Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Fang, President of Mobomo (Part 1)

What use cases are emerging at the cusp of mobile, cloud, AI chatbots and spoken interfaces? Read on for a thoughtful discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Mobomo.

Ken Fang: I’m the President of Mobomo. Mobomo is a mobile web cloud company. We help federal agencies as well as commercial organizations transform their business primarily through mobile web cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Your customer base is mostly federal agencies?

Ken Fang: We’re actually half and half. Half of our revenues comes from federal agencies of which we have fairly large programs. The other half of our revenue comes from commercial clients. There are many more of those. At any given time, we probably have 30 or 40 projects going on.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s pick some uses cases that illustrate the types of applications that you are bringing on to this mobile cloud kind of configuration. What are some of the coolest and most impactful use cases that we could discuss?

Ken Fang: One big recent technical achievement of ours is with nasa.gov. This past August, there was a solar eclipse that basically traversed the United States over the course of six hours. It was a big event. Many people traveled to see and experience the solar eclipse. One of the things that our client wanted to do was make sure that people that couldn’t make the event could also participate.

We helped them build out their website so that there were approximately 13 to 16 video streams anywhere from their broadcast to local stations. We were able to broadcast that and created a page where we would stream all the videos. People could change from channel to channel. The key thing there was that they really could not predict the overall traffic to the site. It was a huge amount of people. I think there were 12.1 million viewers.

We had over 88 million visitors to the site over the course of the day. Some of the stream trumped the SuperBowl. We had three to four times the amount of online traffic as the SuperBowl. Putting that technical infrastructure as well as customer experience together is stuff that gets our team pretty excited.

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down on that? What can you comment on the technical infrastructure that was necessary to put something like that together? What are the trends in that kind of technical infrastructure?

Ken Fang: I don’t think any of that could be made possible without migrating some of this stuff to the cloud. Historically to prepare for an event like that, you would have to go out there, purchase all the hardware, get it installed in data center and do all the testing. Because we were with Amazon services, the reality is we just leveraged the ability to publish static pages to S3 and push that out to content delivery networks. Akamai as well as two other video stream providers were leveraged to stream the video content.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Fang, President of Mobomo
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