Stuck in an awkward situation? A newly announced application called Tickle has been promising to give you an excuse to get away in the form of an urgent, but fake, phone call, which you can slyly activate just by “tickling” (rubbing your finger over) your iPhone. Sounds good, right? Well, it’s too good to be true, as it turns out. Despite what you’ve read in a number of places around the web, this app isn’t real.
But c’mon, you gotta love the idea.
“Tickle” is the latest spoof video from Alex Cornell, co-founder of Firespotter Labs, who had previously entertained us with a parody app called Jotly, which took the tech industry to task for its mobile, local, social (SoLoMo!) app obsessions back in 2011.
(And Jotly later became a real thing, because, why not?)
Firespotter Labs, the company behind Disrupt winner UberConference, also had a pretty great video of the Disrupt Cup’s time with the company, which Cornell also had a hand in.
Cornell, who says he recently left his co-founder position at Firespotter to pursue film and other “weird internet-project” things, teamed up with fellow Jotly co-conspirator Phil Mills for the Tickle video spoof.
“I like the idea of exploring weird and new ways of product development. My skill set is design and video; I cannot code,” says Cornell. “I like the idea of throwing an idea out into the world, relatively formed and outfitted for survival on the Internet, and seeing what happens,” he adds. (Hey, me too – but mine aren’t as funny.)
And just because Tickle doesn’t exit, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t. As Cornell points out, it has an actual use case so if anyone wants to build the thing, they have his blessing.
Here’s the video: