'Net Features : Keynote Systems

Keynote Awards Gold Medal Mobile Retail Sites

Michael Garrity — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:30:00 GMT

Just as the 2012 Summer Olympics were getting underway in London, Keynote Systems announced its own event, the International Summer Games for Mobile Retailers.

For three weeks, the mobile communications and Internet performance measurement company will name weekly Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners determined by the “Keynote Mobile Retail Index – World Edition,” which assesses the download speed and reliability of leading mobile retail sites by measuring them on smartphone devices from a variety of countries.

Index scores are based on a combination of a site’s average speed and reliability, and are measured all day, everyday over the course of a week (from Tuesday to Tuesday). The Mobile Retail Index will show average response times, success rates, and a composite score for homepage downloads on selected retailer sites.

Yesterday, Keynote announced the big winners for the first week of “competition.” The popular French brand Chanel took the Gold, largely because of its simple, sleek site that gave it the highest combined score for Load Time and Success Rate, as well as the site’s ability to maintain 100 percent availability.

German companies secured the next three spots, with the country’s Amazon site taking the Silver and ALDI capturing the Bronze. Despite having the fastest measured Load Time for the second consecutive week, Germany’s OTTO just missed out on the Bronze spot, but did make the jump up to fourth place by improving its availability numbers from 98.5 percent to 99.09 percent. Rounding out the top five was Amazon Japan, who secured 100 percent availability for the second week in a row.

Click here to see the whole list of winners for the first week of performance, and don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled to see who takes the Gold next week!

Keynote Rolls Out New UX Performance Metrics

Michael Garrity — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Internet and mobile cloud testing and monitoring firm Keynote Systems has announced the availability of its Keynote Transaction Perspective 11 and MyKeynote 11 solutions.

Transaction Perspective, an on-demand site-monitoring service for Web performance, now provides brand new user-experience (UX) metrics that leverage the capabilities of Internet Explorer 9.

These new UX metrics include the following:

Time to First Paint: This shows the moment when on-screen rendering begins and tells a user that the site is responding to their action.

Time to Full Screen: This shows when a user’s browser or screen has completely rendered the page (even if additional rendering takes place below the fold).

Time to Interactive Page: The final metric indicates when users can start clicking or swiping or doing whatever they do with the content on the page.

Version 11 will also feature nine new Browser Event metrics based on specifications laid out by the W3C Navigation Timing standard, allowing Keynote to offer enterprise-level IT operations greater insights into the performance of all key phases in a Web page’s lifecycle by observing in more granular detail the small milestones that take place during a browser’s construction of the page.

This information will be presented via the MyKeynote monitoring portal for Web and mobile sites, redesigned to help operations teams find and use performance data charts and graphs in their day-to-day management of websites.

Measuring all of these key milestones in a Web page’s delivery is growing in importance because recent research from Microsoft claims that 250 milliseconds — the virtual blink of an eye — can make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer.

“Businesses are finding new ways to make Web pages feel faster to customers," says Keynote VP of product management and corporate development Vik Chaudhary. “That perception of performance, or user experience, is critical for businesses to monitor closely and now requires measuring much more than total page speed. They must measure user experience from start to finish.”

Keynote Revamps Its Website Load-testing System

Linc Wonham — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:30:00 GMT

Keynote Systems’ new self-service load-testing tool, Test Perspective 3.0, has been redesigned and streamlined to give website owners results in minutes rather than days or weeks. Keynote has also tripled the load-testing capacity of the new system to 30,000 virtual users, so that companies can watch in real time as virtual users expose symptoms of system overload before real users visit their sites.

Test Perspective 3.0 includes guided workflows that take the guesswork out of configuring a website load test, and built-in demonstration scripts that allow customers to conduct their first test against Keynote’s practice site in less than 15 minutes. The self-service testing solution allows business owners, Web operations teams, developers, quality assurance testers and third-party providers to simulate the arrival of up to 30,000 simultaneous visitors to their Web applications from outside the firewall. Scheduling, conducting and analyzing results of tests are all done in-house by your own team, without the need for software licenses, hosting arrangements or consultants.

Pricing starts at $2,000 for 100,000 Virtual User minutes, but Keynote is offering a free trial account that includes 3,000 Virtual User minutes over a period of two weeks. Go to www.bit.ly/tspoffer to set up a free load-testing account.