Yiip Is Like Twitter for Your Voice Clips

4 days ago by Sarah Kessler

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Yiip
Quick Pitch: Yiip records and shares short sound clips.
Genius Idea: Makes sharing sound clips like sharing photos.

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The days when phones were primarily used for voice transmission are long over. A 2010 study found that the average teenager taps out 3,339 text messages every month, and apps make it easy to share tweets, photos and videos.
But Yiip CEO , Taylor Bollman thinks that voice messages still have a place in the whirlwind of short, sharable media.
iPhone app Yiip, which launched this September as “Qwip,” borrows features from several successful social apps and applies them to sound clips. Like Twitter, it limits the length of its messages to make them easily digestible. Public messages on Yiip are less than 10 seconds long, and private messages are less than 25 seconds long. Like Instagram and other photo-sharing apps, users can add an artistic touch to messages before sharing them. In Yiip’s case, users add not filters, but a library of sound effects that range from animal sounds to human skepticism. Users can also add photos to their sound clips.
A familiar “follow” system directs clips from selected users into a personal newsfeed. Private groups keep messages between friends (one-to-one sharing is on the way), and the option to push sound clips to Twitter or Facebook broadcasts them to social networks. Key words from clips are automatically added to create the tags that make them searchable.

Sound has not necessarily been excluded from the mobile sharing boom. A startup called Broadcastr, for instance, has created a crowdsourced talk radio that can be played by location. An app called Heytell turns phones into walkie talkies. And Fotobabble adds sound to photos. Yiip is one of the only voice sharing startups, however, to attempt a community based on quick sound bits.
“Voice is different than text,” Bollman says. “It’s expressive, it’s emotive, it conveys personality. It’s very easy to produce. Conveys ambient audio content…If you’re at a game and the Giants just hit home run, you can capture the crowd.”
But isn’t that true for video sharing apps like Mobli, Vyou and Klip , too?
“Video takes more effort,” Bollman says, “there’s a higher likelihood of a person feeling awkward, it can’t be consumed handsfree…[Audio] is a medium in which it’s easy to to quickly be creative.”
Here’s an example of what you’re likely to hear on Yiip: “I use the bean grinding feature on my coffee pot as an alarm clock,” “Has anyone ever told you that you’re beautiful?” “nan nan nan nan na.”
The startup is still tossing around ideas for a revenue stream — Twitter-like sponsored posts, white-label products for businesses and an API are all possibilities — but its first challenge will be to convince a user base that audio snippets like these, while undeniably creative, are also worth sharing.

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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

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