The engineers at Mobile Commons have been working very hard on our latest release and they’ve done a great job! I just wanted to take a minute to highlight some of the exciting new under-the-hood improvements.

Usage of the Mobile Commons platform has been growing tremendously this year. As with many software applications, as they grow, some parts don’t scale as well as others. This fall, we took a hard look at all the bottlenecks in our software and made some great across the board performance improvements.

Inbox: due to the popularity of mData and mCast, the number of incoming messages in our inboxes has gone through the roof! Unfortunately, that made large inboxes load slowly. With this new release, we have an upgraded database so your inbox will load much faster!
Importing and Exporting CSVs: When we started this business, mobile lists were relatively small. This year we’ve seen the size of mobile lists double, triple, and quintuple due to increased SMS usage by consumers, not to mention full data integration with CRM partners like Convio and GetActive. We’ve sped up the process of importing and exporting CSV files, allowing users to upload 10x larger files and we now process them much more quickly.
Messaging: Part of our secret sauce is how well we are able to handle incoming text messages on a shared shortcode. We’re constantly tweaking our algorithms to ensure that incoming messages are correctly classified. We statistically analyzed a full year’s worth of text messages looking for false positives and other misclassifications. Based on this research, we’re pleased to release the latest version of our text processing algorithms, increasing our lead as the best in the business!
Security: Mobile Commons is built on the fantastic Ruby on Rails framework and we’ve upgraded to the latest version (and all our server software too). While this won’t affect our end-users much, it’s extremely important for us stay very up-to-date with all the latest security patches. Our engineers work really hard to keep your data safe and secure, so we just wanted to mention it.

Finally, we want to thank all of our great customers out there for running such innovative and successful programs and pushing so hard on our technology. You’ve really forced us to work hard and make our products better and better! It’s really exciting for engineers to see their hard work out in the real world, used in all sorts of creative ways they never intended. Never hesitate to let us know other ways we can improve!

Oh, and speaking of algorithms and scaling databases, Mobile Commons is hiring engineers. We’re looking for full time Ruby/Rails developers in NYC. If you think what we’re doing sounds like fun, please drop me a line! I’d love to hear from you.