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Posts Tagged ‘Programming Language’

What the Tweetmeme Toyota Portal Looks Like Under the Hood

Auto manufacturer Toyota launched a new Twitter-based portal called Toyota Conversations tonight and the site is getting a whole lot of press. Most people are focused on how the site seems to contain more positive Tweets than the world at large, but there are a lot of negative links on the site as well.

We got a look at the back-end infrastructure of the Tweetmeme portal system and have screenshots displayed below. These aren’t for the Toyota project in particular, but they are the same tools being put to use in a different campaign. We know you feed and data geeks fantasize about building the ultimate feed moderation system. Check out the one that Toyota put down no small sum to get to use. It’s a nice combination of heavy duty and easy to use, just like you’d expect for a big corporate customer like this. The best news? This system will be opened up to the public soon.

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No Cover Up Here

Below, an item page for a popular link shared about Toyota. Below is what appears to be the company’s direct response. Thus the name of the site, Conversations.

Easy to Use Logic Chains

Tweetmeme portal customers set up complex combinations of rules for which tweets to display using what company founder Nick Halstead calls “a mini-programming language – with a drag + drop interface for setting them up. Rules can be based on tweet, text from the story, title, meta data from the story, geo location data, twitter users who are tweeting…almost any data that is associated with twitter and the linked story that we spider as well. Each channel can have a number of chains – each chain can work separately – but be valued differently – i.e. have a confidence factor associated with it.”

The Big Dashboard in the Sky

This is what Tweetmeme HQ looks at, standing on top of all the channels. The ten person team calls its big set of rules “the pickle matrix”. Every time someone Tweets a tweet with a new link in it, or a Retweet, that data is thrown against the pickle matrix. That’s the field “access count.” Then an optimized process of rules are matched. “The data isn’t the problem,” Halstead says, “it’s the number of rules we put against it. This is 1,000 times more powerful than Twitter’s Track or search because we can apply tens of thousands of rules to every Tweet we see.”

Halstead’s company got a big boost from this deal, but Tweetmeme has been cash-flow positive for at least the last 3 months. “I think the more interesting fact,” he says, “is that I started this company for the sole purpose of doing this and companies are now only just starting to recognize the value in this kind of proposition. I think that shows how far social media has grown up. And that you have to stick at what you know is right – even if people ignore it to start with.”

No word yet on when this system will be opened up to the public, but used in conjunction with other media types like Toyota has it sure seems like there’s a lot of potential here.

Disclosure: FM Publishing, a partner in the Toyota project, is also RWW’s advertising network.

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Facebook’s HipHop: Impact on the Enterprise May Go Deep into the Code

The influence that Facebook is having on the enterprise now goes beyond making the corporate world a more Web-oriented place – its impact now goes deep into the code.

Facebook announced this week that it has rewritten the PHP runtime, translating it to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This is no small feat. Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao said that the rewrite significantly reduced the CPU usage on its Web servers by an average of about 50% depending on the page

The impact of this development on the enterprise will depend on a few factors:

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• What kind of community develops around HipHop.
• How willing enterprise developers will be to embrace HipHop.
• How the improved run time will actually benefit enterprise operations.

Community

Facebook has done something remarkable. They changed the foundation for the programming language that powers thousands of Web sites. But for now, the change really only affects Facebook.

Marco Tabini is a PHP developer out of Canada who is helping provide perspective about the impacts HipHop may have. Tabini says the next step is to develop a community that will actively build upon the improvement. If they do that, there is a good chance that HipHop may be adopted by the enterprise community.

“Even though Facebook’s imprimatur is certainly enough for people to take notice of HipHop, it’s important to keep in mind that, in its current format, this tool is promising but not ready for prime time–not because the tool itself is not production-quality (after all, Facebook is already using it to handle 90% of their traffic), but because there is no ecosystem around it. If you’re running 1,000 servers, using HipHop is going to be mighty difficult without some sort of deployment tool–and no such tool exists at the moment. Therefore, Facebook’s biggest challenge, having overcome the nontrivial hurdle of making HipHop work technically, is going to be that of fostering a community around it to ensure its growth outside of the company’s systems.”

But this should not be overly complex. With HipHop, Facebook created a drop in replacement that Web developers may make without any significant changes to its existing codebase. Tabini says that if it takes off, the impacts may be significant:

“HipHop could be massively destabilizing to the PHP marketplace, because it is designed as a drop-in replacement to stock PHP; in other words, in most cases it will not be necessary to make significant changes to an existing codebase in order to make it work with HipHop. Flipping this concept around, site owners now have every incentive to write code that is compatible with HipHop, thus giving Facebook significant power over the future direction that PHP takes, since it can dictate what works and doesn’t work–and this is potentially going to affect what even the small company does.”

Resistance

The enterprise developer community is dominated by Java and .NET developers. Java is a heavyweight technology. Historically, Microsoft has had a significant hold on the enterprise, primarily due to the hegemony of Microsoft Office, and the enterprise community has scoffed at PHP. Will they be more open to HipHop? We wonder if the term itself may be a cultural barrier for developers. We love the term and think it represents the youthful, modern transformation that is happening in the enterprise. Companies are moving to Web oriented architectures that embrace the open Web. APIs are becoming more important as companies see the importance of connecting with external applications.

Further, PHP is a language for developing Web applications. That seems like reason enough to adopt it. The enterprise is moving to the Web. They’ve been following what Facebook is doing. It makes sense the enterprise would also follow the lead Facebook is taking with HipHop.

Operations

If the impacts really are what they appear to be, the efficiencies alone will create an impetus for adopting HipHop:

Warren Benedetto, a Web developer with Transfusion Media says that, “If it truly is 80% faster than PHP, then it will save companies a ton of money on hardware resources.”

He continues, “This also allows enterprises to seriously consider PHP when they otherwise may not have. A lot of enterprises stick to Java and .NET because of PHP’s perceived (and actual) performance flaws. If HipHop can raise PHP’s performance to the levels of these other languages, it can remain on the table as an option. Then other companies get the same benefits of PHP that Facebook has reaped — more programmers, cheaper salaries, faster development, etc.”

Conclusion

This is a long term transition. Facebook impacts the community then it may affect not just the direction of PHP but of the enterprise as well.

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Game creation tool Kodu comes to the PC as a beta

Microsoft has released Kodu, a game developed by Microsoft Research that lets users create their own worlds while teaching them the basics of game development, as a public beta for the PC. To get started, you’ll need a Windows Live ID to apply for the beta on Microsoft Connect, where you’ll be asked to fill out a 14-question “Kodu Academic Program Questionnaire.”

Originally designed as a learning tool for youngsters using Xbox 360, Kodu was released a year ago as service with a powerful programming language that quickly became a hit in academic circles. Since its release, Kodu has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and is used in more than 60 educational institutions across the globe, according to Microsoft. Redmond thinks Kodu’s biggest hurdle so far, however, has been that schools needed to purchase Xbox 360s, controllers, and so on to get started. Thus, the software giant has ported the tool to Windows as most educational institutes already have PCs with mice and keyboards.

According to the Microsoft, developers aged from seven to 70 can use Kodu to string together simple cartoon icons that define the rules of their game world, rather than using a complex programming language. Microsoft hopes Kodu will continue to be used to introduce children to programming, help them advance their design, math, and problem-solving skills, as well as encourage students to truly engage with computers, instead of experiencing them passively.

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Yahoo! Releases YQL-Powered Meme API

Yahoo! Meme, a rich-media microblog that originally started as a Portuguese-only web app and has since expanded to Spanish and English language versions, is often mistakenly called a Twitter clone.

However, in stark contrast to the 140-character wunder-app, Meme has proven in the months since its release to be a much better platform for multimedia sharing and cross-platform content curation. Now, the Tumblr/Twitter/Posterous hybrid is offering an API built on top of YQL, Yahoo!’s query language that we covered back in May, when we were impressed with its power, versatility, and uniqueness. The Yahoo! team has already used the API to develop a version of Meme for smartphones.

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According to the Yahoo! Developer Network post announcing the release, “Developers can use this open API to create new applications based on Meme as well as easily create mashups with other products through YQL.”

As an example of what YQL allows developers to do, Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks told us in May, “YQL… allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo!’s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small.” Also from our May coverage:

According to Yahoo! Chief Technologist Sam Pullara, the idea behind YQL (launched in October 2008) was to create an agnostic query language similar to SQL, a language familiar to most developers, and let developers use that language to use the Internet as a huge database. “If you make it universally and simply accessible so every application developer doesn’t have to learn every API, it’s be easier for developers to create apps from the data users have taken so much time to make available on the Internet.”

Although YQL looks a lot like SQL, it treats the info on the web as a virtual table that developers can manipulate in a standardized way, regardless of the API that data came from. Developers only had to know how to use YQL to quickly create simple mashups.

Interested developers can check out the Meme documentation. The API, the site says, “is intended for developers who are familiar with RESTful Web services.” In addition to offering superior support for multimedia content and simple access through YQL, Meme also has an excellent built-in repost function, an asymmetrical friendship model, and OAuth compliance.

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Engine Yard’s Rails app support gets another $19M

Engine Yard, a company that helps developers deploy and manage web applications built with the Ruby on Rails programming framework (which is popular for fast web development), has raised $19 million in a third venture round.

This brings the San Francisco company’s total funding to $37.5 million. As a point of comparison, to about 10 times the money raised by competitor Heroku. Both companies offer services to take the pain out of launching a Rails app after you’ve built it, in Engine Yard’s case hosted private on infrastructure or, more recently, on a service called Engine Yard Cloud that uses Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Both companies have described the difference as a focus on service (Engine Yard) versus a focus on automation (Heroku), though the Engine Yard Cloud moves further in the direction of automation.

Engine Yard says it has more than 600 customers. In June, it also added support for JRuby, an version of the Ruby programming language that integrates with Java.

The new funding comes from DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures, with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital, Amazon.com, and New Enterprise Associates.

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Hotmail Co-founder’s New Firm Acquires A Second VoIP Startup: Mobivox

VoIP services company Sabse Technologies has acquired Canadian Internet voice startup MobiVox for an undisclosed amount. The fledgling company provides VoIP calling via existing landlines and cellphones and also enables its users to do conferencing, make group calls, and transfer calls to their home phone from their cell phone.

The young company had raised a single round of funding that amounted up to $11 million nearly two years ago from high-profile investors like Flybridge Capital, IDG Ventures and Brightspark Ventures.

In a statement, Sabse Technologies says it wil integrate Mobivox’s solution into its own offering and retain most if not all employees:

The Mobivox platform and patent portfolio adds to Sabse’s offering by providing a proven voice-interface-programming language, in-the-cloud contact book storage along with network-agnostic telephony integration. Additionally, Mobivox brings a very deep team of speech developers that combined bring more than 100 years of expertise.

The news comes just three month after Sabse, which was founded by well-known entrepreneurs Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail co-founder) and Yogesh Patel, agreed to acquire VC-funded Jaxtr, also without disclosing the amount it had paid for the startup. That means the serial entrepreneurs’ newest venture, which as far as we know has raised no institutional venture funding to date, has significant cash in the bank and aims to move fast in the VoIP calling and conference market by picking up strategic assets left and right.

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