JURNI.

A group of young and enthusiastic startupers from the USA bursting with energy and ideas approached Magora with a view to creating a new social network application. Despite the huge popularity of social apps, their idea was different. They felt that social networks these days all had one common sticking point - superficiality. Our feeds are full of artificial emojis and likes as substitutes for real emotions and meaningful conversations. The startupers wanted to tackle this problem by creating a video social network, the concept of which is based on the simple slogan “Real stories, real people, real life”. The Jurni app is all about real video-based interactions: users keep video journals which they can share with friends, add to their feed and use to create daily 45-second compilation clips.

Before Periscope or Instagram Stories existed, the idea of a video-based social network was groundbreaking, so it wasn’t long before the startup found investors in the USA and began fleshing out the idea with the help of Magora’s development team.

At Magora, we typically develop software projects from scratch. Jurni was one of the rare cases where the client supplied us with full requirement specifications, along with features maps and a design concept that laid the foundations for the mobile app we were to build. Our experts were thus able to hit the ground running, while the clients were busy promoting the app even before its App Store release.

Magora’s programmers translated the clients’ ideas into a comprehensible, clear code.

We utilised the following technologies:

• iOS:  Objective-C, AVFoundation, CIFilters;
• Backend: Ruby on Rails, PHP.

The new app incorporated a wide range of features, including:

• Real-time video editing;
• The option of combining several 45-second clips into one post;
• The ability to pause a video while filming;
• A wide variety of video filters;
• Users can subscribe not only to particular people, but also to topics from these users that interest them most (for example art, business, science, etc.);
• Users can attach a topic and emotion to every journal entry to make it easier to find;
• Integration with Facebook and Twitter;
• The ability to upload videos in the background while filming new ones;
• The option of posting videos to a private or public feed.

The clients took an active role in the development process, arranging video meetings, providing feedback and marketing the app with fantastic enthusiasm and dedication.

Jurni has added a new dimension to the classic vlogging concept by connecting people visually. The app was successfully released on the App Store and has already formed a wide active user base, including a number of celebrities who keep private video journals, share their 45-second Jurnis with people all over the world and have real conversations in video comments. One of the world’s leading IT companies has since approached the Jurni team offering to buy the network, but our clients are not willing to part with ownership of their unique project.