Start-up Fireclick officially makes it debut this week with Web server software called Blueflame that speeds downloads of Web pages to online visitors with a Java-enabled browser.
Fireclick President and CEO Ram Srinivasan claims the Blueflame software can make Web page downloads anywhere from one-third faster to as much as ten times faster. The Blueflame technology, devised by Stanford University engineering students, works by predicting where the Web visitor will go next and then preloads the content into their browser.
"As long as someone is reading a page, that's idle time for your connection," Srinivasan says. "The Blueflame software can figure out what needs to be preloaded by analyzing traffic patterns and predicting what is most likely."
This so-called artificial intelligence technology was developed by Xavier Casanova, Jean-Paul Crametz and Stephane Kasriel, all French-born Stanford University graduate students. They brought in a management team and secured about $1 million in seed funding from Atlas Ventures for the start-up, which now has 21 employees.
According to Steve O'Brien, Fireclick's vice president of marketing, the Blueflame software can also be configured to download specific Web pages to Web site visitors. However, the software can't do personalized downloads of content.
Houston e-commerce firm IntermallAmerica.com has been testing the software. CEO Cheryl Austin said Blueflame does appear to speed Web downloading of pages, especially graphics.
"It's turned out to be very effective, with a page that used to take 35 to 40 seconds to download now boosted to five seconds," she noted. However, she added that the Blueflame software is but one approach to maintaining Web speed that IntermallAmerica.com uses. Other techniques include load balancing and caching.
Fireclick is offering the Blueflame software, which runs on any Sun Solaris- or Windows NT-based Web server, for a subscription of $2,000 per month.
Fireclick: www.fireclick.com
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