Thanks For A Great Year
Viigo has just completed a record breaking year, and it’s largely thanks to you.
In 2009, millions of you downloaded Viigo for the first time … in fact, this year alone, we experienced more than 3 times the number of downloads than we’d seen cumulatively across the entire 4 year lifetime of the company.
Once people started to play with Viigo, they dove right in, driving well over 1 billion impressions across hundreds of thousands of discrete feeds (a great example of the phenomenon of the long tail).
Our servers seemed constantly under ever increasing pressure, but held up very well thanks to the foresight and hard work of our Server team. In fact, our new server architecture, which was rolled out recently and which will power all future clients, will help us deliver significantly more users per unit of infrastructure than ever before, in addition to delivering much faster overall performance. This is important as we expect growth to continue to accelerate in 2010 as rates of smartphone adoption increase, as additional partners pre-load Viigo on their devices, and as we expand to new smartphone platforms for the first time.
I am happy to say that downloads and user activity haven’t been the only bright spots however. We delivered record year over year revenue growth this year, and that growth continued to accelerate towards the end of the year thanks to a record month in December and a record quarter in Q4 across all measures (record bookings, record advertising revenue, record eCPM rates and most exciting perhaps, record enterprise revenue).
What’s in store for 2010? Well, it all starts with a fundamental focus on the product. As many of you have noticed, we’ve had fewer product and service releases recently (down from the blistering pace set early in the year by our Handset and Services teams). This is quite deliberate. Based on your feedback, we knew we had lots of work to do. Furthermore, as we looked at the rapid changes occurring in the smartphone marketplace we decided it was time to make some fundamental changes to our product architecture in order to provide us with a winning platform for the future. In fact, over the past few months, we’ve had a number of important R&D projects underway that will help to change the face of Viigo as you know it.
We promise you that the wait will be worthwhile … our target is for lighter weight, faster clients … augmented by new server-side intelligence … delivered across a wider variety of smartphone platforms … and all designed to provide you with the best way of discovering and consuming content on mobile devices.
Of course none of this happens without the wonderful team here at Viigo … and my profound thanks goes out to them for all their hard work. They’re an amazing group of people to work with.
Wishing you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
Mark Ruddock
CEO Viigo
p.s. I’m happy to connect on Twitter any time … you can find me at @RuddockMH … corporate announcements can be found at @Viigo