Company: TangoMe, Mountain View, CA
Company Description: Tango is a leading mobile messaging service with more than 300 million registered members around the world. Evolved from its beginnings in 2009 as a popular, free, cross platform video and voice calling app, Tango today combines communication, social networking, and content in a single platform.
Nomination Category: Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Product Developer of the Year

Nomination Title: Guy Fighel, Director of Engineering, Platform Infrastructure

Tell the story about what this nominee has achieved since January 1 2014 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

Mr. Fighel has been a technical professional in the field of secure and cost effective mobile telecommunications solutions for over 18 years. Since January 2014, as Director of Engineering, Platform Infrastructure at Tango, Mr. Fighel drove an engineering budget of over $5 million to devise products generating over 10% in user growth, systems automation and stability, and 99.95% uptime. He oversaw technical production automation development, application monitoring, and networking performance analytics and expanded his department’s scope to include oversight of Operational Big Data capabilities, performance measurement and improvement, and product feature development.

TangoOut

Mr. Fighel invented, developed, and brought to market the TangoOut app for Tango. TangoOut gives users free calling to mobile devices and landlines around the world. The product is similar to other solutions, but Mr. Fighel’s extraordinary innovation was recognizing that the company could both save and make money by giving users free minutes.

He also developed and applied the algorithm that makes the app viable as a successful business model. His groundbreaking algorithm calculated the cost to acquire customers through advertising and per-minute rates in various countries and found a balance between free minutes and the cost of user acquisition. Using his algorithm, Tango’s spend on user acquisition via free minutes and friend invites is $.80/user, whereas user acquisition through advertising is $3/user. That is a 75% cost reduction—a remarkable achievement in the VoIP industry.

Since TangoOut’s launch in 2014, the company has grown at a remarkable pace. Its U.S. user base has multiplied at an average rate of 5%. Globally, 15,000 to 20,000 new users register per month. These numbers represent a 10% overall steady growth. In developing markets, the numbers are even stronger. In the Middle East, Tango has achieved over 25% month-to-month growth. In countries such as Bangladesh, Kuwait, Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Saudi Arabia TangoOut came to dominate the mobile social application market in just 6 months.

TangoOut’s success has also had an impact on the market. Others have sought to emulate the model Mr. Fighel developed but none has been able to build the cost allocation and call corridors algorithm that made the concept so successful for Tango. UppTalk, for example, has launched a similar product but, because they have not been able to unravel the algorithm, they can only offer free calls in the U.S. rather than worldwide.

No-Cost SMS Roaming

Mr. Fighel also developed No-Cost SMS Roaming concept for Tango, a product that delivers free messaging to customers. Its innovation is in partnering with providers to enable free SMS communications using the user’s original number. For this concept, Mr. Fighel successfully overcome his own Vonage patents. Tango has achieved proof of concept (POC) for this innovation through a program developed with one of the largest mobile network operators in Singapore and among the largest worldwide.

Multi-Function Video Conferencing

Mr. Fighel also developed a concept that enables a mobile device to perform multiple functions during a video conference without interrupting the ongoing conference. Mr. Fighel’s invention surmounts the limitations still found in other products with respect to performing multiple functions during video conferencing. Tango has successfully implemented this invention in its mobile client for Android, and it is being used by Android users all over the world

Security

With each concept, Mr. Fighel has implemented robust security protections. He developed anti-fraud and security measures for TangoMe to help Tango avoid financial risk. The processes he created ensure that legitimate users receive their minutes while fraudulent users and hacking attacks are blocked. Moreover, for his video-conference concept he implemented authentication protocols to exchange user identities and anonymous information over an encrypted channel without compromising the ability to guarantee users’ eligibility for the service.

With the launch of TangoOut in 2014, Tango has grown exponentially throughout the U.S. and across the developing world. This, in large part, is due to Mr. Fighel’s remarkable contributions and innovative technical achievements.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) accomplishments of the nominee since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

• Led technical teams in full Java software development process from conception to product launch for TangoOut.

• SMS Deliverability spiked to 99.7% overall in U.S. from 80% and to >86% from 60% globally when led re-architecture of SMS Messaging Systems. Service uptime increased to 99.99%. Cut overall costs by $200,000.

• Provided real time data in 30 second increments when streamed information from >40 applications & >1,200 Linux servers globally & entire Android & iOS Mobile clients logs, establishing 1st Hadoop Cluster able to process >100K events per second

- Led on-time and within budget $10M distributed automation.

• Enabled infrastructure cost reduction by >$400K/year by leading transformation to Cloud deployment.

- New services deploying into 5 regions from 1 main application and to be deployed into all 7 regions.
- Re-focused teams to work on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud deployment automation.

• Achieved >80% stability improvement and >28% performance improvement when enhanced worldwide Mobile networking