You rode the Waze, are you ready to Glide?

Of course by now you have heard about the acquisition of the Israeli App company Waze by Google for 1.1 Billion dollars, but there is another ride in town that if you haven’t driven yet, you will very soon.

That company is Glide (http://glide.me). I don’t think I have ever been so excited about an app before to the point where I’m telling everyone I know about it. Even my Mother is now using it! It’s just a great and easy way to communicate with family and friends.

Their tagline is “Video Walkie Talkie” and I think it is a brilliant way of describing it. Glide can also be described as instant video messaging. It lets you instantly, and in real time, record a video from your phone and the person you are communicating with can see the video live in real time if they have the app open. If the app is closed, then you will get a notification on your phone and when you open the app you will see the names of your friends with a notification number if there are messages waiting for you.

For now you need to sign up through FaceBook, but they will be adding in other ways in the future. The good thing about FaceBook is as soon as you login you will see all your friends that are already using Glide.

Each video can record up to 42 seconds and if you’re feeling shy you can always choose to send a text message through the app which also works seamlessly. A future feature will allow you to send a voice stream without the video for the times when your kids spill ketchup all over your shirt.

The videos run and are stored on the cloud so they do not take up any space on their own. This technological achievement, plus the ease of use, puts them far ahead of Skype and WhatsApp and any other “competitors”.

The user interface is clean and easy to use and there are lots of fun features such as group chat and being able to watch all your missed videos in one stream so it’s like you’re watching a mini movie of what you missed. They also have filters so you can film in Black & White, Sepia, or X-Ray. I’m sure they will be adding more in the future.

They have already won several accolades including being the #1 Free App in the APP Store in Israel as well as being a finalist in TechCrunch Disrupt NY — after being chosen from the “StartUp Alley” at the conference from the attendees.

Glide was founded by three Anglo orthodox olim. Ari Roisman, CEO, Jonathan Caras, CTO & Adam Korbl, CMO. Jonathan I have gotten to know pretty well over the years. He created the iPhone App for my company SportsFan.me as well as a few other projects. When Jonathan first shared this with me it was a bit of a different model. The idea was to create “video birthday cards” etc, where friends can all add a short video and then send the finished video to the birthday boy. I liked that idea, and possibly this will be a future feature, but what the team has done with Glide is much more powerful.

Glide is available for iPhones 4 and above running ios 6 and Android based phones running version 3.2 or higher. The Android version is a beta model and there are some bugs and kinks to work out, but when it’s working it works amazingly. These guys are just getting started and there are many new features in the works such as being able to easily share a video as well as to save your favorites. You can use Glide on 3G, LTE or WiFi.

Bottom line is that this company has a huge future and in my opinion we will one day see a 9-10 figure exit from them.