14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has recently launched SNIPP3T, a brand new mobile phone application that allows users to track their favorite celebrities and stay up to date with everything related to them online.
While seeing such an app released by Microsoft might not be so unexpected given the fact that the company is struggling so hard to conquer the mobile phone market, the iOS-exclusive license of the program took many by surprise, especially when considering the investments that the company is making in Windows Phone.
Donald Soon, a program manager who worked on this app, has explained in an AMA session on Reddit that Microsoft actually tries to test the waters on various platforms to see “what works and what doesn’t.”
“Great question and one that we're getting tons of feedback on. Under Satya, MS has a direction to break our existing molds and one of those previous molds was being Windows centric. This is an incubation app right now in the sense that we're trying to iterate and see what works and what doesn't in spaces we haven't fully explored. The target user (celebrity fans) was taken into account for the initial platform we chose,” he writes.
“This is an example of the growth hacking culture that Satya is encouraging at Microsoft and everyone should expect to see more of these experiments released in the future.”
Of course, many have complained that Microsoft is actually abandoning Windows Phone by creating applications that are exclusively designed to run on iOS, but the program manager says that this is not the case. He emphasizes that everything is just an experiment and points to Cortana as living proof that more great things are to come for Windows Phone users.
"There's no abandoning of Windows Phone at all. Cortana's release should be an indication of that. This is a hackathon project meant to show that MS is going to innovate and experiment,” he says.
The SNIPP3T application was specifically optimized for iPhone 5, but according to the description published in the App Store, it works on pretty much every device running iOS 7.0 or later, including iPads and iPods touch.
The app can collect information about a given celebrity, including news, Twitter activity, Facebook posts, photos, videos, and other mentions, to display everything in a single screen, thus making it very easy and fast to read all about your idols. Of course, it’s offered free of charge, and Microsoft plans to update it on a regular basis with new features and options.