Flotype just scored $ 1.4 million in seed money for ramping up an ambitious enterprise software push. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Yuri Milner, Salesforce.com.
The Berkeley, Calif.-based startup has set quite a goal for itself. It is building, as reported earlier, a “massive scale, enterprise-grade bidirectional communication between any server and any device,” in the words of CEO Darshan Shankar, CEO and co-founder. Now that technology has a name: “Bridge.”
Bridge, which Shankar said is already being tested in the field by unnamed businesses, aims to make it easier for software developers to build applications that flow from any end-user device to and from corporate server-based applications. To do that it has to handle all the heavy lifting and complicated work of real-time communications so developers can focus on what they do best. Theoretically, developers could also use Bridge to rebuild big-boy back end applications but the initial push is to foster fast communication, borrowing on lessons learned from massively scaled web applications like Facebook and Twitter, Shankar said.
Flotype, a 2011 Ycombinator company, will provide developers with an API and native libraries for virtually every device, Shankar said. Floytype itself will host a set of server-side libraries that handle the hook between a business’s servers and devices and the Flotype’s own infrastructure. All of that communications between the customer’s servers and devices is all abstracted away,” Shankar said.
The company brings together include several University of California-Berkeley engineers and Amazon and Dropbox alums. It will need their expertise. Fostering secure, real-time communcation that has to cross all the barriers between users’ browsers and company-owned enterprise applicatoins is not trivial. There are a bewildering array of programming langauges on all fo those devices. So Bridge must take all that into account and somehow astract it out so developers won’t have to worry aobut it and offer a developers a single API to hadnle all that.
Floytype is not totally new on the scene. It fostered NowJS software that eases the creation of JavaScript-based web applications.
Flotype’s first product is Bridge, a technology that enables real-time communication between any server, any device, on any platform. Bridge abstracts away the complexity of large real-time applications. This helps developers using cloud or on-premise platforms to build their mobile, web, or embedded applications faster.
“Developers can keep writing in their lanugage of choice and have this real ti
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