Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web
Arnaud Becart, Product Manager at ip-label talks about how ip-label has embraced both active and passive website monitoring to develop an exhaustive end user monitoring solution for its clients. Citing several examples, the presentation discusses how ip-label helps its clients in monitoring user experience across different platforms, several browsers, diverse locations, multiple devices, various content types and varied contexts.
Tim Morrow, Head of Channels at Betfair, an online gambling & betting company chronicles Betfair's journey on delivering a high-performance website. Confronted by a slew of customer feedback and slow load times, Betfair found itself losing out on the high-stakes world of Internet betting. In June, 2011, the company offered a customer-commitment to deliver three second page load times. Tim Morrow takes us through Betfair's cultural and technological journey as they bridge the gap between current performance and their promise to customers.
According to Michael Luna, better radio technology, such as 4G, is not enough to resolve the current and coming data crisis. The data tsunami challenge has been to keep user experience satisfying, while keeping app signaling and network activity clutter to a minimum. Although web-connected applications are still the bulk of the issue, the weight and complexity of streaming is becoming the next significant annoyance. This will lead to a twelve-fold increase in demand for networked services over the next five years.
"All you wanted to know about Opera browsers but you didn't even know you could ask," is presented by Karl Dubost, of Opera Software, as interviewed by Mac Slocum, of O'Reilly Media. Far from being in a "browser war," Karl says we are in a time of "browser love" among browser engineers. Karl also predicts that in 2014 mobile will be more important than the desktop. Karl further describes the differences between the current popular perception of browsers and mobile, and the actual situation, and shares his view of where the focus should be.
Kirk Skaugen presents Intel's perspective on the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. He does not use this dry definition of web analytics, but instead points out that 245 exabytes of data were sent over the internet in 2010, more than for the entire history of the web. It included forty-hours of YouTube video uploaded per minute, 200 million tweets a day, and 7.5 billion photos uploaded per month. Quality and speed are increasing, and costs are shrinking.
Google wants to make the Web faster. Arvind Jain and Sreeram Ramachandram from Google unveil Chrome Instant, a new feature built right into Google's browser Chrome, to make your search results load faster. With Chrome Instant enabled, Google makes an intelligent guess about which search result you are most likely to click on, and pre-loads that search result into a new, hidden tab in Chrome. If you do click on the search result, the hidden tab is unhidden, creating the illusion of an instant browsing experience.
Do not let what you see in the front window at eBay distract you - it is the backroom of the shop that is really interesting. eBay announced X.Commerce, its shopping and payments platform services in late 2011. On top of its acquisition of PayPal, eBay is bulking up into an online payments powerhouse! John Donahoe, president and CEO if eBay, talks with John Battelle about retail and the trends for online purchasing and payment.
Networks do not really carry water; they carry "cow juice." And there are many different products (cheese, whey, butter, etc.) from milk, but water is just water. Telecomm systems cannot carry double cream anymore with multiplexing and people need to get over that, says Neil Davies, Co-Founder or Predictable Network Solutions. Neil describes how to apply rational choices to remove hand waving and risk.
Tim Caswell talks about NodeJS and WebKit. Node is a relatively new and open source software system designed for writing scalable internet applications, mostly for web servers. WebKit is an open source web browser engine with a focus on mobile users. Because of the open source nature and widespread experience with JavaScript these two frameworks allow many developers scattered across the globe to collaborate on projects for which they have a shared interest. They are also more easily learned and applied systems than older competitors.
Can you imagine the U.N. running the internet? The internet has been a Wild West of innovation, fortune-changing, and, yes, job growth, but now regulation steps in, says Daniel Weitzner, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy in the White House. Here, he discusses the global open internet and its relation to governments and public perception. He emphasizes the importance of open access to information on the internet for innovation and job growth, yet this is offset by growing trust issues.
