Tel Aviv-based eVolution Networks revealed its first customer this week, announcing that pan-Caribbean mobile operator Digicel is adopting its Smart Energy Solution (SES), a set of technologies that allows a carrier to power down its towers when not in use.

It sounds like a simple idea, but it’s not an easy one to implement. Mobile networks are designed to deliver their full capacity at a moment’s notice in order to handle the unpredictable patterns of the cellphone-wielding public. Consequently most base stations remain at full power whether it’s rush hour or the wee hours of the morning.

eVolution’s technology constantly monitors, analyzing its radio coverage characteristics as well as daily traffic patterns. Based on that information it decides which base stations in which places can safely be powered down at night or during other off-peak hours without sacrificing coverage. As traffic patterns change, SES changes the mix of cells staying online and off.

Though Digicel runs networks throughout the Caribbean, Central America and in the Pacific Rim, its Jamaica network was the first to get the upgrade. Digicel began testing the platform in early 2012, and fully activated network-wide in October. After three months of operations, Digicel estimated eVolution cut its radio network energy consumption by 23 percent (though eVolution said it can boost savings up to 35 percent in some cases). Digicel believes it can save up to $1.4 million annually in electricity costs, by reducing its power consumption by 2.8 GWh while keeping 1.5 kilotons of CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere.

In the last few years, all of the radio vendors have been prioritizing energy consumption. They’ve drastically lowered the wattage of their base stations, and have introduced “sleep mode” features that allow them to power down when traffic is low. But it’s going to take decades for that newer infrastructure to replace the old 2G and 3G networks – some of which are over a decade old – that populate the world today. eVolution certainly isn’t going to lack for business if carriers start seriously prioritizing their energy footprints.

eVolution, now two years old, has raised $4 million from Breslau Capital Partners. While Digicel is the first carrier to commercially implement its technology, the startup said it is in talks with several other large Tier carriers worldwide, all of whom are suffering from high energy bills.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution
• Key technologies for the smart city
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Today’s mobile networks are rife with various forms of traffic shaping and optimization platforms, from transcoding/transrating technologies that cull out extraneous video bits to policy enforcement engines that prioritize certain types of traffic — or certain subscribers — through the length and breadth of the network.

Those technologies all differ in the techniques used and the specific traffic they target, but they all share the goal of trying to ease the mounting deluge of mobile traffic piling up on carrier airwaves. Where Vasona distinguishes itself from the lot is in the level of precision it can target with its traffic shaping techniques, said Biren Sood, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.,-based company.

Most optimization technologies apply the work across entire classes of data in the network core, or they follow specific subscribers as they move to and fro, throttling back their speeds or compressing their videos regardless of the prevailing network conditions.

But Sood said that the network should be treated as a collection of its parts, rather than as a unified whole. Congestion occurs at the individual cell, so carriers should optimize their networks accordingly, applying traffic management techniques only where congestion dictates, Sood said.

“We understand the nature of the cell, and we understand the capacity of the cell,” Sood said. “With that understanding we can get the right bits to the right applications in the most efficient way.”

Vasona’s kit sits in between the radio and core networks where it monitors the congestion level of its associated cells as well as all of the inbound and outbound traffic streams to those cells. If a cell starts getting crowded, Vasona will start tinkering with mix of traffic going to that cell, for instance prioritizing streaming bits over a file download or tossing out extraneous information in a video, Sood said. Once the congestion in a particular clears, Vasona’s tinker stops, Sood said.

While the company has been flying under the radar for the last few years, it has been busy raising funds and talking to potential customers. So far it has raised $9.8 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and New Venture Partners, and according to Sood its technology is already in a handful of global mobile networks, though he wouldn’t reveal specific customers.

Vasona is playing in a very crowded space. As smartphones proliferate, and consumers and app developers start increasing their mobile data usage, carriers are looking for ways to alleviate to alleviate that demand. In many cases they’re targeting their customers’ habits directly, introducing stricter data caps, throttling back speeds or banning specific applications. But behind the scenes tweaking their networks with bandwidth optimization technologies.

All of the major infrastructure vendors have either developed or bought their own traffic shaping platforms — most recently Cisco Systems bought BroadHop and Citrix(ctrx) bought ByteMobile — joining an already large field of traffic management specialists like Aircom International, Allot Communications, Sandvine and Openet (which recently raised $21 million). A growing number of startups like Vantrix and Skyfire are specifically targeting the problem of mobile video.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• New solutions for the evolving mobile network
• What Mobile Learned From the World Cup
• How to manage the signaling storm in 2013

Bytemobile has two core products: Unison and the T-Series Adaptive Traffic Management System, both of which use a combination of content caching, deep packet inspection (DPI), policy management, analytics and video and web traffic optimization technologies to shape mobile data traffic as it traverses the operator’s network.

The platforms can be used to pare down payloads bound for the mobile phone – for instance scaling video to the resolution of each device’s screen– and manage congestion over an operator’s 3G and 4G data networks. Another key feature is the ability of Unison and T-Series to prioritize certain packets over others. Carriers already use traffic prioritization to throttle customers that exceed soft data caps. But the technology could become more significant in the future if carriers decide to give their own VoIP services preferential treatment and start favoring specific content partners’ video and Web services through “toll-free” traffic agreements.

Privately held and based in Santa Clara, Calif., Bytemobile isn’t the biggest infrastructure vendor in the wireless industry – it has 300 employees – but it certainly has a lot of reach. Bytemobile equipment is in 130 carriers’ core networks, which collectively serve 2 billion subscribers in 60 countries. The firm estimates that 20 petabytes of data pass through its networks daily.

Citrix and Bytemobile already have a relationship to build on. At Mobile World Congress, Bytemobile announced it would house its T-Series management platform on Citrix’s NetScaler cloud networking platform.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• New solutions for the evolving mobile network
• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape

Fortune first broke the story Thursday morning, reporting that the initiative as a new service, but according to The Next Web, the offer is really an extension of the Go Mo program Google launched in November. TNW cited a post on Duda Mobile’s blog that has since been removed from its Website:

“Our hope is that by offering both the education AND the service at no cost for one year, we can help businesses make the shift to mobile more quickly, benefiting both their business as well as us consumers who no longer want to pinch and zoom our way through their regular websites on our phones.”

The service wasn’t exactly expensive beforehand, costing $9 a month, but even a $108 annual fee can be a barrier for entry for a mom-and-pop site with good content but no online revenue stream. Duda keeps its costs low by using templates that automatically plugs content optimized for PC browsers into fields designed to fit into the much smaller footprint of the mobile browser. Duda offers free customization tools as well as gratis support via e-mail and phone.

Google has a significant motivation to bring more Websites mobile. The more phone-friendly content available on the Internet, the more mobile searches Google can generate and the more mobile ad revenues it brings in. From the Fortune story:

Even with the advent of fully capable browsers on current smartphones, many companies are still failing to take even the first step into the mobile space, says Jason Spero, head of mobile sales and strategy at Google. According to Spero, 62% of Google’s top advertisers don’t have a mobile site. “Businesses are kind of late to arrive to this consumer trend, and a large part of that is because they don’t know exactly what to do,” Spero says.

Still this particular promotion isn’t targeting those big advertisers or businesses. Duda’s tools are geared at getting small companies a basic mobile Web presence, not building sophisticated mobile interfaces or m-commerce sites. Duda’s templates don’t yet support Flash, framesets or e-commerce.

Companies that depend on the Internet to generate their revenues have already seen the mobile light. As my colleague Ryan Kim wrote in January, companies ranging from Twitter and Pandora to the newest startups are taking a “mobile first” approach to their services, realizing that the phone and the tablet will ultimately be the primary source of their traffic and profits. Those companies don’t need Google and Duda’s help. It’s the legions of sites out there still unfamiliar with the mobile Web that Google is trying to nudge along.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals
• Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunities
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look

The state of web content today

As richer, more dynamic, more interactive sites have hit the Web; the existing infrastructure has become insufficient. While high-speed broadband has tried to meet the infrastructure demands of the exploding volume and size of content on the Web, it’s clear that throwing pure infrastructure at the problem isn’t enough.

Two new markets emerged from these challenges: the content delivery network market (CDN) and the application delivery controller market (ADC). Put simply: These are technologies that help make your experience on the web a lot faster, while still using the same infrastructure that has been in place for the past two decades.

Remarkably, those two markets are now struggling to keep up with the explosive growth of the web. Sites are too big, too dynamic, and too rich for our existing infrastructure, and prevailing techniques for optimizing performance.

Today, we’re embarking upon the third major evolution in modern web performance. Web content optimization and acceleration is one of the largest market opportunities in the tech sector today, and it’s going to pave the way for the next major era of the Internet. Without it, innovation gets throttled.

The technologies we’re currently using to speed up the web need to be supercharged. They need extra help. That’s where making sure web content is efficiently delivered comes in. It’s about the conservation of bandwidth and the compression of megabytes, especially on mobile networks.

Four problems you can’t ignore

Most of the web performance challenges we face today can be traced to four basic trends:

1. Third-party content. Any given web site incorporates vast amounts of third-party content. This includes content such as advertisements, widgets and syndicated feeds.
2. Dynamic. Sites are now required to be more dynamic than our infrastructure can handle. Twitter feeds are constantly changing, and the data can’t be cached, and furthermore, we expect a high degree of personalization and individually relevant experiences when we visit sites.
3. More, more, more. We’re experiencing a content explosion: Sites have more pages, more pictures and more videos packed into the pages than ever before.
4. New devices. Myriad new devices hit the market every month, all of which are Internet-enabled. This doesn’t just mean more laptops and iPads; we’re also talking about refrigerators, low-cost home security cameras, and even cars!

And why is this happening? There’s a new party in town, and its called social media. Our problems aren’t capacity problems; it’s just that our content delivery infrastructure wasn’t designed for what’s happening. The existing infrastructure is designed on three premises and assumptions:

1. Single origin. Most content will originate from the same web servers, so if these are working properly, then everything is good.
2. Static content. Most information will stay the same, and therefore can be cached across the data center and Internet.
3. Fast delivery. Because content comes from a single origin and doesn’t change, caching and route optimization can deliver everything quickly.

Social media turns these assumptions on their heads. Content is mashed-up, syndicated, streamed from everywhere — with different qualities of service. So even if you’re paying $500,000 for traditional performance solutions, your pages will still slow down to the lowest common denominator, such as a slow ad service or the slower speeds of a streamed page from Facebook.

Yes, we can build new infrastructure, but it will take too long, and it may not be enough. We can throw more of the same performance technology at it, but this only helps so much, and the traditional technology doesn’t do anything for today’s dynamic content, which can’t be cached. At the end of the day, these four factors have driven intense demand for a new type of web acceleration.

With our powers combined, we are …

The good news is that we have the technology to solve the problem, and there has already been a good deal of investment to put the wheels in motion. We’re seeing the many web performance players converge to do this.

Recently, Limelight Networks acquired AcceloWeb for up to a rumored $20 million in a cash and stock deal. AcceloWeb’s technology does precisely what I’ve hinted at so far: It accelerates web content so that it can travel faster over our existing Internet infrastructure. Limelight, a traditional CDN company, is making a large investment in Web content optimization and acceleration. These are two fundamentally different markets converging under one company, yet we hardly heard any talk about the strategy behind the investment.

Similarly, Google recently announced that Google Analytics now offers a Site Speed Analytics Report. It was greeted with applause from the web performance community, but nobody really heard about how this “feature” had much broader implications for the web.

Google isn’t just helping you measure your site’s speed; they want the Web to be lightning fast. It’s critical to the future of their business that the web isn’t crippled by performance woes.

Their revenue is still largely ad-based, which contribute costly seconds to load times if we don’t find a solution. Not to mention: The faster a site loads, the more ads Google can serve. Google cares about web performance because it’s absolutely critical to their business and the future of the web itself.

Just how big is this?

This isn’t just the market opportunity for web content acceleration that’s exciting here. What’s more important is the future of the web, and what this evolution in web performance will spawn.

We’re talking about webscale personalization that isn’t held back by performance problems. Personalization is the web topic du jour, but we’re not going to reach the promise of true web personalization if we can’t load web pages faster than we’re doing on average today.

Similarly, the mobile web is going to face major obstacles if we can’t tune our apps to perform on even the most troubled networks. And we sure as heck aren’t going to usher in the future of virtual personal assistants if we can’t conduct complex processing and deliver that content at the speeds that consumers demand.

Oddly enough, the success or failure of these sexy technologies hinges on a critical evolution in web performance. All of a sudden, the emerging web acceleration and content optimization market is starting to look a lot sexier to investors, entrepreneurs and incumbent technology companies alike.

Ed Robinson is the CEO of Aptimize, a company that produces software to accelerate websites.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
• Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud

But while data center operators might not care where their servers are, the servers do. Today’s data centers are based on Web Services and SOA architectures. Instead of one big mainframe, we have many small servers all talking to one another.

In a traditional data center, machine-to-machine conversations like these can take milliseconds, resulting in slow applications. But if chatty virtual servers live on the same physical machine, they can communicate in microseconds.

Done right, putting virtual servers that need to talk together on the same physical machine could make applications a thousand times faster.

What we need is software that continuously analyzes conversations between all servers, then automatically reconfigures the data center so servers that communicate more often are on the same physical hardware. Call it a Virtual Data Center Optimizer.

The optimizer would be constantly moving servers among physical machines to find the optimal configuration as the data center changes, much as the Internet’s routers are always looking for the best path between two points as the network changes.

Companies already make tools to help humans find good configurations and to manage the flood of new virtual machines. Cirba, for example, helps administrators decide where virtual machines should go based on policy and workload. Embotics, on the other hand, tracks the lifecycle of virtual machines to address sprawl and security challenges.

Firms like these, along with technologies like VMWare’s VMotion, are well-positioned to optimize server-to-server communications. But we need more than just a management tool — we need an autonomic process that’s constantly adapting. Whoever solves this problem stands to speed up data centers dramatically.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook
• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

Fortunately Apple has released a handy guide on the Developer Connection outlining some high level concepts on how to optimize content for the iPhone. Topics such as user iPhone interaction, audio and video experience, and Safari’s supported media (in case you haven’t heard, Flash Player didn’t make the cut) are covered. Here’s a few points of interest:

The finger is not a mouse

Perhaps the easiest to remember and forget. The finger doesn’t have the same precision as a mouse (which I think is painfully obvious right off the bat), and the iPhone handles it’s own special sets of events and gestures that are NOT equal to the desktop. The guide outlines all of the gestures and results as well as supported events.

Think windowless

The iPhone doesn’t have a resizable window like a desktop browser, it has a viewport which it scales content to fit. Once a user double taps on the page, Safari looks at the closest block level element (div, ol, table, etc.) and zooms to fit.

Optimize readability & images

Even though Safari automatically scales text to a “comfortable” size after a double tap, you can feed it an iPhone specific stylesheet to optimize the readability of your site or application on the iPhone. Safari also has a unique user agent string so you can track iPhone’s Safari separately from its big brother.

GIF, PNG & TIFF images can be up to 8mb. Animated GIF images can only be up to 2mb. Anything larger and Safari will only display the first frame of the animation.

Whether you’re a web developer or not, this guide is an interesting read, especially if you haven’t been able to play with an iPhone yet. But if you are, this is a must read. It was obvious to me during the 5 minutes I got to play with an iPhone in the store that web content needs to be tailored to the device. This guide should make things alot easier.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide
• Why the iPad is Right for the Enterprise