Posts tagged reaches
Cassandra Reaches 1.0: What’s Next?
Oct 18th
One of the leading NoSQL databases has reached the coveted 1.0 release. Apache announced Cassandra 1.0 today, just two years after entering the Apache Incubator. Originally developed at Facebook, Cassandra has come a long way in a short time.
What’s new in this release? Cassandra has better performance, better disk space management and data compression on a per-ColumnFamily basis, among other things.
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Cassandra also adds a Windows service in this release, so users can set it up as a managed service rather than running it from a bat file.
I spoke briefly today to Jonathan Ellis, vice president of Apache Cassandra and CTO of DataStax on the 1.0 release, and what’s after the 1.0 release. Ellis says that they did a poll of Cassandra users two years ago to see what they’d want in Cassandra. That produced a wishlist of features that the developers “kept in the back of their minds.” Ellis says that with 1.0 “we looked at that, and we got all of those done. Not all in 1.0 specifically, but in the two years since the survey, we’ve nailed all of those.”
We, in this case, is not just DataStax. Ellis says that DataStax employs “the majority” of people who work on Cassandra, but that it’s a “long tail” project with lots of contributors. Ellis also says that Twitter and Netflix are major contributors, as well as Rackspace “historically.” Then he says there’s a long list of users who contribute minor patches to fix issues that affect them directly, but aren’t involved in core contribution.
On Oracle
Cassandra may be young, but it’s got the industry’s attention. According to Apache’s release, it’s in production use by Twitter, Netflix, Urban Airship, Constant Contact and Google. It’s being used for barcode scanning and geospatial databases. The largest known production cluster exceeds 300 terabytes. It is, in short, a project that has commercial potential. Naturally that’s attracted the big guns in the database industry.
Say what you will about Oracle (I do), but the company certainly has the muscle to make an impact when it decides it wants to get involved with a technology. That’s doubly true when it comes to the database market. So how’s Ellis feeling about Oracle’s decision to get into the noSQL game?
First, Ellis says that Oracle’s entry actually helps validate the noSQL market. “Living in the echo chamber the way we do on the cutting edge of technology, it’s easy to lose sight of how new this is for a majority of companies out there. This is hugely validating for us.”
Validation of a business market isn’t of much consolation if you’re getting squeezed out, though. But Ellis says he’s not worried about Oracle. “Time and again, big companies have proved it’s really difficult for them to come out with a new product in a timely fashion.”
It’s also hard to judge right now exactly what Oracle’s offering. Ellis says the company has put out very little technical detail. But from what he’s seen, Ellis says that Oracle’s offering is more like Cassandra than competing noSQL databases like MongoDB. “So I think they’re on the right track.”
Next with Cassandra
Ellis says that he’s just starting to think about the post-1.0 world for Cassandra. Two features do come to mind, though, that missed the boat for 1.0 that were on a lot of wishlists. The first is triggers.
Database triggers let you define rules in the database, such as updating table X when table Y is updated. Ellis says that triggers will be necessary for Cassandra at it grows in popularity. “As more tools use it, that’s something more users are going to be asking for.”
Another feature that Ellis sees making its way into Cassandra is entity groups. Ellis says that this is for data that shares a primary key. For example, if you’re storing email in Cassandra you can ensure that attachments and body of an email are not saved independently. (This would be bad, for instance, if you saved a draft email with updated body but an old version of an attachment.)
Currently, Cassandra is on a four-month release cycle. At some point, Ellis says that it might make sense to move to a six-month cycle as it matures. But for now, expect the next release of Cassandra in early 2012.
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Google Earth Reaches One Billion Downloads
Oct 5th
Earlier today, Google announced that Google Earth has been downloaded one billion times since it was released in 2005. This number, which includes desktop clients, mobile apps, and the Google Earth plug in, makes Google Earth one of the most downloaded applications of all time. To emphasize the enormity of the number one billion, the post pointed out that a billion hours ago humans were still living in the Stone Age and a billion minutes ago the Roman Empire was the dominant world power.
Google Earth and Maps vice president of engineering Brian McClendon said the following of the one billion downloads achievement:
“We’re proud of our one billion milestone, but we’re even more amazed at the way people have used Google Earth to explore the world. When we founded Keyhole, Inc. back in 2001, we never imagined our geospatial technology would be used by people in so many unexpected ways.”
McClendon, who co-founded the startup Keyhole in 2001, has been a part of Google Earth since its inception. In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole and launched a free online earth atlas the following year.
To celebrate the one billion download milestone, Google Earth introduced a new website called One World Many Stories and released a video detailing the accomplishment. The site, which highlights the many ways people have used Google Earth, features a timeline of Google Earth to enable site visitors to travel virtually to featured destinations as they read the stories.
Since Google Earth launched in 2005, it has been used for everything from killing time while bored to aiding rescue and relief organizations in the aftermath of the tragic Haiti quake of 2010. Although Google Earth has reached the one billion download mark, it continues to add innovative features and encourage new uses for the service.
[Sources Include: Google LatLong Blog, One World Many Stories, & AFP]
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SEO Adelaide Company, Market Ease Business Promotions, Again Reaches Out To … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Sep 13th
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SEO Adelaide Company, Market Ease Business Promotions, Again Reaches Out To …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Market Ease Business Promotions, a specialist SEO Adelaide company, has a support team based in Iloilo City in the Philippines. In July they visited a underprivileged seniors centre, and in their most recent outreach project, they have brought joy to … |
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SEO Adelaide Company, Market Ease Business Promotions, Again Reaches Out To … – PR Web (press release)
Sep 12th
 PR Web (press release) |
SEO Adelaide Company, Market Ease Business Promotions, Again Reaches Out To …
PR Web (press release) Market Ease Business Promotions, a specialist SEO Adelaide company, has a support team based in Iloilo City in the Philippines. In July they visited a underprivileged seniors centre, and in their most recent outreach project, they have brought joy to … SEO Adelaide Company, Market Ease Business Promotions, Again Reaches Out To … |
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Pew data suggests local SEO reaches 28 percent of U.S. adults – Brafton
Sep 6th
 Brafton |
Pew data suggests local SEO reaches 28 percent of U.S. adults
Brafton The research was part of the company's ongoing Internet Project, which aims to identify key trends in internet use in AmericaPew polled more than 2200 people for its survey, which emphasized the value of mobile SEO and social media marketing, … |
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Payless Power Reaches New Customers Online – PR Web (press release)
Aug 29th
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Payless Power Reaches New Customers Online
PR Web (press release) Realizing the reach, precision and cost-effectiveness of online marketing, Payless Power selected Dallas/Fort Worth-based i5 web works to create the new website and handle ongoing search engine optimization (SEO), web site management and hosting. … |
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Yahoo Search Migration Reaches Major European Countries
Aug 5th
Yahoo’s partnership with Microsoft is moving along smoothly and quickly. The transition of Yahoo’s back-end services to Bing are continuing, with six additional major countries now seeing Bing results when they conduct a Yahoo search.
The Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance
Yahoo is a search front-end with a strong web portal platform, but it’s not of a search site anymore. That doesn’t mean Yahoo isn’t gaining some profit from their search, however. They’re still the second most popular place to search from, and only 12 percent of their ad revenue gets bumped back to Microsoft. Additionally, Yahoo can lower its costs, cut some employees, and focus on more profitable services.
That’s the plan, anyway. Shareholders haven’t been particularly happy with Yahoo of late, and some have even called for the resignation of CEO Carol Bartz. The calls for resignation were largely in response to dismal Q2 earnings. Bartz and others have defended the company’s plan, however, stating that the completion of the transition will cut costs dramatically.
Yahoo still runs their own search back-end in several regions, but six major countries are now seeing Bing for their Yahoo searches. “This week we have transitioned algorithmic results to Microsoft in France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom,” stated the official Yahoo blog entry discussing the matter. That’s in addition to six countries that migrated in late July (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Peru, and Venezuela). In total, Bing now runs Yahoo’s search algorithm an search ads in 17 countries.
Once the transition is complete, Yahoo will no longer need to maintain their algorithm or ads, and several additional search-specific services (such as their webmaster tools) can be shut down). Servers can also be closed or re-purposed. Whether it will really turn Yahoo around or not, there’s no doubt that finishing the migration will be a boon for the company’s cost of operations.
[Sources include: The Yahoo Blog]
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Yahoo Search Migration Reaches Major European Countries
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Instagram Reaches 150 Million Photos
Aug 4th
Photo sharing app Instagram announced today that its users have posted over 150 million photos in the nine months since it launched. The free iPhone app, which lets users quickly snap square photos and apply a variety of preset filters for ambience, was one of our top 10 startups of last year, and we’ve watched its meteoric rise with great interest because, according to conventional wisdom, it shouldn’t have happened.
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It’s a crowded space, and several competitors are better monetized. It’s unclear how viable the company will prove to be in the long run; there doesn’t seem to be a clear path to monetization. Instagram doesn’t even have a fully functional website like other apps do. The team is small, the app lacks some key features, and, crucially, it’s not even available for Android. How has Instagram done it?
There are at least two answers: Instagram epitomizes the lean, focused startup philosophy of doing one thing well and building it carefully. And, much more importantly, its users absolutely love it.
Unfazed by the lack of a browsable Web interface, Instagram lovers seized upon its real-time API and built them. Lots of them. There’s even a third-party companion app for iPhone and iPad designed solely for browsing Instagram photos in more ways than its own app makes possible.
Instagram’s approach is not universally adored, though. In fact, some people really, really hate it. Critics, out of love for data and photographs alike, contend that Instagram’s batch of stock filters and its relatively small 612×612 image resolution destroy the quality and integrity of the images. But these concerns are not lost on Instagram users. The #nofilter hashtag is worn as a badge of pride on images that turned out great on their own. And regardless, they’ve shared 150 million pieces of evidence that they don’t much care about all that.
Users are so invested in the process of sharing and finding Instagram photos that meticulous lists of best practices have emerged. Even RWW‘s own reporters, upstanding journalists that they are, are not immune to Instagram’s charms. The iPhone’s powerful camera and retina display offer a compelling experience for photo lovers, and they have a range of choices for photo app experiences. At least 7 million people have chosen Instagram, and they’ve chosen it 150 million times.
What Instagram will do with this good will remains to be seen. They raised a pretty big round of funding this year, and they haven’t put forth a clear path to monetization, while competitors have. Their announcement today says that “brands… have started to realize the power of communicating with their followers through images,” but that doesn’t offer much of a hint. It’s un-journalistic to mistake correlation for causation, but Instagram seems more interested in building a great experience than a great payout, and it sure is remarkable how much users love it.
Photo credit: first photo is Instagram photo #150,000,000 by janefot
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Google Android Nears 50% Market Share, iOS Reaches Second Place
Aug 3rd
Google’s Android platform has seen growth that exceeds even the wildest of expectations. Android now holds 48 percent of global market share, while the iPhone has reached second place with 19 percent.
The Canalys Report
According to the offici…
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