‘Appspand’ is an advanced communication service, allowing voice, video, and chat to be added to any web/mobile app, with a few lines of additional code.
Uberple was founded in Jan 2013 with the vision of dramatically improving communication within the financial services industry. This need was borne out the founder’s experience of crude tools available for communication both internally and with clients. While their scope has been broadened to embrace opportunities in other sectors, Uberple’s dedication to security and stability of service has not.
Uberple’s service ‘Appspand’ is an advanced communication service that will be provided as a white label API for developers. The communications tool can be added to any mobile or web app, simply by adding a few lines of additional code.
The service has clear use cases in consumer facing apps, but also within large corporations. There are also broad opportunities, in terms of industry. These include gaming or mobile social apps targeted at a specific group, such as hospital patients, dog lovers, or other defined interest groups.
The team’s initial interest lay in the financial services sector, where stringent security and quality issues can complicate the delivery of such services. The service has also been built with the needs of high frequency use in mind, considering the behavior of stock traders. As a result of they believe they have one of the most reliable communications offerings available.
In addition to communications, there are other services available on the platform, such as search functionality within stored files and folders, and big data management. Not to mention extensive backend support to help app developers scale quickly.
Sungwoo Pae, Director of Uberple explained; "Our additional functions, such as search and big data management differentiate us from the likes of Layer. We enable users to find very specific data in shared files and our big data tool enables management of that and other user generated data. We will also offer a 'pinning' service, which allows users to create collections of items, such as files, folders, or even series of messages or groups of contacts.”
While Uberple is not the first to offer this type of white label communication service (Layer raised $14 million USD earlier this year), they feel their service is differentiated as it offers device to device communications. CTO Jaepil Jeong explained that this will enable more complex communications than simply person to person. “We can see a growing need for this type of service to be used for connected devices. For example a video camera might be connected to a user’s smartphone and can be controlled remotely using our software,” he explained. This, as well as their first mover advantage in Asia bode well for the company.
How it works
‘Appspand’ makes it easy for developers to add instant messaging, as well as voice and video communication, to any mobile (iOS and Android) or web apps. All that is needed is the addition of a few lines of code. With the removal of this major development headache, Uberple’s clients are able to concentrate on user experience. Ultimately Uberple wants to help developers accelerate growth, increase user retention and achieve profitability more quickly.
Beyond communication, Uberple provides data management solutions, through the cloud, with the aim of taking the risk out of scalability and stability. These issues are faced by all rapidly growing internet-based companies. Uberple also provides a full back-end service, including customer support and maintenance.
The company has already received the interest of local investors. Future Play invested $700k seed capital in December 2014 and the company has even been approached by global messaging services with acquisition offers.
Uberple’s service will be charged according to the number of user accounts that ae registered, as well as an ongoing scalable solution for support and big data management.
Prior to founding Uberple, their CEO worked at NHN, Korea’s largest online search portal as a Server Platform Developer. This has given him key experience in building large scale communications services, which has been bought to bare in the development of Appspand. Their CTO also has core engineering experience from Hangame (one of Korea’s largest game developers), where he was in charge of building their backend gaming systems. These were built with ultimate stability and massive traffic capabilities as key priorities.
The team behind Appspand
Changing the World Through Tech
Uberple’s CEO, Jaeyun Kim, believes that communications technology can have a dramatic impact on a large number of industries. He explained: “While financial institutions may seem complex from the outside, many of their day-to-day operations are actually very crude. Communication certainly falls into this category. We soon realized that many industries can use this technology. Ultimately we want to deliver an easy, fast, and secure solution for a tough backend issue.”
About Uberple: Uberple has developed a white label communications service that they hope will find application across a wide range of industries. Examples include gaming, social networks, payment services, and in the future IoT. With only a few lines of code iOS, Android and Web developers can imbed high-grade chat, voice and video communication, as well as file sharing and big data management. Uberple also provides full backend support, ensuring that tough scalability and stability issues are also taken care of. This allows developers to focus on user experience and growth. Ultimately Uberple believes that their solutions will simplify the build process for new online services, meaning that companies can build and scale more quickly, and with fewer resources.
