Twitter Co-Founder Unveils Q&A App

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has released a new app, and he's hoping it will "make the world a more empathetic place," he tells TechCrunch. Available for free on iOS and Android, Jelly allows users to ask questions accompanied by photos; responses come from users' Facebook and Twitter networks. In an example at Mashable, a user asks, "Worth reading?" with a picture of a George Orwell book. TechCrunch writer Gregory Ferenstein, meanwhile, got a reply to a complex math question.

Similar services are out there already, but Jelly is more focused in the idea of users helping others, Stone says. "Using Jelly to help people is as much (or) more important than using Jelly to search for help," he notes. "If we’re successful, then we’re going to introduce into the daily muscle memory of smartphone users, everyone, that there’s this idea that there’s other people that need their help right now." The Huffington Post notes that the service—supported by the likes of Bono and Al Gore—has challenges ahead. Information-gathering is "a good business to be in theoretically, but it's a business that belongs to Google," writes Alexis Kleinman. (More Biz Stone stories.)