The Big Fat Update
Here are the two products we’ve created over the past few months.
We’ve attended a lot of conferences and meetups ever since we started working on Skcript and the core idea behind it. In literally all the places, one question that we received was consistent.
What does Skcript do?
Everytime someone asks this question to us, we try to keep it as polished as possible, revealing a very tiny feature of the products we were working on. But today, we think its time to talk about it.
Disclaimer:
In any-way, if you are having a perception that this is a shamless plug, it is, so please check out this section.
Quick Background
On December 2013, we started Skcript. We wanted to do one of the purest jobs ever on the planet, and wanted to create a product that would bring those innovations that were lying inside a storage area, into reality. Basically, we were tired of seeing people publishing papers, and literally not touching lives with those amazing innovations. We wanted to break this way of living in the world, and we knew that it would take sometime to do that, and it required a lot of rules.
We knew that we had a lot of barriers to break.
So, here’s the promise we made.
- Never give a damn about anyone who laughs at you
- DO NOT utter a word about what we’ll be working on, till we succeed
- Never really sleep till we get things done, and sacrifice will pay back, someday.
Believe me, holding on to this promise was something that was very very terrible. It literally changed some of our characters over a period of time, but we think it was worth it. Many people thought we were rude, many thought we were selfish, and we even lost some good opportunites and connections. But we still wanted to build a parachute while having this free-fall. Now, here’s the result of this promise we respected.
Product #1:
SHRINK
Compression like never before and ever again
Problem:
Let’s agree. We all have faced this. The error where you are doing something important, and you were just about to get a smile on your face, but the device ran out of storage.
Industry:
We wanted to target the storage industry.
To be prevented:
Growth of storage racks and the spaces they consumed in enterprises. We didn’t want to go back to the ENIAC’s times, where people used to a dedicated room just for one single computer. Times have changed, we might as well follow the time.
Solution:
The only solution that we were able to think of, just like any other IT admin out there in the industry, was to compress existing data and re-use existing storage space.
Challenge:
We were digging around this solution for about a month. We read room full of papers on the best compression algorithms that were readily available for use, or we learnt why some of the algorithms were not in use, even if they were the best in compressing data. So the challenge was pretty clear at this point.
We wanted a whole new algorithm that would radically change the way data-compression works.
The Timeline:
We’re young, and we’re just getting started. No one in the company is/will be more than 30 years old till we stop doing things that don’t scale.
The timeline we set for ourself was just two months.
Achieving it:
At this point, we had a problem, a solution and a timeline to be solved/followed. Achieving it is a brutal challenge. From the day we started off the project with the codename, ‘C19’, we gave up on a few essential things that humans needed to live, like Sleep and rest.
As some might expect, we are not going to be giving out how we cracked it. We’re going to be telling you what we did to crack data compression.
We spent every waking second at work. We tore down papers, wrote code like the stone age people wrote on the walls, stuck on-to our core values and we had a lot of healthy internal arguments.
It was hard. It was harder than living in an active war-zone. We never even had any clue that we would succeed. Also, like many Silicon Valley startups, we never really had ANY aha-moments so far.
Everything happened gradually. Every single try took its own time. And every single failure took its hit on our brains.
But finally, at the beginning of the third month (Yes, the timeline lapsed by about a week), we had the solution, up and running. And the first time we ran it, we knew (fingers crossed) that it would work for real this time. Of course, as a matter of fact, it has to work at some iteration. The hope that it would work, was what kept us going all along. And the journey had to take a pause here.
The Result:
This is something we (Skcript) will be proud of for the rest of our lives, and the generations to follow. Here are 10 highlights of what we have achieved so far:
- We’re talking about compression that’s lossless.
- Data Compression of up to 73%* (Any damn file type)
- Up to 4K resolution video streaming without any loss in the quality.
- Support for 6K and 8K videos (We don’t have the resources to test these resolutions completely. Valley, are you listening?)
- Support for RAW images from any camera type
- Ability to handle images over 20000 x 20000 resolution
- Unprecedented WAN compression for network optimization (Simple data compression was not enough for our thirst)
- Fragmented data streaming for countries where humans would be provided with less streaming bandwidth.
- 5-step installation process for enterprise customers. We don’t require a human with suit and tie to take care of the installation. The Machine takes care of itself. Seriously.
- Hand-crafter server configuration and OS Kernel
Fair enough? We will be listing only these ten features right now. Sorry about that.
Focal Point:
At the end of this very focused period of our lives, it felt like winning a war after losing thousands of soldiers (opportunities). We were really not interested to go to press about this. We were tired.
If something has to be done to make things right, that something has to be corrected NOW.
Product #2:
Evolvr.io
Person of Interest’s ‘The Machine’? We wanted that.
Why:
We believe that any product that a company creates, has its own lifecycle. The product is born, it lives, takes some changes, and depending on the reflections from the users for the changes it took, it lives on, or simply dies.
We all learn from others mistakes. And for people like us, investing time in a product that does not have any value is a huge blow. Instead, we wanted to prevent that. We wanted to create an eco-system that would have data about the changes of a product, and the course it took to survive.
Skcript as a whole loves to create something from ground up for real.
There’s no space for bull-shit talks.
Problem:
When lot of things were happening around us, with regards to handling funds and managing to live with the startup culture of the city, which literally is restricting us from free thought, we saw something pretty bad happening around the world.
We saw companies like Secret and Circa go down and a lot of other companies were doing things that we thought should never happen to them. We wanted to so something to help fellow people like us, and also, we believe that somewhere down the line, when we also hit such situation, we wanted a helping hand.
Solution:
To achieve that, we had to re-think how computers worked. We wanted a cloud based solution, that could learn the things we teach, learn ONLY from the data that’s being fed to it, and possibly predict what could be done to stay positive.
Challenge:
But to create such a thing, we had to feed a huge amount of data. We had to go through the history a company/product before the machine could predict what can be done to make users stay with the product.
The only way to do that was to take the Path that would allow the machine to learn from the evolution of a product, rather than the people manually feeding the hungry machine.
The Timeline:
Creating a machine with AI (or whatever you may call) in it was not that easy. We knew that from the very beginning. But, why on Earth would we give up on this idea? It seemed interesting and we wanted to create a machine that would be available for all of us, 24x7. Just like Siri on iOS.
The timeline we set ourself was just about 7 weeks.
Achieving It:
Alright, now we had everything in place. An idea, the timeline and the solution to achieve the end-result. We first started working on the front-end part of it. We started thinking about the best way that we could possibly render a timeline for a company, and the best way to handle the data by not retaining them for a long term, if it was someone’s personal data.
We started sketching out the plans for the entire 7 weeks, and we started working on it. We worked with a heart filled with passion and rage.
We were knocked down by many people. We still kept silent, and forced ourself so hard to turn that rage and anger into laser focused work. It worked.
We spoke to some people about a part of the idea. Some thought it was good, but some thought it was stupid. The latter kept us going. We had the job of proving people wrong.
We worked hard. Super hard. At this point, we had taken a huge step dreaming about the future, and there was a huge hole in our ship, which was leaking money. We knew that Evolvr.io was our last chance of survival.
If we fail, we would have to build products sitting next to the sharks.
When we thought about the situation we were in, we sat down for a bit, spoke about it, and got back to work.
We worked harder than the previous second, and less harder than the next second to come.
The Result:
At the end, we felt like we were close to finishing the machine. The Machine was all set, and we knew that it would work. We were confident in the hard-work we pumped in, into the platform.
While one team worked on the front-end part day-in-day-out, the other team worked on the backend. And the end-result, is something we think you should know:
- In-depth Developer Analytics for their product
- The Machine can now predict what could be done to the product to make users happy*
- Enterprise API coming later in 2016
- Plug-n-Play support for iTunes App Store, Google Play Store and GitHub.
- Machine suggested personalized product recommendations
- Powerful Research tools crafted to precision
- Designed for our mom and dad.
- Automagic list curation to keep track of your products
- Direct API to The Machine coming later this year for developers
- Truly Smart way to keep track of your product’s analytics in places where the bots cannot enter.
We’ve been testing this platform with a very few developers, and The Machine was able to put a smile on their faces. That made our day.
Focal Point:
At the end, we had created something beautiful. One more time. We’re not sure how long we have before something takes a toll on us. But on thing that will always stay with us, is the products that we’ve created.
You have to have nightmares about the code you’ve written before you could go to sleep peacefully. And that won’t happen for months.
NeXT?
These are the two products that we will be concentrating on for a long time. I very well understand that a lot of investors from the Valley would back off thinking that the team is not focused of is not capable enough to handle two products at the same time.
If you’re one of those investors (Of if they happen to be your friends), please know that ultimately, we see creating products as putting millions of Zeros and Ones beautifully together. We’ve done it already. And we can do such wonders forever.
NeXT year, we have a different plan. A whole new plan that will be focused towards one single goal:
Go BIG or Go HOME.
Starting now, we want to inject this Infectious Enthusiasm into as many people as possible and build a community around us. And ultimately, we wanted move to a place where we are respected for the work we do, not judged by the complexion.
I really have to thank you for reading this 2K long post. Hope you enjoyed reading it.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Steve Jobs
