More than 400,000 people around the world have downloaded Samsung’s Olympic WOW app for the Sochi Games. The app is the first Olympic application the longtime global Olympic
sponsor has made for Android phones, and it’s attracting more than
145,000 visitors per day. Samsung spokesperson Sheri Kim said, "Our vision for the Sochi Games was to make it the most social Olympic
Games. This WOW (app) was very
much a part of that smart Olympic Games initiative. We wanted people to
capture and share their experience through our phone and the public WOW
app.” The app is the result of a year-long effort by a team of five engineers.
It includes elements that have never been available in an application
for an Olympics before, such as an aggregation for cheers between
separate countries competing in a single sport, push notifications on
medal results, rules of winter sports, and a Gametracker feature for
curling and other sports.
MULTI-LINGUAL: The app was developed in seven different languages, and since the
Olympics began, it’s had more than 9 million interactions. The bulk of
those have taken place in the U.S., Canada and Russia.
Samsung Says WOW
■ Total number of WOW app downloads globally: More than 400,000
■ Total number of visitors per day globally: More than 145,000
■ Total number of transactions per day globally: More than 9 million
■ Country with the most downloads: 1) U.S.; 2) Canada; 3) Russia
■ Sport with the most cheers through WOW: 1) Snowboard; 2) Speedskating; 3) Biathlon
Samsung’s Senior Manager, New Business Development Group Shawn Sanghyo Jung said, “It was very difficult (to make it in so many languages). But Samsung is a worldwide company.
We have an affiliate in every country. We asked them to review it in
French and Spanish and Russian.” Samsung has made an app for every Olympics since the 2004 Athens Games,
when it made an app for Palm phones. But those apps historically were
only available to members of the Olympic family, such as IOC members and
sports federation officials. This is the second consumer-facing app
they have developed. (The first was made for Vancouver.) But it is the
first they have offered in Google’s app store.
A SENSE OF COMMUNITY: Jung said, “We wanted to create a community. There was many people in
the world and many people in Sochi. We wanted to communicate between
Sochi people and worldwide people. They share emotion. They share
information in here worldwide.”
Samsung opted to only develop the app for phones, like its own, that use
Google’s Android operating system in Sochi. It is not offering it on
Apple’s iOS system, but Jung said they may consider that next time. The company hasn’t committed to develop an app for the 2016 Rio Games
yet, and Jung acknowledged that developing an app for 28 sports -- more
than double the number that participate in a Winter Games -- would be
daunting, but he still hopes they do it. He got excited at the idea of
developing a Gametracker-like illustration for swimming. Jung: “We can make swimming lanes, like animation, so we can show the
intermediate result in each point -- 50 meters and 100 meters. We can move the athletes at each point, like real.”
