- May 8, 2024
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When he woke up one morning about a year-and-a-half ago, Palm Coast techie and entrepreneur Curtis Ceballos said, he could still see it: Where the app’s icons would go, how the screens would look. He grabbed a piece of paper and started sketching.
“I saw everything. I saw how it worked; I saw the actual design of it,” he said.
And now he hopes his new social media app, TALKiT — which launches on the Apple App Store May 31 — will be the game-changer he envisioned when he dreamed it up.
“I’ve dumped everything I have into this,” Ceballos said. That includes about $200,000, mostly his own money, plus more than a year of time spent developing the concept and finding someone to create the app, which was ultimately picked up and developed by a Texas-based Rocksauce Studios, he said.
The free, ad-supported app is launching on lets users record up to 10-second blips of audio and post them where they’ll be viewable to the world, or, through a privacy function, to a certain group: work colleagues, for instance, or family members, or just one other person.
“This is — and I hate to use the analogy — Twitter for voice,” Ceballos said.
The screens are simple. A user presses a microphone icon to record, then hits the screen again to post. Posts can be played back individually, or, through an autoplay function, one after another.
The individual posts can be pushed to Facebook and Twitter, and played there as well as though TALKiT itself.
Static ads will display every seven posts. A user can ignore them, or open them by clicking on them.
Originally, Ceballos said, the idea of the app was “almost for novelty purposes. You know how people follow celebrities and artists, and they pay people to post their tweets and Facebook? Now with this, you’ll be able to hear their voice.”
But he soon started thinking of more serious applications.
He made the screens as simple as possible so users could use the app on the road instead of texting.
“There are so many different applications that have come about once this started,” he said. “Every day we keep getting new ones, which is what’s really exciting about it.”
At a workplace with multiple TALKiT users, he said, someone might post something like, “Hey, I’m heading to the office. Anyone want anything?”
The app could also be used, he said, by people who have disabilities that prevent them from using text-based social media. The app could "open up a new world for disabled people that maybe can’t text, but they have a voice,” he said.
And TALKiTs, he said, would preserve the inflection that is lacking in text messages and can leave them open to misinterpretation.
Ceballos has made some bold predictions for the app: he expects 20,000-50,000 downloads in the first week or so, a number he says is based on the number of email inquiries he’s received so far.
He’s hoping for about 1.5 million viewers in three years, a number he called “conservative.”
And he envisions TALKiT, which he’s now running with his son Ryan and daughter Gabrielle, employing 20 people in tech jobs over the next three years.
He wants to keep it based in Palm Coast, but hopes it will take off around the world.
“It’s kind of neat. It’s kind of interesting. It’s different,” he said. “It brings back that communication with people. It’s putting the emotion behind the message.”
