Architecture

We looked at MANY mobile instant messaging players and determined the course. Some of them (Causerie – the grand daddy) were good, easy to use but expensive to adopt. Few of them were very inexpensive (kido’s?) but they do not work for their architectural mishap from the start.

You see, mobile phones have limited memory, processing power and very should-be-effectively-used batteries. I just cannot live with the thought that companies are building applications which are against the fundamentals.

I was brushed by our architect on this right from my first day on job that three tier servers (having a number crunching box in between - middleman) is the correct approach for these applications. You reduce the processing power on the handheld. Crunching will not make your handheld more effective! Imagine four people trying for your board room and your nice friend finds the door always shut. Look at other 2-tier applications occupying the board room. For eg: Yahoo will occupy 4x because of its inherent complicated protocol. So your CPU will get used up making it very difficult to run other applications. Your good friend (application you want to run such as Datebook or your Phone) will always have problems as you have many people (other applications) trying to occupy the board room (CPU).

You may ask what if CPU is used. I have the latest cute-looking horse-power handheld. Yes, we have an answer. The battery! Your battery will get drained.

PS: We have talked with few of the top engineers of other companies to see if there is any logic behind these 2-tier systems. They agree that middleman model is the best model but wouldn’t want to do it as it is difficult to write, maintain and implement. They would not want to maintain servers (farm?) which can offload the processing and save the battery.

Moral: if you want less CPU occupancy, more battery – you need mTalk!

Bots

I’m still surprised when customers take the pain of using a browser and try to FIND information while on road. It is so difficult - at least to all of us here! Mobile phones were meant for talking but the data capability is changing the paradigm.

We looked at different applications which should be retrieved at a single touch. Weather, traffic information, stock quotes, movies database, directions, news (NBA, NFL, Business etc.), eBay auction prices etc.

Free

Yep, free. Most of our users are enterprise customers and carriers who deploy mTalk. We earn enough (well?) to keep the mTalk for consumers free of cost.

SMS & Always On

We have started using SMS due to the overwhelming desire to save more battery on your mobile phone (which we anyway save compared to others).

Many users who use it say that our 2 way SMS (you can reply by SMS) is the best option anyone has and can come up.

No, other applications do not use SMS at all and will drain your battery. They cannot as they are based on wrong model. If you hear them say that SMS will be supported from next version, you know them well now.

Response Time (We call time to live)

I have seen few CTOs complain that 3 tier systems will take more time as the message come from a middle box. The fact is - yes; it would take more time if the handheld is equally capable of our quad dual processors boxes (highly powerful) which we run on our datacenters.

We secure your transmission so that your password is not sent as plain text.