They say there’s no smoke without fire. In our case, it was less smoke and more Cloud, with a capital C.
A couple of weeks ago the cloud service provider OVH suffered a fire in one of its Strasbourg data centres. The fire affected several major online services, including the French government and some Google services. Unfortunately, our app service Kokoon Relax was hosted on those affected servers.
At the time, we had been ramping up activity for our carefully thought through launch plan for our new app, MyKokoon...
...which you could say in turn, went up in smoke. There’s a small team behind Kokoon; whilst we don’t have the luxury of infinite resources, it does mean we can adapt and change our plans in a rapid and responsive way. Rather than plough time into recovering our old app service, we took the decision to rapidly bring online a stripped down version of our new MyKokoon app.
We know the importance of keeping a consistent and familiar sleep routine; improving and safeguarding the sleep of our members has been, and will continue to be the priority for our product team. In 7 not-so-relaxing days, we pivoted our workflow and focused on fastracking an interim solution, MyKokoon (Audio) to bring you the sounds for sleep that you know well, and a first glimpse of the transformation that the Kokoon app is undergoing.
MyKokoon Audio is now available to download on both iOS and Android. As a consequence of data lost in the fire, we’d like to ask returning members to select the create an account option when using MyKokoon for the first time.
As always, we’d invite members to share their suggestions and feedback to us as we continue to develop MyKokoon ready for it’s full release.
What’s next?
In a matter of weeks, we’ll be inviting cohorts of our members to download a Beta version of the app on Android with it’s full adaptive audio and data tracking functionality. This will be a gradual process, so that we can uncover potential fringe cases and errors as they arise in a controlled environment, rather than risk disrupting hundreds of our members routines. Our Android members can expect this in the next few weeks, with iOS following shortly afterwards.
We’d like to thank our members once again for their patience, feedback and belief in our shared vision of re-imagining the sleep experience, and helping us to drift of easier, naturally. Their stories continue to inspire us even the weeks where ourselves get little sleep…(!).
