Startup company Twin Prime is seeking to speed up mobile content delivery by addressing the variability in the last mile of mobile networks, between the nearest cell site and the device.
The company has been in stealth mode until this month and recently closed a series A round of funding. Its investors include Milliway Ventures, Moment Ventures, True Ventures and DFJ.
“If you look inside apps, they are three times slower than the Web,” said Kartik Chandrayana, co-founder and CEO of Twin Prime, who noted that “mobile is quickly becoming the first screen” and garnering more of users’ time and engagement, particularly in overseas markets such as India and China.
Twin Prime is targeting social media, retail and other enterprise applications with its solution, which it describes as speeding up app performance without caching, compressing or modifying the data – all of the typical approaches for maximizing performance, which often run into roadblocks in situations such as copyright-protected content that is encrypted. Instead, it relies on what it calls the automated hypothesis testing framework, which co-founder and CTO Satish Raghunath describes in the interview below. Basically, AHT involves the assessment of the network conditions of a user in real-time and uses the contextual information to select the best optimization strategy.
“The approach we chose was to say hey, look, the content is not the problem here – people are going to keep accessing richer content and more content. Really, the issue is how we deal with this volatility and diversity [in the networks],” said Raghunath.
According to Twin Prime’s case studies including social media app Frontback, it has been able to achieve speed gains in the range of 30-200%; Chandrayana said that due to the variability of mobile networks, its gains will always be a range.
“If the performance is going to be different in different places, the same optimization strategy is not going to work for all of these use cases,” said Chandrayana. “What we need to do is pay attention to the environment from where the phone is being used or the app is being used.”
Watch the full interview below:
Want more insight on mobile content delivery? Read RCR’s special report on Content Anywhere.
Image: 123RF
