PacketZoom Announces Mobile Speed as a Service Enabling Mobile Apps to Access Cloud Content Up to 10X Faster

SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 6, 2015) - PacketZoom, pioneering Mobile Speed as a Service (MSaaS), today announced a completely re-envisioned platform that addresses mobile app users 'need for speed.' The service, designed specifically for mobile app developers and today supporting millions of users, speeds up app content download time from the cloud by up to 10 times. The PacketZoom service retires the 40 year-old TCP protocol, leveraging a new protocol that identifies the device as the address for data packets and easily accommodates for the intermittent nature of mobile connections in an intelligent, fault-tolerant way. PacketZoom is designed to work particularly well in low-bandwidth networks or areas with spotty coverage. To leverage the PacketZoom service, mobile app developers simply drag and drop the PacketZoom Speed SDK into their app, which immediately provides unprecedented speeds for downloading cloud content.

Defying conventional technologies that at best deliver marginal performance improvements, PacketZoom comes to market with prominent investors such as First Round Capital, Baseline, Founders Collective and Tandem Capital, who provided the seed funding for PacketZoom and its proprietary protocol-based service.

With this announcement, PacketZoom addresses the stark reality of mobile-user behavior: more than two-thirds -- 68 percent -- abandon an app due to slow loading, according to Zogby Research, a custom research firm.¹ Digi-Capital Mobile Internet Investment Review 2015 Executive Summary provides further evidence of fickle and impatient mobile user behavior.

"There are many mobile apps offering slow, clunky hotel booking services. We stay ahead by ensuring our iPhone app is very accurate and very quick -- essential when people are booking time-sensitive last minute hotel deals," said Harry Jones, co-founder & CPO, Top10, a site that specializes in finding top hotels based on destinations. "Once we integrated PacketZoom into Top10, we significantly sped up data downloads for our one million users and increased click-through rates -- helping convert more visitors to customers."

Innovating for Speed

The underlying PacketZoom protocol eliminates legacy network techniques that have been critical to mobile-network operation but delay content delivery including DNS lookups, three-way TCP handshakes, slow starts, and aggressive back-off to reduce packet loss. By eliminating the most challenging obstacles of legacy technology, PacketZoom enables delivery of mobile app content up to 10 times faster than otherwise possible.

PacketZoom also handles connections differently than legacy protocols, which consider the device's IP address as the destination for data packets. By identifying the device itself, and not its IP address, PacketZoom easily accommodates for the intermittent nature of mobile connections in an intelligent, fault-tolerant manner, ensuring continuous connectivity as any mobile device moves across networks. And because the PacketZoom protocol incorporates sophisticated "situational awareness," it always knows a device's location, tracks dead zones, and recognizes packet drops and other critical factors in real time. All these capabilities are provided through the PacketZoom stack without any client or service side code changes.

"We tried several solutions in the past but we were either unimpressed or unsuccessful. We have 69M installs of four games worldwide and about 2 million monthly active users. As the demand for HD quality graphics grows in the mobile space, so do the sizes of our games and subsequently the need for us to stream content from the cloud. Streaming takes time and adds friction to the first load experience," said Victor Rubba, CEO of Fluik Entertainment, a creator of games for mobile devices. "PacketZoom helps remove the friction and avoids compromising the quality of our games. Initial download times are now faster and the visual experience and quality of the graphics in our games improved as well. We see less players leaving before ever really experiencing the game. Sitting and waiting for content to finish loading now takes seconds and in this day and age, seconds is about as much patience as players can muster."

Easy-Install SDK Makes Mobile Speed as a Service a Snap for Apps

App developers can quickly integrate PacketZoom's Mobile Speed as a Service via an industry-first drag-and-drop SDK, eliminating the need involved changes to the app. PacketZoom developed the SDK in response to challenges of native mobile app development.

"With more than $32 billion in investment planned for mobile-first and mobile-only startups in 2015, there is no doubt there is an exciting opportunity to solve the mobile performance problem," said Bill Trenchard, First Round Capital. "PacketZoom has resisted the temptation of force-fitting legacy technologies by tweaking parameters to solve problems for which they weren't designed. They have been tenacious about finding a solution that works for modern app developers. It's easy to call a new approach a 'radical departure' from the norm, but that's exactly what PacketZoom has done. They have literally rethought and reengineered mobile content delivery down to the underpinnings."

"Every mobile app developer knows that the fate of their app is based on the user experience which drives loyalty to their app," said Chetan Ahuja, CEO of PacketZoom. "Unfortunately, too many apps miss their chance at mass adoption because slow data downloads kill the user experience. Our early traction with app developers like The ArtStack, Fluik Entertainment, Frenzoo, Proletariat, Top 10 and Voltage shows that this is a real problem for developers of all sizes, all around the world. As more companies move to take down websites and move their users to mobile apps, performance is more important than ever."

For more information, please visit: www.packetzoom.com

About PacketZoom

PacketZoom is changing the equation for mobile productivity, delivering the only Mobile Speed as a Service (MSaaS) platform that allows developers to speed downloads of mobile content from the cloud by up to ten times. Built on a patent-pending protocol that makes existing protocols obsolete, the service enables developers to drag and drop the PacketZoom Speed SDK to their applications, reducing go-to-market times and eliminating the technical challenges that have hampered competing approaches to fostering productivity with mobile apps. The company's MSaaS platform has been adopted by companies such as ArtStack, Fluik Entertainment, Frenzoo, Top10, and Voltage Entertainment USA. PacketZoom is backed by investors including First Round Capital, Baseline, Founders Collective and Tandem Capital. More information is available at www.packetzoom.com.

¹ Source: Global study by Zogby Analytics, reported in Social Times, March 4, 2015

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