Melbourne, North Melbourne -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/03/2010 -- Ex-management consultant Johnny Wong and ex-investment banker Ken Ihara have teamed up to create an iPhone App for getting through long meetings.

Their creation is a modern version of Buzzword Bingo – a favourite game of junior executives that has been played on paper for years. Now it can be downloaded from iTunes onto the iPhone.

“We have over 20 years of corporate experience, and have been subject to our fair share of useless meetings,” Ken said. “This is the kind of diversion we wish we had when we were corporate slaves.”

Their multi-player game, called Team BS Bingo (the original name was rejected by Apple on grounds of profanity), enables individuals, small groups or whole divisions to play buzzword bingo together without disrupting the meeting. Users listen for buzz words like “hockey-stick” and “lots of hair on it” and win when they mark four squares in a row. Users can customize their game by adding their own buzz words.

Users who put in the same code are placed into the same game. Users who agree on a strong password can be confident that they will be playing amongst themselves. Users who use weaker passwords may be in for a surprise, and could be connected to another game being played on the other side of the world, a la Chat Roulette.

Team BS Bingo has a chat function, so users can discreetly communicate with other work-mates without interrupting the presenter or the game.

Team BS Bingo also features a shiny red panic button “that should be only pressed when your career is in free fall.”

“This is the most sophisticated and feature-rich Buzzword Bingo available for the iPhone,” Ken said. “None of the other offerings are multi-player, provide a way to communicate with each other, or provide career advice via a panic button.”

There are two versions of Team BS Bingo: (1) the Corporate Edition that is available on iTunes for free for a limited time and (2) the Investment Banking edition that sells on iTunes for $49.

“The Investment Banking edition has a gold background – that’s pretty much the only difference,” Ken said. “Bankers want the most expensive option. We are happy to provide that option.”

Please see http://www.teambsbingo.com. To purchase on iTunes, search for “Team BS Bingo”.

CONTACTS:
Johnny Wong
Ex-management consultant
San Francisco, CA. United States
+1 510 759 4210
Johnny.Wong@teambsbingo.com

Ken Ihara
Ex-investment banker
Melbourne, Australia
+61 4 5121 7109
Ken.ihara@teambsbingo.com

Please contact Johnny or Ken for interview and promo codes.

About Corporate Game Time
Corporate Game Time’s mission is to add humanity to corporate insanity. This is achieved through the development of iphone games that give users a reason to live whilst subjected to useless meetings. Corporate Game Time was founded by Johnny Wong and Ken Ihara, who have over 20 years of combined experience in the corporate sector.

Johnny Wong. Co-author.
Johnny was until recently with The Boston Consulting Group as a Project Leader in their New York office. Prior to that, Johnny worked in product management and engineering roles at Google, Oracle, and a couple other startups. He holds an MBA from Wharton and Computer Science degrees from Stanford and UC-Berkeley.
Johnny is currently based in San Francisco, where he is busy working on his startup -- http://www.endoppler.com -- the mission of which is to save lives by reducing car fatalities through mobile technologies and user communities.

Ken Ihara. Co-author.
Ken spent 9 years in corporate finance in New York and London at Citigroup. Ken was a Vice President in Investment Banking, where he worked on numerous M&A and financing transactions in the automotive and industrials sector.

Ken currently lives in Melbourne, Australia where he is working on his startup – http://www.thepianomaestro.com. This new electronic device will be featured on the New Inventors TV show on February 23, 2011. Ken is developing several other inventions and is also writing a cookbook.

Ken studied electrical engineering at Harvard University, where he developed his electronics and computer programming skills building electronic devices at the Harvard Robotics Laboratory.