DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

Here are the contrarians. When the world is going ga-ga over the tablets and the apps, here is a small video streaming company, Jigsee, which is developing a service for the mobile's minimum common denominator - a phone with a GPRS. Not to mistake, Jigsee works on high end smartphones equally well -- or better.

 

 

Last week we brought a quick interview with Jigsee CEO Ray Newal. Today we bring you an indepth interview with its CTO and co-founder Areef Reza.

Reza is a compulsive network technologist who has worked with the who's who in the north American technical landscape. Excerpts:

Formative years

I started with Nortel, in 1998; I was in the wireless access network team primarily interested in mobility; I was involved in optical networks. I moved to RIM. There I  development activities on BB platform; working at the chipset level. I joined Bridgewaters Systems working on policy management systems for carriers.

It is here when I was bitten by the startup bug. I founded RevNx - a video streaming solutions that would work with entry level handsets, and challenging network conditions. This was initially aimed at Bangladesh, where I come from.

All my career I worked with big companies. I had always wanted to do something on my own. I never got an opportunity. When my childhood friend Shareq Rahman exited one company and wanted to build another, he approached me for ideas. It was a great opp, I had known Raman from grade-6, so we ventured out together.

 

RevNx goes bankrupt but Reza's ideas live on in Jigsee

My first venture was seed funded from family and friends.  We ran out of money after the worlwide launch. Fortunatley, Jigsee was scouting for talent and since our philosophies matched, Jigsee bought over our venture. At that time, Jigsee was focused on discovering content and serving ads. we were more about delivering video content. So there was great synergy.

 

Looking for a job, I met Ray

I was actually scouting for a job when our venture ran out of money. I had sent my resume to a recruiter, who had just met Ray Newal and thought there was a good match between us. I ended up meeting Ray. We discussed our ideas and we saw that whatever we had done under RevNx could migrate over to Jigsee easily.

 

Read our interview with Ray Newal

Hitting upon the mobile video streaming idea

We saw that in many countries cellphones are the only means of accessing Internet and entertainment. The idea was to make an applicaton that would work on entry level phones which have atleast a GPRS connection. We looked into audio streaming and we found video streaming was more challenging. That became our problem space. We travelled to Bangaldesh and did a field study. It worked well.

We made an early protyotype. We outsourced our work and testing to a company a local company.

 

Our initial pilot

When we started it was more like a Youtube application. We had all content coming from end-user. We had an upload feature. Anybody who downloads our app could upload videos.

At the backend we were preparing the content so that it could be streamed back on the network.

We realised that UGC came with its own big issues; illegal content was a huge problem. We could not create a business model out of illegal content.

Whereas at Jigsee, we have tie-ups with leading content  studios and publishers. Everything is legal and affordable.

 

My inspiration in terms of technology

I was involved in mobility and infrastructure. I had this interest in keeping the entire [call] session alive when a user is moving. I had the opportunity to watch an operator's problem in achieving this. At RIM, I had the opportunity to watch the session oriented application from a device's point of view.

Why did we choose to play in the lesser smartphone field when everyone is jumping on the tablet and 3G field?

When we started, there were no iOS/Andrioids. And high end phones were not very capable and formed only a small market. We saw that almost

 

How do we achieve smooth video streaming ?

Jigsee is a smart app. It keeps track of the current network rate it is experiencing. The network in the sub-continent fluctuates a lot.

Does Jigsee use CDNs? Where is your video head-end situated? Is it possible to move your head-ends to the mobile network

We use cloud -- Amazon. We have some kind of CDN.

 

What about other platforms?

We are also working on Android. We are also looking into all other platforms. J2ME may not be growing but it has a huge install base.

 

What is the future of video delivery?

We are going towards 4G and LTE. The wireless network is becoming like wired network. The move in north America is towards ensuring quality of video -- whatever the delivery mode be.

The users expect the same and similar thing on their mobile.

We do see higher bitrate network proliferating in challenging network regions such as Latin America. So our focus would be discovery, giving the right content and at the right to our users.

 

What do I see Jigsee evolving into?

I see Jigsee to be providing multimedia content. We are now video. We may go audio also. We may also become big in discovering content. We will then get into a lot of unserved market.

 

 

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