The Sochi Winter Olympics are well underway in Russia. Despite a rough start with the media complaining about unfinished hotels, dirty water, not enough rooms, lots of stray dogs and cats, and a glitch in the opening ceremony that resulted in the last Olympic ring not transitioning from a snowflake to a ring, the focus is now back on the athletes.

So far, the US Olympics team has four Gold medals – three from Snowboarding, one from Freestyle Skiing; two Silver medals for Freestyle Skiing; and six Bronze medals – two for Freestyle Skiing, one for Snowboarding, Figure Skating, Alpine Skiing, and Luge.

In line with the huge interest in the Winter Olympics, SOASTA (pronounced Soh-Stuh), the leaders in Cloud testing and User Experience for web and mobile, has been chosen as the official web and mobile testing partner for the Sochi Winter Olympics.  It’s signed a 10-year contract with the Olympics to assure high quality web and mobile experiences for the Olympics Games in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024.

“SOASTA was honored to be awarded our first Olympics engagement for the 2012 London Games,” said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO.

“By assuring the delivery of high quality web and mobile experiences for the millions of Olympics fans across the world for London 2012 and Sochi 2014, we are honored that the SOASTA team and technology has earned the trust of the Olympics for the next 10 years.  In the near future we will see the Internet of Things as part of the Olympic experience, with even higher expectations for quality user experiences every time.”

SOASTA’s debut in the Olympics started when it was approached by the Olympic Organizing Committee prior to the 2012 London Games to help its IT team setup a mobile app and website, London2012.com, in anticipation of the millions of expected online visitors.

London2012.com successfully handled 431 million global visitors, 109 million unique users, 15 million application downloads, and 4.73 billion page views.

As early as September 2013, SOASTA began testing the website and mobile app for the Sochi Winter Olympics using its Global Test Platform for continuous testing from 16 locations worldwide. The Global Test Cloud allowed SOASTA to simulate worldwide traffic conditions, and delivered continuous testing for multiple Olympic web and mobile apps, including game times, cultural sites, and volunteer sites, with each site showing a strong mix of both mobile and web traffic.

According to the data gathered by SOASTA, the majority of traffic visiting the Olympic website comes from the US (33 percent), followed by Canada (23 percent), Russia (18 percent), Ukraine and Australia (2 percent), with other countries such as France, Germany, UK and Latvia representing less than 2 percent of web traffic.  SOASTA also determined that Google Chrome is the most popular browser used in visiting the Olympic site, accounting for 30 percent of all hits, followed by Internet Explorer, all versions, at 19 percent. As for mobile traffic, this represents 13 percent of the total traffic to the Olympic site, with 9 percent using the Safari mobile browser, and 4 percent using the Android browser.

As with anything that gains a lot of attention on the web, we can expect that the Sochi Winter Olympics is also creating a huge buzz on social media sites.  Of all the categories in the Games, the Men’s Ice Hockey team is getting a lot of attention. According to Marketwired’s Heartbeat social intelligence engine, powered by Sysomos, Canadian players Patrick Sharp and Mike Smith, and US’ Ryan Miller and Jonathan Quick, are the most popular and talked about players in social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The most talked about teams are  the US and Canada, and it’s no surprise to that those talking about these teams mostly come from the US and Canada.

The dashboard is updated in real-time and it’s quite fun to see changes happening right before your eyes.  The downside is, you’ll just be looking at numbers, and if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you’ll just be confused with the dashboard.  It would have been better if it showed top tweets in real-time, or displayed the latest tweets as they happen.