New York’s Big Datascape, Part 1: Timehop, Parse.ly, Bitly, 10Gen, 2tor

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[Image via AllThingsD]

I started writing about innovators in Boston’s big data scene in the earliest days of Riparian. Researching what other companies were building, analyzing, and selling provided me with a narrative to what might otherwise still be a murky set of concepts.  It also introduced me to some fascinating ideas—Bluefin Labs’ TV Genome and Recorded Future’s event forecasting come to mind. And so, nearly two months in to my New York sojourn, I’m expanding this series in the hopes of making the acquaintance of these companies’ NYC equivalents.

Some people like to say that New York and Boston are rivals. When it comes to sports, I think this is valid; when it comes to technology, I think it’s silly. By and large, the technology each city produces serves different sectors—life sciences, healthcare, and higher ed in Boston, fashion, media, finance, and consumer web in New York. Of course, there are exceptions (there are always exceptions)—but exceptions are testaments to heterogeneity, not (usually) harbingers of power shifts. Four of the following companies serve one or more of the city’s main sectors; the fifth serves higher ed, a sector that, especially these days, needs to be better served everywhere.

Timehop

Parse.ly

Bitly

10Gen

  • Product: 10Gen makes MongoDB, which is a distributed database that stores data in JSON/BSON documents (think MySql with a document-based data model).
  • Founders: Dwight Merriman, CEO (@dmerr), Eliot Horowitz, CTO (@eliothorowitz)
  • Technology Used: MapReduce, Aggregation Framework, atomic operations
  • Target industries: Consumer web, Digital Media, Mobile
  • Location: Soho (Also, Palo Alto, CA)
  • Funders: Flybridge Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures 

2tor

 

Litmapped, Week of June 22, 2012: The Paralysis of Choice

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If you wanted to slap a theme on this week’s Litmapped, I’d say it’s methods of dealing with perceived limitlessness. There’s retreat (nostalgia and preservation), embrace (a whole new system of web navigation), and tempered evaluation (You don’t know how she does it? She doesn’t).

Nick Martin, Software Engineer (@n_w_martin)

  • Read: Why Go Out?
  • Source: Brick Magazine
  • Pull quote: “Maybe we go out in order to fall short . . . because we want to learn how to be good at being people . . . and moreover, because we want to be people.”

Sean Kermes, Software Engineer

  • Read: The Information, by James Gleick
  • Pull quote: “Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

Christina Nguyen, UX Engineer (@chrnguyen)

  • Read: Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
  • Source: The Atlantic
  • Pull quote: “I still strongly believe that women can ‘have it all’ (and that men can too). I believe that we can ‘have it all at the same time.’ But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured.” 

Claire Willett, Marketing and Development Manager (@clairedwillett)

  • Read: Homepagesickness
  • Source: Parsley blog
  • Pull quote: “A set of values visibly inflects web nostalgia: an anti-corporate and open source ethos, geekdom, nerdcore, and Luddism—a sense that imperfections in older web technologies disclosed the necessity of a human presence in the machine.”

Jim Stallings, Systems Administrator (@james_stallings)

  • Listened to: FLOSS Weekly, Ep 214: LibreOffice
  • Source: FLOSS Weekly
  • Pull quote: “We want to get people into a world of open software, of course, and open document formats.”

David Wihl, CEO (@davidwihl)

  • Read/Explored: Endangered Languages
  • Source: endangeredlanguages.com
  • Pull quote: “The disappearance of a language means the loss of valuable scientific and cultural information, comparable to the loss of a species.”

Paula Marciante, Senior Talent Acquisition Manager (@paulamarciante)