We've been asked by many of our Skyfire web browser for Android users this past year when we'd get around to upgrading the app for them. Well, our sincere apologies for the wait – but it's here. Skyfire Web Browser 5.0 for Android redefines mobile browsing by letting users personalize their browsing experience with the very best extensions on the mobile web. Our Skyfire Horizon mobile browser extension platform, which is live on Skyfire's iPad app, on the Android devices of a major US Tier 1 wireless operator, and is also coming to Sprint devices later this year, is now available for Android users worldwide. This is a big leap forward for the browser, and we hope you'll try it out for free by downloading it in Google Play now.

Skyfire 5.0 for Android is loaded with features that make browsing the mobile web more social & more useful than ever before. Extensions like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Yelp, Related Apps, Offers, Readability and many more allow users to stay connected, find deals, browse apps and save browsed content for later – all without leaving the page they're currently on. Users can add, remove and even create their own extensions. Nearly 20 mobile browser extensions have been added to Skyfire's web browser for the very first time. We've also redesigned the look and feel of the application to make it more simple and streamlined than ever before.

Right now users who have Skyfire 4.0 can also download Skyfire 5.0 and have the two versions side by side; in the next few weeks we'll make it easier simply to upgrade from one to the other. Users of the existing 4.0 browser who have upgraded to access Flash video viewing capability will be able to continue watching Flash-based video. It's important to note that with Skyfire’s focus on mobile browser extension innovation, Skyfire Web Browser 5.0 does not include the Flash video upgrade capability.

We are now focusing our consumer web browsers on making mobile browsing more social, contextual and app-like in the wake of the decline of Flash. Many Skyfire users know that Adobe dropped Flash support on Android last year, and that videos are decreasingly encoded in Flash, with mobile video predominantly being encoded as MP4 and other formats. Skyfire is focusing its attention on building an innovative, world-class, free browser, and not on rendering Flash video for mobile devices that don't support it, nor on making Android users pay for that privilege.

Come download the new Skyfire Web Browser 5.0 for Android in the Google Play store now, or watch this video to see how it works before downloading!

Skyfire shares our latest news, latest innovation and gets "social" on our Cloud Solutions for Mobility focused networking channels. Please take a moment to join us:

Skyfire Joins the 1 Billion Browsing Session Club

We’ve got a lot to be thankful for around the Skyfire Silicon Valley and London offices.  Our vision to bring disruptive cloud solutions for mobility to the telecommunications space is truly coming to fruition with Skyfire’s Rocket technology ‘launching’ with carriers all over the world.  With strong validation and adoption from the world’s leading Tier 1 carriers and service providers, you’ll soon see multiple products from Skyfire’s video and app extension framework expertise alleviating network congestion and enhancing user experience on next generation devices.

A key reason Skyfire continues to gain acceptance and approval with some of the world's largest telecom companies as a small, yet innovative and nimble start-up, is due to our incredible Skyfire app community.  Over the past couple of years, more than 15 Million Skyfire users spanning the globe have helped to provide us with invaluable feedback, support and helped spread product awareness as we hone our multimedia optimization acumen - making Skyfire the leader in mobile video and data know-how, and in delivering the latest in consumer app innovation to mobile browsing.

Today, we're delighted to announce that Skyfire app users have now opened Skyfire more than 1 Billion times to embark on their mobile browsing sessions on iPhone, iPad and Android devices. This puts Skyfire Browser in an elite category of browsers, including desktop browsers, that have hit such an astounding number of sessions. You certainly can learn a lot on the way to 1 Billion, and we're applying these learnings in all sorts of new and disruptive ways. We want to take a moment to thank the Skyfire community for helping us reach this impressive and important milestone, because after all, those 1 billion sessions are your sessions.

Happy Browsing!  - The Skyfire Team

This promotion is now complete. We'd love to hear what you think about your new app!

Skyfire is celebrating our 15th Million Download – and the start of the London 2012 Olympics today - by putting our popular Skyfire Browser apps on sale!

We announced yesterday that Skyfire has surpassed 15 Million downloads on iPhone, iPad and Android platforms.  Today, as the Olympics unfold in London, we are celebrating this milestone with our biggest sale ever across all Skyfire consumer apps.  The promotion kicks off immediately with a 66 percent reduction on the price of Skyfire for iPhone (Now just $0.99) and a 60 percent discount off the standard pricing for Skyfire for iPad (Now just $1.99) and Skyfire for Android (Now just $1.99)!  The offer will continue through the end of the afternoon today (5:00PM Pacific in North America).

Customers have opened the Skyfire Browser Apps nearly 1 Billion times over the past two years. That's got to be nearly as many browsing sessions as Big Macs served, right? Our carrier-grade video optimization products will soon be deployed around the world to help to ease the flow of data from congested cell towers, while enhancing the mobile browsing quality and customer experience on mobile and laptop devices.  To thank customers, their families and friends for browsing with us, we want to offer them the full line of Skyfire Apps at a celebratory 15-million-downloads-and-counting price.  

Thanks for your continued support from all of us at Skyfire – Happy Browsing!

Santa Monica, CA - Red Herring announced its Top 100 award in recognition of the leading private companies from Americas, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.

Red Herring’s Top 100 Americas list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work. 

“Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across North America to the Top 100 Winners. We believe Skyfire embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Skyfire should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong.”

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Americas.

Don't Throttle Me: Other Ways To Manage Wireless Traffic

Guest post on Forbes by Skyfire CEO, Jeffrey Glueck

Over the last month much has been said about AT&T’s decision to throttle those customers on unlimited data plans who use over 1.5 gigabytes in a month. As many have pointed out, carriers are confronting real capacity issues as data growth explodes, but blanket throttling is a crude and unfriendly hammer.

Choking users’ download speeds to a trickle, around the clock, for two weeks or more a month, regardless of whether the local network is congested at that moment, is an example of a “solution” developed with rudimentary network management tools and gives the appearance of not having customer experience in mind. In essence, this kind of policy punishes users merely using a service they pay for. A small claims court recently found for an aggrieved user, and agreed the carrier broke its promise of “unlimited data” by choking bandwidth for weeks at a time. More suits are coming.

As big brands should know, heavy users are typically the biggest advocates or worst critics. The voices of the throttled have been loud thus far. And with some reason: carriers advertise that users on smartphones can enjoy video on their devices. But a user who streams just two hours of HD video on their phone could easily be throttled for having eaten up their 1.5 gigabyte allowance. The irony is that carriers can solve the network crunch problem in a more constructive way.

A myriad of options put user experience at the forefront, while achieving the same cost savings: video and image data optimization, WiFi offload, femtocells, 4G build-out and others. I sympathize with the network planners at wireless operators. For example, AT&T says its data traffic grew 5,000% after the launch of the iPhone, which overloaded its network in many large cities. Globally, according to a recent Cisco report, mobile data traffic will grow 18,000% from 2011 to 2016, as smartphones and tablets proliferate. Video sits at the heart of the problem, and is already eating half the bandwidth. Cisco projects video will account for 71% of mobile bandwidth by 2016. This massive increase, what I call Mobile Warming, will flood cell towers, stall video, slow downloads and drop connections.

The problem is only getting worse: Better screens and faster connections allow users to access high quality content, while device makers and publishers keep adding more HD capabilities and content. Meanwhile, users have no way to self-police the size of videos in advance. A one-minute video might burn two megabytes, or 20. With 30 percent of users already averaging one gigabyte of data use per month, the handful of ‘heavy’ users targeted will soon include a large number of mainstream users.

In most digital businesses, brands value their most devoted and frequent users. Can you imagine Facebook informing users they are clicking the ‘Like’ button too often and will be capped? Or Twitter telling their fans to tweet less often? Of course not. Super-users are their biggest advocates. To be fair, AT&T is in a different boat: it spends $20 billion a year on capital expenditures and faces even higher costs as demand continues to grow exponentially relative to subscription revenues. But the larger idea is the same: it’s wise to find a way to make your heaviest users happy that doesn’t break the bank at the same time. There are better ways to lighten the bandwidth crunch, keep video streaming smoothly, and enable consumers to connect at peak hours.

Throttling a customer 24×7 might free up bandwidth for other users, but only by rendering a heavy user’s phone unworkable. Consider an alternative, where heavy users can watch videos while the effective capacity of the tower is instantly expanded based on demand loads.

Cell towers, spectrum and backhaul pipes are a finite resource. If a few users trying to stream videos to 4-inch screens are ruining connectivity for dozens of other current users on the tower, a dynamic “fair use” division of the spectrum does make sense. However, solutions exist today that can let those users enjoy rich media, without ruining it for everyone else, nor bankrupting the carrier. By leveraging solutions like surgical optimization, WiFi offload, femtocells and other technologies, carriers can shape traffic on their networks on-the-fly and save a large percentage of bandwidth without punishing the user.

If you attend mobile industry events as I do, you will hear wireless carriers frequently bemoan that “over the top” services like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and Apple are making large profits riding atop the networks that carriers pay huge sums to build. And that’s true. But sometimes the carriers forget that they too are well paid for this data – by their subscribers. Carriers will earn $80 billion in data-related revenue in the U.S. in 2012, and data customers typically pay $600-$1000 a year. Contrast that with players like Google or Facebook, whose websites typically earn less than $25 a year per user in advertising and search revenue. Moreover, one could argue that over the top services are building the killer apps that allow carriers to sell more smart phones and data plans. Operators do have important paying customers to care for, and retaining those customers makes for good business. It’s time to find a smarter way.

See Forbes Post Here

Skyfire’s Rocket Optimizer, which lets wireless operators save up to 75 percent on video bandwidth, adds image and audio optimization to its carrier-grade product line

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (February 24, 2012)--Today Skyfire unveils the addition of new data-reducing features to Skyfire Rocket Optimizer 2.0, its powerful carrier-facing network video and data optimization platform. This latest development comes hot off the heels of Skyfire's recent Verizon Ventures funding announcement and the securing of two Tier One North America carrier partnerships deploying in early to-mid 2012.

With Cisco’s prediction last week that video will generate 71 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2016, Skyfire Rocket 2.0 sits poised to help carriers solve capacity issues linked to the rapid rise of mobile video streaming. Skyfire continues to build upon its cloud computing Rocket 2.0 platform announced in October 2011, with the additional offerings of device-aware image optimization and audio optimization, further enhancing carrier’s arsenal against network congestion.

• Image Optimization: Skyfire has added highly scalable and cost effective image optimization to the Rocket 2.0 Platform. The platform can optimize most popular image formats on the web and builds on top of Skyfire’s industry-first cloud optimization architecture.
• Audio Optimization: Skyfire rounds up the optimization portfolio with the addition of audio optimization. As with all Skyfire functionality, audio optimization is device and network condition aware providing highest savings with superior user experience.

Skyfire’s video optimization solution increases effective network capacity by 25-30 percent across RAN and network core. With the addition of image and audio support, Skyfire can increase network capacity by an additional 10 percent for a total of up to 40 percent capacity increase.

Skyfire analysis shows that video, images, and audio together make up more than 90 percent of the bits on the web that can be optimized. As for the rest, most modern web servers already compress HTML,Javascript, XML and other text-heavy content and the approximately 2 percent on potential savings does not justify the cost of deploying text compression services in the network.

For a typical tier one wireless network, Skyfire can bring savings of over $100 million in deferred capital expenditure and operating costs in the first year of deployment alone, with a payback ROI in just months. Skyfire’sRocket technology not only delivers game-changing cost savings for wireless operators, but also results in customers having a better user experience on the network.

“Rocket 2.0 is the world's most scalable video optimization solution for mobile operators struggling to deal with the explosion of mobile video and multimedia,” said Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck. “With the addition of image and audio optimization to the platform, Skyfire continues to offer intelligent and scalable network solutions to help carriers brace for the rapidly approaching mobile data tsunami.”

For more information on Skyfire Rocket Optimizer, visit: http://www.skyfire.com/en/for-operators/rocket-optimizer

About Skyfire:

Skyfire is dedicated to leveraging the power of cloud computing to improve radically the mobile Internet experience for both Operators and Consumers. Skyfire’s solutions provide game-changing cost savings, better end-user experiences, and compelling incremental revenue opportunities. Skyfire was recently recognized as no. 4 on Light Reading’s 2011 Startups to Watch list; and by OnMobile as a Top 100 Private Company. As both a laboratory and showcase for new capabilities, Skyfire has honed its technology through a variety of consumer apps, which have more than 12 million downloads to date.

Skyfire is based in Mountain View, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley. For more information, visit http://www.skyfire.com

Follow Skyfire on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/skyfire.

NOTE: Skyfire and Skyfire Rocket are trademarks of Skyfire Labs, Inc. All other registered or unregistered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.

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