Sell and company are at work on "private calling and video calling, secure mail, conference calling, and group video chat." It remains to be seen if this is a viable business model, of course, but the Wickr team doesn't seem to be afraid of some experimentation.Īnd it will indeed have to experiment. We have no personal information to sell and will not do ads." We expect our power users, the top 3%, to pay for our premium in-app purchases. So how does it make money? Sell addressed this in a Q&A on Reddit, saying, "Our plan is for millions, then billions to use our base service for free. In fact, all this cool functionality described happens totally for free. This is traditionally a very costly thing to set up, but it's free inside of Wickr. Sell told us that some municipal governments have been using the app's audio feature to function as an encrypted radio system for emergency workers, local government employees, and the like. Wickr isn't strictly for text communication, by the way - it supports photo, video and audio as well. Police are expected to use Wickr to secure their live communications. A Wickr message sent to you will only ever appear on your phone, but you can only communicate with other Wickr users by way of their Wickr usernames. The app binds your "identity" to your device. Your communications are wrapped in a layer of built-in anonymity because Wickr doesn't care who you are. There's no "sign in with Facebook" option here. Sell, her co-founder, and her advisers are brand-name folks only in the rarefied world of cryptography, and they've created a product that they use themselves.įurther bolstering Wickr's claims of superior privacy: the app doesn't collect your personal information. But Snapchat has already been hacked once, after its management were slow to respond to warnings that it was vulnerable, and its users phone numbers have been published on the web. Snapchat is run by (smart and capable) college students who have rarely been out of the spotlight. Users will come looking for something better." "We're happy to let Snapchat sit in first place for now while it drops the ball again and again. Wickr is an app for spies that kids will use," she said. There's even Whit Diffie, co-creator of the ECDH standard and brand-name guy in the world of cryptography. There's Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and blogger at BoingBoing, who is known for his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There's Dan Kaminsky, the often-unnamed hero who found a fatal flaw in the DNS protocol, a fundamental technology that makes the Internet work. Wickr's advisory board roster reads like a superhero team devoted entirely to protecting secrets. Once you've tried it, there is simply no point in going back to Snapchat. The difference is that Wickr is a messaging app designed by professional cryptographers, for professional cryptographers - but it's simple enough for anyone to use. You have a degree of control over your communication that you don't really get elsewhere. The gist of the app is similar, however: set the countdown timer on your messages (as short as a few seconds, as long as six days), send them to their recipients, then watch as they blow up with a cool animated explosion on the screen when the clock runs down.
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