Once you have a good amount of users testing, its not that difficult to get free servers from the ISPs. The secret is that on-net servers show testers better performance than off-net so every ISP wants to contribute the speed test server. If they dont do it they are shooting themselves in the foot by routing their traffic to competitor networks and getting test results behind their peers.
Whats even worst then your competitors can claim awards for the Fastest ISP and your marketing people are furious!
I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla.
The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annually for this data and we have a few hundreds of of those big MNOs globally. This market is pretty big. Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI so acquiring data business is one of the smart strategies they can implement to stay relevant.
To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right. I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.
>>>>When you are daydreaming (or mind-wandering, as it is referred to within scientific circles), memories that you thought were lost forever can come to the surface again.” >>>
I have been thinking about this lately. Not just in the context of smartphone use but being devoted to some mind consuming endeavour like building a startup.
I have been building and operating company for over 15 years now (I am 43 now). During those years I had amazing quality of life due to success of the business. However, at the same time I spent most of my daydreaming hours on thinking how to grow my business. Now when business is about to be sold and I don't think about the growth that much I am starting to realise I don't remember as many things from my childhood as most of people around me. I keep wondering whether this is common to other people who have been obsessed about something for many years and forgot to daydream about their earlier years.
The complaints from small business owners in the article remind me of the same situation couple of years ago when Facebook reduced brands ability to reach their followers on Facebook. Not to be picking on FB, in the same way Google is shrinking organic reach within SERPs with every passing year.
There is nothing new in this behaviour, it has happened and it will happen on any new platform that gets popular.
I agree. While Russia has lots of popular services which win over western counterparts (Yandex>Google, VKontakte>FB ...) they still do use Google/Apple devices. Blocking them would cause more powerful force than any government can currently yield.
We have a way to go though - Google generously offered $2M in Adwords credit as a response to Ukraine war. Let's encourage them to do more!
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30476940)
This seems a bit useless to me. Its trivial for Russian networks to block out foreign requests before it reaches the sites. So effectively those sites would not be accessible from outside of Russia but inside , business as usual.
I am wondering if this automatically means Russia will switch off gas supplies? Understandably, how Europe will pay for Russian gas when SWIFT is switched off, and probably Russia won't be sending gas for free?
This thread feels like dejavu for me. I had been going through exactly the same with MS Azure couple of years back.
MS gave us some Azure free credits and once they expired it was series of stressful months to get the billing going. Constant emails with different layers of support people and no one could help us to PAY for Azure.
I have been to that site twice , first time about 20 years ago as part of the diving course. I remember one of the exercises was to go to higher depth and do math exercises to prove that our thinking was not impaired due to the depth.
For sure that site was not branded as deadliest in the world, but already back then dive masters told us about people who lost their lives there.
You can already run any workloads on it at a fraction of a price of traditional cloud services.