Netezza announces new architecture with 10-15x price-performance improvement

I have previously discussed Netezza, who produce data warehousing appliances that provide outstanding performance and simplicity for complex analytics on very large data volumes. I did some consulting work with them last year as they added spatial capabilities to their system. Today they announced a major new architecture, which they say gives a 3-5x performance improvement for typical workloads (more for some operations, less for others), and reduces price per terabyte by a factor of 3. So overall price performance improves by a factor of 10-15. Database guru Curt Monash has a good discussion of the new architecture and pricing implications on his blog.

The new hardware architecture is more flexible than the old one, which makes it easier to vary the proportions of processor, memory and disk, which will allow them to provide additional product families in future:

• High storage (more disk, lower cost per terabyte, lower throughput)
• High throughput (higher cost per terabyte but faster)
• Entry level models

I think that the entry level and high throughput models will be especially interesting for geospatial applications, many of which could do interesting analytics with a Netezza appliance, but may not have the super large data volumes (multiple terabytes) that Netezza's business intelligence customers have. Another interesting change for the future is that Netezza's parallel processing units (now Snippet blades, or S-blades, formerly snippet processing units or SPUs) are now running Linux, whereas previously they were running a rather more obscure operating system called Nucleus. In future, this should make it easier to port existing analytic applications to take advantage of Netezza's highly parallel architecture (though this is not something that is available yet). The parallel processing units also do floating point operations in hardware rather than software, which should also have a significant performance benefit for their spatial capabilities.

I continue to think that Netezza offers some very interesting capabilities for users wanting to do high end geospatial analytic applications on very large data volumes, and that there will be a lot of scope for its use in analyzing historical location data generated by GPS and other location sensors. And I am just impressed by anyone who produces an overnight 10-15x price performance improvement in any product :) !

My Ignite Where presentation on Future Location and Social Networking

Here's the (5 minute) video of my presentation last week at the Ignite Where event, part of the Where 2.0 conference. It was a great week - will be posting lots more on my impressions over the next couple of days.

Future Location and Social Networking, by Peter Batty at Where 2.0 from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

This clip is an extract from the O'Reilly video of the Ignite session (under Creative Commons license) - this starts at around 35 minutes in.

P.S. No fish in this one :) !!

New release of whereyougonnabe

We are pleased to announce another new release of whereyougonnabe.

Some key features include:

1. WYTV, a new animated map display inspired by the cool Twittervision, but using data from whereyougonnabe. This displays an interesting mix of activities from your friends and public activities from other users. You can click through on friends’ activities to see more details.
2. Calendar synchronization now uses Google Local Search, based on the context of which city you’ve told us you’re in. So if you’re in Denver, CO and you put a location of “1100 Broadway” or “Apple Store” on an activity in your calendar that week, it will find a suitable location in Denver.
3. We now support display of distances in kilometers as well as miles, a request we have had from several users. If your home is in the US or UK the default setting is miles, elsewhere it is km. You can change your preference on the settings page.
4. The experience for new users is improved – when you add the application you can immediately view data from your friends, or public activities from other users, without having to enter any data. Users just need to tell us their home location before creating their own activities. There is more to come on this theme.
   
5. Various small usability improvements and bug fixes.

As always, we welcome your feedback on the new features, and ideas for further improvements. We will have another new release coming very shortly with a number of things that didn’t quite make it in time for this one. You can try the new release here.

More on Google Local Search

As I recently discussed, we have decided to use Google Local Search rather than Google Geocoding (well, rather than a hybrid approach) for whereyougonnabe. That post got some interesting comments, including one from Pamela Fox of Google who said that Local Search will soon be using Tele Atlas data (rather than NAVTEQ according to one of the other posts, though she didn't say that explicitly), and the implication was that this was the same source data as the Google Geocoder. One would hope that this may mean that they are bringing the two services together, which would be a lot nicer for users. I also ran into Martin May from Brightkite yesterday at the Techstars investor day (which was excellent) and he mentioned that they are making the same move, which was interesting - it turned out we had been looking at a lot of common issues at the same time.

Anyway, I thought I would follow up with a little more discussion on some of the benefits we see of using Google Local Search, as well as some outstanding issues. One aspect that I really like is that you can give it a search point to provide context, and this is very useful for our application. We are especially leveraging this in our calendar synchronization. A typical (and recommended) way of using the system when you are traveling is to create a high level activity saying that, for example, you are in New York City for four days next week, and then subsequently enter more specific activities for those days. When you add an activity in your calendar, we look at the location string in the context of where we think you are on that date. So for example, if I just said I was having lunch at 1100 Broadway, it would locate me at 11 Broadway in New York during those four days, or at 1100 Broadway in Denver if I was at home. And as I discussed in the previous post, the feature we like most about Local Search is that you can search for business names, and again these take that location context, which makes it very easy to specify many locations. Some examples that I have used successfully at home in Denver include "Union Station", "Vesta Dipping Grill" (or just "Vesta"), "Enspiria" (a company where I have an advisory role"), and even "Dr Slota" (my dentist). It's very convenient to be able to use names like this rather than having to look up addresses.

So that's great, but there are still a few issues. One is that Local Search really doesn't work well for airports - if you enter a 3 letter airport code it is very hit or miss whether it finds it. I'm pretty sure this used to work a lot better, though I haven't tracked down specific tests to prove that. But we plan to do our own handling of this case (unless we see an improvement really soon), using geonames (which we already use for locating airports in our tripit interface, but we haven't hooked this into our general geocoding).

I reported over a year ago that I felt there were some issues with Google Local Search on the iPhone, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit some of the same problem areas I reported on then. These problems generally revolved around local search being too inclusive in the data it incorporates, which is good in terms of finding some sort of result, but the risk is that you get bad data back in some cases. Given the good results I had found in my initial testing this time round, I expected that I would probably see some improvement, so I was a little surprised to find that in general most of the same problems were still there. You can see these by trying the search terms in Google Maps (and in MapQuest for comparison).

My test cases were as follows, centered around my home at 1792 Wynkoop St, Denver:

• King Soopers (a local supermarket chain): last time in the top 10 on Google, there were three entries with an incomplete address (just Denver, CO), all of which showed as being closer than the closest real King Soopers, and there was one (wrong) entry which said it was an "unverified listing". This time, there was just one incomplete address like this, so that was a definite improvement, but unfortunately this appeared top of the list so the closest King Soopers was not returned as the "best guess" from the local search API. There were two other bogus looking entries in the top 4, for a total of 3 apparently bad results in the top 10. On MapQuest, 10 legitimate addresses are returned, though in some cases they appear to have multiple addresses for the same store (e.g. entry points on two different streets) - but this is not a serious error as you would still find a King Soopers. This was the same as last time. I tried typing "King Soopers Speer" (the name of the street where the store is located) and that returned me the correct location as the top result.
  
• Tattered Cover (a well known Denver book store with 3 locations). MapQuest returns just 3 results, all correct. Google Maps returns 9 entries in its initial list, of which three have incomplete addresses (duplicates of entries which do have complete addresses, but they show up at entirely different locations on the map), one is a store which closed two years ago, and one is a duplicate of a correct store. The old store does say removal requested, but it seems surprising that this closed two years ago and is still there.
  
• Searches for Office Depot and Home Depot were more successful, with no obvious errors - hooray :) !! This was the same as last time.
  
• Searching for grocery in Google Maps online last time returned Market 41, a nightclub which closed a year before, and four entries with incomplete addresses. This time there were only two which looked bad (including the King Soopers with an incomplete address we saw before). The same search on MapQuest had one incomplete address, the rest of the results looked reasonable. So a definite improvement in this case.
  

So in summary, Google showed a little improvement over last year but not a huge change - they still could use some more quality control to remove bad data entries. But as I've discussed, overall we've obtained very good results for our application needs, so we are looking forward to rolling out the new Local Search based capabilities shortly.

My presentation on "Future Location and Social Networking" at GeoWeb

I gave my presentation at the GeoWeb conference yesterday and it generated a good bit of interest. I recorded it with the brilliant ScreenFlow software which I have been using extensively to do screen capture videos, but this is the first time I tried it with a conference presentation and it worked very well. I talked previously about what I was planning to talk about - in summary, it's about the ideas we have about modeling future location for whereyougonnabe, and I talk quite a bit about the bigger picture of where we plan to take it - combining space, time and the social graph to create a new infrastructure for calendaring and scheduling. 

GeoWeb presentation: The Power of Future Location for Social Networking from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

It's about 30 minutes long but I encourage you to take the time to check it out, I really think that the whole future location area is a very interesting one!

Presenting at GeoWeb next week

I'll be up in Vancouver next week for the GeoWeb conference, which was excellent last year and it looks like there will be a good program and group of attendees this year too. Whereyougonnabe tells me that 13 of my friends will be in Vancouver at the same time as me, so it's good to see a few people starting to use the system!

I'll be doing a presentation on topics relating to future location, which is of course our focus with whereyougonnabe. As we've got further into this, I've really come to realize that there are some hard problems to solve in the space of future location which have a lot of value, and many ways that the core technology we're developing for our initial social networking application can be applied. I thought I'd just post a brief preview of some of the topics I'll be talking about.

Broadly speaking, I think that the hard problems fall into three main areas:

Modeling and performance. How you model future space-time has a huge impact on what you can do in your application - for example Dopplr is a nice application in many ways, but its underlying model of space-time has some serious limitations which really constrain the functionality they can provide compared to the approach we are using.  I'll talk about coarse-grained versus fine-grained modeling of space-time, and using discrete "places" versus a continuous coordinate system. Implementing a fine-grained system with the ability to handle variable search radii in both space and time is pretty challenging from a performance and scalability perspective with large data volumes, and I'll discuss some aspects of how we've approached this. I'll also talk about various interesting modeling challenges including handling overlapping activities, uncertainty (possible / probable activities), alternative plans (may be either here or there), flexible plans (I'm intending to go to the shopping mall sometime tomorrow afternoon), linear activities (like road or train trips).

Determining what's "interesting". Since we are focused on fine-grained future activities, which may be close to home or far away, users may be "close" to their friends frequently, and what constitutes "close" may vary significantly depending on the context. If I am in England for two weeks I am interested in notifications happening between me and friends who are within a relatively large distance of me (a hundred miles or so, say), whereas if I'm going out for a drink in downtown Denver, where I live, my notification radius should be relatively small. If I have friends who live close to the bar I'm going to, should I notify them about my plans or not - they may well be interested but we don't want to overwhelm people with too much information. I'll talk about factors involved in determining what's interesting, including the distance from home of each person, normal distance between the people, how often you see them, length and nature of the activity, and more.

Gathering data on future activities. Of course one of the big challenges with future location compared to current location is creating the raw data about where people will be and when. Obviously making it easy for people to create activities is one aspect of this, but integration with other data sources is also key, including calendars, online booking systems for travel, restaurant reservations, concert or sporting tickets, etc etc. As we pull data from multiple sources, merging those together in the optimal way can be challenging. I'll discuss a variety of ideas and plans we have in this area.

So that's just a taster of some of the areas I'll be talking about - I'll also talk about more specifics of what we've implemented so far and our experience with the technologies we're used, including PostGIS on the back end (which I've been really impressed with), Google Maps, geocoding and local search, the Ext JS Javascript Library, and more. And I'll talk more about the broader range of applications I see for what we're doing.

I'm talking from 4:30 to 5pm on the Wednesday, July 23, so if you'll be at the conference please stop by!

New release of whereyougonnabe

Well, we've been busy in the three weeks since we released our first beta of whereyougonnabe, and today we put out some significant improvements, including support for the Safari web browser, email notification when we find close interactions with your friends, a cool Facebook profile widget, the ability to easily re-use previous locations, and a number of other usability improvements and bug fixes.

This is what the new profile widget looks like:


A major focus for us is making it very easy to create activities, and we have added the ability to dynamically select previously created locations. This is a screen shot showing how this looks on the create activity screen:

We also took some of Stefan's comments to heart, and have made the activity title optional, so you can just say "Peter will be in Boulder" rather than "Peter will be working in Boulder". As well as giving you more flexibility this makes it faster to create activities, as the minimal things you need to specify now are a location, plus start date and end date (which both default to today) - but you have options to enter various other details if you want to. We also fixed an issue with handling accented characters, and made some improvements to our icons, fixing some aspect ratio issues and adding a default icon for people who don't have a picture on Facebook.

We will now email you when we find that you are going to be close to some of your friends, which is just the first step in providing a range of notification capabilities.

We have a lot more things in the pipeline, including further Facebook integration (support for the newsfeed and minifeed coming very soon, plus the ability to set your Facebook status when an activity starts), our first steps in calendar integration, and a simplified interface suitable for mobile browsers.

If you haven't signed up yet or you want to check out the new features, you can do so here. And we welcome your feedback on our new forums (or feel free to email me).

Nice review of whereyougonnabe at Ogle Earth

Stefan Geens of Ogle Earth has written a very thorough review of whereyougonnabe, and has some nice things to say, as well as some good suggestions - thanks Stefan! He compares us to Dopplr, who are really the closest site out there to what we do, and says "Dopplr is simpler to use, while whereyougonnabe is more full-featured". He thought that the "pièce de resistance" was the Google Earth interface and in his summary, he says "in sum, I very much like whereyougonnabe".

To be honest, I'm delighted that Stefan thinks we are already more full-featured than Dopplr when we're still at such an early stage of beta release, and they have been out for some time, and have - rightly - been getting a lot of interest and good reviews. And I would agree with him that Dopplr is easier to use today than we are. Part of this is that they are doing something much simpler than we are, though similar in some respects (I will discuss this in more detail in a future post), but nevertheless we know we want to make things simpler to use and we have a lot of things in our short term plan which will help on that front. But as I said in an earlier post, while there are lots of things on our to do list, it would have been easy to keep improving things for another several months before releasing, but I felt we were far enough along to get something out there and start to build up some users and get some feedback. And while we still have a few more rough edges than I would like, I think the response so far has been very good and I'm glad we did decide to get it out there rather than waiting longer.

And lastly, one small point of clarification / correction ... Stefan suggests it would be nice to have color coding to show "close encounters", and actually we do have that in there already ... I suspect he may not have any close encounters yet so the color coding has not shown up. But a green box around a friend's picture shows that you are "very close" and a yellow box shows that you are "somewhat close". What constitutes "very close" and "somewhat close" varies depending on a number of factors, including how far from home both you and your friend are (in general, if either you or your friend are far away from home, a larger distance is used than if you are close to home). The ability to have a variable distance for determining what constitutes a close encounter is something that Dopplr's approach does not handle incidentally, and I think that this will be a powerful enabler for us as we add more sophisticated features to the application (though not something that the user is necessarily conscious of).

So anyway, thanks again to Stefan for the detailed review. It's been an exciting week, with getting the system out to the world, and by and large everything went very well ... on to working through the big enhancement list now :) !!

Why not just talk to your friends?

Well, we have a few of the Luddites out in the comments on James' blog - there's Andy "whatever happened to talking to your friends" and Bubba "Facebook is inherently evil and a waste of time" (incidentally, Ned Ludd is from Anstey, the village in England where I went to High School, in case you were wondering - though according to Wikipedia there is no proof he actually existed, which I hadn't heard before). But I digress!While I fairly obviously disagree with most of their comments, there are elements of sentiment in there that I do agree with, and they raise some topics which are worth a discussion in terms of how we communicate with people, and how communication mechanisms have evolved. First I should say that obviously a primary aim of whereyougonnabe is to help you meet your friends more often in the real world - I certainly agree with the principle that you can spend far too much of your life sitting in front of a computer, and in front of Facebook in particular.

But electronic communications obviously have a strong role in being "social" and maintaining your relationships with friends - as someone with friends all round the world and most of my family 5000 miles away in the UK, email enables me to keep in touch with them much better than I could without it. That's not a substitute for meeting face to face of course, and that's part of the motivation for whereyougonnabe.

With the rise of social networking systems recently we have really seen an evolution from one to one communication to many to many communication among friends. It's interesting if you use Facebook (which I assume Andy and Bubba don't) to see how a sequence of short and often trivial status messages can give you a good feel for what distant (or local) friends are up to, and every so often prompt you to get in touch with them in response to something you see - much more than you do without that impetus, in my experience. Twitter is the same type of experience. As I've heard Mark Zuckerberg say (paraphrasing), the cost (or effort) of communicating with your friends is significantly lowered by systems like Facebook. Just by taking a few seconds to type in a short message, you can communicate with hundreds of friends wherever they are in the world. I certainly feel more connected with my distant friends who are on Facebook (in general) than those who are not. Now there's a lot of crap on Facebook too (I can do without vampire biting applications personally) and yes, a lot of people waste a lot of time on it, but you can say the same of the web in general, or television, or whatever. But that doesn't change the fact that it does represent a new paradigm in how you can communicate with your friends.

However, one of the challenges with this type of many-to-many communication is that if it becomes too successful, then ironically it can lose its effectiveness. Once you get hundreds of friends using Facebook or Twitter or something similar and they all start posting messages frequently, you reach a point where you just can't keep up with the volume of messages (unless you really don't have a life, in which case Bubba may have a point). So you need some way of filtering that stream of messages down to a manageable volume, trying to select the messages that are most interesting or relevant to you. Facebook claims to do some clever filtering in determining which stories to display in your Newsfeed, but they don't have too much information to go on, and it's not clear to me that they really pull out messages that are most interesting to me.

One of the things that we are doing with whereyougonnabe is to add extra information to certain messages you want to communicate to your friends - specifically location and time - which gives us a much greater ability to extract items of specific interest to you from this big message stream. We do this primarily by choosing messages where you will be close to your friend in space and time, to help you meet your friends in the real world more often than you would do otherwise (back to having a real life :). If that approach doesn't yield enough messages to display, we can display other messages using either random selection, other approaches like those Facebook uses, or by leveraging location again to pull out messages which seem like they may be more interesting - for example, if someone is far from home that is probably an unusual situation and may well be of more interest than one close to home (in general).

Changing direction a little, let's look at a couple of specific examples of how whereyougonnabe can help you meet your friends more often, in a way that really can't be achieved just by "talking to your friends" (or phoning them or emailing them). The first is meeting people in airports. When I worked at Intergraph and was traveling frequently (more or less every week), I would randomly run into someone I knew at Denver airport about once a month. When you consider the huge size of Denver airport, this leads me to conclude that there is a high probability that there are one or more people I know in Denver airport every time I'm there, I just don't know that they're there. Now hanging around in airports is pretty boring. Sure, I can read or work and that's fine, but if I had a chance to spend all those spare half hours between getting through security and boarding the plane by meeting up with friends who I wouldn't otherwise have seen, that would add a lot of value and enjoyment to my life. And whereyougonnabe can give me the information to let me do that. It's really not a practical proposition for me to call the hundreds of friends who are candidates for being in Denver airport before every trip to compare notes on schedules. And if I did an email blast to all of them before every trip I would rather quickly become unpopular, and if everyone started doing that then you're back to the information overload problem. With whereyougonnabe I can just take 30 seconds to enter details on my planned time at the airport and it won't bother anyone else with that information unless it's specifically relevant to them or they ask to see it. And once we have calendar integration working, which will be coming soon, then it's zero extra time on my side, since I have to enter the information into my calendar anyway.

I was also going to discuss the example of very local interactions - like the one I include in the intro video about going to the supermarket - but this post has got way too long already so I think I'll save that for another day. This example is an interesting one as several people who like the general concept of whereyougonnabe have said that they see themselves using it more for long distance trips than local activities. I can certainly understand that as an initial reaction but, having thought about it a lot, I feel there is a lot of potential in both scenarios. But I'll come back to that.

Anyway, I'd like to summarize a couple of things before signing off. I think there are (at least) two rather different ways to look at what whereyougonnabe does. The first is that it's an application specifically focused on helping you meet up with your friends. That's how I started out thinking about it, and still that's certainly a major focus and primary benefit of the system. However, you can also think of it as an evolution of many-to-many friend communication systems, like the Facebook messaging system or Twitter. You get many of the same benefits, of seeing what your friends are up to in a general stream of short messages, but with the added benefit that we can highlight (notify you about) items of specific interest, in particular in regard to opportunities to meet with friends. This becomes increasingly valuable as the system becomes more heavily used, and it becomes hard to keep up with the full unfiltered message stream. If you look at the system only from the first perspective, then as one person said to me, you only get a "reward" from the system when it identifies an opportunity for you to meet someone, which may not happen very often, especially when you are new to the system and don't have many friends on it. But if you look at it from the second perspective, you get "rewards" from the system just through finding out what your friends are up to, in the same way that you do from a Facebook or Twitter, and with the added bonus of being able to see things on a dynamic map which gives you a whole new dimension compared to a simple text stream.

And last but not least, while I disagree with my friends Andy, Bubba and Ned in one sense, and believe that there is significant value in social networking systems, I agree with them that you can spend too much time using such systems, and a key aim of whereyougonnabe is to enable us to spend more time with our friends in the real world.

whereyougonnabe one day in

Well, overall our first day with whereyougonnabe went well. A couple of hundred people from 20 countries have signed up so far, we've had a good amount of positive feedback, and the system seems to have been running well. Personally I have already discovered quite a few interesting interactions with friends I didn't know about before, which bodes well for the system being useful. We got some coverage in the blogosphere from James, Glenn (who will be close to me next week) and Jonathan (who had some constructive feedback and liked the Google Earth integration). As Jonathan commented, the effectiveness of it is very much dependent on the "network effect" - the more friends you have using it, the more useful it is. This is one of the key reasons we built it on top of Facebook (initially) rather than doing yet another independent networking system. I personally am pretty reluctant to invite friends to a new online networking system until I'm really convinced it's valuable - but of course it's not really valuable to you until you have a lot of friends on there, which is a big barrier to success for a new system.

We had a few issues with browser compatibility which we hadn't uncovered in our alpha testing, but which got quickly exposed with a larger group of users. We currently don't support Safari but we're working on that (we knew about this before but it turned out that our nice error trapping worked in the main application but not on the initial sign up page, so apologies to the Safari users who experienced ungraceful crashes trying to sign up - this will be fixed tonight). We've also discovered some issues with IE6 which we hadn't come across before, and we're debating whether to try to support that or whether to follow the "Save the Developers" campaign!

We now have a whereyougonnabe forum up, so please use that to let us know about any problems or to post suggestions for future enhancements. Thanks to everyone for all their interest and words of encouragement!

Our whereyougonnabe application is now open to the world!

Well, after a lot of effort over the past six months or so, and having been in alpha testing for the past couple of months, we have now declared our "where you gonna be" application to be in beta and opened it up to the world. Thanks to my co-developers Glen and Nate for all their efforts in getting us to this point! There are still a huge number of things on our to do list of course, and you will see a lot more very cool functionality appearing over the next couple of months, but we wanted to get the basic application out there to start building up some users and get feedback from more people. See the following video for a general introduction to the application (I strongly recommend clicking on the link underneath the video and selecting full screen HD if you have a fast connection, the quality is much better):


Introduction to whereyougonnabe from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

The key idea of the system is that you and your friends tell us where and when you will be doing things in the future, and we look at this information to tell you when you will be close by to your friends. Even if you end up not being close to your friends, we give you various ways to see what they are doing, which is a good way of keeping up with them in a similar way to Facebook status messages or Twitter, but in a richer fashion which adds both a spatial and temporal element - the ability to display what they are doing on a map, and see what they are doing over time, rather than just right now. This focus on the future is our biggest differentiator - there are lots of systems focused on where you are right now (and we see lots of opportunities for integrating with them, but that's a topic for a future post).

Future location has two significant advantages over current location. The first is that if you only find out right now that a friend is close by, the chances are that one or other of you already has commitments and so you can't meet up. But if you knew yesterday or last week that you would be close by, you could have worked out your schedule so that you could meet up. Secondly, "where are you now" applications typically require a location-aware phone, and these still don't have big enough market penetration to really give this type of application the critical mass that it needs to take off. All you need to use our application is a web browser. Of course, the challenge of future location is that you can't infer it automatically, so one of the critical success factors for us is making it very easy to create activities. Currently this is a manual process, which we have tried to make as easy as possible, but this is an area where you will see a lot of new functionality over the next month or two, with much more in the way of calendar integration and functionality to make it much easier to create a trip with multiple activities.

We have a precise spatial and temporal resolution, unlike other applications we have seen in this space, which tend to have spatial resolution of a city and temporal resolution of a day. This means we have many local applications as well as more global ones - like identifying which friends will be in an airport at the same time as you, or identifying opportunities to coordinate rides when transporting kids to after school activities, or working out which friends will be in bars close to you this Friday night.

We have developed what we think is a very cool interface to Google Earth, which leverages its time capabilities nicely. Check out the following video to get a flavor of this (again, I strongly recommend clicking on the link beneath the video and then displaying the full screen HD version):


whereyougonnabe integration with Google Earth from Peter Batty on Vimeo.

Our application currently runs on the Facebook Platform. The big advantage of this is that you don't need to re-enter your network of friends, you can just leverage the existing social graph that you have in Facebook. In future we will support other social and business networking systems - LinkedIn is an obvious target for the business traveler, and of course OpenSocial is on our list too.

So anyway, please give the application a try and let us know what you think. Now that we have the beta release out "in the wild" I'll be blogging a lot more about some of the technology behind it and some of the things we plan to do in the future.

Spatial Networking wins exit poll!

As I mentioned previously, last night at the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup I gave the first public presentation and demo about what we're up to at Spatial Networking. There was a good turnout of around 200 people and I got a lot of questions and interest, so was pleased with how it went. And in the official exit poll, Spatial Networking was the clear winner :) ...


New Tech Meetup: Who Was Your Favorite? Exit Poll from gwenbell on Vimeo.

You can also read a writeup of the meeting at the Colorado Startups blog. And yes, I will explain much more about what we're up to here very shortly!

Coming out of stealth mode soon!

We have been making good progress on the application we are building at Spatial Networking, which in its initial release will run on the Facebook Platform. We plan to get an alpha release out to a small number of testers by the end of this week, and have a closed beta out within a few weeks after that. So I've decided it's time to start telling the world more about what we're up to, and I'll be doing this, and giving our first public demo, at next week's Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup Group, which is on Tuesday February 5 at 6pm in Boulder. I have found this to be a pretty interesting local group for anyone interested in technology startups. They had about 200 people at the last one. The general format is that 5 companies present for 5 minutes each (with 5 minutes for questions). So I'll have to be pretty concise, but I've been getting used to that with doing pitches to potential investors, who have pretty short attention spans :). If you're in the area please feel free to come to the Meetup, and if not I'll be posting much more information here in the coming weeks.

Startup diary - 7 weeks in

I've concluded that running a stealth mode startup is not the optimal role for doing lots of blogging ... for one thing you're extremely busy, and for another you don't want to talk about most of the things you're doing (just yet)! This is just a quick post to say that I'm alive and well, and we're making good progress towards getting a first release out around the end of this year or early in the new year. I've been writing some Java code, which I've been enjoying after not writing much code the past few years - have decided that software development is like riding a bike, you don't forget how to do it :). And I've been getting into other things which I haven't done directly before, like looking at future funding options for the business. The startup scene is pretty active in the Denver-Boulder area, and I've found the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup Group to be an interesting forum and good place for networking - they meet on the first Tuesday of each month, and the general format is that 5 startup companies present for 10 minutes each. I plan to present at one of the upcoming meetings on what we're up to. Anyway, more news soon ...

Never a dull moment in the Social Networking space

Well, I knew we were jumping into a hot space when I started Spatial Networking, but the activity in the social networking area in the five weeks since we started has been pretty mind-boggling. First, Facebook announced their fbFund (actually just before we formally incorporated the company) which aims to encourage application development on the Facebook Platform by offering grants of $25,000 to $250,000 - which seemed like one good indication that we were getting into an interesting area. Then, after Steve Ballmer saying that social networks seemed "faddish", Microsoft invested $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, valuing them at $15 billion when they only have an estimated $150m in revenues. For a few weeks now there has been great anticipation about Facebook launching a major new advertising initiative, which is expected to be announced next week on November 6.

And then yesterday, there was a major announcement from Google about a new open platform called Open Social, which is as the name suggests a new open approach to social networking. As Techcrunch puts it, "within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game". The impressive list of partners involved includes LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo and - interestingly - salesforce.com and Oracle, who are (presumably) looking to applying some of the principles of social networking in a business environment. We had been thinking about potential applications for our system with salesforce.com before this announcement.

So this all seems like good news for us, in terms of enabling us to integrate the location related functionality we're developing (focused on Facebook initially) with multiple systems using one standard approach.

Startup diary - 3.5 weeks in

Here we are, 3.5 weeks into Spatial Networking. I haven't had too much time to blog ... starting a new company keeps you busy :) !! So far I've really been enjoying it. As I have mentioned before, I am a big fan of Marc Andreessen's blog - he has a lot of great insights into doing startups, and technology businesses in general. One of my favorite posts there is on why not to do a startup, and a lot of that resonates with me already (but no, I'm not changing my mind!).

I have founded one startup before, Ten Sails (now Ubisense), but this one feels very different. At Ten Sails we had four co-founders - myself, Richard Green, Martin Cartwright and David Theriault. Richard and David were both founders of Smallworld before that, so they had been through it before. Richard was the CEO and, while we all had input, he was really driving the company direction. And Martin is an experienced CFO and took care of all the finances, as well as contractual and legal issues - all the sort of things I was happy to ignore as CTO! But this time, according to the official formation documents, I am company President, Chief Executive Officer, Treasurer and Secretary, so there's no hiding from any of that stuff!

Another big difference is that this time we have a very clear idea for a product and have launched immediately into product development, which wasn't the case with Ten Sails, where we spent some time exploring various ideas after we had formed the company. We're in a space, social networking (and location), where there is a huge amount of activity going on, and so far we haven't seen anyone else doing what we plan to do - but that puts a real feeling of urgency into getting our product out as soon as possible, before someone else gets there.

Marc Andreessen says:

First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

And I'm talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs.

I'd put myself in the pretty stable category, but there's definitely a strong element of this. I feel very confident that we're going to build a compelling application and have a great chance of getting millions of users ... but then I get rather nervous whenever I'm listening to a conference presentation or reading a blog about interesting new location-related startups, in case I come across someone doing the same thing ... but that hasn't happened so far :).

One of the other things that Marc says is that in a startup "absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen", and I would certainly vouch for that, at multiple levels. I get to alternate between interesting things like designing a system architecture for handling tens of millions of spatial transactions a day and inventing pioneering new interface ideas, and rather less interesting things like sorting out the new office table which is defective and doesn't fit together, and organizing bank accounts, insurance, office space, etc. But hopefully most of the items in the second group are done now, and I can really focus my efforts on the first group! I'm outsourcing as much of the non-technical work as possible, and have signed up vcfo to provide financial services and KKO to provide legal services.

As I have mentioned in passing, I have two contract developers working for me, who are both doing a great job, Glen Marchesani and Nate Irwin. The first week we spent working around the dining table in my loft (not quite the traditional garage, but I really don't have a garage, just a spot in an underground parking lot which wouldn't work so well :) )...

... but now we've graduated to a cool and funky little office space inside Denver Union Station, which has a good startup feel to it ...

It's about a 100 yard walk from the door of my loft building to the door of Union Station, so that's a little more convenient than the 8 hour, 2 flight, 1000+ mile trip I used to have to get to my Intergraph office in Huntsville.

On the technical front, we have spent a little more time on installation and setup of our environments than I had hoped, but nevertheless we've made good progress on our design and initial development work. We had initially been looking at using Ruby on Rails, but ended up deciding to use Java on the middle tier. The biggest single factor in the decision was Glen's extensive experience and skills with Java, but there were a number of minor technical considerations too. We're still planning to use PostGIS as our back end database, though we're also looking at building a custom file-based caching mechanism for certain aspects of the application. We're currently using Media Temple as our hosting provider, but are thinking seriously about using Amazon EC2 and S3 when we roll out, especially now that Amazon has added new "extra large" servers with 15 GB of memory, 8 "EC2 Compute Units" (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), and 1690 GB of instance storage, based on a 64-bit platform - these servers should work well for serious database processing. These cost 80c per hour, excluding network traffic and external storage. A really attractive aspect of this "utility" approach to computing is that we can fire up a number of very high end machines like this to do high volume performance testing up front, but just pay for the time we are using them, and then scale back to a smaller configuration (with correspondingly lower cost) in the knowledge that we can scale up as necessary as we grow.

We will also be leveraging the Facebook Platform heavily in our first release, and I'll talk more about that in a future post. One of the exciting - and slightly scary - things about this is that there are several examples of Facebook applications growing to a million plus users within a month of launching, which is hugely faster growth than you would expect with traditional old school Internet applications back in 2006 :). And our back end processing needs are much heavier than most Facebook applications, so we have to put some serious effort into scalability. Obviously there's no guarantee we will grow anywhere near that fast, but we have to plan for that eventuality.

Between the ability of Amazon to allow us to scale up hardware on demand, and the ability of Facebook to deliver huge numbers of users and provide a good amount of core application infrastructure to us, I think it's pretty interesting that we can be seriously contemplating the possibility that we could have millions of users running a very sophisticated application within six months or so, and yet still have only a handful of people in the company. Or we might not of course, that's the emotional roller coaster part :).