The Medium is the Message

Humans want to communicate. We crave presence and connection. We unknowingly need connection now more than ever, as attention gets fragmented by devices and interruption. Brilliant services have been created by connecting us across time and space since the telephone, more recently since ICQ and AOL IM in the 1990s and Skype in 2003. Today, three of the top 10 mobile apps (by percentage of time spent in 2012) are communication services, and we believe that communications, via email or chat, will always be one of the true “killer apps” on mobile.

But today’s world is rapidly changing. Text looks like the green screen of the 1980s. The world of today is more than just text and now includes photos, videos, doodles and music: in short, expression. These are the essential bits, the subtleties of communication today. People want to share everything, but they share over disparate channels. They want to share with tone, which text doesn’t allow. Photos and doodles do. That’s why MessageMe is so powerful: it’s a communication service developed by True portfolio company LittleInc. that helps facilitate different mediums of communication in a simple mobile experience. MessageMe includes core mediums—Photos, Videos, Voice, Money, Music and Groups—that let people connect and share in rich and engaging ways.

The co-founding team behind MessageMe has a strong background of monetizing and leveraging mobile data to better target consumers and enhance their experience. CEO Arjun Sethi was previously CEO of Lolapps, which merged with 6waves in 2011 and grew to over 100M in revenues and 200 employees. Alexander Chee is one of the industry’s most promising user experience experts and was formerly the Director of Product and User Experience at Lolapps. Justin Rosenthal, who runs technology for Littleinc., was previously Director of Engineering at Lolapps, and prior to that, developed one of the earliest successful branded social applications, ”My Starbucks,” which reached over 15M monthly active users. And Vivek Tatineni was the Lead Software Engineer at Lolapps and was responsible for managing the engineering teams behind the mobile platform that catered to over 200 developers worldwide on iOS and Android.

The MessageMe team worked out of the True offices for about six months, and we happily beta tested their apps. It has been a pleasure to watch MessageMe develop into the fantastic app being released today.

Arjun, Alexander, Justin and Vivek: Welcome to True!