Our users love the breaking news and sports scores alerts delivered through Imsy. On days, when important soccer and cricket matches are live (which is every day, now that IPL is on), we consistently see doubling of new user sign-ups and usage for these services. However, one complaint that we have often received is that some of the news services probably send too many alerts through the day and it is difficult for users to filter the important ones among all the alerts. The problem was particularly acute in case of world news and soccer news - since there is always so much happening in the world.

We have listened to your feedback and have improved the alerting service.

Now, once you get an alert, you will not get another one for at least half hour. If important news happens during this interval, we will store it and send you the digest along with the next alert after a while, so that you get a chance to absorb all the alerts instead of being bombarded by it.

Further, incoming messages from alerting services will come in silent-mode and will not beep the phone. You will see the alert notification on the phone screen, when you look at it, but sound alert will only be played for messages from friends.

If however, you are a hardcore cricket or soccer fan and cannot wait till the next alert to see the latest score, you can simply send a message to the cricket score or soccer news app and get back the latest score in reply. 

Let us know what you think of the changes. 

Cheers.

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A number of our users in South Africa have requested for regional news and recommended that content from News24 be made available in Imsy. Now, we are enabling just that. Go to Apps section and activate the News24 app

All content and News24 logo are copyrights and trademark of 24.com

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Select multiple recipients, UI improvements and Bug fixes

Happy to announce the release of a new version, v1.02 of the app for Android users. There are some new features, UI improvements and Bug fixes in this version. You can upgrade it from the Android Market.

What's new in this version:

- In Compose screen, you can now select multiple recipients for the message from the list of Contacts.
- On some phones, if the device time was not in sync with local time, there was an issue with the order of messages. Now, all messages should be sorted in the order in which they are sent.
- App does not prompt for re-registration everytime you change SIM on the phone
- Faster scrolling through messages 
- Apps list screen is redesigned
- Other bug fixes and performance improvements

Let us know what you think of the changes. 

Cheers.

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Bug fixes and Performance Improvements

Happy to announce the release of new version, 1.03, of Imsy for Symbian phones. This version mainly offers bugfixes and performance improvements. You can download the latest version from www.imsy.com/s60 right now and it shall be available in Nokia Store (Ovi) soon.

What's new in this version:

- Users on older S60 v3 phones without WLAN support, like N73, N78, N81, E62 had sometimes found that Imsy would not connect even when Internet connectivity is available. That is now fixed. 
- On some phones, if the device time was not in sync with local time, there was an issue with the order of messages. Now, all messages should be sorted in the order in which they are sent.
- Some users had reported issues with display of Hindi news in the Messages screen. This has also been fixed.
- App does not prompt for re-registration everytime you change SIM on the phone

Follow us on Twitter and do let us know what you think of the changes. 

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Attach location to messages, Delivery notice, Profile Photos and more

Two weeks back we released Imsy on Nokia Lumia and other Windows Phones. Users have loved the gorgeous interface and sent lots of praise our way. Thanks. As promised, we are back with an upgrade.

Happy to announce the release of a new version, v0.95.

What's new in this version:

- Now you can attach location to messages 
- Ability to customize your profile photo
- Delivery notice for Sent messages
- Friend "...is typing" notification during Chat
- Ability to turn off Push Notifications from Settings
- Fixed bug that prevented changing default Country during sign-up
- UI improvements and performance enhancements

You can upgrade from the Marketplace now. 

We are working on further improving the user interface and adding some new features too. 

In the meantime, keep sending your feedback.

Cheers.

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More regional language services coming soon

Users in India can now get services in Hindi, starting with breaking news from Dainik Bhaskar - a leading provider of regional news. Go to Apps section and activate the Dainik Bhaskar app

All content and Dainik Bhaskar logo are copyrights and trademark of DB Corp.

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Notification sound based on phone's Profile, bug fixes

One complaint that we got from users is that the new message notification sound in Imsy would give them away in meetings! Even though, there was an option to turn off notification sounds from Settings, users were looking for something simpler - if phone is in Silent mode, Imsy should not beep too, irrespective of the selection in Settings. You have spoken and well, we have listened.

Now, Imsy respects your phone's Profile selection and does not beep in Silent mode. Not just that, even the volume of the beep, when not in Silent mode, depends on how you have personalized the ringing volume in phone Profiles.

There was another weird bug that we found and fixed. Some users were experiencing crashes when Predictive Input mode was selected on N-series and E-series phones.

We are pleased to announce the release of v1.02 of Imsy for Symbian phones with above mentioned features and bug fixes. You can download the latest version from www.imsy.com/s60 right now and it shall be available in Nokia Store (Ovi) soon. 

Follow us on Twitter and do let us know what you think of the changes. 

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Now connect with friends on Nokia Lumia and other WP7 phones

The gorgeous Nokia Lumia 800 is our new love! We just love the phone and the cool Metro UI of Windows Phone 7 (WP7 - Mango). And to make your Amazing Everyday even more amazing, Imsy is now available on WP7 Marketplace. 

Search for Imsy on the Marketplace or download from the link below.

This is version 0.9 of Imsy on WP7 platform - which means, almost all the features of Imsy that you have come to love on Android, Symbian and iPhones are now available on WP7. Features like Auto-suggestion of images to attach to your message, Attaching Location to messages, Customized Profile Photos and adding Emoticons to messages will be available soon. We are working on further improving the user interface and adding some new features too. 

In the meantime, do give it a spin and let us know your feedback.

Cheers.

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We occasionally get emails from developers asking for details on the tech stack behind Imsy. With this blog post, we hope to give a sneak peek of things under the hood and get some more able minds to join us!

At the user device end, Imsy works on Android (Java), iOS (Objective C) and Symbian (C++). We will shortly be adding Windows (Silverlight) and MIDP (Java), with Blackberry (Java again) coming later.

On the backend, the most critical component is the Messaging Gateway, that is responsible for routing and delivery of millions of P2P, Group and apps messages each day. The core of the engine is written in Node.js, which has been hailed as the new Ruby or PHP. At its heart, Node is an evented, non-blocking I/O model - a software architecture that's built not around Threads or data but events. So there is no waiting for one thing to happen before moving on to the next, with the effect that thousands of concurrent connections can be supported all at once. This backend is hosted on load balanced, on-demand instances on Amazon EC2.

On Android and iOS, we use the Push Notification infrastructure provided by Google and Apple. But on Symbian (and soon on MIDP), we use WebSocket. Part of the appeal of a messaging app like Imsy over the traditional SMS is the reliable delivery indicators and speed, where you can even see when your friend is typing! The blazing speed of Node.js and WebSockets let us provide that.

We use MySQL as the database, hosted on Multi-AZ DB instances on Amazon RDS. Since on Imsy, users' messages are stored only temporarily on our system, only till they are delivered, the overall DB size is not much - but the DB performance is absolutely critical in ensuring sub-second delivery. 

Where we find the query response time of MySQL unacceptable, we rely on Redis key-value store for caching. Instances on EC2, working in master/slave mode host the Redis datastore. 

User's profile photos and other images, such as those posted using Twitter Post app inside Imsy, are stored on Amazon S3.

The "apps" inside Imsy - such as breaking news, entertainment, social networking, community chat and contests are built on the RESTful Developer APIs - available to 3rd party developers. Our own developers also use the same APIs to create some of these on-the-fly apps. These are hosted on a separate datacenter and have own load balancers and databases. The language of choice for all apps built by our own team continues to be Node.js - you can say, we just heart Node.js and all its great auxiliary tools like NPM, dnode (for RPC), Knox (for S3), Cron (for scheduling tasks) and many others.

For monitoring the server performance and uptime, we use the fantastic tools forever and monit and the excellent service provided by @PagerDuty. For global SMS Push, to validate user's phone number during registration, we rely on @BulkSMS. And for real-time feed parsing of all the 3rd party news and content, our PubSubHubbub provider of choice is @Superfeedr. Last, but not the least, all the code and version jungle is managed using Git (of course!).

Right now, we are a small team of 4 developers. As we expand our platform coverage to serve an ever increasing community of users and add many new interesting features and apps, we can do with some help, though! If you are a developer well versed with some or any of the above stuff, and excited about joining this party, let's talk. 

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Easy emoticons, better UI and performance improvements

We are pleased to announce the release of v1.01 of Imsy for Symbian phones. You can download the latest version from www.imsy.com/s60 right now and it shall be available in Nokia Store (Ovi) soon. 

What's new in this version:

- Easier way of adding emoticons to messages on N-series and E-series phones
- Better preview of photos and location attachments 
- Fixed bug that caused suggested images to overlap emoticons on some phones
- Performance improvements and other bug fixes  

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In addition to sharing on Facebook and Twitter, you can now use Imsy to share on LinkedIn. 

Go to the "Apps" section inside Imsy and turn on the LinkedIn app. Then click on the Configure button to login on LinkedIn and authorize Imsy to post to LinkedIn. Once done, you will be able to post status and photos anytime simply by sending a message to Share on LinkedIn. 

Below is a sample of how it works.

Simple, ain't it? Follow us on @imsyteam for more updates. And keep sending your suggestions and feedback.

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Send emoticons, new UI, and more...

We got great response for the emoticons support added in v1.0. Today, we are releasing v1.011 of the app for Android users, which adds full support for sending emoticons on Android and some more new features. 

What's new in this version:

- Ability to send emoticons in messages and group messages
- Ability to mute notification sound from Settings
- All new Settings interface
- Faster scrolling through messages 
- Better looking profile pics and photo attachments
- Bug fixes and performance improvements

Upgrade it from the Android Market and as always, let us know what you think of the changes. 

Cheers.

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Soccer news and score alerts on Imsy

Now get breaking news, live scores, match previews and latest club news from the world of soccer in Imsy. Go to Apps section and activate the Goal.com app

Note: All content and Goal.com logo are copyrights and trademark of Goal.com

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Emoticons, new notifications UI, and much more...

We released Imsy exactly three months back, in September. It has been a most exciting quarter. User response has been phenomenal. Hundreds of thousands of users all over the world are using Imsy. Millions of messages are sent each day on Imsy. On Nokia Store (Ovi), Imsy organically became the top downloaded app in it's category. 

We started with p2p messaging over push notifications. In the past 3 months, we added support for unlimited group messaging, ability to post to Facebook and Twitter, location-based Weather, Quotes, personalized Stock alerts, Breaking news and sports alerts, profile photos and many more features. The user interface and performance also improved by miles.

Today, we are releasing v1.0 of the app on iOS (iPhones, iPod Touch), Android (2.2+ compatible phones) and Symbian phones. You can download or upgrade from http://imsy.com

What's new in this version:

- Support for emoticons 
- New, smarter UI for message notifications (Symbian)
- New tabbed interface (iPhone)
- Removed support for sending messages to non-Imsy users, to avoid user confusion about free and charged messages 
- No sound on notifications from messages sent by Apps
- New, more pleasant message notification sound
- Ability to Refresh Contacts manually, to see if new friends have joined Imsy
- Option to recommend Imsy to friends on Facebook
- Several UI improvements
- Bug fixes and performance improvements

So, give it a spin and let us know what you think of the changes. 

Cheers.

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UI improvements, Performance enhancements and Bug fixes 

We are happy to announce the release of a new version, v0.95, of Imsy for Symbian phones. You can download it from http://imsy.com/s60 - it should be available in Ovi store soon.

What's new in this version:

Update: This version is now available in Ovi Store

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Faster, lighter version for Nokia Symbian based phones

Today we are updating Imsy on Symbian platform to v0.94. You can download it from http://imsy.com/s60 - it should be available in Ovi store soon.

What's new in this version:

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On Symbian, Android and iOS platforms

Today we are updating Imsy app on Symbian platform to v0.93. You can download it from http://imsy.com/s60 - it should be available in Ovi store soon.

What's new in this version:

On Android and iOS, v0.93 has been available for some time through the App Store and Market links below. 

As always, send in your comments and feedback on support@imsy.com or @imsyteam

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What's up? Know it with Imsy

One of the most commonly requested "apps" on Imsy is Breaking News and Sports alerts. Today we are releasing just that. Now you can stay on top of news, as it happens, using Imsy. 

News stories from leading sources in the world will now show up instantly. We have a wide selection of tech, sports, entertainment and regional news. Go to Apps inside Imsy, Refresh and turn on your favorite provider. 

Note: all content and logos are copyright of respective owners. 

If you want us to include content from your favorite provider, drop us an email on support@imsy.com.

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Inspirational Steve Jobs quotes on Imsy

Like thousands of other technology entrepreneurs, we're also charmed, influenced and inspired by the great man. As a mark of love and respect to the great visionary, for the next few days, the Quote of the Day app in Imsy Messenger will be sending some of his memorable sayings. Thanks for everything, Steve.

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Pleased to inform you that Imsy is now available in the Ovi store for Symbian S60 v3 phones - for N series, E series and all. 

Click on the link below to download it.

If you face any issues in downloading from Ovi store, you may also get the latest version of the app from http://imsy.com/s60

Our first priority has been to get the app in the hands of as many S60 users as there are. Now, we are putting ourselves to work towards making the UI the best in class.

Do let us know if you face any issues or have any suggestions for improvement by email: support@imsy.com or Twitter @imsyteam 

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