FasterWeb knows how much you value your time. That’s why this Israeli start-up has designed an application that connects you to websites faster, avoiding the usual bottlenecks.

While all of us know what www really stands for, there are times when we could be excused for believing that it refers to a “world wide wait” – such are the sluggish response times you often contend with when trying to access certain web sites, especially the “fancy” ones. It’s frustrating, to say the least, and when it happens, most of us steam, scream or otherwise call our internet service providers to give them a piece of our mind.

But Ofer Gadish, co-founder and chief executive officer of FasterWeb, is not like most of us – and when this Israeli high-tech entrepreneur got frustrated trying to get his work done on the internet, he went out and created a better way to connect to websites. The result? Gadish’s FasterWeb application, which promises to make web surfing easier and up to 10 times faster.

One of the main causes of our slow internet experience is the internet itself, says Gadish, explaining that the standards that make it work were built for an easier, simpler time.

“When the web was first developed, the most challenging sites contained a few graphics, or maybe photos,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “Today’s sites feature dozens of advanced technologies that are not efficiently handled by those standards – not because the content they produce is too ‘heavy’, but because of the way the internet and browsers interact with that content.”

Getting web pages to your browser faster

There are hundreds of things going on under the surface of every web request, and while most of them can be accomplished in milliseconds, says Gadish, some require many more milliseconds to complete.

It’s all these interdependencies that often lead to that “dead” time, when a relatively simple process can’t take place until a more complicated one is completed, which delays the browser from loading the page. “Add up all the milliseconds and waiting time and you end up getting full seconds of delay, which to users can feel like very long seconds,” says Gadish.

Your time is valuable to Gadish and to his partners – Gil Shai, Ofir Ehrlich and Leonid Fainberg – and with FasterWeb, they’ve developed a system to streamline the many processes required to present a web page in your browser.

The FasterWeb application is installed on the server farm supplying web pages, where it modifies the content to eliminate some of the processes, change the order of their execution to prevent dead time, or convert certain processes into others in order to speed things up.

The milliseconds saved by FasterWeb add up to time you save when surfing to sites – without having to install web accelerators or new browsers. Doing those things won’t help anyway, says Gadish, because the bottleneck is in the net, not on your computer.

“There’s almost nothing you can do on your computer to significantly speed up the loading of web pages in your browser,” says Gadish. “For users connected to broadband, nearly all speed problems originate on the server side.”

Every small improvement translates into revenues

The five-megabit fast internet DSL or cable connection that many people have is more than enough to handle even the richest websites. And, he asserts, with FasterWeb users will have the opportunity to experience those sites as they were meant to perform – quickly and efficiently.

FasterWeb just closed a funding round with Israel’s YL Ventures. According to YL Ventures’ Managing Partner, Yoav Leitersdorf, FasterWeb is unique and can finally help websites of all sorts to overcome the bottlenecks that have been holding them back from shining.

“FasterWeb has unique and proprietary technology to further optimize web page load times in addition to what has been achieved so far with existing solutions,” he says, adding that “every small improvement in performance translates into additional revenues for websites, regardless of business model – advertising, ecommerce, or otherwise.”

FasterWeb is gearing up for its big sales push, which it hopes to begin at the beginning of 2010, with the effort concentrating on sites in the US. The technology is already operating on a number of sites in Israel as part of a beta test, making use of dozens of time saving techniques the company is in the process of patenting

“We are concentrating on improving the user experience, which many technical solutions ignore,” says Gadish. “I believe FasterWeb will contribute to a better internet user experience for everyone.”

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