Alex and Philipp Hertel, two former Google engineers, decided it was finally time to focus their talents on a project that interested them. They both wanted to create a new unique platform that streamlined the app creation process for sports enthusiasts trying to find stronger connections to the games they love.
Being originally backed by Google investor Ram Shriram, Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim, and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Hertel brothers created Xperiel, a new mixed reality experience that united sports fans among the digital and physical worlds. Xperiel provides the platform for app designers, from novice to expert, to build and host Real World Web apps that essentially connects users across different hardware and software.
“We are making the real world digitally interactive,” Alex Hertel, CEO of Xperiel, told VentureBeat. “It’s analogous to the World Wide Web and what it did for the internet. We are bringing the real world to life, so consumers can interact and use their device as if it were a mouse cursor on the world.”
The company, which was founded at the end of 2013, has raised $7 million for their new platform with the Dodgers and MLB being a part of the investment group. The money raised will be used to enhance their cloud-based platform that ultimately makes their interface easy to understand for new users.
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“Technology today is largely inadequate when it comes to addressing how to leverage the Internet of Things and physical infrastructure to better engage customers and drive commerce,” Stephen Hendrick, principal analyst for application development and deployment research at ESG, also told Venture Beat a statement. “Xperiel is breaking new ground by providing a highly abstracted language for building event-driven, device-agnostic applications, as well as an IoT-centric connectivity fabric that ties together devices, events, and content to enable customer-engagement and commerce that is far more effective than other available solutions.”
Xperiel’s design facilitates a creation environment that can even attract people with no software development skills at all. The apps created on the platform exist in the cloud and only make their device-related elements available when necessary. Linking apps to Xperiel in the cloud is made possible through their “universal trigger fabric” that streamlines the process of connecting different software across multiple operating systems, such as Android or IOS.
Xperiel is even being implemented in certain sports teams and stadiums, such as Dodger Stadium.
“Dodger Stadium provides our ball club with unlimited opportunities to connect with fans through their mobile devices during home games. Opportunities include everything from promoting special offers to providing personalized greetings on our big screens to playing sponsored games and contests where they can win meetings with their favorite players,” said Tucker Kain, Los Angeles Dodgers’ Chief Financial Officer. “Xperiel is turning our park and everything in it into a giant physical-digital ecosystem, where every inch of real estate can become digitally interactive, connecting fans with experiences that drive higher engagement rates, monetization, and fun.”
Xperiel’s innovation has come a long way for the Sunnyvale, CA based company. The ability to translate different graphical programming languages across a multitude of platforms can potentially lay the groundwork for other innovative minds to build apps.