A pair of North Texas entrepreneurs have developed a smartphone app that lets you know if your ticket is a winner.
Lottery fever comes and goes a few times a year. If you know the winning ticket was bought in another state, you might not even check to see if you won something less than the nine-figure jackpot.
"Just last year alone, there was $52 million in unclaimed prizes -- that's prizes in addition to jackpots," said Elmer Cha, COO of YooLotto.
You can always check your tickets by scanning them at the local convenience store, but YooLotto can do all the work for you right from your phone.
"What a user can do is, just through a simple snapshot, we can track their lottery ticket for you," Cha said.
YooLotto, which is available for iPhones and Androids, went live just this week.
"It's just a cool name that we came up with together," said Eric Yoo, who created the app with Cha.
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"Eric and I we actually share the same bloodline; we're related," Cha said. "And it kind of rolls off the tongue, you know -- 'YooLotto;' your lotto."
It is as easy to say as it is simple to use and explain.
Cha and Yoo demonstrated the app at a Fort Worth 7-Eleven. YooLotto has teamed up with the convenience store chain to promote the free app and give coupons to users.
All you do is open the camera up through the app, make sure the flash is on and that the ticket is on a flat surface. The whole ticket needs to be captured by the camera. You then need to confirm that the numbers on the ticket are correct, and you can submit.
"And then YooLotto does the rest of the work for you," Yoo said.
The app works for tickets bought for future drawings, for which you will receive an update on whether you won or not, and can be used to check old ones.
"We let them know if they've won, how much they've won, if they've lost," Cha said.
Right now, the app only works on Texas Lottery Mega Millions and PowerBall tickets. But the duo plans on expanding to other state run lottery games and other states in the near future.
