Our company is research-driven in the sense that is based on me reading a lot of papers on distributed systems and algorithms (eg. Google papers, Lamport papers), and extracting a design concept from those for our first product (Keyspace). To give back, I write a paper for each product we release or algorithm we invent, and we're an open-source company.
It's working so far, we have bootstrapped ourselves to a nice profitable level, we just rented our first office, and are working on our next-gen database product, which will be scalable not just replicated.
(Btw. we're in Budapest and we're looking for a C/C++ programmer.)
awesome, Maro! one of the biggest impacts of research (in an applied field like CS systems) is that it provides good ideas for people in industry to pick off, adapt, and refine for their own applications. great work
Too bad the top journals are not open access... Unacceptable publishing conditions (and lack of time and incentive) are one of the reasons I don't bother trying to publish our papers in a journal.
yeah, that's a whole other big debate within academia :)
but if you can make your technical reports and white papers public on your website, that could really help out people working in related areas.
Edit: i agree that if you're running a company, it's probably not worth your time and effort to try to play the academic peer-reviewed publishing game; the benefits to you aren't really that great (besides a bit of PR and connections with academics) ... if you want to share technical info publicly, putting it on your website and then letting Google + Google Scholar index your PDFs is far more effective :)
Awesome stuff. If you don't mind me asking: a) how do you make money (I observe your code is open source); b) how do you market or get prospective customers (since it looks like this is an enterprise product). Just curios, because the product looks very interesting and I'm sure your business model will be even more interesting.
Hey Maro, that sounds really cool. I can't believe you're in Hungary. I'm in Budapest for just another week working and studying! I work on stickybits.com. If you can meet up, we should. Call or text me at +1 36 70 574 1198 .
This post is spot on. At my company, the amount of amazing stuff we can build basically had the top blow off once we were finally able to access our dataset using map reduce. In an afternoon, we can build something that previously was inconceivable due to the large data transformations necessary to build it.
It's server is in clojure but is powered by a massive tag analysis job using cascading. I'll be writing a blog post about this in due time once it matures.
Our "suggested shops" feature is now powered by elastic map reduce and matlab to perform matrix factorization, believe it or not. And, we're working on improved search algorithms. Being able to re-index the whole site in 15 minutes makes iterating and improving the algorithm quickly more possible.
And visionaries say, "Holy crap, the ceiling just got lifted off of our capabilities in a huge way -- we can process 100X more data per second/minute than we could 4 years ago, due to changes in the way we think about these things. Ok, let's think of an application in this space."
Big data isn't just a new keyword in your PL/SQL routines.
How is Apple a research-driven company like what the author was describing? I suppose you could argue they are researching new designs for technologies, but really that's it. They don't tackle new conceptual challenges like Google did with automated page ranking, for instance.
I think Apple is very strongly research-driven with respect to materials science and industrial design: the basic design of the iPhone / multitouch interface, the unibody design of recent MacBook Pros, the stainless steel antenna in the iPhone 4, and so forth.
Don't forget NeXT. I never considered owning Mac until OS X (that is, until I got a functional UNIX OS). Prior to OS X they were for graphic designers and people wanting a better typewriter, I stuck to Sun workstations (before the Ultra-5, past that point, the switch to PCI bus and IDE drives, they essentially became slow commodity machines) and Linux PCs.
NeXT was probably even more technology driven than the startups Bradford describes: formed around an operating system, hardware, OOP and a programming language. Sun was much the same way, but unfortunately they devolved to the extreme of making science projects rather than products.
It's working so far, we have bootstrapped ourselves to a nice profitable level, we just rented our first office, and are working on our next-gen database product, which will be scalable not just replicated.
(Btw. we're in Budapest and we're looking for a C/C++ programmer.)