An Interview With Steven Wright: Founder Of HitcherNet

The world is in your room now. Now you don’t have to conduct old fragile experiments of sending huge files from your smartphone to another. In this ever rolling technology, there is one app that you will find most valuable in terms of connectivity and stability and a must have app from the day you open your new smartphone.

While in a WiFi, you can send files around other phones seamlessly and wirelessly at tremendous speed of more than 250 mb/s to HitcherNet peers. Interesting!! You may have been wandering in the Google or Play Store searching for applis like this. Click Here and find some positive feedbacks and Click Here for video tutorial and Click Here to download this from Play Store. Bye Bye SMS, Hola HitcherNet :)

Steven Wright is the brain behind HitcherNet. He worked with GoDaddy and served the US army till 2003. It was a pleasure to conduct a graceful interview with Steven. Now we will get to know how he thought of such a big project that can change the way people share files and moreover, the future plans with HitcherNet.

First things first..me and my frndz love hitcher net :)

Awesome!

 

So why hitcher net…

I guess there were tons of options for android!

So HitcherNet is a big project. We’re not just trying to make the best and fastest file sharing app for mobile users, we are actually going to create a communication network.

There are more and more options out there – but unlike superbeam, wifi shoot etc…we’ve spent the last 6 months focused on stability.

WiFi Direct is like bluetooth on steroids – with mobile devices becoming more prevalent, more powerful, and more technically capable – the ability to “off network” areas of sufficient device density is going to be a reality.

Which means that our plan of creating an asynchronous, decentralized mesh based file relay system is closer than ever.

The next few updates will feature some really cool improvements, such as:

1. remembered connections

2. multi-file transfer (up to five at a time)

3. other permissions features

which will make HitcherNet feel more like any email application one has used.

 

That is indeed impressive Mr. Steven. These features will retain current Hitchernet Users. But there IS 1 thing:

are you dependent on Hitchernet? What if it didn’t show expected results…coz people know there ARE apps like airdroid, bump etc…

Over the last month we have seen tremendous growth in the number of downloads. I believe that once we roll out a tutorial and other enhancements the choice for a file sharing app will be clear.

We have other features in mind as well – but the ability to have 100% secure communications and not rely on a Telecom company to send data is huge!

 

Ok so moving on now Mr. Steven, you were in the US army for some years…posted in Iraq…what after that?

Yes, that was quite a while ago. I left the military in 2006, after that I worked for GoDaddy.com for three years and then the U.S. Government as a contracting officer for several years. I Founded Kharybdis Technologies a little over a year ago and have been working hard to bring our products to market.

 

Great!

Kharybdis…how did you came up with that name…

what does it mean??

can you describe it in 5 words?

lets see…Whirlpool sea monster in Homer’s “The Odyssey” , well that’s 7 words… Nope, I guess I can’t describe it in 5 words.

It’s an alternate spelling of Charybdis which was a giant whirlpool monster in the famous Greek novel “The Odyssey” by Homer.

Our first product was a data analysis tool where we pull in large amounts of data from different flowing sources – clean the data, parse the data, and the visualize it. So the imagery went along with the name. This of course is not HitcerNet…..but infochurn.com

 

ok..

I was going to ask that! What is your fav…out of the data sharing and data analysis…

HitcherNet is our primary focus right now. We think it has the broadest appeal, and the ability to connect with users in nearly every country as well as every language. Moving data and communicating is universal. So if we can provide the medium to best move that data then we can help the most people. Eventually HitcherNet will be just as common as sending a text message only it will be with HUGE amounts of data and independent from the internet.

I also need to mention that we are working hand in hand with our development partners in Nepal. HitcherNet is being developed along with Bajra Technologies in Kathmandu Nepal.

 

You say communication is universal, whom are you targeting exactly..Asians..? the hub of emerging economy..?

I think we are targeting the future to be honest. I think all of the big telecoms and networking giants like Cisco are focused on making our existing system better; meanwhile they are overlooking the fact that more and more people are carrying around these little super computers. Mobile devices are going to keep getting better. They will be able to store more data, process data faster, and have longer battery life. Why not create a network that augments, or replaces the internet in areas of high density. Asia is certainly a fantastic place to test this theory – and yes, we do think focusing on these areas of high growth makes sense.

 

true.

The internet works well in many places, but building the infrastructure is very expensive. The whole system is inefficient – software and hardware have to interact over a 5 layer model that has been slapped together over the years. HitcherNet doesn’t require a router or wireless access point, so it will be faster and more efficient…and more secure! Our only restriction is range, which will certainly be improved in the future. The networking aspect is the tough issue to solve, but we are confident we will make that a reality soon.

 

hmm.

so you say, Steven, that HitcherNet is a big project..

can you justify a lil…like how many employees are there right now…and apart from you who is the contributor/co-founder…

This project is truly a collaboration between Bajra Technologies and Kharybdis Technologies. I don’t want to give credit to any one or two individuals. We are small though, with about 7 people working at any one time….so although it’s a big project, we are still a startup company in the truest form.

 

Great. You say Steven that you are targeting the future…do you have any other app in mind right now?

I always have ideas running through my head, but right now the focus is on HitcherNet – What direction to go and how best to get there. We need to focus on the users. Through feedback and continual improvement we will make our app better than ever.

 

How would you revert to customer if they find any bug in HitcherNet. Do you feel free to contact them?

Users are highly encouraged to reach out to us and/or leave feedback in the form of reviews. We implemented a bug tracking feature a few updates ago and we work on smashing those as they arise. Please leave feedback – we will respond swiftly.