So here's a quick Q&A session before we get down to dishing out on our scoop, munching, and digesting it as we always do: Do you know Whatsapp? Do you know Messenger?? Do you know how to use them??? I'm guessing you're about to knock me on the head with a huge cooking spoon or slap me for asking such a silly question. okay! But just before you do that, another quick question: How would you like to run your own messaging service? Aha I see I got your attention. Well, that is what Sendbird does for you. How? (me in pidgin) em! I go like stop the question and dish the food already before person beat me. Lols! 😁
Now, Sendbird is an SDK (software development kit) that lets you quickly build chat tools for your apps and services as an app developer. Cool right? And it's very easy to use as well as very affordable... (I think). This service was birthed out of a desire to incorporate a messaging feature into a community-based application called "Smile Mom" -which was designed to connect nearby mom's- but "they" couldn't find a straight-up ready-to-use solution that would suit the app, so they built one themselves. Now, I know you're wondering who "they" are. I'll tell you. It's John Kim and his team, that's who. The Sendbird company is launching out of Y Combinator's Winter 2016 class. In case you're wondering, Y Combinator is a start-up fund for startup companies. The company was formed in 2005 and is a major accelerator for start-ups. A powerful startup incubator for Tech Giants. Research shows that the average app looses 77% of its users in the first three days. That calls for some better way to keep your users around and Sendbird enables you as a developer add real-time chat functions to your app in a few minutes. I think it's awesome. Just think about it for a sec... You can incorporate messaging into your business and communicate with your customers one-on-one or as a game developer you can add chat functions to your games, so your users can play and connect with each other. Amazing! And just so you know, John Kim's background is in gaming and as you know communication is a real deal in that area. With the shift of games to mobile devices, there is greater need for communication across these games. Kim, originally a programmer, sold his last startup to GREE. In his own words he said, "We've been building this for a couple times when we were building our social game, we had to build this chat functionality every time. We felt like it was re-inventing the wheel every time. Even though chat is really important, as a start-up you have limited resources. You want your product guys and engineers focusing on what matters most. Sendbird operates on a paid subscription model, where the pricing varies based on the number of users who are using the chat services. Now this is not the first of its kind but is certainly one with a difference. *I think I'm just hyping right now* Layer is also a chat software development kit with similar operations as the Sendbird, but only allows a certain number of persons chatting in the same room. Sendbird has 15 employees and started in Korea but is now based out of San Francisco. It's live in 340 apps now and counting and has around 2 million monthly active users chatting through its platform. Great stuff! See why I asked those questions earlier? Hmmm! You can thank me later *winks*.
No comments:
Post a Comment