Many of us are aware that the latest social media boom is Instagram, and selfies are all the rage right now! Since then, the #Wefie trend was spawned, encouraging us to take pictures together with our friends and loved ones instead of flooding the news feed with our ‘selfish’ selfie shots. In the month of August, I am proud to announce that a group of dedicated animal lovers are launching the first of its kind photosharing app, the Petfie.
Animal and pet lovers can now look forward to sharing their passion for animals with a new smartphone app. This is currently available for download on the Apple App store and will serve as a platform for pet owners and animal lovers to take selfies together with their pets, or just the pet itself – thus the term “petfie”
Petfie’s unique animal centric approach allows users to follow solely animal profiles. Unlike any other social networking app available on the market where users create profiles for them, and ‘follow’ fellow users, users ‘follow’ animals instead!
Petfie aims to integrate the community of animals/pets alike in a map’s view. These animal profiles, either pet profiles or profiles of community animals, are created and managed by pet owners or the community. Users can upload photos to the local pet/animal profiles, while discovering other animal profiles globally at the same time. In the future phase, Petfie aims to be a one-stop umbrella for animal-related businesses/services and animal welfare organisations. Through profile listings on the map, fellow animal lovers will be informed of new initiatives or products.
As a start, the Cat Welfare Society (CWS) of Singapore will be making use of the app for its Stray Cat Sterilisation Programme (SCSP). In this collaboration, the community will be informed of the cats that are in need of sterilization through the profiles created for these cats, which will be tagged with the status ‘Sterilisation Needed’. The community can then easily identify the cat profiles (denoted with a red drop pin) on the map and bring them to the appointed veterinaries for sterilisation. This empowers the community to be involved in the project via “crowdsourcing”.
The app was conceived by Jerome Chan, a fellow animal enthusiast who noticed a gap for fellow animal lovers and pet owners to get together to form an online community. Chan envisions building Petfie into a platform that brings animal lovers, pet owners, and related businesses and organizations together.
“I hope that by building a tight nestled community of pet owners and animal lovers, individuals, organizations and businesses, they can share photos and tips of their favourite animals, to seek community support and to advocate animal welfare”, explained Chan.
A version for web and Android will be made available later in the year.
For more information about Petfire, please visit http://www.petfie.com
Jackie Loh Writer The Influencer Media
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