I don’t get it. A bunch of tech ‘elites’ partying out in Cyprus made a funny video and suddenly they’re turned scapegoats for the entire web industry?
I guess they’re to blame in the housing led recession and over leveraged financials led by bank managers…
Oh well…
Tags: Humor, Technology, Web 2.0
Designing for scale is one of the greatest challenges when building when building web applications for the Internet. The huge scale of the Internet and the amount of potentials users requires applications to be able to handle huge amounts of data and traffic.
Today’s Internet applications has to be design with large scale in mind:
While the need seems obvious, implementing a working solution seems is not trivial, and so we see a lot of new companies that fail to handle the load (Cuil, Twitter, ….)
Joining Nuconomy’s ranks recently has opened me to the world of web scalability. And so, I’ve had to do quite a lot of reading the past couple of weeks.
I’ve compiled a list of the best resources I came across:
SlideShare Link
(removed their player embed as it was throwing internal exceptions. So much for SlideShare’s QA…)
We describe our experience building a fault-tolerant data-base using the Paxos consensus algorithm.
Despite the existing literature in the field, building such a database proved to be non-trivial. We describe
selected algorithmic and engineering problems encountered, and the solutions we found for them. Our
measurements indicate that we have built a competitive system.…
We used the Paxos algorithm (“Paxos”) as the base for a framework that implements a fault-tolerant
log. We then relied on that framework to build a fault-tolerant database. Despite the existing literature on
the subject, building a production system turned out to be a non-trivial task for a variety of reasons:
While Paxos can be described with a page of pseudo-code, our complete implementation contains several
thousand lines of C++ code. The blow-up is not due simply to the fact that we used C++ instead
of pseudo notation, nor because our code style may have been verbose. Converting the algorithm into
a practical, production-ready system involved implementing many features and optimizations – some
published in the literature and some not.
Got some more interesting scalability resources to share? feel free to leave a comment…
Tags: Google, Internet applications, Scalability, Web 2.0, web scalability
My friend Eran from Kampyle invited me to be the first to try out and review their new service, now in private beta stages.
The company, based in Ramat Gan, offers a new service for website owners that will help them collect and manage user’s feedback.
According to Eran, most companies today use simple email forms to track feedback from end-users. This mailbox tends to become flooded as companies fail handling the overwhelming amount of feedback and lack the human resources required to read and analyze all the responses, to act upon these feedbacks and to respond to these feedbacks.
Kampyle aims to offer a service that can give insights that are usually only available to companies that are able to employ a large customer support organization - the ability to track, analyze, manage, act and respond to a large amount of feedbacks without requiring a significant human effort.
One of the most important aspects of making sense of a large amount of comments is figuring out the similarities and grouping feedbacks according to topics.
Besides the obvious grouping by feedback type and sub-type, the Kampyle team is working on an algorithm that can also figure out similarities and group according to the actual content of the feedbacks. It can also provide an automatically generated summary for a group of feedbacks.
Besides the actual feedback, Kampyle also collects contextual information (like resolution, OS, browser version…) which may prove useful in understanding the feedback.
One of the important aspects of managing feedbacks is the ability prioritize the most important issues and analyze the possible causes.
Kampyle’s Feedback Analytics dashboard provides an overview on the site’s feedbacks. Besides the regular analytics features that illustrate the amount of feedbacks and the rate they’re being received, overview of feedbacks by grade or by type, the Feedback Analytics screen displays information to help with decision making - which topics are the most important (most reported) and require attention and an analysis on the possible causes…
The whole purpose of the management and analytics screen is to allow you to figure out what is the input you’re end users are trying to provide you with, and act upon this information. End users like being listened to, and what better way to let them know you care about their feedback (which is not just thrown into a flooded unmonitored mailbox anymore) than to respond to their feedback?
Using Kampyle you can quickly respond to a group of users who gave feedback on an issue.
Every site and every new startup wants to gather feedbacks from its users. Developing such a system and dealing with the processing complexities is, by definition, not part of the company’s core. So I think a lot of site owners will appreciate Kampyle for taking that task off their shoulders and providing them with an out-of-the-box service that provides them both actual feedback and insights, allowing them to concentrate on their core product - their site.
By the way, I’ve added Kampyle’s feedback button to my blog’s side panel on the right (and to the bottom) of this post.
Let’s hear some feedback about this site… What do you think about the content? Did you notice the new design? 
Tags: Israeli Startups, Kampyle, Web 2.0
