Coolgorilla History

Back in 2005 a group of us decided to start making software for iPods... not an easy task for primates with fingers like bananas. We wrote a website and lots and lots of humans came to download our first application, a music quiz. We then decided to do a quiz about films which people also seemed to like. One of us realised that a lot of you humans like the game of football so we wrote a guide to the World Cup which over one hundred thousand of you downloaded from all over the world, including several people from Vatican City!

We tried to think about what to do next. Some of you humans like to do things like 'thinking outside the box', 'brainstorming' and 'blue sky thinking'... we thought it would be much better if we just had a good idea. So we sat down with a big pile of bananas and, after a bit of head scratching, realised the biggest difference between humans and gorillas... we only have one language but you all speak different languages. What if we could develop some software for the iPod that meant humans from all over the world could understand each other. After lots and lots of work we finished the application and some nice people from a big travel company called lastminute.com gave us a truck full of bananas for all our hard graft.

Everybody liked our iPod phrasebooks and so we decided to make something similar for mobile phones too. These were an even bigger success and lots of people wrote about how good they were.

Not so long after that, we got a message from a bloke called Steve who knew a lot about iPods and he told us that there would soon be an iPod that was also a mobile phone. We didn’t believe him at first but as it turns out his name really was Steve and a couple of weeks later there was this new thing called an iPhone.

So, we soon released a web-based iPhone translator which proved extremely popular although what iPhone users really wanted was a downloadable version.

Listening to the cries of the iPhone owning community, it wasn’t long until this Steve guy swung by again and showed us something called an iPhone SDK and the App Store which meant that we could develop downloadable iPhone applications which could then be downloaded by every iPhone and iPod Touch user in the world.....which we thought was rather good.

So, on the 10th July 2008 Apple opened the App Store and four of our lastminute.com Talking Phrasebooks were available to download all of which charted in the top 25 most popular fee apps. What's more, the Phrasebooks have now gone platinum having received over 1 million downloads within the first few weeks!

Most recently Coolgorilla have released their London Travel Guide which people have told us is the most advanced travel guide ever! It’s really cool and has stuff like aerial video footage, photo galleries, embedded maps, telephone links and is jam-packed full of interesting facts. So, if you are visiting London anytime soon make sure you download it!

The evolution continues!

October 2008