Everyone keeps talking about Smule’s virtual lighter iPhone application called Sonic Lighter (iTunes link).
I wasn’t impressed: there are no less than ten different virtual lighter apps in iTunes, which is what I’d call a saturated market. And it gets better, because Sonic Lighter costs $.99. The official Zippo iphone app is free. The basic functionality of all of these is similar – you have a virtual lighter, you light it and when you move the iPhone the flame moves around.
The number of downloads for Zippo isn’t available; Sonic Lighter says they’ve had 70,000 downloads already. But here’s one way to compare them: that the free Zippo app has been available since September 18 and has just 27 reviews. Sonic Lighter, which has only been available since Wednesday, already has 44.
Here’s why people are going crazy for Sonic Lighter, and are willing to pay $.99. Smule has built in social and viral features that are helping this spread like mad, and they also give this ridiculous but effective incentive to use the app all the time.
You can optionally share your location information with the application, and when you light it you show up on a virtual earth-like globe. France and Japan are going absolutely crazy with users, which you can see quite clearly from the virtual globe and the screenshot to the right. The longer a person keeps the lighter going (I have mine sitting here burning while I write this), the more”KiloJoules” you burn. And that helps contribute to the geographical teams that are sprouting up and trying to be the brightest on the globe. Oh, and you can blow on the microphone and extinguish the flame.
I’m not kidding about this. You can actually view a version of it here, along with a listing of the brightest cities. I’m determined to move San Francisco and San Jose up the list (they should really be combined for fairness in my opinion).
Sonic Lighters can also ignite other lighters on other iPhones, which is a fun party trick if you’ve had enough to drink. Pretty soon iPhone users in the room who don’t have the app will be happily paying $.99 based solely on the geek peer pressure. This video shows that feature in action.
So why is this working? I told you loyal readers back in August. Unlike its competitors, it’s effectively leveraging location awareness and social networking/human team building instincts to create a bit of a phenomenon. The result is a viral spread.
Some facts about the first few days after the app became available:
- First phone-to-phone ignition somewhere in the Muir Woods National Monument on Monday, September 15th at approximately 5:00 pm PT
- Since then, the flames have spread across six continents, eighty countries, and 3,204 geographically unique locations
- There have been 68,514 unique ignitions representing 3,977 unique locations across the globe
- Smule can rank the cities of the world by Kilojoules burned day, reflecting real-time data accumulated from usage of the Sonic Lighter
There are some smart people behind Smule, which has raised capital from Bessemer Venture Partners. CEO Jeff Smith previously co-founded and ran Tumbleweed, an email security software company which he took public on the Nasdaq and grew to $50M in sales before stepping down as CEO. Along with Jeff, Smule was founded by a group of Stanford and Princeton music PhD’s, including Dr. Ge Wang. He’s also a Stanford professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra. It also turns out that Sonic Lighter is not Smule’s end goal. Rather, its a demonstration app for a new audio programming language called ChucK.
Cool innovation …
Also, Im digging that GPS alarm clock iPhone app… iNap
http://www.yout...h?v=01lAqYyZ8-w
iLighter parody
reminds me of all the useful apps available on facebook.
location based lighter app {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/OHHWnE8Qk5_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”location based lighter app ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/i3y6prse47″}}}
whoa dude, you like got the wronggg lighter in your video – this article is talking about SONIC LIGHTER, which is INSANE.
(your video is showing crazy lighter, which suxxxxxxxx mules man)
@cornholius
duh
Who knew Location Based Anthing was gonna be Big? A handfull of people envisioned this Location Based Opportunity and Executed on this genre long before it broke. All this Locator terminology is just now coming front and center.
http://www.wetv...om/the-locator/
SonicLocator.com-faster than a speeding mullet
That’s actually pretty awesome for showing off at a club while drunk
I’ll buy it for sure.
Interesting concept getting people to support their city. Great way to sell the app.
First thought: “what a pile of over-hyped dogshyte” which I guess was probably your intention! As I read through the article though I gradually found myself coming onboard and “getting” it! Sounds pretty damn cool and all for just 99c.
Oh no – hang on – I’d have to buy an iPhone too. Damn you Mike Arrington!
Wait until the inevitable “Light up an iPhone for charity. Make your city the brightest on the map!” campaign launches.
wow
This is the best and simplest example I’ve seen for clearly understanding the platform you’re building on and how to take advantage of it. The combination of social, viral, and location-aware are huge. Now, imagine doing this with something that will hold our attention for more than an hour or two. I bow down to Apple for creating an environment that inspires so much innovation.
with all due respect, but this is getting ridicoulous…
I have the feeling that some of you are living in a bubble… the biggest financial crisis since the ’30s and we are here discussing about a “virtual lighter”… WTF!
what if instead of building this stupid things we could come up with something to prevent this shameful crisis to repeat again?
because, let’s face it, we are not going to expect that Bush and his former Goldman Sucks buddy will come up with a real plan…
the biggest financial crisis since the ’30s
Step 1 to retaining your sanity is to turn off the TV. Just because Sarah Palin says it doesn’t mean it’s automatically true, you know.
what if instead of building this stupid things we could come up with something to prevent this shameful crisis to repeat again?
How about we let the free market work and let them fail if they’re going to?
Ayn Rand came up with the answers ages ago.
Hey Mike, There’s an article for this stupid app but NO article about Apple rejecting applcations for iphone (and the NDA rejection letter for developers)?
@Luca: World financial crisis is totally, absolutely, 100% unrelated to the virtual lighter. Even more, TC isn’t about financial stuff but tech&innovation topics.
How many percent can the developer take of the .99$?
I believe you get to keep 70%
brilliant!
Nice to see that chuck is getting some traction. But I think it has been around for a couple of years, remember playing around with it 2006-ish.
You should try it again. There’s a lot of new features and cool things in the pipeline. Friend of mine did some neat things with it in terms of looping, splitting, slowing down / speeding up different streams. Definitely some smart people working there.
Aren’t you really asking “what’s with all the stupid people downloading the stupid lighter iPhone app?”
that is what the business works….
“I wasn’t impressed: there are no less than ten different virtual lighter apps in iTunes, which is what I’d call a saturated market.”
Impressed or not, looks to be working for them.
69,000 downloads * .99 = 68310
68310 – 30% = $47,817
Not bad for an app that you’re not impressed with.
At first glance this “lighter” looks so ridiculous. But, Michael you do a great job in explaining why the concept behind it is brilliant, not ridiculous. (I still think the lighter is ridiculous. But, I’d bet you the value of Techcrunch that Chunk is far from ridiculous.)
yes this is very interesting concept
This is interesting. Indeed very interesting. This is a pattern that we can observe throughout the evolution of technology: Get people empowered by a new advancement in technology, and it will enable them not only to do more complex tasks easier, but to do simpler tasks easier as well, if not more so.
It’s like when YouTube came out (along with other “clones”). Did it get people to submit professional videos about serious stuff? No! We got StarWars Kid, Chocolate Rain, and Mentos+Diet Coke! Because these are somewhat more closely related to us.
So get a very versatile, portable device on which (other than calling you buddies) you can build socially interacting applications, and you get a spreadable virtual flame! The hell with work-empowering tools that helps us get through the day, we want the primitive stuff!
This is crazy. In this time of urgency to save energy, people are just burning power
for a “light” in a web-page… this is insanity .. You actually call this smart .. and you actually participate in this insanity ?
Be careful not to confuse the context. It’s like saying that all this money is going into space exploration instead of going into medical research. With this kind of comparison anything can sound like a bad idea.
Something like this would be great for charity organizations, and thinking about it I’ve realized what a great tool the iPhone would be for raising money worldwide through social apps like these. Anyone give any thought to that?
This is not a bad idea. Imagine something like that 1000$ app that only displayed a shiny icon, but only this one would cost something like 1$ and would display an icon of the charity that you would have supported.
yea, that would be so awesome. it would be like all the kids wearing those “I support X” bracelets, just to show OTHER people what they support.
I’m making a bracelet that says “I SUPPORT OTHER BRACELETS”. should be a hit.
This is stupid. I guess I could use it at a concert rather than risk burning my fingers whenever some power rock ballot is being played…other than that, I can think of no purse.
Yeah, another reason for people to hold their phones up in front at shows.
@Fan
I was merely trying to point out that there are more interesting topics than a virtual lighter, even for a technology blog like TC
um…that should say ‘purpose’…not purse.
Now if they just worked this into concert promotions in some way they may be able to extend it even further.
You actually think this is a good thing? You poor sad morons. Get a life.
Hey — if you can make seventy grand for a stupid application like this then this is not a bad thing!
You are actually taking the time to insult “poor sad morons”? You poor sad morons.
morons=moron (I guess the joke is on me now…)
There’s also the free “Freebird” app, but the lighter just kind of flickers in the wind, and doesn’t move based on the accelerometer.
”…has raised capital from Bessemer Venture Partners.” For a cigarette lighter simulation? you must be joking. How do they plan to make money?
Did you not read about Chuck? How about the fact this app has already generated $70K? You need help with reading comprehension.
Pretty cool.
Virtual lighter is nothing special, obviously.
But the location tracking and social features are pretty damn brilliant.
This could be implemented as a Facebook app, but (for whatever reason) I couldn’t imagine it getting any traction. The iPhone is clearly a better platform for useless, gimmicky, and fun apps.
Well the strategy worked, cause they got your to blog about it…
Slow news day?
You missed the whole Freebird joke. Of course it’s dumb – in fact, it’s dumb on purpose. Even though it hasn’t been funny in a generation, you still have to laugh at the dumbness. No doubt it will puzzle future cultural anthropologists studying the middle and late American periods.
Linky
What i cant believe is the fact thay you can bring yourself to call this an App.
Use the brain Micky boy.. this is not an App(lication) its a novelty at best.
It sounded stupid at the beginning of the article, but as said before… by the time I finished it, I kinda want to go buy the app…
At many type of events (esp in DJ culture) it is common to raise your lighter up (hey, there is even a song about it of the same name that is huge). Not everyone smokes or has a lighter, and not every venue allows it. Now the 15-30yr demo that goes to these events has an acceptable (and cool for the next few weeks) way of doing something that they did (or wanted to do) anyway.
For this demographic, this is a new way to do an existing behavior, not an existing behavior on its own.
Also France + Japan have big DJ cultures, so perhaps that’s why we are seeing the spike there.
So lets entertain that this is not as stupid as it sounds, but a clever product for an existing market behavior.
Ah yes, because this hasn’t been happening at every single rock concert since forever.
Sorry, but it’s nothing to do with the popularity of “DJ Culture”.
I don’t know, this App very useful.
I can just see all the Wall Street MBAs holding a vigil outside of Congress and waving their virtual flames in unison to get their handout passed.
Of course, they can’t be trusted with real fire at this point.
Someone should whip up a quick equivalent app for the Obama campaign…
Virtual flame app is very interesting.
It can be made even more interesting if one can name the flame e.g. Olympic flame, Cancer charity flame etc. These flames could be distinctly identified at http://app.smul...r/sonicnetwork/. This will display which social cause is picking up momentum at which location. The awareness about any issue will spread across due to the viral phone-to-phone ignition.
Its really amazing !
Nice… Geek peer pressure. Who would have ever thought that?
Jason Kiesel
Founder & CEO
http://www.freedomspeaks.com
That just shows how retarded are iPhone buyers (Mactards, fashion lemmings)
Why are you slating iPhone owners because of this app? I own one because I work with macs all day, and the way everything syncs is ingenious, and makes things simple. Plus I dont have to walk around with a seperate ipod in my pocket.
This whole review is talking about the technology used behind the app, and what it could possible be used for in the future? Admittedly it has been around for a few yeahs already, but this is a way of bringing the technology to a vast amount of people.
good thing it doesn’t give off CO2
I dont get your comments. You say early on you’re not impress in the first paragraph then you go on to gush away about the social networking features of Sonic Lighter…am i missing something?
Nope, just media savvy.
..not following. plse enlightn the less media savvy…
I must admit that virtual globe is useful… to locate the retards.
But not nearly as useful as the comments on Techcrunch.
True. So you bought the “app”?
The globe is a popular thing. Some Wii games have it. PS3 has it too for folding at home. The idea is not original but it’s a brilliant application
I guess this app would be totally cool at def leppard and ac/dc concerts…
Well, at least the application has most of the ingredients of a mobile killer App.
See what make a killer app according to tech-talk.biz
http://tech-tal...ile-killer-app/
Another luxury problem solved.
man, if the iphone had an actual lighter, it might be useful. i could smoke up and watch the end of the world.
It’ll be great at concerts!
Anyone that thinks SF and SJ should be combined for any purposes is a retard. That is all.