Real-Time as a Service? Check Out What Notify.me is Working On
Can being "present in the now" be packaged and sold as a service? A number of companies believe that it can be and are aiming to offer a "real-time" layer of functionality to consumer websites and businesses interested in this growing trend online.
On one hand it's just a speed up the infrastructure play, but the impact of real time information delivery on a user's experience of a website can be profound. The latest entrant into this market of white label real time service layers is called Notify.me.
Notify.me has begun rolling out two Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will allow publishers to offer sophisticated real time notification of events to their readers and interface designers to pull notices in as they become available online. These APIs are free to use but the company hopes they will help build up enough consumer demand to demonstrate scalability and get a foot in the door with business customers. The medical industry is the first business target but the company is also reaching out to financial, shipping, and software businesses.
Making websites real time is the hottest trend online this season. From Facebook to Google, Twitter, Digg and countless little innovative startups, it seems like everyone is either doing it or talking about it. (See our Introduction to the Real Time Web for background.) Might some sites choose to use an outside service that specializes in real time infrastructure, instead of building their own in-house? That's what Notify.me is betting on.
Notify.me is a San Diego based startup made of tech industry veterans, some working on the company on the side, others full time. The company has taken no funding, has no revenue and no one working there is being paid. The executive team is made up of engineers from companies like MP3.com, the Health Care division of SAIC, Napster, DekiWiki and Yahoo. It's a pretty hot crew to get together with no pay to take a long shot at productizing a technology like real time.
This isn't just another fly-by-night "instant alerts" service, though casual observers may have thought as much over the several months that the free consumer version of Notify.me has been available. (We count ourselves among those casual observers, in fact!)
Using the free consumer service, anyone can set up alerts to be delivered by IM, SMS, email or to an Adobe AIR app whenever an RSS feed updates. That's nice and hopefully Notify.me's service will work better than the alternatives do these days, but RSS to IM/SMS alerts are nothing new.
Where it gets really exciting is in the two APIs the company is working on.
What's New: The APIs
A REST API is available for publishers now and C# and Perl libraries should be available in two weeks. That API allows publishers to define particular events on their site and then offer real time alerts to readers when those events occur. You might want real time notification when someone leaves a comment in reply to yours, or when a site publishes news concerning a particular topic, or when a new event listing is published so you can buy tickets right away. The possibilities are endless and fun to imagine.
The second API in the works is an Actionscript and XMPP Client API that allows developers to build interfaces for audiences to consume real time alerts through. That API has specs in draft form now but the company says it expects little change to occur before a final release.
What does that mean? It means you could add real time notification consumption to apps on the web, desktop or iPhone (using the new Push Notification Service in the next iPhone OS release).
Put those two APIs together and you've got publishing and reading apps going in real time. Hello real time web!
Can They Sell Real Time to Businesses?
The Notify.me team has immediate designs on business customers. Talks have begun with companies in the medical, financial and software fields. Doctors could use real time updates to track patient updates, including allergies and drug conflicts as they are discovered, prior to prescribing medication. Medical practices could push lab results to physicians instead of waiting on a chart pull request.
Would medical software companies use a hosted 3rd party API as real time infrastructure? Notify.me says they have consulted with HIPAA experts who believe that as long as the company transmits notification of an event and not personal medical information, they should be legally compliant.
Figuring out rules for determining what kinds of information gets delivered will be one challenge that Notify.me will have to tackle with customers. As Sameer Patel, another entrepreneur in this market, points out: "What's absolutely necessary in the B2B space though is smart aggregation before push comes into play. Failing this, its going to be a fire hose that will quickly alienate the end user."
Gnip is another service offering similar kinds of functionality, but for different markets. Gnip head Eric Marcoullier had this to say about Notify.me's B2B prospects:
"Good for them. Further validation that slinging realtime data around has value. I bet they'll find good money there. We've even considered some of those use cases in the past, but have shied away because of the liability that's associated. The Gnip team works really hard to make sure that the platform is always running (with 99 point nine something uptime since launch) but if data gets held up for an hour, nobody's life depends on it. I'm psyched someone else is diving into the mission-critical data delivery while we work on business-critical data."
Indeed, reliable scalability will be Notify.me's biggest challenge. That's something the company has focused on since the start. Proving their case and building a name for themselves as a popular consumer notification service is a business strategy that quite a few other Web 2.0 type startups have done well with.
Can that strategy work with real time notifications, though? We suspect that business customers may be more interested in integrating real time functionality than all but a few power user consumers will be, so if you like the consumer service of Notify.me you'd better use it now, before the more viable business market takes precedence in the company's day to day decision making to the detriment of free accounts.
In the meantime, we expect that someone will succeed in bringing a real time service layer to the websites we use and work with every day. Real time is just too compelling for the paradigm to go back into the genie's bottle. It could be Notify.me that finds that success.
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Hi,
This is exactly what my company is offering. We are delivering over 30 million notifications/month and have been in business for a year.
It goes further than that actually
Nicolas, alright, I'll bite - what company is that? M-X-M email delivery? Seems like a stretch to say "exactly." More details?
Notifixious had APIs since the begining... both XMPP and HTTP callbacks ;)
Julien, that's good to know. No offense, but how come no one has posted to your developer community in 6 months? Does that mean people aren't really interested in real time APIs?
I wonder if there truly is a large market for a B2B service like this. As for the medical example, would you use/trust the internet to deliver critical medical data?
Posted by: Rene de Vries
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May 20, 2009 1:19 PM
Rene,
I don't think it's a matter of the medical industry 'trusting' the technology -- there will surely be kinks in implementing something new like this. I think it's a matter of if it solves a problem the medical industry has. They would have to be willing to make some tradeoffs as it will not work 100% the first time around. I'm pretty sure the medical industry understands that.
Marshall, you're right our API hasn't been successful in the past few months... I wouldn't conclude anything general from that though. We have had trouble to "popularize" our service to the 3rd party developers.
Realtime is wonderful and we're string believers, but we have also noted that about 65% of subscriptions made through notifixious have been made by email... which is, as everybody knows, not real-time. I think it is very important to remember that for "the rest of the world", realtime is pretty 'scary'. The feedback we got from our users is that they "don't want" to receive a continuous flow of information. However, we have noted as well, is that we can actually convince them of doing that, they usually tend to want more.
Again, I am not saying that anybody can generalize upon our experience, but, as it turns out for us, real-time hasn't really been a major 'advantge' for our users...
Julien, thanks for the frank reply. I am very curious to see how the experience of other companies plays out relative to yours so far. Good luck and thanks for the conversation.
I believe there is many realising and capturing this boom. I am one of the spectators watching how it can help my businesses of my team and me.
Its great to think it will be for events.
The medical application is far off. For one thing, no doctor I know stares at a device all day long, and they already get so much interruption that I don't know if they can stand anymore.Not to mention the miasma of misinformation surrounding privacy in health care.
And the real reason: this is not a problem for doctors.They have many sources of real time information.
Does this have any application to manufacturing? Real-time order and production processing could be pretty interesting if linked to mobile or standard web-enabled devices.
Having worked for a food manufacturer, I've seen this kind of thing being costly and difficult to implement. It would be great to be able to take the real-time data input on the production floor and pass it further along to people throughout a company via something like notify.me (assuming it would have to be customized to funnel the data).
This general topic is not really in my league, but got me thinking anyway..
Hi Marshall,
We are kind of under the radar right now as we were busy making our customers happy and building out a rock solid technology.
We target developers and provide them with the infrastructure and code to embed real time capabilities in their applications. Integration with us is a matter of minutes or hours.
We have launched CritSend, a messaging delivery service addressing real-time delivery: email (with deliverability guarantee), IM (Yahoo, AIM, and coming soon - Skype), and SMS. If I look at our customer list, we execute the use cases you describe and more.
We have been servicing quite a few companies for over a year now. Things are going well so far (profitable, growing fast, hiring great developers). When our website launches soon, I can send you the full intro.
There is definitely a good business in this space, but a commodity one and it is much more technical than one can expect.
Hello, I'm Jason, Founder of notify.me. Its great to read everyone's thoughts and I would like to take a bit of time to respond.
@Yael Miller is exactly right about the types of business applications we are working on. We think the idea of aggregating raw data and automatically distributing critical pieces in real-time to important stakeholders is critical to helping an organization succeed. As you can imagine, this concept will be applied to many companies and industries, and we are building a scalable architecture and integration tools to address the demand.
We were contacted directly by two large east coast medical institutions about integrating this technology. The goal is to provide time-critical, real-time notifications to help physicians cut through the noise. The industry is currently undergoing a transformation where payors, providers, and physicians are finding great incentives to work together and find new efficiencies. We are finding that a real-time service that spans multiple organizations and host systems to allow these efficiencies to be realized is also in high demand.
Couple other responses:
Last note - we are constantly trying to innovate and we learn best by working closely with our customers. If anyone is serious about implementing our service to enhance their business, feel free to contact us through our website.
This is something that has a lot of use case in business. Why is IBM MQ or Tibco Messaging not in this space. I know for sure that Financial clients use the IBM and Tibco a lot. They are pricey and unaffordable for SMB.
Heard some Google guy talk about realtime recently. Maybe they could really pull it off...
I could not agree more-count me as another person who has been using the notify.me service since last year but didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary. These changes will open up tremendous opportunities, especially for live events, as Lisa commented as well. Great post, thanks...
YAY!! Arne!!
Marshall, DekiWiki? Come on man! MindTouch.
Ah, I failed to mention in the last comment that Arne, the architect of Notify.me, who is also an architect at MindTouch, blogs here: http://blog.developer.mindtouch.com/author/arnec/ :-)
On Aaron's note, I'm currently testing integration of notify.me REST API and DekiWiki's Page Alerts feature to provide real-time notifications via notify.me from any DekiWiki installation. Will release the code along with C# bindings for our REST API under Apache 2.0 on http://wiki.notify.me/API (svn coming as well).
pretty cool seems like something i'd use
Hi, it looks fantastic. I would love to understand in what way does it differ from an imaginary friend at friendfeed? Or what will make it better? Thanks.