Blog
February 2009

Welcome to our blog. Through it, we hope to offer insight into or products and technology, as well as some general news that we hope may affect your transportation habits.

Faster service delivery, without lifting a finger

Over the last month, we have quietly begun enabling a new feature for all of our clients that should dramatically improve their page load times and overall site performance.

There are two primary factors that affect the rate at which web sites load: the speed at which our servers can generate a response, and the time required for that response to get back to the user.  The first factor is fairly easy to optimize; we run high quality code, on high quality servers, in a high quality datacenter.  The second factor, however, has traditionally been tougher to 'tune' -- after all, our clients may be spread out all over the country, but our servers are all still located in Dallas.

That's where our new Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes in.  Here's the basic idea: instead of serving all of our clients sites from our Dallas-based datacenter, we distribute the content to 'virtual' datacenters across the world.  We have CDN servers located in Seattle, San Francisco, LA, St. Louis, Newark, Virginia, and Miami.  For international users, we also are distributing content from data centers throughout Europe and Asia.  When a user sends a request to an application running on our platform, it is automatically routed to the nearest server for processing.  For example: if you're accessing a Goose-powered service from New York City, most of the content delivered to you will be coming from Newark, instead of all the way from Texas.

The best part?  As a program administrator, you don't have to do anything - your CDN is automatically enabled.  Happy surfing!

Posted by Nick Shiftan on February 15, 2009.

Mass Transit Paradox

We've written before about the challenge facing public transit as demand for service increases.  The New York Times covered the "rider paradox" in a story this week.  Here in Seattle buses are packed and another fare increase was just approved.  Transit agencies across the country are cutting service and raising fares. 

While the stimulus package winds through Congress it is worth noting the levels of proposed investment in transit ($3b is a potential but not guaranteed figure) versus the public money already doled out to seemingly healthly banks and credit card firms.  As an example, credit card goliath Capitol One received $3.5B in December and promptly bought failing Chevy Chase Bank while claiming they did not need the bailout funds to complete the deal.  That leads to the obvious question of why they needed bailout funds in the first place. 

Hopefully we'll see more federal funds directed towards public transit which, as the Times article points out, facilitates employment for lower income workers. 


 

Posted by Charlie Crissman on February 3, 2009.
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