HSE Students Develop Instant Messenger for Portable Devices

Students of the Higher School of Economics have developed an app called Chill that allows users to talk to their friends on their portable devices (the Apple Watch and Android Wear) without using text or voice. The application went on the market June 9^th and was instantly added to Product Hunt, the world’s largest platform for startups.

The startup’s team is rather young and includes Grigory Tareev, a student in the Faculty of Computer Science, Kirill Chekanov, who studies in the Faculty of Economics, and Ilya Trusov, a developer from Nizhny Novgorod. Grigory and Ilya are responsible for developing the app for iOS and Android, respectively, while Kirill handles the financial side of the project, as well as PR and marketing. Chill’s mentor is business angel and entrepreneur James Haft.

 We are in the stage where “smart watches” make up 5% of the wearable device market, but this will be 90% by the end of 2016. Our product will grow together with the market. There’s currently one large competitor, YO, which was the first to offer users a way to send simple messages in context. But our product is better; while our competitor allows users to send only “YO” to their friends, we allow our users to express clearer and brighter messages (see photo above). For example, instead of writing “at Starbucks by your office,” you can just send a coffee symbol, and for “running late” – a rocket symbol. The most interesting aspect is that the same symbols mean different things in different contexts. If you are in an airplane, for example, the rocket symbol would mean “Taking off. Will hit up as soon as landed.”

Grigory Tareev
Software Engineering Student

 

The Product Hunt service allows many players in Silicon Valley to be the first to learn about new and interesting startups. Each day, site administrators select 20-40 new products from around the world. Making it onto Product Hunt is a good start that will allow Chill to boost the number of users, secure investments, and gain media coverage. The blog Wearables and the website Firrma, for example, have already written about Chill.