Agawi offering platform for streaming apps via Amazon Web Services

Streaming platform startup Agawi said it is expanding its offerings to enable app companies to stream their rich media apps to smartphones, tablets, and computers via Amazon’s web services cloud technology.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based Agawi has created a platform that that streams a game or app directly to a device, even if it doesn’t have heavy-duty hardware or doesn’t have the software installed. Coupled with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) technologies, the Agawi streaming tech enables apps with 3D graphics capabilities to run smoothly on mobile devices.

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Agawi has had its technology for a while, but Amazon announced today that it was expanding its cloud capabilities to host applications that require heavy-duty graphics, based on technologies supplied by graphics chip makers such as Nvidia. Amazon has had limited graphics-heavy cloud infrastructure before, but now it is greatly expanding it, thanks to AWS’ new G2 instances.

Agawi is bringing its True Cloud app streaming platform to G2 instances on the Amazon cloud. Agawi has been using True Cloud with EC2 instances for two years, accessing thousands of concurrent servers. Now it will be able to tap Amazon to stream graphics processing unit (GPU) instances to stream graphically rich interactive apps to mobile devices.

“This is a big step forward in virtualizing apps in the cloud and cost-effectively streaming them to any mobile device in the world with the lowest interactive latency possible. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technology and work with AWS to deliver a compelling and scalable platform for multiple use cases,” said Rohan Relan, the chief executive and a founder of Agawi.

Previously, Agawi focused solely on providing streaming game services. It has streamed over half a billion minutes worldwide to date. The new tech will enable apps to be virtualized in the cloud and streamed to mobile devices. That means those apps should be able to run on a variety of platforms without being changed, giving them the same cross-platform benefits such as browser-based apps.

Rajat Gupta, founder of Agawi, said in an interview with VentureBeat that a lot of action is moving to mobile and that app makers can realize huge benefits by moving to cloud-based apps. For instance, some mobile ads could be streamed directly to mobile devices, where the ad itself is an app.

“That’s one example of what we could do,” Gupta said.