March 2019 Summaries

The article discusses six main UX expectations affecting consumer choices in bet-waging platforms, focusing on engineering and infrastructure to prevent customer churn. These expectations include speed, live synchronization, constant connectivity, 0% downtime (100% uptime), consistent message ordering, and data integrity independent of traffic. The article highlights the importance of efficient technologies delivering a seamless experience for mobile users following live sports and betting on games. It emphasizes that minimizing latency, ensuring synchronization across screens, maintaining constant connectivity, providing 100% uptime, delivering consistent message ordering, and preserving data integrity are crucial to customer satisfaction and retention in the sports-data industry.

In February, Ably Push Notifications graduated from beta to general availability, allowing developers to easily integrate native mobile push notifications into their applications through a unified API. The platform supports iOS and Android push notifications, with the ability to send them over existing channels or directly to individual devices using the Ably REST Publishing API. Ably uses Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) for iOS and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM/GCM) for Android to deliver messages reliably and instantly. The platform also offers experimental support for Web Push notifications. Ably Push Notifications enable engaging with mobile users in a more relevant, useful, and effective manner. Examples of how customers are using Ably Push Notifications include e-commerce transaction notifications, alerts based on specific triggers, mobile gaming push notifications, location-based push notifications, and launching background processes in a battery-efficient way. Notifications can be delivered over channels or directly to individual devices. The platform supports publishing native push notifications to devices identified by their unique device ID, assigned clientId, or recipient details of the native push transport such as `registrationToken` for FCM and `deviceToken` for APNs. Devices must be registered with APNs (for iOS) and FCM (for Android) to receive native push notifications. Ably Push Notifications are supported on all client library SDKs except .NET and GO, which will be updated soon. The platform also offers an experimental Web Push feature for browser notifications.

The Future of Sports Data report by Ably Realtime and OnePulse reveals that the sports data industry is undergoing a transformation driven by digital sports fans and new data-sharing technology. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular for watching sports, with streaming audiences and those watching across multiple devices rising 20%. This shift from discontinuous to continuous experience of sports has led to an increase in demand for real-time, high-quality data. The report highlights the need for data providers to improve their services to meet these expectations, focusing on speed, reliability, synchronization, connectivity, and elasticity. Additionally, innovative use of available data will be crucial for organizations to stay ahead in this rapidly changing landscape.