"Far too many young people remain excluded and unable to use the web to share their talents and ideas"

-Tim Berners Lee, on internet access as a basic human right

Surge - A Scalable, Streamable Raster Graphic Format for the Web

The Web is a fantastic place to access new information and learn about most aspects of human knowledge. Through it, we seek to teach, inform, and entertain ourselves alongside others. A huge part of the modern Web experience includes downloading dozens of high quality, high resolution images; lossy and lossless, transparent and opaque, in many different sizes. A single webpage might include at least 2 or 3 high resolution images, and accessing this content quickly enriches and fascinates us. There is a measurable disparity in the global internet experience, however, which is now known as "The Digital Divide".

Fast broadband is the exception, not the norm.

In the developed world, the vast majority of people living in urban areas have access to fixed terrestrial broadband internet connections of at least 25(down)/3(up)Mbps. This proportion drops significantly compared to rural areas and falls even further when considering the developing world. 

Progress, but slow.

Since the internet was invented, and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital divide has generally decreased across the developed world, but the change has taken decades and still isn't enough. Worse yet, in the developing continent of Africa, average broadband download speeds per-country can be less than 15Mbps. Imagine trying to see a celebrity's Instagram page with speeds like that!

Picking the weeds, but leaving the roots.

Chosen Few Software believes that a big part of the solution to the digital divide is in the process of being addressed by current organizational and institutional efforts, which aim to raise the bandwidth line itself. However, the other piece of the puzzle is sorely missing; reducing download sizes themselves.

This is where our new technology, Surge, enters the ring.

Check back in on Surge soon!

Because "More content faster & sooner, for a richer and more equitable Web."