Mobile applications redefined the user experience but represent only a pit stop in the continuing evolution.

Published in Entrepreneur:

"There's a great deal of confusion about the mobile web," says Joshua Bixby, president of website optimization firm Strangeloop, in Vancouver, B.C. "Businesses haven't known what to do about it, and the largest companies have been focused on coming out with their own apps for individual phones.

"What's getting the mobile web more attention is executives checking out their competitors' websites from their iPhones and finding out [those sites] work better on mobile than their own," Bixby says. "Then they force their IT departments to change direction and prioritize the mobile web."

Read full article here. 

HTML5: Options and Opportunities

Published in EContent:

Joshua Bixby is co-founder and president at Strangeloop Networks, a firm that designs, builds, installs, and supports hardware and software solutions that accelerate the performance of websites and web-based applications. Bixby says the term HTML5 has come to be used almost in the same manner as the terms Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 have been used-as a catchall phrase that represents the next evolution in online experiences. "People are trying to come to grips with what to call an interactive web experience in a modern browser," says Bixby. "Others have started to release these incredible interactive web experiences that we want to name. We want to call it something, so everyone is calling it HTML5."

"It's not the standard that's interesting," adds Bixby. "It's this idea of a new web application that is more dynamic, more integrated, more HTML-based than ever before."

Read full article here. 

Hotel booking provider Kiwi Collection accelerates its site load times

Published in Internet Retailer:

“We were incredibly impressed at how quickly Strangeloop improved the site’s performance,” says Reid.

For instance, the retailer cut the average load time across the world by more than half, from 13 seconds to 6 seconds. And, the effect was even more pronounced in Asia, where the load time fell from 22 seconds to 10 seconds.

Read full article here. 

Performance and the cloud: The era of the end user

Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby, talks about BitCurrent's report on his blog:

This week at Strangeloop, we’re missing our VP of Product, Hooman Beheshti. He’s in Santa Clara, chairing the Performance and Monitoring track at Cloud Connect. If you want to follow along at home, they’re streaming the keynotes live, and BitCurrent (one of the forces behind Cloud Connect) has been live-blogging some of the sessions.

In the lead-up to Cloud Connect, BitCurrent released a very readable report called The Era of the End User, which discusses the cloud, user experience, and internal productivity.

Read more about the report here.

Chrome 10: More About Speed Than Security

Published in TechNewsWorld:

"Security is a difficult proposition for a browser," Bixby told TechNewsWorld. "Calling attention to all of the potential evil that exists and making people paranoid about browser vulnerabilities does not help Google get ad clicks, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) get downloads, or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) get people to use their software in the cloud."

Read full article here. 

Strangeloop VP of Product Hooman Beheshti to chair Performance and Monitoring track at Cloud Connect 2011

“One of the keys to the great content at Cloud Connect is that the track chairs all have day jobs,” said Alistair Croll, Cloud Connect Content Chair. “They get their hands dirty every day on complex issues, running some of the biggest sites in the world, digging into thorny performance issues, and building public and private clouds. They speak from experience, and Hooman is no exception. I’ve worked with him for a decade, and I consider him the smartest person I know on anything to do with web performance and optimization. We’re thrilled to have him be a part of the event, particularly on a topic that’s of such growing importance.”

As chair of the Performance and Monitoring track, scheduled for Thursday, March 10, Mr. Beheshti will be bringing together experts from the field of performance measurement to discuss what they’ve learned from measuring the performance of cloud platforms, what companies should be measuring in their cloud applications, and the best methodologies for making those measurements. Guest moderators and panelists include Cloudscaling CEO Randy Bias, Gomez CTO Imad Mouline, and Reddit.com Operations Manager Jeremy Edberg.

Read full announcement. 

22 not-so-short links about web performance

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

After January’s roundup of performance links was so well-received, I thought I’d make this a regular post. February was a busy month. Here are the best articles, studies, and blog posts I’ve read in the past four weeks.

Find out more here.

Strangeloop partners with Exclusive Concepts to speed up websites for Yahoo! merchants

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions is the largest hosted platform for ecommerce stores, with more Internet Retailer® Top 500 retailers using Yahoo! than any other hosted solution. Exclusive Concepts, the leading resource for online stores seeking to convert online shoppers into loyal buyers, provides a breadth of marketing services – from advanced search engine marketing to conversion testing – to more than 800 merchants around the world. As an authorized Yahoo! partner, Exclusive Concepts will be the exclusive provider of Strangeloop’s website acceleration technology to this market.

“We pride ourselves on bringing best-in-class, enterprise-quality solutions to online retailers of all sizes,” said Scott Smigler, CEO of Exclusive Concepts. “After comprehensive testing with Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer service, we saw an increase in conversion rates of up to 40%. We are very excited to add this service to our suite of resources for our valued online retailers. Our partnership with Strangeloop will bring online retailers of all sizes access to best-in-class technology that was previously only available to large enterprises.”

Read full announcement.

Search's Social Tie To Reputation And Rankings

Published in MediaPost:

The change levels the playing field, so those searching on the engine get access to better, more relevant content faster, rather than being bombarded by useless pages designed to con people into clicking on ads, according to Joshua Bixby, co-founder and president of Strangeloop. "I think it is true that some good sites might get caught in the net amongst the bad, but the true goal is to weed out the worst 'content farm' offenders who have been trying to fix the field for some time," he says. "Although there is a chance Google's efforts will catch the big guys first, allowing new offenders to spring up in the midst, I feel this is a tremendous strategic move forward for the industry."

As marketers tweak the content on sites and strategy, it will become interesting to watch how the move alters the outcome of search results. Bixby suggests that marketers focus on refining the quality of their sites to ensure that content is fresh and poignant so their domains continue to rise to the top of the rankings. In the end, it's a positive move for marketers looking for targeted leads and consumers who want to quickly find content online.

Read the full article here.

Gawker readers are leaving in droves. Is slow performance partly to blame?

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

Gawker Media’s radical redesign of all its sites has left a lot of readers unhappy, and they’re apparently leaving in droves. TechCrunch reports that a couple of the sites have suffered major traffic hits, with Gizmodo and Gawker.com losing up to half of their accustomed page views.

The comments from upset readers point to issues with the sites’ new design and architecture, but my hunch is that people will often complain about a website’s design, when what they’re really reacting to is speed and usability. So I ran Webpagetests on Gawker’s three biggest sites, then compared them to archived tests from November 2010.* (Here’s where I thank Pat Meenan profusely for keeping such a great public archive of old tests. It’s really useful to have them around for benchmarking purposes.)

Read the full post here.