A simple, concise look at what realtime technology is, realtime app use cases, and how a Data Stream Network like PubNub benefits developers.

1. What the heck is a
realtime app?
Joe Hanson
Content Marketing @ PubNub

2. At the core, realtime technology is the
publishing (sending) and subscribing
(receiving) of data “as it happens,” in real
life.
Information and data is sent and
presented in milliseconds.
What is realtime?

3. What are some examples?

4. When someone sends you a message in a chat app,
and you receive that message on your phone, or you
get a push notification, that notification or message
is received in realtime.

5. When you watch your taxi moving on a map on your
phone, and it smoothly moves along the street
towards you, the map and taxi location is updating
in realtime.

6. In a multiplayer game, when two players move their
characters, player position is updated on both
browsers in realtime.

7. When you click a button on your phone to change
channels on your TV, that signal is sent in realtime.

8. When you’re walking to your house, and your lights
turn on based on your geolocation, that signal is
sent in realtime.

9. How is this possible?

10. To make realtime happen, devices are sending little
tiny packets of data to one another (bi-directionally)
in under a 1/4 second.
That sub-1/4 is considered ‘realtime’ speed.
Publish
Subcribe
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Data
Stream
Network

11. This doesn’t just magically happen.
The app developer needs a realtime data stream
network to send those little tiny packets of data.
Building a ‘realtime’ infrastructure yourself is hard,
can get expensive, and is a large burden on
development time. And once it’s built, you then have
to maintain and scale that network.
Data Stream Networks

12. This is often why many of our customers often
go through a build vs buy stage, and soon realize
that building it themselves isn’t plausible.
Developers will first try to build realtime into
their application with an open source protocol,
but soon find it’s expensive, time consuming,
and tough to scale.

13. Hence why developers build
realtime on a data stream
network.

14. So app developers use our data stream network,
which we’ve built and globally scaled for the
developer.
This saves them time and money (they don’t
have to build it themselves, we did it for them).
Businesses like PubNub are known as many
things: IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), data
streaming services, realtime data stream
networks, realtime networks, etc.

15. The value to the developer is that they can use our
infrastructure (our network) so that they can focus
on their apps.
The infrastructure is made up of multiple data
centers (massive server rooms spread across the
globe) that move (aka, ‘stream’) these small packets
of data.
This type of infrastructure is called a realtime Data
Stream Network. And that’s what we do at PubNub.

16. Realtime data streaming is changing the way we
build web, mobile, and Internet of Things
applications.
And to mimic real world interaction, the web is
being pushed from static to realtime.
Static
Web
Realtime
Web

17. Now that you understand what PubNub does, check
out the PubNub Use Cases page, and see some real
world examples of realtime technology in use.
Or if you want to get started right away, sign up for
a free account and head over to our short Quick
Start Tutorial to get going.
Getting Started