LOVE, a London-based startup, was valued at $17million after its pre-seed funding. It aims to change the way people keep in touch with their family and friends. The company will launch a messaging app that combines video calling and asynchronous audio messaging. It is privacy-focused, ad-free and privacy-focused.
However, LOVEs biggest differenceiator might not be the product itself but rather its mission.
LOVE wants its product direction to be governed by its users in a democratic manner. This is opposed to having its future decided by a few corporate executives. The company also stated that the long-term goal of LOVE is to eventually hand over ownership and governance of the app to its users.
These ideas are part of larger trends towards Web 3.0 or the next phase of internet development. In this new world, services are decentralized and user privacy is enhanced, data is secured, and transactions occur on digital ledgers like a blockchain in a more distributed fashion.
LOVEs founders include serial entrepreneur Samantha Radocchia who founded three other companies and was an early advocate of the blockchain as the cofounder of Chronicled, an enterprise-level blockchain company that focuses on the pharmaceutical supply chain.
She is a passionate advocate for emerging technology, having written her anthropology thesis about currency exchanges in Second Life's virtual world. Now, she is a faculty member at Singularity University where she has given talks on blockchain, AI and the Internet of Things. She also wrote a guidebook on the blockchain, Bitcoin Pizza.
Christopher Schlaeffer was the co-founder of Deutsche Telekom. He held various roles at Deutsche Telekom including chief product and innovation officer, corporate development officers, chief strategy officer and chief strategist officer. This is where he, along with Google executives, introduced the first Android-powered mobile phone. He was also the chief digital officer of VEON, a telecommunications services company.
After Schlaeffer had begun organizing a team to spread LOVE to the public, the two met. This included co-founders Chief Technologist Jim Reeves and Chief Designer Timm Kekeritz. Kekeritz was previously an interaction designer at IDEO in San Francisco and design director at IXDS. He also founded Raureif, a design consultancy in Berlin.
Radocchia explained that what attracted her as CEO was the possibility to create a company with more positive values than the current culture. In fact, LOVE is a reference towards this goal. She was also intrigued by the possibility of developing new business models, which she calls "non-reliant on advertising and harvesting data from our users," she said.
LOVE intends to make money from its website without advertising. Although the company has not yet explained its business model fully, they did tell us that users would opt in to services via granular permissions or membership.
Radocchia says that we believe that our users would rather pay for services they use and give permissions to in a specific context, than for their data to be used in an opaque advertising model.
LOVE plans to share more information about the model in the coming year.
The LOVE app is a well-designed mobile messenger that offers a variety of interesting features. You can video call your family and friends in the same way as any other chat app. Love currently supports five participants per call, but it plans to increase that number as the app grows. The app supports audio and video messaging to allow for synchronous conversations. This functionality is already available on the market in tools such as WhatsApp with audio messaging support or Marco Polo video messenger. They don't offer the same feature set.
LOVE has a 60 second limit on video messages. This is to keep things concise. As anyone who has used Marco Polo knows videos can get a little rambling which can make it difficult to catch up on group chats. You can also view the video content and read the transcription. This is useful for accessibility purposes, as well as for times when you don't have headphones or are not in a quiet place. You can also translate conversations into 50 languages.
Radocchia explains that a lot of traditional messenger products and communication are text-based. This is how we approach it differently. She continues, "While other platforms may have some of the same features as we do, I believe that the way we approach it has completely turned it on its head." She adds that instead of bolting video messages onto a primarily text-based interface [LOVE] is actually doing it the opposite way. They add text as a kind of magically transcribed extension and something you will never need to type out on your keyboard again.
To make it feel more natural, the app's user interface was designed to encourage eye to eye contact with the speaker. This is done by using design elements that allow bubbles to float around while you speak and grow with the speaker. Hans Ulrich-Obrist is the curator at Serpentine Gallery in London. The company collaborates with him to develop new filters that don't focus on beautification and gimmicks but instead help people feel more comfortable when using their cameras.
This has created a filter that abstracts your appearance in the style animations or other visual arts.
The app claims to use encryption at all levels and will automatically delete its contents after seven days, except messages that you have recorded, if you choose to save them as memories.
Radocchia says that privacy and the right to forget are two of our commitments. This information is not needed or wanted by us.
LOVE was soft-launched in the App Store. It has been tested with a few testers. Now, it is trying to organically grow its userbase through an invite mechanism. Users are asked to invite at most three people to join. The same process explains why LOVE requires permissions to use speech recognition to create subtitles.
LOVE estimates its value at $17 million USD. This is after pre-seed investments by a mix of traditional startup investors as well as strategic angel investors from a variety industries including film, television, and financial services. This fall, the company will raise a seed round.
The app is available for iOS at the moment, but an Android version will be released later in 2015. (Note: LOVE currently does not support iOS 15 beta software. It has issues with speech transcription as well as in other areas. This should be fixed next week with an app update.
