They fell in love, built a video messenger, and lived ‘appily’ ever after

Meera Innes grew up in Japan. Born to an Indian mother and a British father. While working in London, she fell in love with Adam Baker, a serial entrepreneur. Both of them travelled frequently and often found themselves in different continents. They longed for a personal way to see each other as well as their other loved ones.

There were several communication apps, from WhatsApp to Skype and Hike, to choose from. But both Innes and Baker wanted something more personal, private, and engaging. That got them thinking about video-sharing, and led them to build Reel messenger.

“Sometimes the nicest way of staying in touch is to record a visual message to say ‘I’m thinking of you’. Last week, my cousin in San Francisco had a baby, and my uncle, visiting her from India, sent me a video of the baby – by email. This was heavy at both ends and not the easiest way to share video. Instances like this are precisely why we’ve built Reel, so that we can promote the use of video as an instant messenger – the next iteration of messaging,” Innes tells Tech in Asia.

Developed with Indian users in mind, Reel uses little data, takes up no storage on the mobile device, and can be used on a 2G network.

Users can record a video message of up to 20 seconds in duration using their phone camera, review it, and send it to people in their phone book. The sender can choose how many times the message can be seen on a loop. The message is not saved on the sender’s side and deletes automatically from the recipient’s inbox immediately after the video has been played.

The instant video messenger for Android devices verifies users with their mobile phone number, and based on the user’s preference while installing the app, gets access to their phone contacts. The users are able to check who among their contacts are already using Reel, and also invite others. These elements differentiate Reel Messenger from other video-messaging apps like Skype’s Qik. “Reel Messenger is like WhatsApp, but for video,” says Innes.

Made for India

Reel messenger is a ‘made for India’ product, which is not surprising. After all, India is the world’s fastest growing smartphone market. Thanks to the influx of low cost devices, more and more Indians are swapping their brick phones for smartphones.

According to a study by InMobi, messaging is the second most popular activity among Indian smartphone users, after social networking: 46 percent of mobile users are on messaging apps regularly, compared to 28 percent who play games and 22 percent who access shopping apps.

But mobile internet in India is a lot slower. The average achieved download speed of a mobile internet connection in India is 1.1 Mbit/s while it is 16.7 Mbit/s in Singapore.

Innes says they took these regional problems into consideration while creating Reel.