The opening of ballot boxes for the presidential and legislative elections this year caught the attention of the entire nation; the multinational technology company iKala also cooperated with Dcard, Taiwan’s largest social forum for young people, launching the “Election ballot box opening stream chatroom”. Almost 200 thousand youths were called upon to participate, allowing Dcard members to view the stream on the website or their mobile phones at any time to learn about the progress of the ballot box opening while sharing their thoughts and opinions with other Dcard members.
iKala has been deeply rooted in the media industry with cloud technology for many years, and helped the media carry out innovative services that allowed their contents to reach every corner of the world. Voka Cheng, head of marketing for Dcard, stated: “The election ballot box opening stream chatroom was wildly popular and drove more young people to discuss it on Dcard. Dcard members had more interactions, and there was an average of several hundred comments per minute. The number of overall active users reached a new historical high on Dcard and helped Dcard launch a new attempt of text-based participation in interactions through streaming.”
Wei-Ting Ho, product manager of Dcard, added: “In the technology connection with iKala this time, we achieved the goal of completing development, testing and launch within 7 days; the iKala team provided great support in technology and experience, and reduced the risks and costs of the project significantly. They also allowed the team to focus more on the promotion of the event, and they met our overall requirements for speed and quality.”
Frank Gong, cofounder and chief technology officer of iKala, also indicated: “The key technology that allowed us to help Dcard create the ballot box opening stream chatroom for the elections in our cooperation this time that gave them smooth interactive experiences simultaneously on the website and app was the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with its high stability and integration. It provided us with more flexible auto-scaling that accelerated our development speed. In addition, the deployment of Google’s global backbone network architecture also allowed Dcard members around the world to connect to the event page with the fastest speed, meeting the high requirements of the system for total processing capacity, bandwidth and low latency.”
iKala combines cloud and AI technologies to help media and entertainment industries quickly respond to markets and focus on providing differentiated content to seize mind share and market share
The cooperation between iKala and Dcard showed the rapid changes in the ever-changing media and entertainment markets nowadays – accelerating and improving digital services through the integration of the cloud and AI is now the trend. The market research institute IDC also predicted that by 2022, 45% of the enterprises around the world will deploy their applications in containerized multi-cloud environments, and 74% of Taiwanese enterprises will deploy in hybrid/multi-cloud environments. Frank Gong explained: “As a long-term partner of Google Cloud, iKala has rich experience in data-driven marketing and digital transformation solutions. Through the three main features of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – speed, cost-saving, and expandability – we can help media and various industries build modernized IT infrastructures and optimize operation benefits.”
IDC further indicated that in 2020, the digital transformation of global enterprises evolved into “Transformation 2.0”. As the implementation and application of AI technology becomes more and more mature, the focus of the next wave of transformation will be “data-driven”, using data as the core to drive new operation models. Seeing the development for data-driven business opportunities, iKala is also ready to have its powerful data analysis and machine learning technology team provide cloud integration services, including cloud infrastructure modernization and marketing data analysis, media streaming solutions, and AI photoshop services, to help enterprises cross the digital transformation threshold with ease and to continue innovating and developing diverse services to catch the attention of consumers and seize market opportunities.