MOBILUCK.COM: SOCIAL NETWORK FOR GEOLOCALIZED MOBILE PHONE

In May 2007 I have joined the startup MobiLuck.com as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This startup is focused on geolocalized social network for mobile phones.

Closer to my friends: geolocalization and social networking.

Users are geolocalized automatically so that they benefit from advanced features such as find the nearest indian restaurant or meet handsome people close to them. Users receive SMS alerts when their friends come close.

Our technology is carrier-independent as we have developed an original and the service works worldwide as it is available in more than 10 languages including chinese, arabic and hebrew.

Traffic explosion: I.2M users & 35M pages/month

This LBS friends finder service has attracted more than 1.2 million users (June 2009) since its launch in August 2007.

Currently the service recruits an average of 2K to 8K users per day as per the current trend.

By end of Q2 2009 we saw our traffic doubling every 3 months which hit 35 millions pages per month!

Technical environment

Server side: clusterization of the application

The server-side development is based on LAMP: Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP.
The service is distributed throughout a cluster of servers (ranging from duo core 2 with 4Gb of ram to octo-core with 16Gb or RAM).

Each box is given a role -- and only one every time is possible:

• front server: run the Web server (Apache2)
• back server: run a mySQL instance

In order to face the traffic explosion we have, I recently clusterized mySQL itself and switch to a Master/slave replication on two octo-core servers. I migrated to mySQL 5.1 from 5.0.

Client-side: iPhone and Facebook

- Client-side development in xHTML and xHTML Mobile
- iPhone development in Objective-C/Cocoa: geolocalisation API, networking and communication with the back-office
- Facebook app development: enable facebook user to run mobiluck from within Facebook

Web-services

We interface with many third-party through web services: Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, Maporama, SMS brokers, advertising agency, cartography, geocoding & reverse geocoding, etc.

Advertising platform and service wide monitoring

The business model relies on ad distribution based on users’ profile and localization. We integrate miscellaneous advertising agencies and distribute ads on a per country or per profile basis in order to maximize our revenues.

Our system embeds an home brew monitoring system and statistics tracker that enable us to conduct the business and take decisions in an agile way.