J.J. Jenkins
jjjenkins.md@mustangdaily.net
Whenever you can take something in real life and put it on your phone, it’s a good idea. Especially when Google agrees.
Cal Poly computer science alumni Reed Morse and Grantland Chew added Punchd, an app that puts loyalty cards on your smartphone, to the Android and iOS marketplaces more than two years ago, after taking a class in app development at Cal Poly. Their philosophy was simple: stand out. That isn’t an easy task when there are more than one million apps for iOS alone.
“I think a lot of computer science people don’t understand this: You can build a really awesome product, but it doesn’t matter if no one is using it,” Morse said. “If you’re building a business, the biggest problem to solve is how are you going to distribute that product.”
Google helped solve that problem when the company swooped in during Spring 2011 and bought Punchd for a reported $10 million. Morse joined the Google team while Chew began working on a new startup app in San Francisco called Kiip.
Morse now works on a Google iPhone app called YouTube Capture, which allows users to easily take video, edit it and post it to YouTube without leaving the application. It even reminds users to hold their phone horizontally while filming to ensure the best video quality.
Part of Morse’s job involves reviewing applications for positions on the team, an experience that reminds him of the value of Cal Poly’s “Learn By Doing” education especially in a field that requires hands-on experience.
“A lot of people do not have that much real world programming experience,” he said. “I could not care less about how good you are conceptually, I want to see what projects you have worked on, what code you’ve written and what open-source projects you’ve contributed to.”
As for the other part of the original duo, Chew began transitioning away from Punchd in January 2011 after graduating from Cal Poly, but remained a technical adviser and kept an equity share in the company until it was sold.
He now runs the mobile development of Kiip, an app that allows mobile game developers and businesses to reward customers for completing tasks within an application or in real life.
“It’s like the ‘too good to be true’ free iPod,” Chew said. “But it’s an actual free item.”
Kiip is free and currently available on Google Play and is coming soon to the App Store.
Both Kiip and Punchd are similar in the sense that both focus on businesses relationships with their customers and give any store owner the ability to interact with a consumer via his or her smartphone. Consequently, it gives developers an easy way to sell their product to a business and create a revenue stream.
“I think the most quality (app) ideas now are ways that you can benefit everybody in the ecosystem,” Chew said. “Something that benefits the shop owner and not the customer is not going to get used, because the customer is not going to use it and vice versa. You have to really balance both of them to create a sustainable idea.”
That’s what the two set out to create at Cal Poly with Punchd.
David Janzen, who taught the Android development class that sparked Punchd’s creation, saw that Morse, in addition to his coding skills, was a talented designer, and that Chew was deft at making the app work for businesses.
Teaching the class for the first time and working out the kinks in his plan for the quarter, he saw Morse and Chew work with Punchd from the concept phase through its initial roll-out during winter quarter in 2011.
“My goal was to make it a very entrepreneurial class, to make it a class where students implemented their own idea because mobile is a field where you can take an idea and fairly quickly implement it and distribute it to the entire world,” Janzen said.
Google is now using its vast network to bring Punchd features to more users, though it announced in December that the company would kill the name and fold some of the app’s features into Google Wallet, a much-hyped service that allows users to pay with their debit or credit card from their phone.
Though Punchd will be no more when Google shutters it this summer, Chew was pleased the idea behind it remains.
“I’m kind of sad that the Punchd name is going to die,” he said. “It’s great that it’s been integrated into such an awesome company and I really hope that the way (Punchd) shines through the product will work out and help everybody out.”
Though Morse and Chew have fully transitioned away from the app that jumpstarted their career, they see Punchd and the time they spent building it at Cal Poly as one of the defining moments of their lives thus far for different reasons.
Chew noted how the app introduced him to the startup scene in Silicon Valley where a successful developer has to stand out in a room full of people with ideas such as “LinkedIn for infants.” Morse relished the opportunity to run Punchd and gain executive experience before Google surprised the team with an offer. Though the app was originally Morse’s idea, he says it hasn’t been too difficult letting go and allowing his bosses make the best of Punchd’s features.
“It’s Google’s product now, it’s not mine and they can do whatever they like with it,” Morse said. “The people who run Google are a lot smarter than I am, so I absolutely trust them from a product standpoint. We had a really good run and it was an interesting experiment.”