Two developers with six seconds of fame in the tech world are back in business with a new app. Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, best known as two of the co-founders of Vine, have launched HQ, which delivers trivia questions to users in a live streaming format.
As with many other trivia apps, HQ delivers multiple-choice questions to players and gives them only a few seconds to respond. What makes this offering unique the live format of its rounds. Two times a day, at 3 PM and 9 PM EST, host Scott Rogowsky (who we saw in a mobile-friendly talk show earlier this year) fires off a series of 12 questions to thousands of contestants. Anyone who makes it through that gauntlet is eligible to split a cash prize with all of the other winning players. As TechCrunch notes, a recent match resulted in a $150 reward, which was divvied up among the champions via PayPal.
HQ is the latest in a series of projects for Yusupov and Kroll. The developers have launched several apps since they departed Twitter — which purchased Vine from them in 2012 for a reported price of $30 million — in 2015. As they have looked to establish their new ventures, their most famous creation has gone dark, much to Yusupov’s chagrin. When Twitter announced its decision to shut down Vine in 2016, Yusupov responded by tweeting “Don’t sell your company.”
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With HQ, Yusupov and Kroll make have finally hit a jackpot in their post-Vine careers. The new app is funded by a Lightspeed Venture Partners seed round, and according to TechCrunch, its recent games have drawn close to 5,000 concurrent players.
