Simon St. Laurent, O'Reilly Media | Strata Data Conference 2013
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 07/03/2013

Yesterday, the O'Reilly Fluent Startup Showcase had 11 different startups demonstrate their products in front of 4 judges-- Chris Wilson (Google), Simon St. Laurent (O'Reilly Media), Peter Cooper (Cooper Press), and Brady Forrest (PCH)—the judges chose two startups and the community voted on a third. Those selected presented, quite briefly, for the crowd to show off what they have to offer.

The two selected by judges were Modulus, an application delivery platform for developers, Scoot, an urban-transportation model involving scooters (with an app), and kWIQly, a consultancy company determined to make businesses less energy wasteful.

Modulus: Node.js, MongoDB, hosting, scalability, and especially monitoring

To speak about Modulus, Charlie Key, co-founder and CEO, took the stage and in his brief time spoke about an application platform specifically designed for developers providing: scalable hosting, integrated MongoDB database, and statistics--all built around node.js.

As a significant part of the platform (and very important for DevOps) happens to be the visualization and statistics. Since Modulus provides hosting for developers, citing the service as "premier node.js hosting," that means that those servers become the environment and housing for the applications running on them. As a result, those servers have all the sensors and knowledge about what's going on. And what's going on is all part of how development and operations work together to produce efficient, functional apps.

From the website: "Modulus has a motto of 'track everything'. Every request that enters your application is stored and available in real-time. Statistics are broken down by individual routes, so you can see which route is taking the longest to respond, which is transferring the most bandwidth, and which is the most active."

Here on DevOpsANGLE I've constantly come back to the need and necessity for monitoring and there's numerous application-hardware providers who deliver automation based around that concept. The better the monitoring.

Both mobile and web come together for Modulus, added Key, "Most of their customers are mobile, but they have a variety of customers who use node.js for web API. They also have some large games taking advantage of the platform."

Scoot: Use an app to rent a scooter instead of taking a taxicab (or owning a car)

Next, Dan Reigel co-founder and CTO of Scoot Networks, took the stage to talk about an interesting take on the "zipcar" concept but for scooters. Set in San Francisco, Scoot has over 35 scooters stored in 8 locations around the city. These scooters are shared, electric, and accessible by smartphone app.

Scoot seeks to disrupt urban transportation by providing an app that enables people's phones to become part of a scooter network. Basically it enables people to use their cell phone to find, rent, start, and return scooters.

To work properly, the application is device-agnostic currently by being an HTML5/JS application that can run on any mobile device. However, looking at the current technologies Scoot's developers are seeking to make the application more native to different platforms to make it faster and more responsive.

To help people find scooters (and where to turn them back in again) the app provides beautiful maps delivered by the Leaflet library and MapBox.

kWIQly: Making more energy efficient buildings through parsing data

The community-selected startup happens to be kWIQly—a startup developed around the idea that there's a great deal of energy waste and that can be mitigated by understanding energy use. George Catto, marketing director, took the stage to talk about his company's product and how people can make excellent use of it to save energy, and money.

As Catto quickly explained, "$1.5 trillion of energy wasted every year," and kWIQly seeks to change that. The company name has "KW" meaning kilowatts, "IQ" meaning intelligence, and "ly" for quickly.

As for a business model, kWIQly combines a great deal of information about all the energy use in a building (or presumably a campus) and provides it as a scalable, online, software-as-a-service (SaaS) consultancy. And looking at their business model, it's obvious that kWIQly will benefit greatly from the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things as a model is that everything in a particular system is connected, and in the case of energy use that means sensors. In a single building, most of the devices that could take electricity could also emit metrics as to how much they're using, when they're on, when they're in operation, and all of that information flows out and into a database. Right now, the startup doesn't appear to do this, but it's a definite space it could move into.