March, 2008

Wow… what a day!

Plugg really blew my socks off last Wednesday. It was a wonderful event: over 300 people either with a start-up or with loads of money, trying to find each other. I had a great time.

Unfortunately, MyOwnDB didn’t make it until the last three contestants, but then again, I don’t think we were up for it yet. Just look at the companies that won!

Bragster

My personal favourite. They exist for some time now though, have made business deals with celebrities as 50 cent and Eminem and are represented in various European offices.

Viewdle

At first, I didn’t really understand what they were doing, but it is a great concept. Again though, this is not a start-up like we are. People in 3 countries, 7 PhDs hired full time, building on ex-KGB technology, working for 3 years, … A nice interview with the COO can be found at zoomz.

Zilok

Dubbed the eBay for online rental. Operational in 4 countries in 2 continents. Also won the peoples award.

Compare this to MyOwnDB: Unofficially founded in November 2007 only, core product has one year of development behind it, nothing spent on marketing yet, …

Anyway, it was a huge boost for us being selected to the last 20 already. We’re very proud of that! Thank you Robin, for organising this great event. This was the first public event on which MyOwnDB was presented.

For people who missed my 2 minute pitch, this is (more or less) what I said:

Thank you all for being here. And thanks to the jury for letting me in.

MyOwnDB is a joint venture between Zeropoint.IT, a managed software development outsourcing company and Raphael Bauduin, famous as the FOSDEM founder.

Together, we bring the concept of databases up to the next level. Some 10 years ago, we all made the switch to managed programming languages easily, but in the world of databases, everything still happens old school. The *main* focus is still on data storage, whereas *we* focus on data management. I’m talking about custom data types, fine grained access level control, localisation, online collaboration on your data, REST APIs, …

Up to today, MyOwnDB has been fully funded by owner investments. Our core product has one year of full time development behind it and one year more is planned within the current budget. (This all happens in Pakistan by the way).

With MyOwnDB, we are aiming for three revenue streams:

• paid user subscriptions on myowndb.com
• recurring license fees for large(r) local enterprise installations
• a worldwide MyOwnDB partner certification programme

Our business model is pretty “modern”: it’s based on abundance. We want to reach out to the people (users and developers) as soon as possible, converting a small percentage of them into paying customers. The best way of reaching this goal is releasing the product under an Open Source license. This is planned for this summer, together with some kind of media campaign. Without any marketing budget, we get 250 website visits per day and convinced more than 1700 users to register for an account. Of course, we want to increase this pace. Extremely.

I see the opportunity. Do you?

You can always reach me on bart@myowndb.com.

Thank you.

hapπ day! :-)

Our mailserver had a hard time last weekend keeping up with the loads of emails thrown at it. It took 2 minutes to get an ssh connection, because all other processes than qmail and spamd were kicked out of memory and swap space. This is when I decided to try out greylisting. What a success!

But what I wanted to show here are two lists:

> sqlite3 /var/db/greylite/greylite.db "select ip from pending" | xargs -n 1 geoiplookup | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 15
389 GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States
285 GeoIP Country Edition: KR, Korea, Republic of
209 GeoIP Country Edition: TR, Turkey
208 GeoIP Country Edition: RU, Russian Federation
208 GeoIP Country Edition: IT, Italy
194 GeoIP Country Edition: RO, Romania
179 GeoIP Country Edition: BR, Brazil
172 GeoIP Country Edition: ES, Spain
167 GeoIP Country Edition: CO, Colombia
166 GeoIP Country Edition: AR, Argentina
163 GeoIP Country Edition: PL, Poland
134 GeoIP Country Edition: --, N/A
120 GeoIP Country Edition: CL, Chile
118 GeoIP Country Edition: CN, China
115 GeoIP Country Edition: MX, Mexico

and

> sqlite3 /var/db/greylite/greylite.db "select ip from verified" | xargs -n 1 geoiplookup | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 15
141 GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States
 28 GeoIP Country Edition: TW, Taiwan
 22 GeoIP Country Edition: GB, United Kingdom
 20 GeoIP Country Edition: BE, Belgium
 14 GeoIP Country Edition: RU, Russian Federation
 14 GeoIP Country Edition: FR, France
 14 GeoIP Country Edition: DE, Germany
 12 GeoIP Country Edition: NL, Netherlands
 10 GeoIP Country Edition: JP, Japan
 10 GeoIP Country Edition: CN, China
  9 GeoIP Country Edition: IN, India
  8 GeoIP Country Edition: PE, Peru
  7 GeoIP Country Edition: TR, Turkey
  6 GeoIP Country Edition: UA, Ukraine
  6 GeoIP Country Edition: CA, Canada

Some questions and remarks I have here are

• Who is sending us all this email? :-)
• This database is only in use for something like 24 hours now. Wonder what it will look like in a year or so…
• Why is Taiwan second in the verified list? We don’t have any customers there. Is it a popular relaying country or do they have intelligent SPAM bots?
• I’m happy to see we seem to be blocking off South Korea mostly.

If anybody else can make more sense out of this data, please let me know. Thank you. :-)

Earlier this week, I was present at a HOT or NOT session, organised by Sioux. This session included a talk by Alan Cox on The Future of Linux.

Philippe, it was definitely worth it! :-)

It was the first time I attended a talk by Alan, and I must say I was greatly surprised. He had a very nice presentation, a clear voice and overall a pretty entertaining way of presenting his material. The content of the presentation was fairly technical and dry, which made it extra hard to present it in the way he did.

One nice thing I’ll remember form his talk is about the discrepancy in computer hardware evolution. Intel and AMD keep on putting more and more cores into their processors. Each time you buy a new computer, your amount of pre-installed RAM has at least doubled. But when speaking about hard disks, we only see the size increase — 40MB to 1GB tot 500GB to even more today — but their speed is still the same! Sure, we went from plain ATA to SATA and PATA (never mind SCSI), but that’s only a performance increase of roughly 20%. This introduces many challenges to software land, as people expect to be able to download stuff at more MB per second as their hard disk can handle. Or data centres are more often than not waiting longer for a 1TB backup to complete than their mean time between backups. Alan says: “Hard disks today are more and more like tapes. Great for linear access, awful for random access”.

Another interesting thought was about the evolution of the GPU back onto the CPU. This puts Intel ahead, and ATI is “safe” too, under the hood of AMD. But what will nVidia do?

I was also happy to hear that he believes Europe is doing a good job in the battle against American Software Patents lobbyists.

Overall, an interesting night. Thank you Sioux.

Look at the following screenshot:

What’s so funny here? First of all, when searching for “Open Source” on Google (google.be, the Belgian version to which I was redirected automatically), the first (sponsored) result is a website from Microsoft. I thought this was quite ironic by itself, but when you think about it a bit more… this means that Microsoft actually must have a Google Adwords account and pay for the “Open Source” keyword!

Isn’t that ironic?

Funny thing is that their link (http://www.Microsoft.be/DefyAllChallenges (mind the upper case characters)) doesn’t work: “We’re sorry, but there is no Microsoft.com Web page that matches your entry. It is possible you typed the address incorrectly, or the page may no longer exist. You may wish to try another entry or choose from the links below, which we hope will help you find what you’re looking for.”

Oh well…