Announcements, News - July 21, 2015

TradeHero case study by Microsoft Azure

Singapore web app startup, MyHero, devised an ingenious stock-market investment game that enables successful players to earn real money. What they needed was a technology-neutral cloud platform, rapid global-deployment capability and technical support to help their team quickly build the app. With support from the Microsoft BizSpark program, they launched this app within 3 months and the game, TradeHero, is now a stunning success, attracting a quarter of a million players.

The mobile app industry is global, and intensely competitive. To be successful, developers need to turn their ideas into reality with exceptional speed. The barriers are huge, however: besides creating the app, developers need a hosting platform that allows them to deploy swiftly and seamlessly with minimal capital investment and maximum scalability. They also need hosting options that preserve their ability to work with whatever technologies they want.

Singapore startup, MyHero, recently surmounted these challenges with phenomenal success. Today, the company’s ground-breaking TradeHero gaming app has over 250,000 customers, and in September 2013, its global success helped secure S$12 million in venture capital investment—one of the largest ever for a Singapore web start-up. Back in early 2012, however, co-founders Dinesh Bhatia and Dominic Morris had a great idea, and no technical route to market. “Our TradeHero concept was a game that allowed players to earn real dollars by becoming recognised trading experts,’ says Dominic Morris, Chief Technical Officer, MyHero. “We would give subscribers $100,000 in virtual currency to trade in 28 stock markets around the world. Retail investors would pay monthly subscriptions to track the decisions of successful players, generating revenue for the ‘trade heroes’, as well as MyHero.”

To turn their idea into a service, Morris needed a high-performing service platform. He hoped the game would attract hundreds of thousands of customers, which meant the technical solution had to be highly scalable. Also the platform needed to cope with high-volume data streams from multiple stock exchanges.

“Performance was a key factor in our service platform selection, but we also had to satisfy a number of technical criteria,” says Morris. “The platform had to support a very wide range of Microsoft and open source technologies, running on Windows and Linux servers.”

His developers also wanted a software development platform to help them create the App using multiple languages as efficiently as possible. Additionally, to ease deployment, Morris needed local and proactive developer support from the platform hosting service provider. Above all, Morris needed to preserve as much capital as he possibly could.