Tango (application)

Tango is a third-party,[2] cross platform messaging application software[3] for smartphones developed by TangoME, Inc.[3] in 2009. The app is free and is popular for offering video calls[4][5][6][7][8] over 3G,[8] 4G and Wi-Fi networks.[9]

Tango has more than 200 million registered users as at March 2014[8][9][10][11][12] and, among Android devices, it is the 12th most downloaded app.[13] It is rated by PCMag as “the simplest mobile chat application out there, with a good range of support.

History

Tango, based in Mountain View, California, was founded in September 2009 by Uri Raz and Eric Setton.[14][15] Setton currently serves as its Chief Technology Officer[15][16] while Raz is its CEO[14] and Brian Hansen the senior director of operations.[3]

Raz, a serial entrepreneur and Setton, who holds a Stanford PhD in electrical engineering, created the service using peer-to-peer and video compression technologies with the ability to scale to hundreds of millions of users with low infrastructure costs and high quality video.

The founders raised venture capital from a range of investors such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Len Blavatnik.[17] A financing round in March 2014 brought in $280 million from Alibaba, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and other investors.[18]

As at March 2014, Tango employed just over 160 employees. Tango has offices in Beijing, China, and Austin, Texas, in addition to its Mountain View headquarters.

Eric Setton
Founder, CEOAs CEO of Tango, Eric is driving the company’s vision of helping people around the world feel closely connected to those they care about. Before becoming CEO, Eric held a number of roles at the company driving its revenue, its analytics, and its product, as Tango’s CTO. At the company inception, as its first key technologist, he leveraged his expertise in multimedia communication, peer-to-peer networks, and video compression to lead Tango’s release of the first cross-platorm mobile video calling service in the world.

Prior to founding Tango, Eric co-founded and served as CTO and VP of product of Dyyno, a video streaming and distribution company, and also worked as a research scientist at HP Labs. Eric is one of the world’s leading experts in peer-to-peer video streaming and video compression and even wrote the first book on the subject, Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming, in 2007. Eric has contributed to more than 30 research papers in his field and holds six patents either granted or pending.

Eric holds a B.S. degree from Ecole Polytechnique, France, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Eric’s favorite Tango moment… “When my wife went back to work after our baby girl was born, I showed her our six week old doing her first trick one morning. She was at the office, I was at home, we were using Tango on our phones. She teared up and that’s when I knew we were close to making our vision come true.”