Fireside Chat with Cy from Crowdsound
Cy is the Founder of Crowdsound, a realtime audience engagement tool built with Firebase and Angular.
What is Crowdsound?
Crowdsound is a one-stop shop for live events.
![](https://fireassets.firebaseapp.com/resources/images/blog/crowdsound.gif)
Whether you’re creating a talk, a panel, a seminar, a news show, or any live event, you can interact with your audience in real time. Crowdsound allows you to look at your audience’s demographics, take questions from audience members, quickly poll them, and follow up with them later.
On top of that, Crowdsound gives those audience members a say in the conversation. They become more than just users: they become participants. They can even message each other to stay in touch after the event is over. No more fumbling to to exchange contact info.
What inspired you to build the app?
It began with trying to get feedback on a talk of ours. While we were trying to solve this problem, we realized that there was a bigger issue at hand. How could we get active participation from an audience? The problem became clearer when the event got broadcasted live to a virtual audience.
Right now, most events are like one-way streets: you simply deliver content to passive viewers and listeners. We were inspired by the idea of finally giving audience members active voices in the conversation, regardless of where they’re located.
The first time I witnessed a speaker answer my question during a livestream was exhilarating. I felt included in the event and immediately invited more of my friends. We want more people to feel exhilarated--to feel like they’re being heard. We want to enable large groups of people to share their ideas and collaborate to reach their goals. That’s what motivates us at Crowdsound.
How are you using Firebase and Angular?
Because of the real-time nature of our app, we built it completely on Firebase and Angular. We are truly putting Firebase’s capabilities to the test.
It was clear we needed a tool to send live data changes to thousands of devices simultaneously. Without Firebase, we would’ve needed a much bigger team, and that team would’ve taken months to build what we’ve built in just a couple of weeks.
In addition to AngularFire we’re using a custom implementation of Kato Richardson’s synchronized array.
What other technologies are you using?
We have a Node server on Heroku and static assets on Amazon S3. The great thing about Firebase (and its Security and Firebase Rules) is that it gives us a centralized place to exchange data. That way, we can use Firebase as an API to our own servers and make more complex queries. It’s especially useful when we need to crunch analytics information for our customers.
What are some of the most interesting use cases of crowdsound you've seen so far?
Professors using Crowdsound to quiz their students in real time. It's great to see them quickly getting a pulse on how well their students are absorbing the material.
In a classroom setting, we’re deterred from speaking up when we don't understand a concept because we don’t want our peers to think we’re not as smart as they are. It’s human nature. Unfortunately, what often happens is that half the class doesn’t understand something, but no one actually wants to speak up. Crowdsound lets teachers test their students anonymously on the fly and use the results to focus on the concepts that actually need extra attention.
What's next on your roadmap? Any exciting upcoming features you can share?
We’re excited to share that native video streaming and private rooms are coming very soon. After witnessing our customers fidgeting with Google Hangouts that only allow 10 users and other streaming services that take forever to set up, we wanted to create a one-stop solution with everything you need to run your live event out of the box.
Introducing Firebase Hosting
Today we’re excited to launch Firebase Hosting, production-grade hosting for developers. Firebase Hosting is designed for use by mission-critical sites and apps. We’ve built it from the ground up for security, reliability, and scale.
Key features of Firebase Hosting include:
- CDN-backed global content delivery
- Automatic SSL certificate provisioning
- Support for non-SNI devices, to ensure all users have a secure experience
- Custom (and even naked) domain support
No other hosting service matches these features.
On top of this, we’ve made Hosting incredibly simple to use by providing one-command deploy and one-click rollback. Developers now have a fast, secure, and reliable way to host their apps.
The Rise of the Static App
Once upon a time, in the dark ages of the internet, apps dynamically generated HTML server-side every time a page was requested. This was slow, difficult to scale, and required users to connect to distant servers to get their content.
Even worse, this required clients to talk to a server on every state transition. For mobile users, this meant applications would break the moment connectivity was lost.
With the advent of fast JavaScript engines and powerful mobile devices, client-side page generation has become common. Angular, Ember, React, and a number of other client-side rendering technologies have transformed the application stack. Servers no longer need to send different HTML to each client. Instead, a single optimized set of static assets can be served to all clients. These static assets can then be placed on a geographically-distributed CDN, meaning users need only load data from a nearby point-of-presence (POP) rather than a server on the other side of the planet.
This new model has advantages for both end users and developers:
Faster Load Times: Static assets are cacheable and can be served from a local CDN POP.
Smoother State Transitions: Apps no longer need to load HTML from servers to move from page to page.
Apps Work Offline: Application logic runs on the device, meaning apps remain responsive even without network connectivity.
Easier to Scale: Delivering static content is easier than scaling server processes.
Less Complex Operations: Fewer servers to worry about means you can spend more time writing code.
Better Cross-Platform Support: Since all dynamic data is loaded from an API, it’s easier to build for mobile, web, IoT, etc.
The Role of Firebase
Static apps load dynamic, personalized data from an API. Firebase is a popular choice for this API since we eliminate the need for server-side code and allow apps to deliver data changes in realtime. We’ve been thrilled to be a part of this shift and are especially excited about the popularity of our bindings for Angular, Ember, Backbone, and React.
However, providing only an API for dynamic data left our developers needing to find their own solution for hosting their assets: HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.
You Asked. We Built Something Awesome.
You, our developer community, voiced your frustration with existing hosting solutions. None of them had the same level of ease, reliability, and polish as the Firebase API. Since hosting is such an integral part of app development, we chose to solve the problem ourselves.
What does this mean for you?
It means we've thought hard about how hosting should work. Firebase Hosting includes:
1. One-command deploys; one-click rollbacks
Deploy your content in seconds with the Firebase command line interface. Once uploaded, content begins serving immediately. With one click in the App Dashboard you can rollback to an earlier version and it will begin serving immediately. There’s no need to re-upload an old version if you’ve made a mistake, saving you precious time.
2. SSL by default
Every app on Firebase Hosting is served over HTTPS. Gone is the pain and expense of buying and installing an SSL certificate. From acquiring the cert to securing your domain, we do it all for you.
3. Your own domain
If you have a paid account, you can serve content from any custom domain, even a naked domain. Using our free plan? Don’t worry, you’ll get all the other advantages of Firebase Hosting on your own firebaseapp.com subdomain, for free!
4. Lightning fast content delivery
With Firebase Hosting you get a global footprint out of the box. We’re using one of the fastest CDNs available. Content is cached at POPs in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific on SSDs, meaning no matter where your users are, they get your content fast.
5. Straight-forward pricing
We’re rolling Firebase Hosting into our existing plans, without raising the price! If you’re on our free Hacker plan you get:
- Free hosting at <your-app>.firebaseapp.com
- 1 GB of storage
- 100 GB of transfer
If you’re on our Candle, Bonfire, Blaze or Inferno plans you get:
- Hosting on your custom domain and an SSL cert at no additional charge
- 10 GB of storage ($0.03 / GB above that)
- 1 TB of transfer ($0.10 / GB above that)
Get started!
Firebase Hosting is available starting today. Over 1,000 apps and sites have been deployed in our beta period and we're using it to host Firebase.com!
Get started by signing up. For more details, check out the documentation.
Welcome to the future of hosting!
Chris Raynor
Firebase Hosting Lead