Tag: presentations

Stream Processing

The 2nd new market to consider is stream processing. On Wall Street everyone is doing electronic trading. A feed comes out of the wall and you run it through a workflow to normalize the symbols, clean up the data, discard the outliers, and then compute some sort of secret sauce. An example of the secret sauce would be to compute the momentum of Oracle over the last 5 ticks and compare it with the momentum of IBM over the same time period. Depending on the size of the difference, you want to arbitrage in one direction or the other. This is a fire hose of data. Volumes are going through the roof. It’s business analytics of the same sort we see in databases. You need to compute them over time windows, however, in small numbers of milliseconds. So, again, a specialized architecture can just clobber the relational elephants in this market. I also believe the same statement can be made, believe it or not, about OLTP (online transaction processing). I’m working on a specialized engine for business data process- ing that I think will be about 30x than the elephants on the TPC-C benchmark.

Joi Ito on World of Warcraft

Back in the early days of MMORPGs, you met people online who you would play with and they were your friends, but it was cyberspace and real life. Sometimes you had crossovers, but generally you didn’t run into people walking down the street who also played. The difference is with almost 9M players (although 6M are in China) you can now go to a dinner in Silicon Valley or in Berlin and you’ll often find somebody else who plays World of Warcraft. Families play. If you look at the statistics, a huge number of people play who are real-life friends, which is a different than it used to be. So I think that World of Warcraft is similar to what we’ve have been working on for a long time, but it’s a big jump and it’s growing very, very fast. And I think it’s going to grow faster.