Optimizing Video Streaming: MPEG-DASH, Video Compression, and Codec. Want to wach a video? Go to YouTube. No questions asked. If you’re a rebel, LiveLeak or Vimeo. YouTube serves more than 1 billion unique visits every month. 80% of their internet traffic is outside the U.S. while 100 hours worth of videos are uploaded every minute. Crazy, right? How is YouTube optimized? MPEG-DASH A few years ago, YouTube switched to a streaming protocol called MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). MPEG-DASH is a standard on how to handle streaming content. Back in the old days when you experienced buffering issues, the […]

Remember When Al Gore Created The Internet? Neither did we. The World Wide Web is getting ready to turn 25 this year. One notable contributor we can thank for the advancement of the Internet is Tim Berners-Lee. Back in 1989, Tim was a British computer Scientist in Switzerland at CERN. Often times researchers were wasting time by spending weeks solving an issue, only to find out that it had already been done years earlier by another researcher. Concerned by the constant loss of data, he made a proposal for an information management system. A system of interlinked documents that can […]

Worldwide 4G/LTE Data Shows USA Performing Second Worst for Speed The speed of mobile broadband in the U.S. have shown no signs of improvement compared to other countries. The report from OpenSignal studied sixteen countries download speed. Australia took first place with 24.5 Mbps, improving 42%, from 17.3Mbps to 24.5Mbps The U.S was second to last, just ahead of the Philippines (5.3Mbps) with 6.5Mbps.To be more precise, the U.S. finished next to last in 4G (LTE) mobile broadband speed. LTE stands from Long Term Evolution, AKA 4G. According to OpenSignal “The technical definition of 4G is that it should have data speeds capable of reaching […]

 Swenzy Floods The Daily Dot’s Twitter with Fake Followers Swenzy is a company that offers marketing services on social media sites. They offer fake YouTube views, Facebook likes, and Twitter followers. The Daily Dot has recently received an additional 75,000 viewers and counting. Because of the extra boost, 85% of The Daily Dot’s followers are now fake. If The Daily Dot didn’t write an article  of their experience, Twitter would’ve most likely took some form of action. The Daily Dot also stated that it was a DDoS attack. Unfortunately, the writer was wrong. The method of the attack is more […]

The Popularity of Vine, BuzzFeed, and GIFs Are you looking for something amusing, short, interesting, or funny on the web? My answer to you would be GIFs. An example of a site that incorporates GIFs would be Buzzfeed. Generally, here’s an idea of Buzzfeed’s guideline for writing: Gather Ideas for Top 10 List. Write One Sentence for Each Point. Deploy GIFs as Examples. Repeat. The Trending of GIFs The popularity of GIFs have inspired websites like Buzzfeed and mobile apps like Vine, which enables users to create and post seven second video clips. As the trend continues to grow, companies […]

Speeding Up Your Mobile App Mobile users are expecting top web performance. Their expectation of mobile equates to their experience on desktop. Bryan Mcquade covered his team’s mobile web (anti-)patterns with the end goal of getting their site to load from 20 seconds to a little over one second. He identifies critical CSS and compares pros and cons of inlining the critical CSS in HTML. This is important because the Critical Rendering Path refers to all the elements the browser requires before painting a web page. Prioritizing which assets on the CRP is a must for mobile devices. Bryan gives […]