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A change of focus for New York-based social app developer Albumatic — and a change of name: introducing Koa.la

Social media man­agers mon­i­tor­ing new social ideas might like to know that New York-based pho­to-shar­ing start­up Albu­mat­ic has a new name – and a new direction.

Head­winds and new ideas 

Launched in Feb­ru­ary this year, Albu­mat­ic (now re-named Koa.la) orig­i­nal­ly focused on build­ing apps designed to cap­ture and share events as they hap­pened. If a bunch of friends decide to do a rock gig in a garage, Albu­mat­ic let them pho­to­graph it and instant­ly share it with oth­er near­by Albu­mat­ic users. They could then come over and take their own shots for sharing.

Social media man­agers who think this is a pret­ty neat idea may be sur­prised that the startup’s co-founder, Adam Lud­win, and his team sensed from the out­set that there were “head­winds” imped­ing the chances of the app explod­ing into a major hit. So they start­ed devel­op­ing a new one and came up with a pho­to-shar­ing app that inte­grates with mes­sag­ing firm Kik’s new “Cards” platform.

And there’s more to come – Albumatic/Koa.la has already built three apps which inte­grate with Cards, but the team is plan­ning to build more apps for a range of oth­er mes­sag­ing platforms.

The next big thing?

A mea­sure of the suc­cess of the change of empha­sis can be gleaned in a sin­gu­lar fact: with­in 22 hours of the release of Koa.la’s ‘Cos­tume Par­ty’ app (a game which lets users share drawn-over snaps of them­selves or their friends on Kik), it had attract­ed a mil­lion play­ers. Today, that fig­ure stands at 4 mil­lion – and Lud­win believes it’s on course to attract 10 mil­lion by year’s end.

Can­ny social media man­agers might want to take note of some­thing: Lud­win and his team sense that mes­sag­ing plat­forms are The Next Big Thing in social media. As for the orig­i­nal Albu­mat­ic app, it hasn’t been moth­balled – the Koa.la team will go on sup­port­ing it but they’ll stop devel­op­ing it.

As Lud­win puts it:

“The Albu­mat­ic app is doing fine in terms of num­bers. The truth that every­one knows and no one wants to say is that if you’re a mobile app, you’re either grow­ing very, very fast and you’re one of the three that mat­ter, or you’re one of every­one else. Why overex­ert our­selves in such a high­ly sat­u­rat­ed mar­ket when we had this wide open oppor­tu­ni­ty that we could real­ly exe­cute on?”

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