When Abhilash Inumella walked into Hike Messenger’s office and introduced himself as a representative of Samosa Labs, the prompt reply was ‘but we didn’t order for samosas.’
That’s how Hike, a cross-platform instant messaging service for smartphones, nearly missed an opportunity to gather instant internet traffic the moment a movie was released.
But after a little chat, they had cracked the ‘samosa’ code. For instance when the Kabali promos released, ‘Kabali daa….’ was shared insanely.
Still puzzled? If you are clued into the latest activities on Whatsapp, then you would have noticed the pre-recorded audio clips from movies doing the rounds.
So, what is the connection between dialogues, punchlines, shares, chatting apps and a samosa? Abhilash says, “Our samosa has nothing to do with the popular Indian snack. The Samosa app is a way to spice up your conversations. Share punchlines, proverbs, corny love messages, witty responses, funny expressions and song clips from popular movies. It has inline integration with Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Hike. It allows users to listen to clips anytime, anywhere before choosing the clips. The clips can be saved offline to view without 3G/WiFi. We currently have Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam clip and working on more languages.” Samosa Labs is founded by Abhilash, Sasank Abhimanyu Pamulapati and Rahul Reddy Koora, all IIITians.
The app’s name has a history: One evening during a break, as they were brainstorming to come up with a name, they named it samosa!. Why? “Someone ordered samosas and we realised everyone eats samosa for chats and breaks, so we wanted a name that’s common and simple,” laughs Abhilash.
The Samosa Lab team is happy to be the sole occupant of the third floor of an under-construction building. “C’mon our office is nice. We have an open space and our work is lot of fun. It get crazy when new movies are about to be released. Filmmakers are themselves using samosa for promotions and the mileage is huge. Kumari 21 F got about 700,000 views on Youtube, and a dialogue touched 1.2 million hits on our platform,” explains Abhilash.
Politically incorrect
The app has trending, #hot, #trending, #new #ringtone options and besides also have a wide range of speeches from rallies and public meetings of Chief minister KCR, KTR, Jagan and Chandrababu Naidu, guffaws of Rahul Gandhi and the funny ones from Lalu Prasad Yadav.
All one has to do to access the audio files is download the free app from Google play or App store, select the preferred language, listen and share straight from the app to any of its inline integration channels.
“The political punchlines give stiff competition to the popular ones associated with Brahmanandam, Chiranjeevi and Pawan Kalyan. In Tamil, Rajinikanth is the all time favourite, followed closely by Vijay,” says Rahul. Typical for a young startup, they work a designation-free setup. “We are all developers, bug fixers, coders,” they laugh.
So go along, get the tea and samosa rolling.
