Interview with Peter Cranstone, CEO of Remote Communications Page 2
Integration Your Space -- Integrated Portal in the Browser. The goal has always been to move data more efficiently over the Internet. Our core speed products are sophisticated programs all under 100K in size which accelerate content over the Web for any device. HyperSpace also includes the ability to not only compress text/HTML/XML in real time but has advanced Image optimization controls which can scale, convert to black and white, and image optimize graphics on the fly. In the connectivity arena, ElseWare allows us the ability to "clip" data from any existing or dynamic content and then deliver if reformatted and compressed for any target screen size. EMAS gives us the ability to notify the user of timely news events. These can be delivered directly in to our Your Space portal in the browser. This is essentially a "brandable" section of real estate in the top right hand corner of the browser. It supports, audio, video, HTML/XML/JavaScript (all compressed of course). As they say a picture is worth a thousand words... http://www.remotecommunications.com/site/yourspace.htm
BTW, the commercial version of HyperSpace(R) includes a "smart snap in engine design." This allows new compression algorithms for different MIME types.
WR: What can webmasters expect in terms of bandwidth savings, and download speedup after installing mod_gzip on their apache servers?
PC: A lot of research has been done in this area. Here are the numbers we feel comfortable quoting. With a "general" mix of text and graphics the overall bandwidth savings/improvement is about 30% - 33% If your site is text heavy, i.e. JavaScript or lots of XML then the savings can climb to as high as 97% with our more advanced commercial products. With regard to the performance improvement in the server it's quite dramatic. Our technology is very fast and has been benchmarked at 1000 Transactions Per Second on a PII 300. Using available benchmarking software for the Apache server we have seen a 164% performance improvement in the server.
WR: What percentage of browsers currently in use support HTTP 1.1 compression by default? I noticed that MSIE 4.5/5 Mac does not support it (but Netscape 4+ does).
PC: Virtually all browsers released after 1998 support HTTP 1.1. A quick test reveals the browsers ability. Click on this link:
It runs a line test. About halfway down the page, the browsers "header" information is shown. If the accept - encoding line shows: gzip then the browser is capable of receiving compressed content. If your browser doesn't support it, there is generally a version available for free which does.
WR: Vigos AG recently released a proprietary mod_gzip module, how does it compare with yours?
PC: We have not been able to download a version of their software yet. As soon as we can we will run a comparison for your readers.
WR: How did Remote Communications come about?
PC: Two guys, one in Fl, one in AR decided to build something from scratch. We first met on another more complex data compression product (which is now HyperSpace(R)) First product was a universal bookmark application. Second idea was "speed up the web" and thus HyperSpace(R) was born.
We met another guy in Russia... Konstantin J. Balashov (aka, Cotty) He's a brilliant programmer with a core focus on compression. He said, "You need worlds best compression algorithm for your smart engine"... we said build it. He did and now he's part of the team.
Three guys, a Brit, an American and a Russian (Kevin and I have only met twice, we've never met Cotty face to face) built HyperSpace(R) using nothing more than a 28K connection for communication.
