Golgi gets $5 million to make your apps load faster

Steven Loeb · May 21, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3712

The company's goal is to "kill the spinning wheel" by making apps 20 times faster

People have absolutely no patience for slow apps. None at all. Just one slow start, or crash, and that app will likely be deleted, end of story. It's a big problem for app developers, since you, me and everyone else has experienced that kind of problem at some point.

Now a new company called Golgi is going to try and solve the issue for good.

Golgi is a new data transfer platform that is seeking to eliminate mobile apps’ long loading and update times. It delivers data between apps and servers quicker, so that apps can with data that is as fresh as possible. As the company puts it, that will allow them to "kill the spinning wheel," aka the symbol of lagging load times.

 The company launched on Wednesday, after being in closed beta for the past six month. Andt is coming out of the gate with $5 million in fresh funding, which came from its parent company Openmind Networks.

Apps that use Golgi launch 20 times faster than they do without it, Golgi CTO Brian Kelly told me in an interview. And it can boost performance even in areas with bad connectivity.

And while there are other companies out there that are offering a similar service, he said, only Golgi offers both a back end layer, which keeps apps updated even when they are completely switched off, and a store-and-forward system, which keeps track of updates during poor network conditions and makes sure apps update the moment they regain wireless connection.

"Nobody is doing what we’re doing, offering both set of tools within the tool box to solve this problem," Kelly said. "On top of that we allow developer to have more control over what sort of data they exchange and how they exchange it."

So how important is it really that apps perform up to their expectations? Honestly, very, very important.

According to a recent study put out by Compuware found that 84% of respondents said that mobile app performance was either important or very important. And 80% said they expect their apps to load in three seconds or less, which, frankly, seems kind of unrealistic.

People have a lot of expectations for their apps, and that puts even more pressure on developers to deliver. So what Golgi's ultimate goal is, said Kelly, is to allow them to worry about the problems they are trying to solve, rather than worrying about the back end by saving them both time and money.

"A key part going forward is that we allow developers to worry about what they are trying to solve, while we take care of the data exchange," Kelly told me. "We want their heads in the app space, not in the plumbing space."

And one more added benefit? With the FCC voting in favor of Tom Wheeler's "fast lane" idea for net neutrality earlier this week, which will allow companies to pay for direct connections to Internet users, Golgi could be the service that comes to thr rescue of all the apps that get left behind.

"One of the advantages of Golgi is that it uses the network as efficiently as possible even in bad connectivity," Kelly said. "For the apps not in fast lane, Golgi would help out in that sense."

Essentially it would allow those apps to use "the bandwidth left over after paid for services were done with it."

Despite what it sounds like, though, Kelly made sure to tell me that he would not relish having that kind of opportunity if the proposal is ultimately adopted.

Find out more about Golgi in the video below:

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