Rego goes viral in Brazil for the wrong reason
Yesterday we at Makalu launched our latest product — Rego, an iPhone app for bookmarking locations. It's like Gowalla, but without the social part.
The good news is that Rego is doing very well, throughout the world. But then to our surprise, it went viral in Brazil. The unfortunate news is why it went viral in Brazil.
Turns out, Rego has an "special" meaning there, and Gizmodo Brazil covered the story in this hilarious article which got thousands of retweets and Facebook likes.
Here's my version of the story:
As they say, "All press is good press"—so we're looking on the bright side, or maybe better, where the sun don’t shine.
Update: After posting this video, I had an interview with Daniel Junqueira of Gizmodo, the author of the brilliant original post there. His colleagues then followed up with a second article on Gizmodo, about our interview.
Update 2: You know, our first thought about this was, "Oh what a disaster!" But at that point, there wasn't much to do. And, to be honest, it's pretty damn funny so we just rolled with it. Turns out the situation has been very positive — the meaning isn't that strong, downloads in Brazil have gone through the roof! And since Rego is actually a pretty great app, the Brazilians are loving it (as is everybody who has downloaded it!)
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