#dexetra

Around 5 years ago, we started Dexetra with a simple mission of creating a global product at the intersection of Mobile and artificial intelligence. At somepoint, cloud became the 3rd vertex of this mission. Over the time we have created global products like Iris, Friday, Dialapp and Knock, many of which were well ahead of time when they were being used by millions of users. We were one of the first movers in Context mining and predictive computing which is now the backbone for popular apps like Google Now, Siri, Graph search etc. Today we are announcing our partnership with Quixey, which will allow us to dive deeper into the grand vision. With a bigger and more established team and infrastructure, we will be able to grow together and faster, while giving me, and my team more time to focus on building world class products.

This next chapter will not change anything for you, our users today as all our products will continue to exist for now. Our small but world class team of 15 will now be a part of Quixey, bringing with us our products, userbase & IP and we will continue the journey together will hundreds of other Quixiers.  I will also take this moment to thank people who made this journey possible. First of all my 5 cofounders and the angel investor, George who helped us jumpstart the whole journey. Also, our investors, Vijay from One97, Qualcomm Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Mohit from Sequoia has been more of a mentor to me in this whole endeavour. My dearest team with whom I have spent more hours than my own family, and who are just like family to me. They've been with me through thick and thin as a support and motivation. I also believe without the support from tech community we would not have become a known brand. Sarah from techcrunch, Shradha of Yourstory and other blogs which have helped get the word out to all of you. And lastly every user who've put thousands of 5 star reviews and +1s to our apps, or sent us feedback, criticisms, and encouragement over hundreds of thousands of emails.

We at Dexetra, are big supporters of wearable technology and have tried everything from the Nike Fuelband to Fitbits. But, the true potential of wearables surfaced when Google announced the Android Wear and we are pretty sure this would change the way we interacts with these devices. Wear is all about quick responses and notifications, which in essence, abates the need to open up our phones and besides, it’s cooler to check emails on the watch.

Ever since the wear Developer Preview SDK was published we have been exploring the platform to to see how we can include Wear into our Apps and thanks to a couple of our guys being at Google IO, we got our hands on a Samsung and an LG. We’d already started developing on emulators, and a physical device just stepped it up for both Designers and Developers. We could find a lot of issues which we couldn’t have spotted in the emulators, for instance, touch areas became more apparent and we could shape up the notification icons better.

The extensive and comprehensive documentations for the Wear helped us navigate the maze faster and we at Dexetra have always believed following guidelines is the easiest way to build stable, scalable and clean solutions. So, if you follows these, adding Wear support to your apps will be a piece of cake.

 But Wear, however, was born just yesterday and needs a lot of nutrition to have widespread adoption. Occasionally, even the sample apps provided by the SDK fails to behave in the proposed manner. And, to developers, not having a round faced devices made it harder to test our apps.

Note: Round emulators are not completely dependable.

We started off our Wear venture with Knock. Knock replaces calls with a single intent/question, by showing a message in the incoming call screen with, quick response options. The incoming Knock screen on the phone has the text, photo, name and response options. It did not take long to translate the design onto a wear screen.

    When someone Knocks you, you can either say YES, NO or send a location from the phone or Wear. You needn’t take your phone out to reply. Simple and quick, exactly what wear is meant for.

  We recently pushed an updated to Dialapp, adding a host of quick response options, primarily, taking down notes while on a call. With the Wear update, the notes pop up on the watch when you are a call, making the second screen really useful!

Here are our 2 cents to Wear Developers:

Learning Curve:

Android devices and Wear work on the same APIs. Our android devs had an almost zero learning curve while working on the accompanying wear apps.

Building through Android Studio on the updated SDK was very easy.

WearableListenerService is very useful and works like a charm!

The Support library is very helpful. We used it for our Incoming message screen, Speech confirmation screen and Notes Screen. Technically, they we used in GridViewPager, BoxInsetLayout,ConfirmationActivity, DelayedConfirmationView, WatchViewStub, CardFragment. Highly Recommend this.

Some views in the Support Library did have bugs, like GridViewPager crashing when either row or column count is zero.

Dev Environment:

The emulator for rectangular screens is pretty accurate and correctly reflects touch areas and type and icon sizes.

Round Emulator, however, has not proved to be equally dependable. For e.g. round emulator does not have the 30px cut in the bottom seen in Moto 360. So it is not possible to accurately set touch areas to the required sizes, and developers cannot predict behaviour on real devices.

The round emulator also has a few other bugs : sometimes it does not box the children inside even when used with a  BoxInsetLayout. 

Some feedback we have: It will be great to have an emulator on the phone, as touch experience will be easier to understand, experience and perfect.

Some links on building for wearables and designing layouts.

Documentation:

The design documentation is extensive and complete. The UI toolkit was detailed enough for us to design and develop initial versions with relative ease, without the actual Wear devices

The Dexters have been working on something absolutely amazing for a few months now. What started out as a hobby project just kept evolving making believers out of the entire team.  It was the sheer freshness of the idea that has worked in its favor.

So what exactly are we talking about?  We present to you, Knock, our new offering for Android.

The follow up question would be what does this Knock do?

According to a market research we conducted, close to 70% calls we make are, what we term, status calls. The regular Where are you? Are we on for dinner tonight? How about a movie? These questions can easily be answered with a simple yes or no.

Messaging is one way to go about it but it doesn’t warrant an immediate response and it costs money! Putting ourselves in the shoes of a respondent, we might be in a meeting or maybe driving, it is next to impossible to respond to each message/text instantaneously. A call will not work either, for the very same reasons. So we started out with brainstorming on how we can help the users to do away with these status calls while still getting the message through.

The solution was to have a messaging system wherein a user can send a message to his/her contacts who are on the same platform. The message would be depicted as a call at the receiving end. The receiver can swipe to respond with a ‘yes’, ‘no’, share current location, send a message or call back. What’s more? If a knock is not responded to in 60 seconds, it’s deleted and the sender is notified.

We think it’s a fair assumption that calls induce more actions in comparison to a message or text. Therefore, mimicking the call screen is our approach to get a prompt response.

At Dexetra, we understand and firmly believe that an app has to have a clear and frequent use case for it to be branded useful. With Knock, we strongly feel this is something that does justice to our vision.

We hope you have as much fun using Knock as we’ve had building it.

When I say "the phone" I mean the phone app in today's context. We have smartphones, feature phones, touch phones, QWERTY Phones, iPhones, Windows Phones and what not. But all of them share one common primitive app, which is the Phone Dialer app. The same list of recent calls, which we name as Call History.

Call History sucks!

Call history is like a Vestigial organ, I don't understand its purpose. It is meant to quicken the process of calling someone. So it is like a quick look up list of your important contacts. 15 years back, with not much processing power in a phone, Call history was the best way to imagine this. But in today's advanced Multi-core processor phones era, Call History is pretty much useless. It is filled with your Pizza delivery, Customer Care and other senseless numbers you've dialed recently.

We were fed up.

So, we thought we will create a dialapp which will magically show the people you want to call at any give context. It is powered by friday (of course). It will learn from your calling patterns, location, time, recent social interactions and many other things (secret sauce) to populate a list of people whom it thinks you will call (most probably).

We have found that (from our private beta), 65% of times the person you want to call is within the first page, and 84% times he is in the first two pages. (a page = 5 contacts).

Think about the amount of time it can save in your daily life. If you make 25 calls a day and each time contact searching takes 30 seconds, we bring it down by 26 seconds. So that is around 11 mins a day.

So in a month we give you an additional 5.5 hours. You can catch up a full season of Sherlock with that time and you will still have an hour left!

De-x-etra?

It has been a hectic few weeks for us here in Dexetra. That is why we didn't have any new blog entries. That said, now we have great news to share with you. Our Android App SpeedSense has been a major hit, and we have got rave reviews from users. We thank them for their responses and suggestions. Most of users felt that SpeedSense needed a HUD mode as well. So we have been working on it for the past few weeks. So, we will be pushing an update to our existing SpeedSense app which adds a HUD mode. But we are not stopping here. We are also launching a more sophisticated, customizable SpeedSense application for the Pro users. It features different HUD themes, and you can also save/send a detailed speed log as a spreadsheet, which includes your location, speed, altitude and other information. You can virtually save the whole trip data and send it your mail.

The Pro version will be launched along with the updated version of SpeedSense.

HUD Mode

The HUD mode would more convenient if you are actually driving and you just want to see the vital numbers, with your phone docked near your dashboard. So instead of the analog dial, we use text, but still maintaining the aesthetics and the beauty of SpeedSense. Here are the screenshots of few of the HUD themes we have in SpeedSense Pro.

SpeedLog Another great feature that we add to SpeedSense is the ability to save logs. By just enabling Speedlogging from the settings, you can save a detailed log about your traveling. This includes the location, Altitude and the Speed, against time. You can, at any time send this log from the application to your mail, as a spreadsheet (.csv) and do extensive data mining from this! Take a look at one of our SpeedLogs which we have mined into MS Excel.

This gives lot of interesting options and ways to use SpeedSense Pro.

You can use it to log a complete route/ trip map including timestamps, altitudes and location information.

You can use it record your daily( weekly/monthly etc) traveling patterns.

Find your average, top speeds and other stuff just by mining the extensive data.

We hope SpeedSense would a great utility for anybody who travels/likes to travel. We are excited by your responses and this keeps us motivated to improve it more and more. 

SpeedSense for iPhone, Blackberry

After the overwhelming response from users, we are also launching SpeedSense for iPhone and Blackberry. Hope this would open up the app. to more users and segments. Keep a watch on this space to know about the launch dates.

New Post has been published on http://projectopenhand.biz/sequoia-and-qualcomm-put-1-million-into-dexetra-makers-of-friday-the-search-engine-for-your-life/1437

Sequoia And Qualcomm Put $1 Million+ Into Dexetra, Makers Of Friday, The Search Engine For Your Life

Dexetra, the makers of Friday, a contextual personal search application for Android, has raised a Series A round of funding. The investment comes from Sequoia Capital (India) and Qualcomm Ventures, and is in the “millions” (between $ 1 and $ 2 million). The company won’t disclose the final amount because there’s still a possibility that new investors will be joining the round at a later date.

The funding comes at a time when there’s a shift underway in the search industry as a whole. Users are beginning to interact with search in new ways, such as through voice search and personal assistants, for example, and search itself is becoming more personalized and predictive. Google has been toying with experimental features where Gmail data is included in users’ search results and social signals are integrated via Google+. Plus, the personalized and automated Google Now feature pops up local info, weather, appointments, traffic alerts, and more on devices running the latest version of the Android OS.

Friday, meanwhile, is similar in that it too is built on top of users’ own, personal data and activity. The app, for those unfamiliar, publicly debuted last July (on a Friday!) offering what could be summed up as “a search engine for your life.” Friday, which is part personal assistant, part search engine, and part “quantified self” data keeper, keeps a history of your communications, including calls, text messages, emails and more, and combines those with other events your phone is able to record, such as photos snapped and battery drains, and then it mashes it all together with data from third-party services, like Facebook and Foursquare.

On top of all this personal data, users can also install mini applications called “applets,” which offer single use cases to help make sense of the data Friday collects. One of the first applets to launch was called Trails, a travel diary that shows your travels plotted on a map. In a about a week, CEO Narayan Babu tells me that we’ll finally see another applet make its debut – this one will be for photo search. Another music-focused applet will follow in around a month. The company also has an alternative phone dialer app in development, which shows you not a recent call log, but a list of the people you are most likely going to call based on your current context. (However, three big Android OEMs are interested in that one, and have made offers, so its launch is being delayed for now.)

Dexetra also has a slightly older app, the Siri-like Android app called Iris, but the company now thinks it will sunset Iris and fold its users into Friday going forward. The two apps were more tightly integrated this fall, but Iris’ functionality could just be incorporated into Friday in the future, if need be.

Something that’s a bit surprising about the funding news is that Friday is not the kind of hugely popular application that would normally see a big investment – it doesn’t have built-in virality because of the sensitive, personal data it stores. That makes word-of-mouth growth more challenging. Babu tells me that the app has just 120,000 users currently on Android. However, those users have generated a lot of files (files being anything from a photo snapped to a check-in or song played and more). To date, 130 million of these “files” have been recorded, he says.

Going forward, the plan is to now work with Qualcomm to put Friday on its reference devices, where the app will also be integrated with Qualcomm’s AllJoyn, the company’s experimental development framework that enables ad hoc, proximity-based communication between mobile devices.

New Post has been published on http://projectopenhand.biz/sequoia-and-qualcomm-put-1-million-into-dexetra-makers-of-friday-the-search-engine-for-your-life-2/1439

Sequoia And Qualcomm Put $1 Million+ Into Dexetra, Makers Of Friday, The Search Engine For Your Life

Dexetra, the makers of Friday, a contextual personal search application for Android, has raised a Series A round of funding. The investment comes from Sequoia Capital (India) and Qualcomm Ventures, and is in the “millions” (between $ 1 and $ 2 million). The company won’t disclose the final amount because there’s still a possibility that new investors will be joining the round at a later date.

The funding comes at a time when there’s a shift underway in the search industry as a whole. Users are beginning to interact with search in new ways, such as through voice search and personal assistants, for example, and search itself is becoming more personalized and predictive. Google has been toying with experimental features where Gmail data is included in users’ search results and social signals are integrated via Google+. Plus, the personalized and automated Google Now feature pops up local info, weather, appointments, traffic alerts, and more on devices running the latest version of the Android OS.

Friday, meanwhile, is similar in that it too is built on top of users’ own, personal data and activity. The app, for those unfamiliar, publicly debuted last July (on a Friday!) offering what could be summed up as “a search engine for your life.” Friday, which is part personal assistant, part search engine, and part “quantified self” data keeper, keeps a history of your communications, including calls, text messages, emails and more, and combines those with other events your phone is able to record, such as photos snapped and battery drains, and then it mashes it all together with data from third-party services, like Facebook and Foursquare.

On top of all this personal data, users can also install mini applications called “applets,” which offer single use cases to help make sense of the data Friday collects. One of the first applets to launch was called Trails, a travel diary that shows your travels plotted on a map. In a about a week, CEO Narayan Babu tells me that we’ll finally see another applet make its debut – this one will be for photo search. Another music-focused applet will follow in around a month. The company also has an alternative phone dialer app in development, which shows you not a recent call log, but a list of the people you are most likely going to call based on your current context. (However, three big Android OEMs are interested in that one, and have made offers, so its launch is being delayed for now.)

Dexetra also has a slightly older app, the Siri-like Android app called Iris, but the company now thinks it will sunset Iris and fold its users into Friday going forward. The two apps were more tightly integrated this fall, but Iris’ functionality could just be incorporated into Friday in the future, if need be.

Something that’s a bit surprising about the funding news is that Friday is not the kind of hugely popular application that would normally see a big investment – it doesn’t have built-in virality because of the sensitive, personal data it stores. That makes word-of-mouth growth more challenging. Babu tells me that the app has just 120,000 users currently on Android. However, those users have generated a lot of files (files being anything from a photo snapped to a check-in or song played and more). To date, 130 million of these “files” have been recorded, he says.

Going forward, the plan is to now work with Qualcomm to put Friday on its reference devices, where the app will also be integrated with Qualcomm’s AllJoyn, the company’s experimental development framework that enables ad hoc, proximity-based communication between mobile devices.