Top Internet Entrepreneurs Invest In Fast Websites

The three internet entrepreneurs who developed, launched and sold the ground-breaking Mail Marshal Software to NetIQ have taken a 27 percent stake in Aptimize Software; innovators of software that speeds up websites and intranets.

Marshal Software's Martin Oxley, Kevin McFall and Peter Hodges have assessed more than 30 businesses in the past six years and Aptimize is the first they have chosen to invest in together.

"We've been looking for is a product that meets a genuine need – and the need to speed up the worldwide web is huge," Martin Oxley said.

Aptimize's web page optimization software is a world first, automatically performing optimisation processes that previously required time consuming and expensive manual development.

Mr Oxley said the "ingenuity" of the Aptimize web performance technology, which reduces web page load times by up to 75% using a breakthrough called 'resource merging', appealed 'immensely' to the three. Resource merging reduces the number of files that make up a webpage as well as the size of the files.

"The concept is easy to understand but difficult to develop - in this respect it's similar to MailMarshal, hence its appeal," Mr Oxley said.

"Aptimize is solving a global technological problem. Despite the explosion in broadband and connectivity, people who are browsing the internet a long distance from the server can wait for up to 30 seconds for pages to load.

Mr Oxley said people often wrongly ascribed slow load times to shortcomings with broadband.

"Telcos are often unfairly implicated in slow load times, when the problem lies with the number of 'trips' that files need to make between browser and server.

"With ever richer web site content – pages with more than 100 images, scripts, styles and HTML frames aren't uncommon, – this problem is only growing. It's a problem that Aptimize solves."

Recent research by Jupiter Research suggests that a third of visitors to a site leave if a page takes more than four seconds to load.