Thursday, August 22, 2013

Going for that million

The day after the SuperBowl, I had mixed emotions. I was licking my wounds for the loss of the Niners, but I was really happy for the amount of users and the feedback TOK Football received.

Then, out of the blue, an email hit my Inbox. There was a logo in the signature. Big, visibile. The logo of my soccer team. Juventus. The best team in Italy, one of the top ten in the world.

There are few things in life that give a man emotions. One, it is the logo of the team he rooted for, since he was a child. For me, that is Juventus (the Giants, the Niners, even Ferrari are passions I acquired along the way). Juventus is the one love my dad passed to me. Something that is in my DNA, and will ever be.

The email said they tried the app and were really impressed by it, and they wanted to talk to me.

As any geek would do, the first thing I did was checking the raw source of the message. I have been the author of multiple pranks in my life, surrounding emails. This one looked like a potential good prank from a friend, but the SMTP server was mail.juventus.com, and the IP from Turin, home of Juventus. As legit as they come.

It was not a prank. Of all the teams in the world, it was my team. Out of nowhere. They wanted TOK.tv, for Juventus fans, like me. When my ultimate goal when I started TOK.tv was to talk to my dad and brother, during Juventus games...  What are the odds?? Unbelievable.

Today, a bit more than six months later, we are launching Juventus Live. The TOK.tv app that allows Juventus fans to talk to their friends, while they watch their team on TV.

It is a big deal for us. Juventus has 6.8M fans on Facebook. They are a huge brand worldwide. TOK Baseball is doing great: I am hopeful we can get to 100,000 users by the end of the season. But this is different: our little brand can do so much, but with Juventus on the cover, we are going to get to that million of users in a few months.


To celebrate the event, we even have a new logo, and a new website...

Go download Juventus Live from the App Store. It works for your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It has news when there is no game, and live stats during the game (plus sounds that make you feel you are at the stadium). We have it in English and in Italian. If you are a TOK.tv user, your friends will be there waiting for you, same backend. If you are not a Juve fan, still check it out, maybe you can jinx us ;-)

And if you want to know if there is a burp sound... No, there is not. But I am going to fight to get it back in. Maybe, before we get to that million... As usual, stay tuned.