Alumnus creates photo-sharing app

Move over Instagram, a new app created by USC alumnus Christopher Karimian is aiming to change the way people engage with photos.

Splore — a mobile app where users discover and discuss trending photos — is currently in beta and will be launched on Feb. 29. Users will be able to share, interact and make their own content trend through upvotes.

Karimian said the app will allow users to follow hashtags related to their interests, rather than people, and view content based on it, which sets it apart from other similar apps.

“They will receive a stream of photos on their news feed that have the hashtags they follow,” said Karimian, the CEO. “The second thing that is different is that every post you receive is new. You are not tied down to any person, and you discover people much better.”

The news feed is limitless on Splore. New photos will appear on the screen every time a photo is posted with the hashtag a user is following. Karimian said that it makes the app unique.

“On Instagram, when your feed runs out, and you are still bored, you can always go on Splore, where your feed will never end,” Karimian said.

Muhammad Mustafa Zaffer, a senior majoring in business administration and a business operations and strategy analyst for Splore, sees the importance of using ideas to create a news feed.

“On Splore, you are subscribed to a favorite idea of yours,” Zaffer said.

An algorithm picks out the best photo based on upvotes regardless of the amount of followers the profile has.

“A person should go viral based on the content they have,” Zaffer said. “This is a platform where you can take an interest in every photo that you see.”

Splore concentrates on building social engagement by linking a person’s profile to other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and SoundCloud. Social engagement will benefit photographers at USC and abroad, Zaffer said, who can reach a larger audience through the app.

“As a business developer, I have reached out to photographers from all over the world, including Hong Kong, Pakistan, Middle East and the Philippines,” Zaffer said. “We have photographers from USC, who are food bloggers and are interested in just jumping onto the platform as soon as we launch because they know that their content is really good, and they can go viral within our hashtags.”

The discussion section about photos on Splore is important to the app’s function and has been given high priority by Splore’s programmers. Users can comment and vote on particular photos on Splore.

“We want to be cutting-edge on social media,” Karimian said. “In the comments section, we have comments being pulled from the database and laid out on an overlay, and this hasn’t been done before, until Yifan, our coder did it.”

Yifan Zhou, the alumnus of the class of 2015, was involved with the front-end coding, which is the main part of the app and includes multiple gestures, multi-threading, animation and parallax viewing. He designed an algorithm to calculate the popularity of each image dynamically.

Splore has seen success in competition with other start-ups. It was nominated as an alpha startup and best tech startup at the Web Summit and Timmy Awards, respectively.

“This experience was overwhelming,” Zaffer said. “I applied to Web Summit and aced the interview. They invited us to the conference, and when we attended it, the response we got was phenomenal.”

Samy Abbas, the head of product and design at Splore, was at the company from the beginning and designed and built the app around exploring photos. After receiving funding, he began work on making the interface more user oriented.

“I came up with ‘Splore’ because it’s a play on words for “Explore,” since that is what you’ll be doing all day long in the app — exploring the world’s photos,” Abbas said in an email to the Daily Trojan. “[User Interface] is the fun part. This is where I began to think about all the intricate but simple animations that one will find all throughout our app.”

Karimian wants to provide users with the best product and then work backward from there.

“Our ultimate goal is to provide you with the best possible feed,” Karimian said. “We would give you the posts on your feed based on your interests. Right now, we are under the minimum viable product model, where we want to get the product out and make sure people love it and add these additional features at the end.”