Six months ago Doug Richard finally succumbed and created a Facebook page. The technology entrepreneur and investor enlisted the assistance of his 16-year-old daughter to get him up and running on the social network.
Before long his daughter’s friends, who thought the former Dragons’ Den star “cool” were requesting his ‘friendship’. Concerned that his only friends were teenage girls and people might read things between the lines Richard quickly set about his network of contemporaries.
All this was in the name of research. Richard is co-founder and CEO of Trutap. It’s in closed beta right now but is quite possibly set to revolutionise the way 18-24-year-olds interact.
Essentially, it’s a free mobile service that for the first time combines all the key elements of social networking into one application. And it does this on a global basis. The company recently secured $6.5m in additional Series A funding, to add to the first part sum of $6.5m and the $1.2m seed round, at which point Richard invested. He’s excited because social networks, according to CEO of the Wireless World Forum Josh Dhaliwal, are set to grow 150% in 2007 and the next step, he says, is for it to go truly mobile in Europe and the US.
Trutap combines the ability to text, share pictures, use instant messaging for groups and individuals, chat, and blog via all the accounts 18-24-year-olds currently use – including MSN, Yahoo!, AIM (AOL) and ICQ, Blogger, Blog.com, Flickr, Friendster, Xanga. In the near future, users of MySpace, Bebo and Facebook will have the option to Trutap their friends and write on each others’ ‘walls’ while on the move.
Over coffee in London, Richard created a Trutap account for me. After a brief delay and a system crash – probably due to my handset – I was able to taste the potential. With only 200 people able to access it right now, most of whom are developers working on the back-end technology, we’re certainly not talking critical mass. Nevertheless, a member of the Trutap team back in Cambridge, instantly welcomed me to the group with a bunch of flowers.
This isolated experience was not much beyond SMS text messaging – a quick hello and an attached image. The key difference though is that the person at the other end was just one of the group who could see my own message – in precisely the same format as Instant Messaging – and the exchange was free.
Don’t you dare think Trutap sounds simple though. Doug Richard would probably self-combust. Admittedly it’s got to be intuitive, but it’s taken 40 man years and a good deal of cash for the team to develop it. In order for it to work, the technology has to remotely identify the mobile operator, the firmware (the programme held permanently in a computer’s memory), and the exact handset (of which Trutap covers around 93-98% of the handsets in use). And it has to do all this globally. The permutations are virtually endless and as Richard says, “there’s no simple path to happiness”.
Because of this, it’s unlikely Trutap will face much competition. The challenge will be getting the word out there, but with teenagers competing for use of the PC in many households or with the possibility of their parents’ beady eyes over their shoulders, Trutap will enable them to take their social lives truly on the move.
Richard is a highly articulate and convincing entrepreneur. And I, for one, am not about to argue with the likely impact of his newest contribution to technology. Watch this space!
