Tangible Idea, a mobile development team from Korea, has launched Meeple, a mobile app that aims to provide mentoring services to those who are in dire need of academic and personal help.
Unveiled in January this year, it connects middle and high school students to university students in Korea.
Meeple involves two kinds of users. The first group are the mentees – middle and high school students who are unable to seek proper assistance from their peers and teachers. The app enables them to communicate with college and university students.
The other group are the mentors – these are tertiary students from college and university who have gone through secondary school and are able to attend to the mentee’s problems.
Meeple’s features
Authorization Process
Implemented to give mentors credibility, this feature authenticates their identities on Meeple to ensure they are legitimate and from the institutions that they initially selected when registering. For instance, choosing Seoul National University from the institution list requires the user to go through screening to indicate that the user is from that university.
Mentoring service (Conversation box)
This particular feature is the crux of the application. When a mentee and a mentor are matched, the conversation box appears and they could start communicating.
Report system to ban inappropriate users
The report system is also an important feature of the application. This particular addition is to reduce or even eradicate users who indicate inappropriate behaviours.
Materializing ideas
Co-founded by Shawn Byun and Ingyun Baek, who are graduates from Seoul National University, Tangible Ideas got its name from the founders’ vision of turning opportunities and ideas into tangible gains.
With an aim to be a top mobile application provider for different age groups and motivated by the desire to bring out the inner qualities of individuals, the company values FLECS, an acronym for: feedback, lateral thinking, efficacy, creative idea and sustainability.
Its two co-founders manage marketing, planning, and financing while the remaining four team members are app designers and developers. The company counts targeted advertisements as its business model.
Aiding the Korean education system
Even as South Korean students are lauded by the international community for their extraordinary academic performance, the education system in Korea is convoluted not only by the demanding environment but also by the expectations of parents.
According to Shawn, this has resulted in the education system becoming highly competitive, and the government is concerned about the extreme study behavior of students. It has even reached a point where government officials have raided late-night tutoring academies to seek those violating the 10pm curfew.
Shawn sees Meeple as a way to aid students who have to survive the tough education system in Korea.
On the marketing front
Although there are other similar services on web platforms that provide mentoring services, such as Edu Chosun Mentoring and SNU Mentoring, which are supported by the Korean government, Shawn is optimistic about growth in the mobile app market.
“Smart phone penetration is supposedly growing at a 30 percent rate. We believe this figure will grow exponentially and Meeple is expected to follow the upward trend.”
Prior to launching, Tangible Ideas formed a mutual agreement with MODU Communications, a teen’s magazine that is distributed to most Korean secondary institutions, to promote the app.
Expansion plans
Tangible Ideas plans to take Meeple into the global app market by introducing the application in English, Chinese, and Japanese, with a focus on Asian countries and the United States.
Furthermore, the app will be extended to a web platform to supplement the smart phone application by facilitating networking and connectivity among mentors-to-mentors and mentees-to-mentees.
Currently, they have 1200 downloads and 600 registered users.
Eyeing secondary school and university smart phone users who make up the company’s target audience, Shawn anticipates that users of the app are expected to number 100,000 by the end of 2012 and rise to a million by 2013.
Started as a self-funded company, the team has been looking into investment opportunities and has met with a few Venture Capitals in Korea.
Meeple is currently available on the iTunes App Store and Google Play.
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