Fastly has raised $10 million in a Series B round for its SSD-powered content delivery network (CDN) used by the likes of Disqus, Twitter and GitHub. The round was led by August Capital.
Fastly, founded by Artur Bergman, the former CTO of Wikia, uses a patent-pending fast-caching engine that delivers content at what the company says is the fastest recorded time to first byte. Fastly… → Read More
Globally, the speed for broadband connections is steadily on the rise: according to Akamai’s Q1 2012 State of the Internet report, it’s now at 2.6Mbps, compared to 2.3Mbps in the last quarter, and a rise of 25% on a year ago and a reversal of the 14% decline of last quarter. South Korea continues to remain the connection king, with an average connection speed of 15.7Mbps. The U.S., meanwhile… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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