Interview with Mobilewalla founder!

Last week we have profiled Mobilewalla, the app discovery engine. That product is less than a month old and it already gives amazing results. We went a little further with the product and checked on few things. I got a chance to talk with Mobilewalla Founder, Anindya Datta. Check out Anindya’s profile at Crunchbase.

Here’s the interview :

How did MobileWalla get started? Considering your previous company Chutney is in the virtualization space?

Anindya : Core technology behind Chutney is database access and making the access fast. That is my core area and Mobilewalla is built on the same philosophy.

What makes Mobilewalla run so fast?

Anindya : Our infrastructure is in cloud and our core philosophy is “No search should go to the disk”. We build 5-6 layers of caching, use anticipatory caching, prefetching to fetch the data. All the reads we do when a user performs a search will be from the memory.

How do you track apps and how do you rate apps?

Anindya : Tracking the apps is a semi-automated process. We have a team in Kolkatta which would be checking for new apps and extract information out of it. The database we have now is built over three years in a similar fashion. We continue to do the curation for the new apps too as a part of our operations.

For rating of the apps, we collect huge amount of data from across the social media networks. We are at 3.2 TB right now and we add 12 GB of data every day. The analysis on this data is the core of our recommendation engine. Without going into the details let me give you an example.

Mobilewalla performs intelligent processing of tweets and considers volume, sentiment and growth of chatter around apps in twitter to rank the apps.

On Youtube whenever  a new app video is posted, we look at the number of views and the number of likes and take that data into consideration. We capture the data in a time series fashion and analyze on it.

My dream is to predict the hot apps right when they are launched.

Do you make the distinction of free vs paid apps? Is there way to search for free apps only?

Anindya : In scoring we will not judge by price. But we can let users filter for free apps and also recommend similar free apps. We might build this in future versions of Mobilewalla.

Anindya : Are there plans to introduce android tablet apps?

Yes. We will be getting Android tablets also to the data store.

Anindya : How do you plan to make money?

The number one problem for app developers is app discovery. We plan to help developers reach their expected levels of app discovery. We also plan to help developers in placing the app in the right category and providing highly relevant co-placements of the apps in ad inventories across the web.

Where does Mobilewalla go from here?

Anindya : Mobilewalla site is completely built on HTML5. We will work towards getting the website running on all mobile browsers (iPhone, Android etc…) In 90 days we will be bringing out a iPhone/iPad app. In 180 days we will bring out an Android app.

We will also enhance search by providing better search relevance. We will also improve our recommendation engine and provide a way to filter for free apps.

What phone do you use and what are your favorite apps?

Anindya : I use Blackberry and iPhone when I am in Singapore and in the US I use Android. Google Maps, Facebook, Words with Friends Free, Angry Birds and  RottenTomatoes are some of my favorite apps.