Pusher, the London start-up that provides tools and a cloud infrastructure for developers to add real-time features to their applications, such as push notifications and messages, has launched a new dedicated product features . Nicknamed 'Chatkit', the API and the SDK are intended to do the bulk of the work needed to add a chat feature to an application or service, and see Pusher start moving to what the Chief Operating Officer Sylvain Giuliani described as a multi-product company. beyond the basic Pusher offer.
Designed to be easy to use but flexible enough and powerful enough to allow developers to create a plethora of chat features, Chatkit provides features such as granular user roles and permissions, private and public chat, hit indicators , an online presence and automatic reconnection. Further, the Pusher Chatkit Product Roadmap includes support for users who send various media, such as photos, videos, audio and GIF files, and manage downloads, downloads, and hosted storage.
On one call, Giuliani explained that some features of Chatkit could be achieved by developing the basic Pusher service, but not just using the new chat API and SDK. A separate chat product also helps to support more specific chat features without cluttering or complicating Pusher's more general offering.
He also admitted that there are a number of competitors in the space, which also allow developers to add chat features to their products. These cover something like Layer.com, which could be described as a hybrid between a chat widget and a developer API to create your own chat feature in your application, at Twilio Programmable Chat, which looks a lot like Pusher Chatkit.
More generally, when choosing an API or a platform as a service, Giuliani says that developers generally consider three things: Does it provide the features / features that I have? need? Is it easy to develop on, giving a good amount of bang for my developer money? And is it reliable? It turns out that uptime is a big problem.
On this note, Pusher appears to have a decent track record, born from his client list since its founding in 2011. For example, the New York Times uses Pusher to feed news and last-minute events on its first page, including graph / real-time statistics, updates and live news feeds (tweets, quotes, photos, etc.). Another client is Doordash, with Pusher feeding real-time updates of the status of your food delivery.
Meanwhile, I understand that the startup has generated revenue from the outset, and has resulted in very modest funding of $ 3.5 million, most of which is (reasonably reasonably) a risk debt.