Doug Cutting, Founder of Hadoop - Extraction Point with John Furrier
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2011-08-08

John Furrier sits down with Doug Cutting, founder of Hadoop. Doug is an advocate and creator of open-source technology. Doug and John talk about the story of Hadoop and what's happening in the Hadoop world.
 In our wrap-up session, SiliconAngle founder John Furrier expressed doubt that many of these startups will take on traditional rounds of funding and go on to become established companies. He said that with the amount of angel and seed funding out there, and the ability of these companies to operate with relatively small amounts of capital many of them can continue on their own without VC funding. He also mentioned that many of them seem more like features than like real companies, and that some of them might either be acquired or simply fail, only to come back with something better later.

I take a different view -- given the recent "acquihire" trend and the talent shortage, I think most of these companies will probably be attractive to both investors and to acquirers. Some will be more attractive for the talent alone, but there's some interesting IP being created as well. For example, Observe.It (here's our interview, which starts at around 14:30) is an impressive real-time Web analytics company and was the winner of the Node Knockout competition. There's some great IP there -- it's a Web marketer's dream to be able to see not just heatmaps but the exact clicks that a user makes. But it's going up against many entrenched competitors like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg and WebTrends. Maybe the company can make it on its own, but it seems more like an acquisition target.

Services Angle
Of course it's not just startups using Node.js. Yahoo, eBay and even Walmart are using it in production. There remains controversy over whether Node.js is truly "enterprise ready," but it's already in use. Looking at the NodeJam contestants provides a great sense of what the next generation of near real-time applications will be like, whether they're built on Node.js, Erlang or some other platform.

Here are a few more interviews we conducted with NodeJam participants:

Colingo

Nodefly Systems

WebMobi

Observe.it

Watch for more to be added on theCube.