After scooping up rival Cotendo for $268 million recently, content delivery and web services giant Akamai is making another acquisition today—Blaze Software. Blaze’s technology helps accelerate speed of Websites, and optimizes load times while cutting bandwidth costs. Financial details of the dealn were not disclosed except that it was an all-cash transaction.
As Akamai explains, there are more performance bottlenecks for website load and speed times, as richer web applications and mobile web sites become more popular. Blaze’s cloud-based service automatically optimizes the code on a web page during the delivery process to ensure faster transmission of content and a faster rendering of the page, whether served to a PC, tablet or smartphone. → Read More
Classify this as a rumor for now, but Israeli business press is reporting that Akamai is poised to take over one of its competitors, website and mobile acceleration technology vendor Cotendo, for $300 million to $350 million. Founded in 2008, Cotendo has raised over $36 million in funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Tenaya Capital.
A few months ago, Cotendo raised $17 million in new funding from its previous backers, with Citrix Systems and Juniper Networks stepping in as strategic investors as well. Other strategic partners include Google, AT&T and Sumitomo Corporation. → Read More
Videos on the iPad and other tablets look great, and increasingly apps are being created specifically for watching videos on tablets. There is just one problem: they cannot be found by search. This problem is true for information in all apps in general, but it is particularly one for video.
A couple weeks ago, I moderated a panel at Beet.TV’s Video Strategy Summit where this topic came up. In the video clip above, Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at the NPD Group, points out that there is no electronic program guide for video apps, which “makes it very difficult to discover video.” If you have a thousand video apps, that makes it very hard to find any one video. → Read More
Content delivery and web services giant Akamai has acquired mobile web development company Velocitude a mobile services platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Velocitude helps companies with mobile web development in commerce and marketing applications. The startup’s technology helps deliver mobile content to websites in a variety of devices. The Velocitude Mobile Platform allows a consumer to purchase products, sign up and view accounts, see product information textually or by video, interact with social media sites and/or be alerted via SMS. Velocitude will be folded into Akamai’s mobile content delivery service. → Read More
One of the best things about being an academic is being able to mold young minds and guide them to success. When one of my students, Andrew Leblanc told me he was entering the Duke Startup Challenge Elevator Pitch Competition, I told him to come and see me and do a practice run. After all, I had judged several of these contests at Duke and other universities. I thought I knew what worked.
After the eleventh iteration, Andrew got it right. He wasn’t trying to pack his presentation with unnecessary details. He had slowed down his pitch, added a personal touch and was now exuding confidence. Andrew even researched the background of the judges and tailored his message to their interests. So after two hours of intense preparation, I had little doubt that Andrew would win.
Andrew lost. I was surprised. But what I told him afterward is that it really doesn’t matter. Contrary to what the organizers of these competitions will tell you, university business plan contests don’t produce winning companies. Yes, a number of companies have emerged from business plan bake-offs that have been moderate or small successes. But not a single home-run has emerged from this now-omnipresent practice. → Read More
Initial reports said that hundreds of thousands of people watched YouTube’s Live U2 concert on Sunday night. Then reports yesterday raised the estimate to 2.5 million. Double that, and then double it again. 10 million is the real number of live streams that YouTube did that night, according to Variety.
That’s massive, and it’s obviously the biggest live streaming event YouTube has ever done. But even more impressive is just how smoothly it went. I watched about half of the two and a half hour show, and if there were any interruptions, I didn’t see any. I didn’t even see any hiccups, it was that good. I had the show running full screen on my desktop computer, and it was pretty great picture quality for live streaming video. → Read More
We’ve all grown accustomed to Twitter’s website going down. And even Facebook is often less than reliable. But tonight a big boy has crashed. Apple.com is completely offline right now. → Read More
Speculation was rampant the last few weeks that Google had to rely on a third party content delivery network to make the YouTube Live live concert stream properly at scale. Despite the fact that Google has it’s own quite impressive CDN, streaming live video (as opposed to progressive downloads, which YouTube has historically relied on) is hard stuff. And expensive – you have to license Adobe’s Flash Media Server, or a competitor like Wowza, and pay at least a couple of cents per gigabyte transferred on top of normal costs.
We’d heard rumors that Google had partnered with one of the big three live streaming services – Mogulus, Ustream or Justin.TV. And in fact Google has met with all of those startups to discuss partnerships or an outright acquisition.
But instead of working with them, or building their own streaming media CDN, they chose to work with Akamai. Google won’t confirm this, but it’s fairly trivial to detect (see screen shot below). Why did they go with Akamai instead of partnering? One key factor may be that Mogulus, Ustream and Justin.tv haven’t streamed live events with much more than 100,000 simultaneous viewers (correction: one person associated with Justin.tv emails to say they’ve hit “well over 400,000″), so tonight’s concert would have been an experiment in scalability for them. → Read More
On Election night everyone was glued to their screens. Not just their TV screens, but also their computer screens. Going to the major news sites, hitting refresh on the interactive electoral maps millions of times, and watching Obama and McCain give their final speeches of the campaign streamed live over the Web. According to Akamai, which is the content delivery network for most major news sites including CNN which had a record day on its own), NBC, Reuters, and the BBC, global visitors to news sites peaked last night at 11 PM with 8,572,042 visitors per minute. → Read More
Akamai wants to branch out of the content delivery business. Today it announced an all-cash, $95 million acquisition of acerno, a subsidiary of database marketing firm i-Behavior. Acerno pools purchasing data from online retailers, who then share it among themselves in an aggregate, anonymous way. So if one retailer sees that people who buy pencils also buy sharpeners, when somebody looks at a sharpener on another site it will know to put up an offer for a pencil. This data becomes more valuable as the connections become less obvious.
Akamai will combine acerno’s purchasing data with its own Web browsing data to offer Websites an even more refined way to target ads. It is blending acerno into a newly created data business called Advertising Decision Solutions. → Read More
Nirvanix, an Amazon S3 competitor that launched last Fall, has partnered with CDNetworks, a content delivery network that competes with the likes of Akamai and Limelight. The partnership makes Nirvanix’s cloud storage service available to all of CDNetworks’ customers, who will be able to store an unlimited amount of data on Nirvanix’s servers and then push this data out to any of CDNetworks’ 63 worldwide distribution nodes. The companies claim the partnership will save customers 80-90% of the costs associated with building out storage infrastructures of their own. CrunchBase Information Nirvanix CDNetworks Akamai Limelight Networks Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Akamai engineering manager David Barrett, who spoke on the record as being opposed to the Warner Music sponsored music tax (more) last month, was fired on April 25, sources say. Barrett criticized the proposed music tax in an interview with Portfolio Magazine. The relevant text: David Barrett, engineering manager for peer-to-peer networks at Web content-delivery giant Akamai, says he’s opposed to it on principle. Griffin’s plan, he says, is tantamount to extortion, because it forces everyone to join. “It’s too late to charge people for what they’re already getting for free,” says Barrett. “This is just taxation of a basic, universal service that already exists, for the benefit a distant power that actively harasses the people being taxed without offering them any meaningful representation.” Warner Music is an Akamai client, and we have heard from one source that they “leaned on” Akamai following Barrett’s statements, and threatened to terminate their business relationship. We’ve confirmed that Barrett has been terminated, but we have not yet had a chance to speak to him or Akamai about the details of the termination. The timing is certainly suspicious though, to say the least. Barrett joined Akamai last year as part of the acquisition of Red Swoosh. CrunchBase Information Akamai Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
When we watch movies or play music online, there’s a flurry of unseen activity making sure that data arrives when and where it’s supposed to be. This is the job of the high speed fiber and computer systems of the internet’s content distribution networks (CDNs). Every website that streams content (live video, music) needs a CDN. The flurry of new media online has made it a prime time for companies like Akamai, Limelight Networks, Level 3, VitalStream, BitGravity, and EdgeCast who provide fast and efficient ways to deliver rich media to millions on the internet. The market is estimated to be around $800 million, of which Akamai controls about half. One of the newer networks, EdgeCast (2006), has closed a $6 million in Series B financing led by Steamboat Ventures, which is affiliated with The Walt Disney Company, bringing their total financing to $10 million. Steamboat joins Series A investors such as Mark Amin, Chairman of CinemaNow as well as Jon Feltheimer, CEO of Lionsgate films. The new funds will be used to expand internationally, scale the network for additional capacity, enhance features, and market to more businesses. EdgeCast has distinguished itself from other CDNs by charging for bandwidth instead of lumping the cost in with the cost of other CDN services. This means customers should see declines in their bill as bandwidth costs drop. But these businesses are as much defined by their customer list as pricing plans. Level3 provides the backbone for YouTube’s content. Limelight handles Microsoft and Amazon Unbox. BitGravity serves Revision3. EdgeCast’s most recognizable customer is IMAX, but their investment from Steamboat Ventures leads me to believe they’ll be the CDN of choice for Disney as well. CrunchBase Information EdgeCast Akamai BitGravity Limelight Networks Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
