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Love trivia? Love San Diego? Love San Diego trivia? Soon there will an app for that

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What San Diego destination is the most-visited national monument in California?

If you know the answer to that and other San Diego-related trivia questions, you may be the target audience for a new trivia game app called YAS that is set to launch on Monday.

And you also may know more than the app developers themselves, who misspell Ron Burgundy’s name while listing him among the four possible answers to the question in question, none of which appears to be an actual national monument. (See the courtesy image above; the Hotel Del Coronado is a national historic landmark and the U.S.S. Midway Museum is operated by a nonprofit organization. Balboa Park is a city park.)

The app — now available for download through the Apple app store — is being released amid the success of trivia game apps like HQ Trivia, Trivia Crack and QuizUp where players can win real cash prizes. What makes YAS different from the rest is that it is set to launch with a San Diego-themed questions and challenges.

San Diego, California, USA, April 9th, 2018. | From left to right, Luis Chavez, Sean Thielen, Dmitry Shapiro and Jonathan Miller co-founded GoMeta, a San Diego-based tech company about to launch the latest trivia game app called YAS.
(Alejandro Tamayo / The San Diego Union Tribune)

I sat down for an interview with the creators of the app and here’s they said about how it will work and what players can expect to win.

What is it?

YAS is a live trivia game app that offers cash prizes for players who correctly score on questions and challenges. Winners can get cash prizes from as little as $100 and as high as $1,000 per game.

How does it work?

Users are given questions to answer or instructions to challenges to complete in a certain period of time. The more people RSVP to play the game, the larger the cash prizes.

At Monday’s debut, users on the YAS app will be prompted to play trivia games. The games will start automatically at 1 p.m., 3 p.m., 5 p.m. and then 7 p.m. — all Pacific Time — and users must be on the YAS app before the game start to be eligible to participate.

In between game times, users who log on the app will enter a virtual waiting room where they can chat with other players and are given the exact time when the next challenge will take place. The app is not geo-location based, which means that any users outside San Diego can also play.

GoMeta is promoting its soon-to-launch trivia game app, YAS, via a Facebook Event page.
(Facebook.com)

Where can you get the app?

The iOS app will be available to download via the Apple app store as early as Friday, GoMeta CEO Dmitry Shapiro. Until then, those looking to play the game from its earliest stages will be alerted via a Facebook Event page.

Those marked as “going” on the Facebook Event page will be alerted when the app is ready for download. An Android version of the app is not yet available.

Who is behind the app?

The co-creators of the app include Shapiro, a former chief technology officer at MySpace Music and a former Google employee, Jonathan Miller, Sean Thielen and Luis Chavez.

Per GoMeta’s website, some of the financial backers of the company include former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, former MySpace CEO Mike Jones, and a number of other technology innovators from Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Product Hunt and others.

Shapiro says the company has a seed investment of $2 million.

Why San Diego first? And will it expand to other cities?

“San Diego is the finest city in America and we’re hometown boys and our office is here,” Shapiro told me when I asked why the app was launching in San Diego with regional-focused questions.

Shapiro said the company staged a location-based scavenger hunt in September 2016 that gave $500 to one winner. The scavenger hunt, which can be seen in a local news broadcast in 2016, served as a test bed for the app, he said.

“We don’t know where we’ll go next, but for a while it’ll be based in San Diego,” Shapiro said, adding that the city is only a theme and that players do not necessarily have to be in San Diego to play.


Email: luis.gomez@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @RunGomez

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