Just beat it.

As we celebrated the arrival of 2011, we can’t help but look back and reflect on how far we’ve come.

It’s been just over 19 months since we launched sgBEAT in public beta, and our growth has simply been phenomenal!  We’d like to thank all our fans for their support!

We’re really excited to share some fun statistics here at the start of the New Year:

General Stats
Total Users: >30,000
Total SMS Exchanged: >5,300,000
Total Beats Received: >36,000,000
Total Page Views: >2,000,000

Lens, Brands and Friends
Total Visual Beats Posted: >3,600
Total Visual Beat Impressions: >89,000
Total Brands Published: >40
Total Brands Impressions: >14,000
Total Brands SMS Impressions: >700,000
Total Friends Impressions: >1,300,000

It’s been fun for us watching these numbers increase, and we hope you found it interesting too!

Here’s to a great 2011 and beyond!

Yours,

The sgBEAT Team

We’re pleased to announce that we’re rolling out the sgBEAT Brands platform this month, and for every day in August from today, we’ll be announcing a new participating store to all of you.

sgBEAT Brands is a membership platform and it’s just one way we hope to create more value to our users for signing up with our service. You’ll be able to find the list of participating online stores here, and basically all you have to do at each site is quote your sgBEAT username, ‘sgBEAT’ or the designated coupon code to enjoy 5% off all your purchases.

If you have an online store and would like to be a part of this platform, just drop us an email at brands@sgBEAT.com with your application! Any other inquiries can be directed to this email address as well.

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team

For a while now, we’ve been slowly giving access to Beatific to our top users, and today we’re really happy to announce that all Silver users will be able to use this premium gateway.

Beatific is better than SMS as it is more reliable, with two different modems using the same number on two continents across the globe. If either gateway were to go down due to Internet connectivity or power issues, the system automatically failovers to the other gateway allowing seamless and continuous delivery of your SMS.

If you’re a Silver user, you’ll be able to find the number of Beatific on your home page just below the banner. If you’re not, it’s not at all hard to be one!

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team

P.S. The gateway name was thought up by one of our Rockstars, @RagnarokTMDL!

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then a thousand pictures tell a story.

sgBEAT Lens is that story, not of us, but of the thousands of users who use sgBEAT every day. We’ve curated more than two thousand photographs over the past year, and we expect this gallery to grow as hundreds more are contributed every month. Feel free to browse through this amazing collection at your own time.

Sharing photographs on sgBEAT is easy. Email your MMS to mms@sgBEAT.com or upload your images from the site now!

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team

Over the last few months, sgBEAT has had a couple of major events with breaking news and we’d like to make sure you’re always up to date.

In March, our one of our SMS gateways (SMS+) was terminated, while more recently, we celebrated our first year in Beta. The difficult part about breaking these news, however, was letting you know. We posted the announcements on the sgBEAT home page and on the various social networks we’ve connected you to, but there was limited reach since we didn’t automatically link your accounts when you joined.

We’ve decided not to compromise any longer on communication with you, our loyal existing users, which is why you’ll find yourself following sgBEAT on Twitter and Plurk.

We believe this channel is necessary for us to let you know any important news regarding the service. If you look at our tweet history, we post announcements only occasionally (barely a couple or so week), so don’t worry, we won’t be spamming you with random chatter.

We strongly urge that you continue following us to stay as up-to-date as possible, and in reward, get first dips to our freebies.

We promise. (:

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team

P.S. This was done via OAuth using the Twitter API. We did not at any time log into your account. sgBEAT treats user privacy very seriously.

P.P.S. Like us on Facebook here too!

P.P.P.S If you’d like us to follow you back, drop us a line @sgBEAT and we’d gladly do so! 

P.P.P.P.S. Quick tip: for Twitter usernames on sgBEAT, use ‘@@username’ instead!

Thank you all for your reblogs, RTs and birthday wishes! We really appreciate your support and we hope you enjoyed your free Bronze account upgrades too.

[[ Stronger ]]

We’d like to conclude our 5-part series reflecting on our past year with this final entry on our increased reliability. Yep, hopefully, through these few posts, you’ll have more insight as to why sgBEAT is now Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

In this new installment, we’d like to share how we’ve made our service ‘stronger’ and more resilient to downtime.

Increased reliability.

We’ve beefed up all our gateways (SMS, MMS and Twitter/Facebook/Plurk) with a message queue system. This feature allows us to reliably queue your SMSes or tweets for later delivery even when portions of our server or the Twitter website is down. You don’t have to fear losing any of the beats you send (at least in the areas within our control).

A more reliable system:

Premium gateway.

We’ve added a new premium SMS gateway for our loyal power users. Aptly named Beatific by one of our Rockstars, this premium gateway consists of two different modems with the same number on two continents across the globe. If either gateway were to go down due to internet connectivity or power issues, the system automatically failovers to the other gateway allowing seamless and continuous delivery of your SMSes. (Note: This premium gateway is only available for our Rockstars right now. Be one today!)

The location of our gateways:

View sgBEAT Gateways in a larger map

Lots of monitoring.

Tons of monitoring have been added to our service this milestone. We now are completely aware of our services’ uptime and are automatically alerted by email if anything goes down so we can start repairs immediately. Most of you would also have received SMS alerts when we had gateway outages. We also keep our Status page updated in real-time about the state of our system. Bookmark that page today!

Status page that shows you sgBEAT’s health:

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team

P.S. As always, do let us know how we can improve through our feedback channels at support@sgbeat.com and our Facebook and Twitter pages.

P.P.S Stay tuned for sgBEAT v0.6!

sgBEAT was launched in public beta exactly a year ago, and back then we were just a couple of guys with a server and two gateways. Well, today we’re still the same few people with just a little more hardware, and thousands of people in Singapore use something we’ve built on a daily basis to share personal moments in their lives with their friends and the world.

Between 365 days ago and today, YOU have been the difference.

sgBEAT turns one on this day, and it really would not have been possible without every one of you. We don’t have a candle or a cake, but we’d like to offer you something for celebrating this wonderful day with us.

Under ‘Edit Profile’, just type in the promotional code ‘sgBEAT365’ at the bottom of the page to enjoy an instant Bronze account! This will let you receive SMS replies from sgBEAT and Twitter after you’ve followed step 3 here.

It’s been a truly fantastic year for all of us, and we’re looking forward to many more with you.

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team

P.S. Spread the love and sing us a birthday song if you’d like! (:

This entry is fourth in a 5-part series reflecting on our past year.

[[ Faster ]]

Our previous posts touched on how we work harder, and better our service.

This entry is third in a 5-part series reflecting on our past year.

In this post, we’d also like to let you know how we’ve tried to make our service faster, for your benefit. We don’t sit idle when it comes to our site’s performance. Nope, we constantly instrument, measure, analyse and improve. And all this, completely for free! We haven’t charged a single cent from any of you, and will continue to keep all these basics free.

Reduced SMS gateway lag.

We started to hit a bottleneck in our SMS processing pipeline resulting in a period of huge delays as SMSes got clogged up (yep it caused that one incident we’re really sorry about). But we’ve fixed that and made our SMS processing 3x faster, reducing lag to just several seconds. As you can see, we treat SMS lag very seriously, and even track each of your telco’s lag separately. You can see both the number of SMSes we receive from each telco and their corresponding lag time in log seconds. (Haha, yes, you can see we were very original in choosing colours for each telco! :P)

The amount of lag we’ve reduced:

Faster website.

We’ve done a whole bunch of database and server upgrades in order to get our site way faster and stabler than before. If you don’t believe us, check out these 3rd-party response time graphs courtesy of Pingdom! We’ve still got a way to go, and have yet to unleash our secret weapon which will make us at least another 3x faster. We’ll do that we start allowing access to archived beats and when we need more juice!

How much faster we’ve made the site:

Faster Twitter imports.

Twitter imports used to take days as our number of users exploded and you wouldn’t receive any SMSes until a long while later, when it was probably useless. Now, we’ve sped up our Twitter importers such that your imported tweets take on average 20-30 minutes for the our most active users. Rockstars? You get them in mere minutes, often under three.

Receive incoming tweets in near real-time, faster than before:

Existing members, if you’re not already at the Silver perks level, or one of our Rockstars, you should upgrade yourself now!

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team

[[ Better ]]

We’ve shared how we work hard to improve our service.  We also strive to serve you better—offering you better features, better usability, better service, and better ways for you to express yourself in your beats.  Don’t just take our word for it though!  We’d like to show you what we have added for version 0.5 of sgBEAT.

This entry is second in a 5-part series reflecting on our past year.

Richer Links to Twitter/Facebook/Plurk.

We’ve enhanced our links to these external services by adding MMS support, maps, directed beats and qualifiers. ‘Nuff said, I guess pictures speak a thousand words (no pun intended :P).  Check out what happens when you send an MMS to sgBEAT with 3 accounts linked!

Settings that reflect your linked social networks:

Your MMS update on Twitter:

Your MMS update on Plurk:

Your MMS update on Facebook:

Beat Roulette.

With all the hype about Chatroulette and Omegle, we decided to see how fast we could come up with a similar anonymous chat service for you guys using SMS. Voila, Beat Roulette was born within a week, quickly growing to over 180 users, with over 1200 pairings made and over 16000 anonymous beats sent! Stay tuned for a Beat Roulette v2.0 as we incorporate new ideas and feedback to improve this service.  

The Beat Roulette poster:

More outgoing SMS.

In this past year, we’ve delivered more than 220,000 beats and tweets via SMS to your phones ! We’re also prototyping new innovative ways to get more SMSes to your phone for free (Rockstars, you’ve seen some of this already), so you never have to worry about missing out on anything happening while on the go. Wait for the news once we enable it for all.  

Many existing features.

Oh, yes, if this is your first time reading about sgBEAT, all these features above were introduced in v0.5. They are in addition to what we already have had in our previous 4 milestones: Facebook/Plurk/Twitter links, visual MMS beats, appending your location in map beats, poll beats, Chinese language beats, trending topics, etc.  

Location beats to show where you are:

Poll beats to get opinions from the community:

Visual beats to share what you see:

Trends so you know what people are talking about:

Don’t believe us? Sign up for sgBEAT yourself and give it a spin!

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team

P.S.  Here’s a sneak peak at what’s coming soon.

• Link your Google Buzz account
• Facebook updates to your phone (“reverse Facebook link”)
• Plurk updates to your phone (“reverse Plurk link”)
• Re-enabling our MMS to number without telco lag

Looking back on this past year, it’s quite amazing to see how far we’ve come. If you’ve been with us since the beginning, I’m sure you’d have noticed that we’re always trying to find ways to improve the service. We’re not just contented to sit back and let the service run, but we love exploring new options and ideas constantly. In fact, we pretty much develop by Daft Punk’s ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” That’s kinda our team mantra. :P

[[ Harder ]]

This entry is one of a 5-part series reflecting on our past year, and in particular, the work in sgBEAT version 0.5.

Site Redesign. 

We rolled out a site-wide upgrade as part of this version. New architecture, new looks, and better usability. Let’s take a walk down memory lane and check out how our site used to look vs. what you can see now at http://sgBEAT.com. If you haven’t signed up yet, check out also our enhanced interface for better usability. 

The evolution of our interface:

Rockstars.

We recognised our elite power users by letting them call the shots for new features we add. In return, we give them access to all our premium services and the latest features for free, and award them a pretty badge! Anyone can be an sgBEAT Rockstar as long as you pledge to help us out. 

Explosive Scale.

We’ve grown to more than 16,000 users within this short year, altogether contributing more than 10 million beats—1.6 million of which were by SMS. Yep, thanks to all our users, we’ve made sure that Singaporean voices—yep, all your “thoughts, rants and ideas”—are heard globally. Check out some of our cool users! Spot yourself in there?

sgBEAT’s growth to date:

A mosaic of our users:

We hope you enjoyed the first part of our series. Stay tuned for the next update!

Yours,
The sgBEAT Team