Layer is the open communications Layer for the Internet. We make it easy for developers to add rich messaging, voice and video to any application. We handle all of the hard parts so developers can focus on building an excellent user experience for their customers. The Layer team is full of developers and designers passionate about enabling people to communicate better across all of the products they use.
about the company
Founders
Tomaz is the CEO & co-founder of Layer. He's passionate about blending web, mobile and telephony into innovative products; while hiding the complexities behind simple interfaces.Before Layer, Tomaz was founder of vox.io. Previously, Tomaz was the main creative at MarandLab, a division of Marand, based in Ljubljana, where he used to contribute in form of ideas and product innovation. His work at Marand has been rewarded in Slovenia and abroad.Tomaz is also the founding organizer of MobileMonday Slovenia, a monthly series of mobile related events.
As an early stage product and markets guy, Ron launched a number of highly innovative companies, including Grand Central/Google Voice, OpenDNS, Scout Labs and Swivel as managing director of Minor Ventures. As founder of MkII Ventures, Ron cofounded Prism Skylabs which is working to brings physical spaces online, creating new places for people and businesses to understand and engage each other.
Layer in the press
Now, with the communication platform Layer, things have gotten much easier for many — in fact, the company reports that it’s now integrated into nearly 500 live applications. Some companies already using Layer include GoButler, Hinge, Udacity, Forbes, and Trunk Club. If there’s anything that Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Operator have shown, it’s that we’re in an era of conversational commerce. Facebook is taking this approach with its Messenger platform and has brought on board retail companies like Everlane and Zulily. “The way we’re evolving the product is around things for the core messaging product that would add value on experience.
The report estimates that global investments on C-RAN architecture networks will reach over $7 Billion by the end of 2016. Although Japan and South Korea continue to spearhead commercial C-RAN investments, interest is also growing in other parts of the world. The ongoing 5G race is expected to significantly boost C-RAN investments over the coming years. The author estimates that over $1 Billion of all C-RAN architecture network investments will be directed towards 5G networks by the end of 2020. However, by the end of 2020, we expect that virtualized BBUs will account for over 6% of all C-RAN BBU investments.
As more and more media content gets consumed online, and as businesses rely more and more on cloud services, the need for data center capacity in places that aren’t known as major data center markets, is growing quickly. Vapor’s primary target is the quickly growing edge data center market. We specifically chose to narrow it down to companies we feel are addressing some of the biggest pain points in data center design and management. The startup also has developed a commercial server and rack management software product called Vapor Core and open sourced a portion of it as OpenDCRE, or Open Data Center Runtime Environment. Vapor IOFew companies have attempted to challenge the way people think about data center design as radically as Austin-based Vapor IO, which came out of stealth in March, has.
Why don’t you create a separate IP storage network?”So it’s an IP network only for storage. We basically put an easy button on the IP network and that has been going really well. We’re seeing more and more people move towards IP storage as a complement to what they have. There’s that and then there’s just raw IP storage. IP storage is a great opportunity for us.
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We basically put an easy button on the IP network and that has been going really well. The traditional SAN product is moving well. It’s probably the single biggest reason why a customer who didn’t think about Brocade before thinks Brocade now. If you asked someone three years ago about Brocade in the IP business, they wouldn’t even be sure we were in that market. I think it’s caused a lot of customers to rethink their architectures, because they know they want to get to SDN/NFV.
Indeed, AT&T is looking at ON.Lab’s ONOS SDN controller, which AT&T helped define, for that specific function, Fuetsch says. AT&T is also looking at extending SDN and NFV “down the stack” into Layer 1 functions such as optical transport and access. “So at the CPE, these boxes are extremely flexible, very scalable, they have great economics, and we believe customers are going to want them,” Fuetsch said. Many operators like AT&T are deploying bare metal/white box switches to make their service and operations networks more flexible and scalable. The switches will run a uniform operating system and protocol stack, ostensibly defined and/or developed by AT&T, that will also run in the AT&T cloud for scale and operational simplicity, Fuetsch said.
At this year’s Disrupt NY, previous finalists and winners of Startup Battlefield will once again take the stage. Last year Alfred won Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF. During Disrupt NY next week, 25 startups will take the stage in a bid to win $50,000 and the Startup Battlefield Cup. Trello was a finalist at Disrupt SF 2011 and raised a $10.3 million Series A in the summer of 2014. This year’s Startup Battlefield class is as strong as ever.
“Actively transact” means conducting a sales transaction that results in Simplify Commerce making a deposit to the checking account you have linked to your Simplify Commerce merchant account. *To qualify for this prize, you must apply to become and be approved as a Simplify Commerce merchant by June 30, 2015, and actively transact via the Simplify Commerce gateway. Believe it or not, we’re just a week away from the start of the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon! If you qualify, Simplify Commerce will rebate the 2.85% + 30¢ per transaction processing fee for your first $50,000 in sales through December 31, 2015. Hackaday is keeping its hardware events page up-to-date as they add equipment to the hackathon parts bin.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees virtual reality as a future platform of its own, capable of providing digital experiences in people's daily lives. In other words, making Messenger a platform would be a gamble. And for the same reasons Facebook might turn Messenger into a platform, it could do the same for other apps like WhatsApp or Instagram, he said. The more Facebook broadens its platform for developers, the more that network and its value grow. Even if Facebook doesn't turn Messenger into a platform at F8, it will likely do so in the future, said John Jackson, an IDC analyst focused on mobile business strategies.
Layer supports the ability to send text, voice, photo and video messages, and can be used in either standalone messaging apps, or in apps where messaging is only one of many features, and not the app’s main purpose. Atlas is live today on a dedicated website here, and Layer is also now open to any interested developers. The code for Atlas is open source, and is fully integrated with Layer, making it easier to kickstart the process of integrating messaging into an app. They can change the fonts or colors, or they can simply use Atlas as the basis for building a highly differentiated messaging service of their own. Today, there are just around 1,500 active developers using Layer on a monthly basis.
One startup, called Layer, has built the infrastructure and front-end user interface tools developers need to do just that. The Pop and Imoji apps are examples of live apps using messaging from Layer. With the numbers of people using messaging apps already huge and still growing, many developers are looking for easy ways to build the functionality into their own apps. Atlas provides a set of open-source tools that allows developers to add messaging “as well-designed as iMessage” to any iOS or Android app, the company says. San Francisco-based Layer offers the infrastructure as a hosted service, and the service went into general availability today.
Developers using Sinch can implement free calling, messaging, group messaging, SMS and call termination all within their own app. Rebtel, Sweden’s smaller answer to Skype, has just infused $12 million into a new spun out company called Sinch, aimed at making communications tools accessible to mobile developers for any app. According to Sinch CEO Andreas Bernström, developers only spend a few minutes getting started with Sinch and then they’re ready to roll. For app to app calling and instant messaging, pricing is based on the number of active users and the number of minutes or messages used. For app to phone calling and SMS, the price is based on a per-minute or per-SMS cost.
In exchange, the engineer is likely offered the promise that his or her option shares will one day turn into big money. This thread on Hacker News is excellent at illustrating all of the considerations upon accepting an offer. In cases where a startup is sold within a few years time, there is often acceleration agreements for unvested shares. “Engineer #1″ is frequently granted ownership significantly less than that of the founders. Often difficult to get, the first engineer sets the tone for the rest of the development team.
SAN FRANCISCO — The winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt startup battlefield is Layer. Layer has raised $1.5 million from MkII Ventures, SV Angel, Pacific Partners, Data Collective, Promus Ventures, Anthem Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, CrunchFund, and others. “We offer the only wireless power tech that can offer 1 watt of power and span an entire household, powering multiple devices,” Zeine said. Layer is an “open communications layer for the Internet.” The technology makes it easier to build messaging, voice, and video into applications in minutes. Dryft has raised $500,000 and is based in Menlo Park, Calif.SoilIQSoilIQ wants to change the way the world grows food.
The Aruba 7200 Series with new Aruba AppRF technology is the only wireless LAN platform with the integrated application intelligence and controls to optimize application delivery. Bangalore: Aruba Networks announced a new wireless LAN platform that addresses the explosion of mobile applications and devices challenging enterprise networks, while dramatically reducing enterprise IT costs. “Aruba is helping these customers address their requirements with a wireless LAN platform that not only delivers improved ‘speeds and feeds’ but offers true insight into and control of application performance. Using a simple dashboard in the controller interface and in Aruba Airwave management software, Aruba AppRF gives IT unprecedented insight into individual user traffic streams for troubleshooting, long term planning and real time prioritization. To accomplish this, Aruba AppRF software, which runs on the 7200 mobility controller, uses Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for Layer 7 insight to identify application traffic.
And now with Nicira, VMware owns a software defined networking (SDN) solution that was designed for heterogeneous hypervisor and cloud environments. In other words, you can create a software-defined datacenter (or part of a datacenter) with VMware if you’re all-in on vSphere virtual machines. If you want to extend workloads to a public cloud, you’ll need to find one that offers VMware platforms and tools. DynamicOps already manages non-VMware hypervisors as well as workloads running on open virtualization platforms in multiple clouds. Following on the heels of a very busy couple of weeks, VMware announced its acquisition of Nicira yesterday.