Toronto-based app designer Sukhsagar Singh from Snapwise Inc. won an award for the app uCiC( pronounced you see, I see) at CES 2015 (Consumer’s Electronic’s Show). It won the ‘best new app’ award at the Mobile Apps Showdown.
The app is a new way to connect to helpful strangers that can show you what’s going on anywhere you are not.
Say you’re in a hurry and want to know how long the line at your favourite coffee shop is. Send a “REQUESTto” and insert the location of the coffee shop into the app. If somebody who has the app is at that location, they will get a notification and (hopefully) take a picture of their surroundings and show you what you need to know. They will get “karma points” for helping you out, which, in turn, they will use to send their own requests to other users of the app. Robin Raskin, founder of Living in Digital Times who helps make the showdown possible says the app is powerful.
“Wherever you are, you can ask a question about anything to anyone, anywhere in the world, and then you get a live answer,” Raskin says. “it’s a mash-up of really good ideas.”
The Mobile Apps Showdown website reports that uCiC won the online-voting portion of the showdown, with a total of approximately 20,000 votes, which Raskin says is a wide network. She also reports that there was another app that received more votes, but was disqualified for illegal activity.
Raskin says judges in the competition look for apps that are breakthrough and long-lasting — the app most likely to succeed. She says the Canadian app fulfilled all of those qualities.
Raskin says Snapwise Inc. is “a small company that’s making a big impact.”