Before SnapChat There Was Quimby

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Unless you’ve been living under the Christmas and holiday rock, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the “controversial” mobile app startup, SnapChat and the ensuing controversy surrounding Facebook copying the technology as “Poke”.

SnapChat is a mobile texting app that allows multimedia texting. What makes it particularly intriguing is the fact that messages sent with SnapChat can self destruct. Make no bones about it or call it anything less than it is, it is the “sexting” app and its burning up the charts. SnapChat quickly found its place in the top 3 apps in the iTunes App Store where it’s been living for weeks.

Teenagers are using it in droves for sexting, to talk freely about others and for anything else they don’t want accidentally left on their phones.

Facebook was quickly called out, when after seeing the runaway success SnapChat was having, copying the technology completely and releasing it as a mobile app called “Poke”. Poke quickly rose to the top of the charts as well but when people realized how Zuckerberg’s mobile engineers blatantly ripped off SnapChat, Poke began falling as quickly as it rose to the top.

Before SnapChat though there was another app designed to do the exact same thing. We first reported on Toronto startup Quimby back in April when we interviewed the apps founder Heather Burns.

Burns had teamed up with our good friends at Toronto mobile development giant Bnotions. The premise for her app was the same thing, self destructing messages.

Burns tried to take the high road though, she suggested adults may use it for when they are away from each other for long times and long distances. Another use case for Quimby was highly sensitive messages between employers and colleagues. Either way Quimby is just as much for sexting as SnapChat is.

SnapChat also went on the defensive at first but of course any press but your obituary is good press right?

See out interview wit Quimby here

Toronto Startup: Quimby Technolgies Creates Self Destructing Mobile Messaging

Have you ever been in a relationship and maybe sent a naughty message or two, possibly with a picture? Did you live to regret that message when you broke up with that person? Now we’re not talking about kids or teenagers and sexting here, real adults do this kind of thing, especially those that travel a lot. Maybe you had a really rip roaring night at the club and sent a bunch of photos to your posse, perhaps you wanted them to live the moment with you, but not on Monday morning back at the office. What about this, have you ever had an idea you may have wanted to share with some somewhat trusted colleagues, but just enough so they could grasp the idea, not steal it down the road?

If you’ve ever found yourself in one of those scenarios or millions of other similar types of situations than you’d be happy to know that Heather Burns and her Quimby Technologies, a Toronto Startup, has created a self destructing messaging platform. Burns teamed up with Alkarrim (Alex) Nasser of BNotions, to create Quimby Technologies and Quimby the self destructing messenger app.

Now Burns is pretty sharp, she is well aware that there are some people who are going to shout out at the rooftops why this is a bad idea. The same kind of people that can’t get over the fact that Craigslist or Zaarly exist, and in our exclusive interview we asked her about just those types.

More after the break
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