Five Interesting Startups at Strata

Innovation was on display this week at the O’Reilly Strata conference in Santa Clara, as the show hosted its Startup Showcase. There were a lot of innovative ideas on display during the showcase, but hear are the five that we found the most interesting and worth having on our collective radars.

Import IO

Winners of the Startup Showcase at Strata this week, Import IO aims to make it easy for anyone to drink from the big data fire hose that is the Internet. The company hopes to enable virtually anyone to hop in, set up data pulls with rows and columns and start collecting from data sources readily available on the internet. 

Founder and CDO, Andrew Fogg explains the concept here:

In a blog graciously accepting the top honor at the event, they remind people that the technology is still very much in development, and isn’t necessarily “production ready” just yet. 

Sisense

Winner of the “Audience Choice Award” of the Strata Startup Showcase, Sisense is boasting this week that their in-memory, on-chip Prism solution can analyze 10 Terabytes in 10 seconds on a single server node (an “off-the-shelf” Dell PowerEdge R720 Rack Server).  Its compiler runs inside the CPU and inside the machine control unit, and decides in real-time how to best execute queries – either in RAM, disk, or both.

“If you have large data volumes and you don’t have large armies of data scientists, and you don’t want to spend a large budget solving your data problems, this is where you look for us,” said Bruno Aziz of Sisense during the showcase.

The company boasts over 400 customers, including Target, Merck, Yahoo! and others.

Beyond Core

In the famous Sid Meyer game, Civilization, a player can call upon an animated advisor to give them advice on how they should manage their growing empire. Startup, BeyondCore, takes this idea to the enterprise, giving CxOs the ability to get an animated briefing based on their company’s data.

“It’s an animated briefing that feels like somebody is walking you through all the interesting things in your data,” says CEO Arijit Gupta. There are not enough analysts around to do analysis, and thus insights aren’t being acted on, says Gupta. The BeyondCore solution aims at giving bite sized briefings to business execs that tell them the story of their data.

The company claims several Fortune 500 companies have signed up, claiming all manner of CxO looking towards them. “They all have data that they want to analyze, they just can’t get the insights fast enough,” says Gupta.

Splice Machine

“Who wants to write Java Map/Reduce programs or learn some unusual, crippled variant of SQL,” asks startup, Splice Machine, who claims to be the first massively scalable big data database, and believe that the rest of the industry made a mistake in discarding SQL.

“What’s different about us is that we’re a transactional database, where many of the other databases are analytical,” says CEO, Monte Zweben. Fresh off a $4 million dollar funding round, Zweben says that Splice Machine is looking to help those building apps that need to autoshard their big data for real time, interactive apps. 

wise.io

Startup, wise.io say that they want to make their machine learning algorithms available to help companies model user-specific sentiments and access real-time insight.

They claim to have built a speedy learning and prediction algorithm that beats weka, R, and Python sklearn (v0.12) in both speed and memory usage, and have recently begun a beta launch for their Machine Learning as a Service platform.

Related Articles:

SiSense Analyzes 10 Terabytes in 10 Seconds at Strata 

New Ropes for Scaling the SQL Wall