The fourth Big Data Berlin took place on Thursday at Instituto Cervantes with insightful talks by four industry professionals and plenty of time to network before and after over beer and pizza kindly provided by Criteo.

The talks kicked off at about 7:20 in a packed exhibition room at the Instituto Cervantes, which has certainly added a value to the evening with the Spanish art exhibition currently on display and the lovely atmosphere created by the space.

I started by giving a small background on who we are as Dataconomy, and how we are trying to build this data lovers community online and offline. It seems like a natural step forward to us to take that community that follows our news stories and reads tech-oriented content on the website either to inform or to educate themselves, all together in real time, real space in order to get to know each other, connect and hear and learn from industry professionals with long time experience in the field.

Our first speaker for the evening was Brian Bulkowski, CTO at Aerospike, a company that operates real time Web and mobile applications with the aim to create a more interactive and global front edge database. Brian discussed new models that could optimize advertising results, get more data and better models through NoSQL.

Carsten Petzold took the floor to demonstrate how big data can optimize online dating experience. He shared some fun facts about the dating industry such as that there are about 300 million searches per month around buzz words such as love, dating, flirting etc., that 33% of married people have met online (and I am certain that number will double very soon), 50% of singles use online dating and in a nutshell, it is a huge industry. Carsten talked about optimizing users experience to get better and more integrated results and how data can optimize search engines. Carsten’s talk certainly gave some good ideas putting all that good data into use and turned a business talk into a good flirting opportunity.

Franz Scwab from Exasol AG followed with a much more technical talk providing solutions to chasing that pareto frontier, or else, how to achieve in-database multi criteria optimization with Skyline Querries. Every company thinks of its customer and tries to find optimal solutions for both the customer and the company. Skyline queries can compute the Pareto Frontier which gives back non-dominated solutions and consequently reduce data volumes by filtering only relevant content and accelerate the decision making process.

Our last speaker for the evening was Charles Radclyffe who asked a rather philosophical question that I am also pondered by for quite a while now – are analytics, ioT and Artificial Intelligence a convergence, a threat or an opportunity? Well, one should certainly use the right tools to solve whatever business or non-business related issues arise but the question persists as to how the future will evolve and the humane or inhumane result that will bring.

After the talk finished, we all had the time to get to know each other and network, approach the speakers, ask questions and find career opportunities over free pizza. Overall, it was a great evening and we are very pleased with your attendance and encouragement – looking forward to our next Berlin event at Instituto Cervantes on April 30th!

Only a month into the year, and already several of our expert’s predictions for 2015 in big data are coming into fruition. 2015 is certainly looking like the year of AI & automation, with all three of this week’s most-shared news pieces below focusing around prediction and AI. 2015 may, too, be the year of the economists; both Kris Hammond of Narrative Science and Gabriel Lowy of Tech-Tonics Advisors published excellent pieces on the huge big data opportunities for the financial industry.

TOP DATACONOMY ARTICLES

10 Internet of Things Influencers You Need to Know

“It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that the Internet of Things is going to revolutionise how we live, work and think. Although broaching this field can be daunting, it is certainly worth looking in to the fascinating applications and technology associated with this field- if you’re looking for the latest insights into how IoT will shape our future, this list is a great place to start.”

3 Reasons Why Banks Can’t Afford to Ignore AI

“While companies use many approaches to extract value from data they capture, organize and store, it is only recently that we have seen a new class of technologies emerge providing real impact — those powered by Artificial Intelligence, aka AI.”  
 

Aerospike’s New CEO John Dillon on the 2015 Roadmap for Database Tech: Less Hype, Better Technology

Yesterday, NoSQL innovators Aerospike announced that Silicon Valley veteran John Dillon will be stepping into the breach as their new CEO. He’s got big plans for the company- largely revolving around less marketing buzz, and more love for developers. His ambitious roadmap is definitely worth a read.

TOP DATACONOMY NEWS

Eve Stumbles Upon a Possible Cure for Malaria. Eve is a Robot Scientist.

A laboratory automation system that harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in order to glean and understand scientific data constant experimentation is called a Robot Scientist. Eve is such a Robot Scientist and if certain U.K. researchers have it right, then Eve might have stumbled upon a possible fighting chance against malaria.

This Programme Knows If Your Startup Will Be Successful

The startup landscape is a minefield, where even the most brilliant ideas can fall by the wayside without proper implementation and business acumen. This is where Thomas Thurston comes in. Thurston believes he has developed a predictive algorithm which can mitigate some of the risk involved with starting and investing in a new business.

Am I Going Down? Uses Flight Data to Calculate Odds of Your Next Flight Crashing

“A new iOS app Am I Going Down? refutes the claim that there’s a “one in a million chance” of your plane crashing. In fact, if you’re on a Boeing 747-700 flight from San Francisco to Dallas, there’s a 1 in 4,593,011 chance you’ll crash.”  

TOP UPCOMING EVENTS

23-24 February, 2015- Eleventh International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society, CA

Conference themes this year include: Technologies for Human Use, Technologies in Community, Technologies for Learning and Technologies for Common Knowledge.  
 

12-13 February, 2015- Apache Hadoop Innovation Summit, San Diego CA

“Hadoop, a huge piece of the puzzle, continues to present both exciting opportunities and engineering challenges. Can you become cloud native? What new alternative paradigms are available with Hadoop? What are the limitations of sole Hadoop use? How can you use it for machine learning. What about Integration? Corporate Accessibility? Ethics? These burning issues are what the summit looks to address.”

TOP DATACONOMY JOBS

Sr. Data Engineer (m/f) –NumberFour AG   

“As our Sr. Data Engineer you are responsible for the planning and implementing of scalable, stable and high-performance scoring systems.”

Physicist / Mathematician / Computer Scientist as Data Scientist, Blue Yonder

If you would like to be part of a highly innovative, challenging and extremely future-oriented software market, and a young and highly motivated team, then please send us your detailed application.

2015 is certainly an exciting time for NoSQL database vendors Aerospike. 2014 saw them open source their technology, post groundbreaking benchmarks and add a whole raft of updates to their platform. Today, they’ve announced that Silicon Valley veteran John Dillon will be stepping into the breach as their new CEO. Dillon has 30 years of experience in the database tech field under his belt, having previously been the CEO at Salesforce, EngineYard and Hyperion. His resume also boasts a leadership position at Oracle, during the time they went from multi-million to multi-billion profit margins. Needless to say, he has big plans for this promising company.

Speaking to John earlier in the week, one of the things that stuck out most was his commitment to better marketing. “The biggest challenge I’m going to put on the marketing department is to make sure we’re not a company that’s full of hype,” he said. “There’s sort of the notion in Silicon Valley and tech communities around the world that if you brag a lot and put out a lot of press releases, everybody is going to think you’ve won the battle. One of the reasons why I joined Aerospike is this is about better technology, and I wanted to join the company that I thought had the best potential and the longest term opportunity to tackle.”

Even the most casual followers of the database tech market will have noticed a marked trend towards news announcements and press releases which claim any given technology is the best, the biggest, and the fastest. But when you have every player in the market making these grand claims, the power of these assertions is lost. This is something Dillon is keenly aware of- “Everybody is saying “We’re really fast, we’re really scaleable, we’re really fault-tolerant, we’re really great- and everybody in the world is adopting our technology”. Well, that can’t be true if all of the companies are saying exactly the same thing.”

“What we have at Aerospike is a technology that works really, really well and the customers love it because we support them and we provide kind of a TLC that’s necessary.” Indeed, Aerospike have a rich history with giving back to the developer community; their last raft of updates was focused around giving back to the developer, bragging an impressive roster of new clients– as well as 33 key updates that the open source community gave back to them in return. “I think that’s a better approach these days than spending all the money on marketing,” Dylan noted. “Developers want vendors that are helpful, that have technology that works, that have support and resources that are willing to engage to help them tackle problems that they couldn’t tackle with other technologies. That’s who we are and I think that’s probably a marked difference from what I’ve seen in terms of of reviewing some of what I call “First Generation” NoSQL Database Vendors. They raise money at ridiculous valuations and then they spend it on marketing. I told Monica [Pal, Aerospike’s CMO] that we’re going to spend our money on building great technology and servicing our clients. It’s a little bit of a different notion but we think long term it’s probably a better strategy.”

So, if Aerospike’s focus moving forward isn’t going to be on breaking the bank with the marketing budget, what is it going to be? “Well we’re experiencing rapid growth and my focus is going to be to maintain a high degree of customer intimacy and customer support and satisfaction,” Dillon explained. “In other words we’re going to succeed 100% with every customer- that’s probably the core value, it’s already here in the company, but I intend to reinforce it. What we will also do is gradually tackle additional market places that have the characteristics that require higher data volumes, unbelievable scalability requirements and low latency and reliability and we’re just going to tackle one market after the other, do those really, really well.

“We have a pretty darn good database, but we just don’t think that trying to get everyone to adopt at once the right kind of focus. So I enjoy the press releases where other NoSQL vendors are saying “we’re opening offices all over the world”- I think that’s a great way to spend a whole bunch of money and have very little to show for it.We tend to tackle sort of a market at a time. We’d rather do fewer customers and do them well than try to spread ourselves too thin.”

Overall, the plan is not world domination- yet. It’s continuing to do what they do very well, and gradually trying to get more people to adopt their user-cenrtic approach. “We’re not really trying to save the world, but there’s something satisfying in being able to provide technology that actually meets user requirements and takes a headache off their plate.”

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Back in August, Aerospike announced they were open-sourcing their signature platform. At the beginning of December, they were back again with news of a record-breaking Google Compute Engine Benchmark. Now, to round off what has been an exceptional year for the flash-optimised, in-memory NoSQL database, they’ve released a whole raft of updates to their database.

The full announcement is, in a word, extensive- you can read the whole developer’s Christmas wishlist of updates here. We recently discussed the announcements with Aerospike’s CTO Brian Bulkowski; he highlighted three key developments which he believes are instrumental in fuelling the real-time applications of tomorrow.

1. A Whole Host of New Clients

One of the key headlines from the announcement is new clients for Python, PHP, Go and Ruby, plus a whole host of upgrades for Aerospike’s Java, Node.js, .NET / C# clients. Bulkowski highlighted that the vast range of clients was a demonstration of Aerospike’s commitment to their community.

“In the polyglot language world, you can’t just have a world-class database; you have to be in the community, you have to have different connectors, you have to be giving back to your community,” he explained. “Monica [Pal, Aerospike CMO]’s catchphrase for this release is ‘It’s about what we’re giving to developers, and what developers are giving to us’. It’s about having a great Ruby client, having a great PHP client, having a great Go client- we’re having a huge amount of success with Go, which is a little underappreciated as a language. On paper, it looks a little like a laundry list- but it means to our communities, is that they know we have them covered.”

2. Hadoop Integration

The integration of InputFormat allows Hadoop tools to analyse data stored in Aerospike, without performing ETL from HDFS. Aerospike’s Indexed MapReduce also allows you to analyse specific subsets of data, eliminating the need for the large data lake analysis typically offered by HDFS.

As Bulkowski explained, “The nature of analytics is, once you’ve written your analysis, you don’t want to have to do it again- it’s troublesome, it’s error-prone- you want to use the tools you have. By backing the Hadoop tooling- even though we know our own tooling is better, faster and more capable- being compatible when it comes to analytics is really a benefit. Our key value comes from being row-oriented, rather than a streaming store like HDFS- so what we looked at was, what can we give to an analytics community as a row-oriented database? The benefit is not having to ETL- being able to run those jobs directly on your database in a safe and sane fashion.”

3. Docker Containers

As we have previously reported, taking a developer-centric approach in 2014 has become synonymous with Docker support. Bulkowski was certainly excited by the rapid development of containerisation, but was keen to stress the technology has a long way to go before it reaches maturation. “The containerisation of both the data centres and also the cloud are still in their infancy,” he remarked. “From a technical perspective, I think it’s a great idea. Containerisation definitely has the potential to reset the game in terms of high-IO applications like us. In terms of being in the community, having a Docker image that people can start playing with is great- but it’s still early days.”

These three headlines only really scratch the surface of this extensive announcement; Aerospike have also announced enhancements to their enterprise security, a raft of storage and performance improvements, and 33 key community contributions- just three months after going open source. I would urge you to give the full list a read here, and to keep your eyes peeled for further Aerospike innovation in 2015.

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(Image credit: Aerospike)

Aerospike, the provider of flash-optimized in-memory open source NoSQL database, revealed earlier last week that Forensiq, a fraud detection innovator for the online advertising industry, utilises Aerospike for its system.

Aerospike’s NoSQL database enables Forensiq to continuously update its fraud database of over 500 million users, mobile devices and IP addresses and accurately detect potential fraud within 5 milliseconds, bringing quality and transparency to online advertising, according to an Aerospike press release.

“When it comes to online advertising fraud detection, speed and reliability are crucial. With Aerospike we’ve found a solid database offering that is built for tremendous performance and true scaling,” vouches Matt Vella, CTO at Forensiq. “We have grown 1000 times over the past year, and as we continue to enhance our innovative technology to fight online ad fraud, we need an equally innovative database technology like Aerospike to fuel our explosive growth and scale our business.”

“Advertising funds the Internet and Forensiq is using the fastest database in the world to combat online advertising fraud, making things better for the entire Internet economy,” said Brian Bulkowski, co-founder and CTO, Aerospike. “We are thrilled to support Forensiq’s explosive business growth.”

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reports that out of the $50 billion current worth (2014) of the U.S. digital advertising industry, an estimated 36 percent of ad impressions are fraudulent and may never be seen by humans or influence purchases.

Forensiq filters out fraudulent impressions in only 5 milliseconds during the pre-bid as part of the 150-millisecond RTB process. The Forensiq reputation platform continuously collects real-time data every time a user views, clicks or interacts with an ad and delivers a reputation score to customers so they can determine whether or not to bid on an impression.

Unlike first-generation NoSQL databases and in-memory technologies such as Redis, Aerospike allows for “elimination of the need to develop new application logic to deal with the complexity of caching or managing shards, routing requests, handling replication and failover,” thus helping it focus on algorithms to increase online ad performance for customers and grow its business.

Two clusters located in data centers on the US East and West Coast enable Aerospike to run in pure RAM on bare metal servers. Forensiq uses Aerospike Cross Data Center Replication (XDR) to keep data in the two clusters synchronized. Additionally, Forensiq designed a data management library to insulate the application from the specific database APIs and ensure fast and easy migration from its existing NoSQL database to Aerospike.

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(Image credit: Aerospike)

Aerospike have been making serious waves as a NoSQL solution for the advertising industry, due to their ability to process millions of transactions every second. It comes as little surprise, then, that they’ve managed to secure a $20 million series C round of venture capital. The round was led by NEA, with Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Alsop Louie Partners and Regis McKenna also contributing. Their battle plan with this new investment is two-fold; first, open source their technology. Second, use this new exposure to move into new markets where speed is vital, such as finance, retail and travel.

Aerospike have, up until this point, focused their efforts primarily on the advertising industry, but “there’s a moment when the time is right to go for broad adoption”, as CTO and Founder Brian Bulkowski noted. Now that they’ve built a robust platform, Aerospike is ripe for expansion.

They hope that open sourcing their product will build both trust and exposure for their product. They’re now following a similar “open core” business model to NoSQL competitors MongoDB, where the technology will be open-sourced, by they’ll maintain premium enterprise features for their paying clientele.

They are, however, stepping into a crowded marketplace. There’s a vast proliferation of NoSQL solutions out there offering the same focus on performance and low-latency, who’ve been around a while and already have established client bases. But Bukowski is confident his team’s technology will speak for itself. Moving forward, Aerospike are hoping to introduce connectors for other platforms such as Hadoop and improvements to SQL query language support. Only time will tell if Aerospike manage to establish themselves outside the realm of advertising and marketing.

Read more here.
(Image credit: Aerospike)

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