FasterWeb Gets Investment – Pushed To Go Faster
If you listen to Google (and these days who doesn’t) speed is everything on the “Web page load times are *the* critical metric” says Marissa Mayer, Google’s SVP for search. According to her, the entire basis for Google’s success was their emphasis on extremely fast page loads way back in the dial-up era when the Web loaded line-by-line. Many more companies and Web standards organizations have followed Google’s lead and I don’t think there is an infrastructure issue more crucial to any major Consumer or Business Web service.
Tools like Google’s Web accelerator Toolbar, and AOL’s TopSpeed have been around for a while. Today my friend Yoav Leitersdorf managing partner of YL Ventures informed me of the the announcement of a brand new player in the Field; Israel Based FasterWeb who claim to have a new technology that can make a site perform 2X-10X faster. They have just closed an undisclosed round of funding from YL Ventures and Yoav had this to say “FasterWeb has unique and proprietary technology to further optimize web page load times in addition to what has been achieved so far with existing solutions. Every small improvement in performance translates into additional revenues for websites, regardless of business model – advertising, eCommerce, or otherwise. FasterWeb’s exceptional team has the perfect mix of talents and backgrounds to take their brilliant technology everywhere.”
FasterWeb uses 45 different techniques to optimize the web, this is done either on the end of the content provider or the ISP. In other words, the end user won’t have to do a thing to experience the increase in web speed. In addition, FasterWeb will work across all the major web browsers, starting with Internet Explorer and Firefox immediately, and expanding to the rest, including Opera, Chrome and Safari, when it’s ready for its widespread release next year.
FasterWeb was founded by Ofer Gadish, Gil Shai, Ofir Ehrlich and Leonid Fainberg.
Tags: fasterweb, page-load, YL Ventures, Yoav Lietersdorf
July 19th, 2009 at 7:42 am
There were many players in the past in this area, all killed by higher bandwidth available to users (I even worked for one in the mobile field). What's makes FasterWeb stand out?
July 19th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Higher bandwidth only improves latency if your bandwidth was very low to begin with. The major issue with web performance is the number of roundtrips you make to the server. An average web app page is dev/maintenance-oriented, has many includes(CSS/JSs), lots of browser specific code, etc. If you can weed out and inline most of this, close to the app server – you get instant performance improvelemt.
July 19th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
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July 20th, 2009 at 2:45 am
Kfir,
FasterWeb is addressing the non-bandwidth issues actually – from latency to client-side render time issues.
Higher bandwidth will only further highlight the need for this kind of optimizations.
Check out this Yahoo! article – http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html – you will notice that many of the suggestions there have nothing to do with bandwidth-related issues. FasterWeb does some of this, as well as some more advanced optimizations made possible by its server-side components.
July 20th, 2009 at 3:09 am
so you are focusing on methods such as HTTP pipelining, caching, compression etc?
July 20th, 2009 at 3:11 am
I hear you – but then the biz model is at risk isn't it? Optimization is a nasty business, with long B2B sale cycles, and need for constantly support new browsers and technologies. Also we saw in Flash Networks that web is not enough – but vertical apps are needed in order to maintain market leadership. It was different times, and I wish all the best to FW.
July 20th, 2009 at 3:16 am
This is exactly why I think that open source should have been a cornerstone of their strategy. And yes, without I do believe the biz model is at risk, and sale cycles will be long and hard.
Still, they provide a lot of value – and they are smart folks – I am sure they will find the right formula.
July 20th, 2009 at 3:22 am
I am not part of FW nor affiliated with them. I heard about their technology a few months ago, is all.
July 20th, 2009 at 3:28 am
Ok cool.
Ayelet – it will be interesting to get some clarifications from FW….
July 20th, 2009 at 6:45 am
Kfir,
FasterWeb is addressing the non-bandwidth issues actually – from latency to client-side render time issues.
Higher bandwidth will only further highlight the need for this kind of optimizations.
Check out this Yahoo! article – http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html – you will notice that many of the suggestions there have nothing to do with bandwidth-related issues. FasterWeb does some of this, as well as some more advanced optimizations made possible by its server-side components.
I am less comfortable with other elements in FasterWeb's strategy (as it was a few weeks ago when I participated in a due diligence process on FW) – I strongly believe it would have made sense for them to work more closely with the open source community for at least part oft their offering.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:09 am
so you are focusing on methods such as HTTP pipelining, caching, compression etc?
July 20th, 2009 at 7:11 am
I hear you – but then the biz model is at risk isn't it? Optimization is a nasty business, with long B2B sale cycles, and need for constantly support new browsers and technologies. Also we saw in Flash Networks that web is not enough – but vertical apps are needed in order to maintain market leadership. It was different times, and I wish all the best to FW.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:16 am
This is exactly why I think that open source should have been a cornerstone of their strategy. And yes, without I do believe the biz model is at risk, and sale cycles will be long and hard.
Still, they provide a lot of value – and they are smart folks – I am sure they will find the right formula.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:22 am
I am not part of FW nor affiliated with them. I heard about their technology a few months ago, is all.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:28 am
Ok cool.
Ayelet – it will be interesting to get some clarifications from FW….