Hang around the world of emerging technology long enough and you’ll stumble upon a collection of odd starts and strange coincidences.

For example, most of the staff showed up hung over on the day Sandvine opened its doors. And the man behind one of Canada’s coolest technology companies, RapidMind, is actually named McCool.

But a story where identical twins team up with a physicist-quoting CTO? Now that’s strange.

Strangeloop to be precise.

Fast performance or feature-rich? Strangeloop says ‘yes’.

Most current web development projects incorporate blogging, social networking, instant messaging and file-sharing, all of which are server intensive and bring with them network-mangling volume spikes.

Strangeloop’s AppScaler, or AS-1000 accelerates Microsoft AJAX applications, improving the user experience and allowing software developers to focus on features instead of painstakingly optimizing code. But it isn’t simply a speed-booster.

By intelligently managing server calls, Strangeloop also helps clients reduce bandwidth consumption, further reducing costs.

“Our product has [the] ability to watch what goes through a box, [recognize] performance problems and then decide what to do about [them],” says Joshua Bixby, co-founder and vice-president of product development.

The executives get back in the loop

Strangeloop was co-founded by Joshua, his identical twin brother Jonathon, and CTO Kent Alstad. Alstad worked with the Bixbys at IronPoint Technology, which they founded and later sold to The Active Network less than 30 months after startup.

“At IronPoint, we were kind of at the bottom left of the dynamic content arc,” says Joshua. “Strangeloop is an outpouring of trying to solve that problem between performance and interactive features.”

According to Alstad, the name Strangeloop comes from Gödel, Escher, Bach, a book by Nobel-prizewinning physicist Douglas Hofstadter.

“He talks about recursive logic with inherent problems that ultimately breed awareness,” says Alstad. So Strangeloop really stuck with us,” he says.

Das cool.

Solving real-world problems

Organizations that are trying to make the jump to Web 2.0 often don’t know what they are getting into.

“[One] client was a big university under pressure to offer a dynamic, interactive environment to students,” says Joshua.

“The solution they bought worked great on a demo box, but once it was rolled-out across the enterprise, it was taking 10 to 20 seconds for a page to load. Their only options were to go back to the vendor, buy 50 really expensive servers, or spend huge on bandwidth pipe,” says Bixby.

Each of those options meant more money, resources and time.

“That’s where Strangeloop [came] in,” says Joshua.

The nuts and bolts

Typically, application providers try to solve the performance/features conundrum through code optimization.

The AS 1000 uses intelligent caching with user-defined constraints to manage the otherwise cumbersome load of system calls and messages to-and-from applications servers.

“It starts learning right away and it continues to learn,” says Joshua. “That’s important with dynamic applications because the nature of how and when they are being used is always changing.”

The AS 1000 has four key technical differentiators, according to Alstad.

“First, the technique used to modify requests and responses is kept inline,” he says. “Instead of having calls to other servers we optimize data transfer between the application server and the AS 1000.”

Differentiator number two is that the AS 1000 sits at a strategic place in the network, ”. . . so we get to see all the traffic,” says Alstad.

“Third, the AS 1000 measures performance data coming through the network and adjusts in real-time,” he says. “And four, we’re experts at ASP.NET. We’ve already had all those long nights of coding pain.

At the business logic level, Strangeloop’s value is its flexibility.

“On the browser side, you can set static stuff (content that doesn’t change to cache), and grab dynamic stuff through auto updates without the need for a whole bunch of coding,” says Alstad. “If you decide you don’t want some pre-set rule followed anymore, flick a switch.” Try and do the same thing with code and you’ll constantly be recompiling, and sacrificing time, money and end-user goodwill.

Joshua adds one more key differentiator to the list.

“Our box can get into an organization, powered-up and optimizing in under 20 minutes. We’ve actually timed it.”.

Strange days, indeed

Jonathan believes that helping their clients deliver that experience will propel Strangeloop forward as a key tool for the entrepreneurial gold-miners of Web 2.0.

“I think we’re pretty unique,” he says. “[We’ve] had success in trying to push around the pain point from our last business, and the pain point in the ASP.NET market today.”

The company has been previewed in Customer Technology Preview, with beta-launches scheduled for October 2007, and Strangeloop has already picked up a significant award and a big war chest of cash.

In August 2007, Strangeloop won a Microsoft Best of TechED 2007 award. “We credit that to our vision and pre-beta testing,” says Jonathan. “ASP.NET is such a clear pain for business . . . it’s a big honour for us and we’re excited to win many more.”

And in July 2007, Strangeloop picked-up CAD$11.5 million in Series A funding, one, of the largest rounds of private Series A financing for a technology start-up in Canadian history, Jonathan says that Strangeloop plans to spend the money broadening its virtual office of senior staff, and quickly accelerating the company’s sales mission.

“It used to take that university’s web site 20 seconds to load [a page],” says Joshua.

“We put the AS 1000 in – with zero code or infrastructure changes – and the page loads in two seconds,” he says. “And a server that could handle 100 transactions per second can now handle 1000, (which creates a need for fewer servers)”.

“We’re trying to be the leader in the dynamic acceleration market,” he says. “The opportunity is big enough and we have to go after it quickly.”

That’s a lofty objective for a technology that’s yet to move to full product launch. But the market potential is there and, hey, stranger things have happened.