FriendCaller Blog

Back in April Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted taking FriendCaller along with it. In August we mentioned in our blog about AWS facing a serious outage again, and that was quite a puff for numerous startups, including FriendCaller, and so millions of users. Obviously, managing billion of calls are totally not possible without cloud hosting. Especially when it comes to our Video Calling, it is entirely dependent on peer-to-peer technology.

More or less same problem is being faced by the BlackBerry users since Monday. BlackBerry users have been left furious after their internet service crashed Monday morning, with outages touching subscribers in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Communications and social networking tools, including the email,Internet, Twitter, BlackBerry Messenger, and Facebook, were unable to process data from around 11am and the problem persists. Outage is reported to spread across Brazil, Chile and Argentina on Tuesday being the latest headache for the Canadian based Research in Motion (RIM).

RIM assured later on Monday that all services had been restored to users; however the root cause of the problem was still unknown. It took nearly 20 hours to restore the services, but within a few hours after restoration, the services collapsed again; causing problems to the users, many of whom solely rely on it for their business communications.

‘We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience it has caused’, said RIM in an email statement.

No need to mention RIM’s BlackBerry services has long been awarded by executives and politicians who rely on its security parameters to deliver email and other messaging to mobile personnel. “The current situation with the BlackBerry outages couldn’t come at a worse time for RIM, following some harsh criticism in recent months,” Informa Telecoms & Media analyst, Malik Saadi, said in a statement. RIM has struggled this year with fewer sales of the BlackBerry against rivals like Apple’s iPhone, various models from HTC, and other handsets powered by Google’s Android OS.

In the August blog we mentioned that as far as RIM’s BlackBerry is concerned, we noticed progressive trends that have made us go for creating a FriendCaller App for BlackBerry, therefore we certainly don’t want this outage to affect us in future. We hope RIM gets success in resolving the problem at their latest.

We at C2Call are big fans of Amazon web services. To manage millions of users and millions of calls would not have been possible without cloud hosting. Our Video calling launch was very well received and AWS took thousands of additional calls without any performance issues. Our Video calling service is based on our Peer-to-peer technology but there are cases with additional server load for the initial call phase where we establish the P2P connection and for the multi party Video conferencing that we will launch soon.

Status History of AWS EU-West-1

Having said this, it it the second time we have been hit hard by Amazon services outages and I watch the AWS service dashboard with the same fear as the stock market. One shock after another. First Amazon EC2 in Ireland went down and took our corporate email server with it. They manage to damage the database as well…This was Sunday and Amazon is still working on the recovery. Ouch! The updates provided by Amazon do not provide an easy reading, same as our first outage. Is basically the same story “We were prepared but it did not work when put to the test“

Status History of AWS 8th August

Then, ECS on North Virgina went down. Our quality management tool picked this up before Amazon noticed and we can not loose North Virginia as most of our US traffic is managed from there. Luckily, AWS could recover before we had to shift the instances across the country to California. This time the service was impacted only for 15 minutes or so but for me, the incidents took the concept of “elastic” to another test and there is no clear winner.

I really hope Amazon goes back and works on its back up solutions, It is a great service but these interruptions that can last for days are serious.

Android here, Android there, everyone is talking about Android. From small electronics boutiques to large big box retailers, it seems that you can purchase an Android phone virtually anywhere. During its much publicized developer conference, I/O, Google announced that on average, 400,000 new Android devices are sold to the customers daily. Now, this is truly impressive.

We must, however, take a moment to ponder the reality in the great disparities between the high-end smart phone devices and the low-priced Android devices. Essentially, Android is the mobile OS for the masses. Gartner’s recent, and widely cited report on the mobile devices market, found that Android now dominates with 36% market share, twice that of Apple’s iOS.

For a long time, it seemed as if every day, a new Android mobile phone was being announced. Now it is the Android tablet that is making its debut virtually everywhere. HTC, Acer, Panasonic, Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, Motorola, RIM and many other major manufacturers are bringing Android-based tablets to market. Huawei just introduced a new Android tablet, dubbed the MediaPad, the first 7-inch tablet supporting Android 3.2. Even Amazon has expressed interest in entering the Android tablet market, which makes sense, because it already has its own app store for Android apps.

This level of competition among Android tablet manufacturers is a good thing for consumers, and has resulted in the availability of a wide range of devices designed to meet virtually any unique style or preferences. As an added bonus for consumers, the prices of the Android tablets will undoubtedly fall quickly, due to this increased competition and widespread availability.

FriendCaller’s Android VoIP app is consistently being updated to meet the requirements of these new devices. We have been paying particular attention to the needs of the various Android tablets, and thus have optimized the app to align with the wide selection of features that are currently available.

Our latest version has a completely new audio engine that has been substantially improved from Android 2.3, and now provides echo cancellation and noise reduction. Additionally, our social features are constantly being optimized, supporting an improved friend finder, and now friend suggestions.

Do you already have FriendCaller on your Android device? Get the update! If not, download the app today! We offer an easy to follow start-up guide for all new FriendCaller users.

If you have already installed and tested the new version, let us know if you used it on your Android tablet. We welcome your feedback!

Our Android App has once again been updated after your encouraging feedback and suggestion. It now waits with great features for you to download.

With the launch of the new Amazon AppStore, and the Google Android Marketplace (web version), we have determined that our Android application is becoming popular quite rapidly, and is receiving high number of daily downloads, hence, we have once again worked out everything on the app to create a more interactive experience for you.

In addition to the numerous improvements made to the user interface and the optimization of various functions, there are a few features that require an honorable mention.

First, of course, the new awesome design. Yes, the Android app also shines with the new FriendCaller deep soothing colors. Besides the interface, the Facebook integration has gotten further improved and now pictures of friends are shown in the contact detail view. This does only work for friends who also have a Facebook account with picture, but also for friends who doesn’t. You can now see pictures of your friends who are already connected with Facebook connect, and a standard picture of those who are not. This makes easy for you to find your friends in the contact list view and click them to call instantly.

In past, we have pointed out on several occasions in our blog posts, that we will also bring some new exciting features to our Android app just like our famous iPhone application have. Therefore, it was finally a time to integrate the well-known Offer Wall, which gives you the option to earn free credits by simply downloading other free Android apps.

Furthermore, another major new change, which you will surely experience in the new Android version is the new contact list. Friends and Contacts are now fully merged in to a single easy to access contact list. The old contacts list of separate friends and contacts does not exists anymore. Also the speed dial feature is now fully available. Now a slider pops up from the bottom showing all the phone numbers from a contact you tapped on before.
Not to forget, since there is always a room for more improvement, we are delighted to present you with the new contact management feature, in which if you tap and hold on a particular contact for some time, a dialog will pop up with three of the following choices:

1. View details → opens the detail view for the selected contact
2. Arrange in groups → will sort the contacts by their online status
3. Arrange alphabetically → will sort the contacts in an alphabetic order

Summarizing, you will definitely discover many more new things besides some of the major ones mentioned above. So download or update your Android with the new FriendCaller app for Android and experience the best VoIP calling app in the market. Now you can make FREE calls via voice over IP to landline and mobiles worldwide, by using the Offer Wall to earn free credits.