Imagine an app that smacks your phone with a high-five. Or hugs you. Or worse, farts.
That’s the idea behind Blabcake, a social media app underway at Walking Thumbs, an Oakland-based entertainment startup founded by John Feghali, CEO.
This is Feghali’s second foray into the gaming and toy business. The CMU grad previously co-founded and designed robotic toys for Bossa Nova.
Blabcake is just one of three apps in development. Squareland, for casual gamers in their teens and up, is a strategy game with 80 levels; it was released this spring through the App Store. Berry Rescue, targeted for the same audience, is coming soon.
Blabcake is generating the most excitement, says Feghali. It’s a newfangled expression platform that offers users more than 40 ways to express themselves and more than 25 ways to share their most intimate feelings (and bodily functions, apparently) through animated blabs, super blabs and moods.
The app will be launched in the next three months.
“We’re doing something very different and unique, targeting teenagers who are the main text messengers,” he says. “We’re all about expressing yourself digitally. You cannot hug someone in a digital conversation. Or do silly things like fart and throw up.”
So how does a social media app convey physical feelings or blabs via texting? The messages, he says, are animated emoticons, sent through words and pictures.
Walking Thumbs employs 18 in Oakland and is hiring.
