion at Twitter, Instagram-parent Meta launched into the microblogging scene with Threads. Aimed at users and advertisers fed up with Twitter’s handling following the Musk takeover, it made a large splash in the first week with over 100 million sign-ups. This was helped along by Twitter announcing it had temporarily limited the amount of tweets users could view in one day. Threads works in a similar way to Twitter, where a mix of short posts from accounts followe...| Business of Apps
Zoom is a video conferencing app, geared towards business usage. It was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, and launched in January 2013. While gathering considerable popularity and coming to run profitably in the following years, Zoom truly entered the public consciousness during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. It was to Zoom that users across the world turned to stay in touch during the lockdown effected to stop the spread of the virus. Prior to founding Zoom, Yuan had helped to build WebEx, in...| Business of Apps
Fortnite refers to a video game series, set in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world. It is produced by Epic Games, and uses the company’s signature Unreal Engine. At present, there are two games that fall under the Fortnite umbrella: a team-based survival shooter called Fortnite: Save the World and Fortnite: Battle Royale, which as the name suggests is a last-person-standing game. The former was released in a paid-for early access version in July 2017. A free-to-play version was antici...| Business of Apps