Spin the Bottle

After a few nights of intense ideation (putting ‘i’ in front of everything we could think of…iChair…iTable…iBed…iCeiling) we finally settled on the idea of iDrink-mobile drinking games for the college age group. We we set on the idea of creating a drinking game suite for iPhone which would include essential drinking games such as Kings, Spin the Bottle, Quarters, and a Blood Alcohol utility to make sure you didn’t have too much fun. Spin the Bottle seemed like the easiest way to jump into a new coding language, so we started right away. At the time, early August, there were no competitor applications on the AppStore.

With the steep learning curve for Cocoa, Spin the Bottle took about two weeks to complete, but the extra time allowed us to brainstorm some extra features. The final product allows different backgrounds and bottles, the ability to brag about your lucky night over email, and a cheating feature to make the bottle point wherever you want it to. The cheating feature was meant to be a completely secret feature that users would have to find once they downloaded the app. That didn’t happen.

The best way to describe Apple’s approval process for new iPhone applications is “a black box.” You put your app in, no one knows what happens inside, and your app is approved or rejected in 2 to 8 weeks. Spin the Bottle took fully 8 weeks to make it onto the AppStore, during which time 6 other Spin the Bottles had been approved. So we did what anyone would do in intense competition: insisted that our product was better than the rest, and market it as such. Our app is now called Spin the Bottle PRO, and we heavily expose the cheating feature. Check it out in the store:

Spin the Bottle PRO – $.99 :

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=289097904&mt=8

“Your night is about to get so much better”

Introductions and The Beginning

Hello, my name is Rob. Over the past 4 months I’ve been working with two other Stanford students to build a company, Swavv Applications, building iPhone apps for the college market. It’s been a journey from product deveopment, to dealing with Apple, to battling with fierce competitors. Hopefully I can help any other developers or entrepreneurs who want to cash into the mobile market…Hopefully

Swavv actually started as an end-of-summer project between me, one of my co-workers at a Silicon Valley startup, Rohan, and my summer roommate, Lucas. We decided to make iPhone apps while eating Ramen in our cramped dorm at Stanford. Before I get carried away with our ideas, let me introduce the team:

Rohan Bhobe: Rohan is a senior studying Electrical Engineering. He sets up the server-side handling for our online apps, in additon to being our designated stats-watcher. Other than coding and sending out team emails entitled “Check our our stats!”, Rohan is an avid Cricket fan and player.

Lucas Manfield: Lucas is a sophomore studying some blend of Philosophy, Literature, and Spanish? Sounds like an unlikely fit for an application startup, but Lucas writes all the code for our apps themselves. When he’s not dealing with Objective C, he’s probably playing squash or trying to catch up on actual classes.

Rob Balian: I’m also a sophomore studying Mechanical Engineering. My job description is slightly more ambiguous. After seeing some of my code, Lucas has asked me (kindly) not to write code anymore. However, I’m responsible for the graphics in our applications, marketing, and blogging about our efforts.

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