Chat with Doug Richard TruTap - scared? You will be!

Doug Richard is so direct that he nearly scared me senseless today. Luckily he didn’t and I am here to tell the TruTap story!

What happened?

Well, first of all - I was all excited about meeting him and seeing the offices. To my surprise the offices were really small and open plan and up to 35 people were huddled in a room. He looked at me and said, “well we are not wasting money on image”. I was slightly disappointed but, hell what is an office! Everyone there seemed happy and one techie who I met said he loved seeing TruTap grow!

So then I tried to be aggressive with Doug early on. I said, “Doug are you taking off more than you can chew with TruTap? It’s a very competitive environment”.

Well. Let me tell you I nearly had a heart attack when Doug jumped up and said, “who” and started writing on a white board. Shriek. My head started spinning and every IM provider left my memory! I felt like I was back in a class room. I did my best - but Dough is very direct. So, my directness didn’t work. Luckily by the end of it I named six - so not that bad!

We started again.

This time I said, “Doug, tell me everything on TruTap in five minutes”.  He smiled at me and before he began he said, “ambitious darling. You ain’t seen nothing yet.” He then detailed the three stage plan and gave me an in depth overview.

Yikes. I couldn’t believe his honesty. I think, I can write up more of this when I do a full review of TruTap (which is now working and installed on both my devices).

But the main points. Trutap is about being available on every device. We now support 385 - which is more than any anyone else. He said, our vision for TruTap is to be elegant. We want to create a very elegant seamless service. We look at competitors such as Apple to replicate the best of breed in user interface.

Trutap is a social graph. It will be the communication service for social graphs for mobile communication - which is completely different to online. When you are mobile and your presence is enabled and you connect - you have the potential to actually meet, fast, now, quickly. TruTap’s vision is not only to offer IM, blogging, seamlessly but

wait for it

we aim to be a social network.

 Yes. He said that, that is huge.

Back to the interview he said, “you can extend your social graph with Trutap”.

Then he stopped and he said, we now are in BETA and we support four main messaging providers. Our aim is to support 15. Now, that is ambitious.

(Yes. At this point, I did regret my opening sentences - but thank-god I didn’t live blog!)

OK. I will go into more detail after testing the application. I gave Doug the 2 minutes on GoMo News and asked him for some tips on growing the business - I am not going to tell you what he told me. But yikes it made sense!

More soon with a demo. If you have a TruTap account - get one and add me - username Bena.

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