Kaazing announced today that it has closed $17 million in new funding. The company, which is the leading provider of a platform for the living Web, will use the funds to continue to expand and grow its customer base, particularly as it moves aggressively into the mobile market.

Today, Kaazing is being used in many industries where high-performance Web communications are critical, including financial services, retail, gaming and entertainment, transportation, and mobile. Representative customers are BSkyB, Cantor Fitzgerald, ITRS, Southwest Airlines, and The Limited.

"In the past, to provide our clients with the most immediate and responsive services, we had to engineer very complex systems using a tremendous amount of client-server technology," said David Kim, Director of Development, Cantor Fitzgerald. "Kaazing allows us to deliver real-time, detailed, and responsive information on any platform, including mobile devices, but with a great deal less complexity and cost than before. This significantly differentiates us from our competition."

The Kaazing Platform enables real-time Web communications over a "full-duplex pipe". This is a dramatic change compared to the legacy architecture that has been the foundation of all Web communications since the early 1990's. The platform upgrades the Web architecture to one that works like a telephone with direct connections, rather than a telegraph system that requires a "request and response" on each end. Because Kaazing's founding team contributed the groundbreaking HTML5 WebSocket protocol design that makes a fully connected Web possible, the company leverages that expertise and offers solutions that go well beyond the standard's basic capabilities: the unique, core benefits of using the Kaazing platform are secure, scalable, real-time Web communications over any Web-enabled device without the dollar- and bandwidth-cost of the infrastructure that has previously been needed to enable live and interactive Web solutions.

"This new living Web will allow us to interact with our friends and colleagues at levels we couldn't have imagined five years ago, solve business problems that seemed impossible, accessing systems and share information at levels never seen before. The Web as we know it today was only the beginning, now the living Web will change everything," said Jonas Jacobi, co-founder and CEO of Kaazing.

"This is particularly true as we enter a hyper-connected world where mobile devices are the norm and accessibility to live information anywhere at any time for business and end users is a must-have requirement." (See Kaazing for Mobile at http://kaazing.com/mobile).

One of many examples of the way Kaazing provides benefits is a media company offering mobile applications to its users of real time sporting events. By developing the application to take advantage of the Kaazing platform, the media company now has made it possible for viewers to bet on live events in real time from anywhere on their mobile devices. The application uses a fraction of the bandwidth and has 1/10th the overhead cost compared to other approaches.

"As we move into a world where most people rely on the living Web for nearly every aspect of their lives, the market can no longer afford to rely on legacy Web infrastructure solutions and technologies to deliver on these new requirements," said Ray Bingham, key Kaazing investor who is also on the boards of Flextronics International Ltd., Fusion IO, and STMicroelectronics NV, among others. "Kaazing represents both a technical and economic disruption of the market by making it now possible for companies, applications developers, and users to have a much better Web experience."

About Kaazing

Kaazing (www.kaazing.com) is the leading company focused on enabling the Living Web™ - the nearly ubiquitous real-time, interactive, collaborative applications that have become the norm. Kaazing's founding team played a key role in defining the WebSocket standard and the Kaazing platform is the world's only enterprise solution for full-duplex, high-performance Web communication supporting the HTML5 WebSocket standard. Based in Mountain View, CA, Kaazing is privately held, with international channels throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some of its customers and partners include Cognizant, Informatica, Intel, TIBCO, USAA, and a variety of financial, ecommerce, transportation and entertainment companies.