New Service Provides Testing and Monitoring of Mobile Data Services, Including: Wireless Web Content, Ring Tones, Downloadable Applications and Rich Mobile Content
San Mateo, Calif., — April 04, 2006 — Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), the worldwide leader in services that improve online business performance and communications technologies, today announced the introduction of Keynote Mobile Application Perspective®, the industry's most comprehensive wireless content testing and monitoring service. The new service, which is a complement to Keynote's already successful Wireless Perspective® service, provides a complete solution enabling mobile service providers, online portals and enterprises to better ensure the quality of their mobile content and services.
With the introduction of Mobile Application Perspective, Keynote underscores its commitment to support The New Internet, of which mobility is a key component along with broadband and rich Internet applications. Along with the acquisition announced yesterday of SIGOS, the leading supplier of mobile data network testing and active service monitoring systems to major wireless operators in Europe, Keynote's new product further establishes Keynote in the mobile service level management market.
Keynote Mobile Application Perspective provides customers with an efficient, reliable, repeatable, interactive way to test and validate mobile content and applications on thousands of devices and using multiple profiles. The service provides powerful key metrics and insights for mobile service providers and portals to better satisfy the end-user experience and to prevent wireless data services churn.
Mobile Application Perspective addresses the challenge of testing and managing the end user experience of today's increasingly complex mobile applications over any wireless device. It is a cost-effective and comprehensive, fully outsourced service, providing developers and service providers an easy way to test and monitor content integrity and service levels of mobile applications using over the air connections from multiple geographic locations and a variety of wireless carriers. All tests are done with an extensive, up-to-date library of 1,000+ different devices and user profiles, plus providing the ability to load additional device profiles into the library.
In a recent article discussing the development of wireless data services for mobile devices, noted author, Preston Gralla, said, "Currently getting information from the Internet on mobile devices is a difficult, frustrating experience. Web sites aren't built with mobile phones in mind and so viewing and interacting with the sites is problematic."
Mobile Application Perspective helps content developers and service operations departments in portals and mobile operators swiftly test and verify the actual end-user experience of WAP transactions, of sending and receiving text or picture messages, downloading ring tones, playing games or running JAVA applications. The new service provides a simple push-button recorder so developers can interactively test and browse content in real time using any device of their choice from a vast library of device models. The same recorder may also be used to record multi-step wireless transaction scripts with elaborate rules for monitoring and checking for content correctness, freshness, responsiveness and reliability.
All test data is available in MyKeynote.com, the same portal where other Keynote measurements are visualized. Mobile Application Perspective also provides near real-time reporting and alerting, data feeds into customer dashboards and actionable insights that result in superior quality of service for mobile applications.
"The timing of the release of Mobile Application Perspective is especially opportune as 2.5 and 3G wireless data services penetrate the market," said Scott Crawford, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates. "The depth and breadth of devices that Keynote supports with this offering is giving providers of this rich mobile content access to metrics and insights essential to delivering on the experience demanded by wireless users."
As part of its Beta program for Mobile Application Perspective, Keynote monitored 7 leading mobile portals over a three-month period to assess the service level from the end user perspective. The mobile portals included: Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO), Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), MSN (Nasdaq: MSFT), ESPN Mobile, CBS Sports (NYSE: CBS), ABC News (NYSE: DIS) and Schwab (Nasdaq: SCHW).
Using Mobile Application Perspective measurements in two geographic locations, San Francisco and Seattle, Keynote found that service levels for content portals vary considerably depending on the mobile device and also network carrier. For more detailed results, contact info@keynote.com.
Availability and Pricing
Keynote Mobile Application Perspective is available immediately as an outsourced automated monitoring service with pricing beginning at $500 per script per location per month, and as an interactive content testing service beginning at $1,000 per month for 20 hours of interactive testing.
High volume customers can also outsource with Keynote to host dedicated testing and monitoring agents in a variety of public locations across the world connected to their choice of carriers, and also acquire on-premises testing and monitoring agents from Keynote for use in data centers or private network locations.
To learn more about Keynote's Mobile Application Perspective, go to www.keynote.com/solutions/slm_mobile_test_monitor.html or contact sales@keynote.com.
About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq "KEYN") is the worldwide leader in services that improve online business performance and communications technologies. Keynote helps approximately 2,300 corporate customers and 11,000 individual subscribers become "the best of the best" online. The business premise supporting Keynote's mission is: "Online businesses can't manage what they don't measure." As an independent and trusted third-party, Keynote provides IT and marketing executives with unbiased benchmarking data, competitive analysis and operational metrics from the customer perspective. This data measures service levels and customer experience of Web sites, broadband services and mobile communications.
Known as The Internet Performance Authority®, Keynote manages a market-leading infrastructure of 1,600+ measurement computers and mobile devices in over 114 locations and 66+ metropolitan areas worldwide that assess service levels and a panel of over 160,000 consumers who participate in interactive Web site tests that assess user experience. These online user experience tests capture customer attitude and behavior to answer the critical "why" behind the "what." Keynote's geographically distributed measurement services, on-site monitoring appliances, competitive intelligence and custom studies ensure that its customers outpace their competitors in online service levels and overall user experience.
Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
Keynote and The Internet Performance Authority are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2006 Keynote Systems, Inc.
Editorial Contacts:
Della Lowe, Keynote Systems, (650) 403-3233 dlowe@keynote.com
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote, (650) 403-3305 dan.berkowitz@keynote.com