As we are all looking forward to lockdown being over and normal life to resume, we’ve been hit again with a potential £5,000 fine for leaving the UK.
Yes, that’s right. Trapped inside our homes due to COVID restrictions, online shopping has gone up and live gigs have all been cancelled, leaving us to figure out how to stay entertained within the confines of our Netflix and Amazon subscriptions.
The number 1 shopping app in the UK called OOOOO started as a social commerce platform and is now offering multiple entertainment channels. It beat Amazon and eBay to the number 1 spot on the iOS shopping charts with over 160,000 downloads.
OOOOO is an interactive live shopping and entertainment platform where you can watch jewellery shows in Camden Market, Dior bag shows from Paris, boxing classes from North London to yoga classes from Bali.
One of the OOOOO shopping channels we particularly like is Sneaker TV. Sneaker TV gives you access to incredible discounts on Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and Asics with access to 1.8 million trainers in the UK. Sneaker Guru’ Franklin Boateng, the “King of Trainers” hosts the shows.
A month ago, Busking TV was launched, giving out-of-work musicians a chance to earn money every day singing live to a grateful audience of music fans.
Most recently, Book TV launched and viewers got to watch two award-winning poets read poetry live on the OOOOO app for National Poetry Day.
One poet was Nii Ayikwei Parkes, an award-winning writer, sociocultural commentator, and the co-founder of flipped eye publishing. Raised in Ghana, he co-founded filla! magazine, Ghana’s first student-run national magazine, aged 17, before embarking on a literary career over a decade later. Veteran of several poetry festivals, and former poet-in-residence at the Poetry Café in London, he has performed poetry in the United Kingdom, Europe, Africa, and the United States and was a 2005 Associate Artist-In-Residence with BBC Radio 3. Other residencies, grants and awards include a 2003 Arts Council England award and a 2003 Victoria & Albert Museum residency. He was children’s poet-in-residence at the Brighton Festival in 2007 and in the same year he was British Council writer-in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles and became one of the youngest living writers (along with Owen Sheers and Choman Hardi) featured in Transport for London’s Poems on the Underground programme with his poem “Tin Roof”.
Nii Ayikwei has won multiple international awards including the ACRAG award, and his novel Tail of the Blue Bird won France’s two major prizes for translated fiction – Prix Baudelaire and Prix Laure Battalion – in 2014.
He was selected as one of Africa’s 39 most promising authors under the age of 40 for the World Book Capital Africa39 project in 2014. Nii Ayikwei serves on the boards of World Literature Today and the AKO Caine Prize and was chair of judges for the 2020 Commonwealth Prize. Currently Producer of Literature and Talks at Brighton Festival, he is the author of two collections of poetry The Makings of You (2010) and The Geez (2020), both published by Peepal Tree Press.
The other writer who spoke on National Poetry Day was Malika Booker. Malika was born in London to Guyanese and Grenadian parents. Growing up in Guyana Malika returned to the UK aged 13, with her parents. She began writing and performing poetry while studying anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Malika founded the poetry collective Malika’s Kitchen, which also included Nick Makoha.
She was “discovered” by flipped eye as her first publication, Breadfruit, was with flipped eye in December 2007. Her first full collection of poetry, Pepper Seed, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre prize for best first full collection published in the UK and Ireland. She was the inaugural Poet In Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Booker’s poem “Nine Nights”, first published in The Poetry Review in autumn 2016, was shortlisted for Best Single Poem in the 2017 Forward Prize.
OOOOO is giving a diverse range of music artists, writers, and spoken word poets a platform to showcase their work and earn money in a difficult economy. Whilst musicians get a flat fee from OOOOO every day to perform, there is additionally a “Tipping Feature” which gives viewers the opportunity to tip the artists you love.
With the difficulty and competition of promoting performing arts on Facebook and Instagram, OOOOO pays musicians an upfront fee and has a guaranteed audience that will watch you perform.
OOOOO co-founder Sam Jones said about Busking TV “The show is designed to help people express their gift – and help us grow in a different way to just buying ads. It was never about the money – it was about helping people grow. That is why the busking.tv channel is designed”
Download the OOOOO app here: apps.apple.com/gb/app/ooooo/id1516870943
And visit the OOOOO website
