A new startup called Twin Prime said that its technology can increase mobile app content delivery speeds by up to 100 percent via its new Global Location and Context-based Acceleration Strategy (GLAS) technology. The company said the technology "utilizes automated hypothesis testing to achieve real-time automatic selection and deployment of optimization strategies customized for specific mobile network characteristics and operating conditions including device, application architecture, network type, quality and location."
The company, founded in 2013, emerged from stealth mode last week with a $9.5 million round of Series A funding led by DFJ and True Ventures with participation from Milliways Ventures and Moment Ventures. Joining the startup's board are Bubba Murarka, a partner at DFJ, and Om Malik, a partner at True Ventures and the founder of the now-shuttered GigaOM news site.
Twin Prime explained that its technology can be injected into mobile apps by mobile app developers and will speed up the time it takes for mobile app users to receive content over the network. Specifically, the company said mobile app developers can install the company's "lightweight" software development kit (SDK) into their apps "in a matter of minutes, even over secure protocols like HTTPS, without having to make lowest-common denominator compromises in mobile app development and design."
Already, the company has tested its technology with an unnamed social media app that was able to use Twin Prime's technology to increase its content delivery speeds by 30 percent to 200 percent across much of the world. The result? The social media app said Twin Prime's technology cut download times by 2 seconds per image.
Twin Prime said its technology is complementary to current methods of speeding content delivery like the use of content delivery networks (CDNs). The company said its technology doesn't rely on caching, compression or content modification, and works primarily in the wireless "last mile" between the handset and the cell tower, which the company said is where 70 to 90 percent of today's latency challenges occur. The company said its technology works across both Wi-Fi and cellular.
Twin Prime sought to place its technology into the context of the wider industry--the company said it is "solving the optimization problems of the $3 billion mobile acceleration market" where every 100-millisecond delay in content delivery "can equate to a 1 percent drop in revenue, there are literally billions of dollars at stake."
According to TechCrunch, Twin Prime's technology is running inside 5-10 apps and another 20-30 companies are testing it.
Speeding the delivery of content in general has been at or near the top of wireless engineers'' technology wish list for decades. Indeed, the wireless industry's move to LTE network technology was in large part to increase the speed of users' downloads and to cut network latency. Moreover, U.S. wireless carriers have implemented a number of new technologies aimed at speeding the delivery of content, most notably video optimization that is intended to both quicken users' access to video and make the transmission of video more efficient on the network.
For more:
- see these two Twin Prime releases
- see this TechCrunch article
- see this CED article
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