Can you feel the days getting longer? The Northern Hemisphere is slowly, surely, turning over to spring. 🌞
illumy is preparing to turn over a new leaf, too 🌱. Actually, several.
We’re hard at work prepping a massive update to the illumy platform — the biggest since our 2019 beta launch.
Here’s a little bit of what we have in store.
We’re hitting the gas pedal
Because we’re building illumy for global 🌍 communication, every interaction needs to feel instantaneous. Even if the person you’re talking to is on the other side of the world.
In practice, instantaneous means you connect to our data centers in 150 milliseconds or less. Just how fast is 150ms? An eye blink is about 4/10 of a second (400ms). We’re talking less than half of that.
Right now, we see California-to-Virginia connections of 80ms. California to Uruguay 🇺🇾 is coming in at 120ms. And California to Ukraine 🇺🇦 is 150ms.
As we continue to tweak the illumy platform, these times should keep coming ⬇️. With the new illumy, you’ll be able to reach anyone, anywhere in less than a blink.
We’re improving performance at scale
Speed is just one piece of the puzzle. These super-speedy connections 🏃💨 also have to happen at scale — so you can be a part of gigantic message groups with no performance degradation.
Our goal here is 10+ million endpoints. In our tests, we’re hitting that milestone with no sweat. At 10+ million simulated endpoints, we managed to crash our test PC setup. So, yeah, you could say the illumy platform is passing the stress test. 👀
We’re cleaning up workflows
“Workflows” are the things you do on illumy: creating a new message 📬, updating your profile 🖋, or adding a new contact 🙋♀️.
As part of our big platform enhancements, these actions are getting a tweak. They’ll be prettier on web and mobile, as well as quicker and more intuitive.
Your profile, for example, will go from multiple tabbed “pages” to just 1️⃣. As soon as you enter something in a profile field, or change a profile field permission, it will update.
Another enhancement is coming soon to the illumy login process. Soon, we’ll adopt Oauth2 as our user access and authentication standard. This will make your info more secure 🔐 by “tokenizing” your username and password — letting illumy talk to other services on your behalf, without passing your info along.
We’re delivering the world’s best VoIP
VoIP is voice-over-IP, or phone calls transmitted over the internet. If you’ve placed a call via Skype or your smartphone’s WiFi Calling feature, you’ve used VoIP.
But have you ever noticed (cue Jerry Seinfeld) that VoIP can leave call quality a little … wanting? 😒
That’s what we’re aiming to fix in the new illumy platform. The nuts and bolts of it is, we use the ordinary telephone network ☎️ for most of a VoIP call. The illumy backend handles just the first part: getting you onto the PSTN’s copper wires.
What this offers is great call quality ✅ at very low bandwidth 🤏 — because you don’t need the internet to handle the whole call, like other VoIP providers do.
Our VoIP plans are big enough that they deserve their own blog post, so stay tuned.
We’re rolling out a lot of firsts
illumy will be the first communications app to roll chat 💬, email 📧, voice 📞, and video 🎥 into a single threaded conversation.
But *as seen on TV voice* that’s not all.
We’re also aiming to be the first app to offer emojis in 4K. You probably don’t have a 4K computer monitor today, but if/when you get one, we’ll be ready. 😄
In addition, we’re going to be the first communications tool with audio gifs. They’re the fun Giphy gifs you know from today’s illumy … with [[sound]].
Don’t worry: the audio will be muted by default, and illumy will remember your mute on/off preferences across conversations.
Can’t wait for the new-and-improved illumy? 🥵 Well, neither can we. These platform updates are coming very soon. You’ll know they’ve arrived when your illumy app and web experience gets an injection of color .
illumy is building the next way to communicate. We’re excited you’re here. 🎉
Photo by Frederik Löwer on Unsplash.
