Recap of Nov 12 - Meetup

[Alex Lam]

Hey TVIC,

Great catch up last night. Here are some links/recap on some of the topics discussed.

In light of the recent Lightning Lab Christchurch programme, there's a resurgent topic around startups and investments.

Atlassian IPO - 

http://fortune.com/2015/09/25/atlassian-files-ipo-papers/

If you used Atlassian's products - you'd know how sticky it can get - be it Jira or Confluence. It can be something you'd love to ignore at work and while HipChat is no Slack - you can't argue that Atlassian has done very well serving 48,000 recurring customers that they charge $100m per annum. The valuation is around $3.3 billion - a billion dollar bug tracking business!

Docker

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2909543/virtualization/after-four-rounds-of-fundraising-docker-mulls-how-to-go-it-alone.html

What the heck is yet another service that keeps getting buzzed around? Docker simplifies deployment by bundling dependencies and has been the buzz for a while, having raised more than $180 million - it's yet another service that old school linux users from Slackware, Debian, Redhat/Centos, et al.

If you ever had issues with continuous integration deployment and a strong need to not have a single point of failure at the network level (ie. if you have hosted applications on AWS servers located in Virginia over the past five years, those outages related to thunderstorms and floods may have woken up your entire tech team in the middle of the night - then Docker is one of the potential solutions).

I haven't had enterprise production deployment experience with Docker yet - but it was rather handy when checking out new software that requires a bit of setup.

Machine Learning - Numenta

http://numenta.com/#technology

Which brings to one of my recent experience around Docker - was installing to check out Numenta when the linux source builds weren't compiling well. It's Docker version installed fine (tried it on both Mac and linux server (yes, a docker linux within linux, we're past the age of inception now)).

Numenta's Nupic has a machine learning algo that learns - and when it learns something, it calls it an anomaly. What is something like this good for? Well, if you're building things that connect to the internet that sends out streams of data - and you don't have time to look at reports and chart, but want to be alerted if something seems amiss - Nupic's for you. Pete's building his beer brew that reports online, Marek's home temperature measurement raspberry pi charts out how chill things are this season - if you want to be the first to be notified of a spike that's extraordinary - check out nupic. 

With it's learning mode, you can teach it to identify patterns that are subtle. 

Which then brings us to the Internet of Targets

https://www.shodan.io/

Which brings up the future capability of potentially seeing what's in your neighbour's fridge, or just some random fridge on the planet. 

How would you manage all the interactions? Which platform do you use?

Which brings us to Thunder! The IoT platform by Salesforce.

http://www.salesforce.com/iot-cloud/

When you think about it, it's only the logical next step that the system that many sales people would use, that they would build a platform to sell directly to the end users. With many things being connected to the internet, why sell to people when you can sell directly to the thing that uses it?

SalesForce - selling to people/organisations

Thunder - selling to the connected things in organisations!

And later, you would have things buying things from each other. It's the new new thing 2.0! (The original new new thing story is here - http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Thing-Silicon-Valley/dp/0140296468 )

For more startups that are funded to explore this thing - 

https://angel.co/internet-of-things

See you all next month.

Cheers,

Alex

[Marek Kuziel]

wow Alex, what a splendid summary!

Thank you for putting it all together.

Numenta looks particularly useful. I will have a play.

Marek

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[Pete Nicholls]

Great post, Alex! Thank you! Definitely going to check out Numenta.

“Things buying things” reminds me of this story I read a while back about a bot that made random Trade Me purchases:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/4/3728500/amazon-random-shopper-recommendation-engines

(Inspired by this XKCD comic, of course.)

Machines capable of making purchasing decisions is the first step on the road to companies being run by algorithms, so it's a source of amusement and some relief to see how far away we are from doing this well.

See you next month!

Our venue will hopefully be Pomeroy's on Dec 10, if I can secure a booking that close to Christmas :)