Deliberate Ambiguity

Powerset is glad it served booze

I was disappointed in a recent Wall Street Journal article that included a brief bit about Powerset:

At one point in the conference, women in lab coats began working the crowd, handing out test tubes filled with "power shots" of vodka and cranberry juice. They were touting Powerlabs, an online "community" from a start-up called Powerset Inc. that is creating a new Web-search engine. Powerset says the women worked for a public-relations firm.

Now, I chatted with Becky and, because this paragraph leaves out the very important fact that I myself wore a lab coat for most of the conference and handed out hundreds of test tubes, it looks like we exploited the women from our PR team.  Each of us donned the lab coats voluntarily and I had a great time talking to people as I passed out shots (some at 8:00 a.m. or earlier)

Given the shenanigans and absurdities listed in the article, not to mention some of the companies in the DemoPit TechCrunch40 (e.g. "rmbr is a funware application that combines the best of social multiplayer games and digital photography to maximize fun, stickiness and virtual item revenue" - huh?), I was even more surprised that Sterling Hager decided to single out Powerset as a sign of bad PR.

First of all, not only did Sterling admit to bad blood with SHIFT in his article, but the facts were wrong.  As I noted above, you couldn't tear my lab coat off me.  My only regret is that we didn't have time to put the Powerlabs logo on them!

Now, more importantly, every (smart) company tries to do something memorable to attract people at a conference.  Mint, quite brilliantly and also booze-related, served Mint Mojitos at 4:00 on Monday.  Note that Mint has very clear marketing and even won the event.  Cake Financial served delicious cupcakes.  Also, at the end of the conference, some company gave away 10 iPod Shuffles (as if anyone in the crowd (besides me) doesn't own an iPod or four), another a flat-panel TV, and another a trip for two to Ireland.  All gimmicky -- and by my memory of which company did which, you can see a direct correspondence with originality and me remembering the company name.

Powershots were popular and cost-effective.  For less than $1/shot, I got lab coats, branded test tubes, stoppers, test tube holders, coolers, booze, and mixers.  The shots were greeted with varying degrees of glee, giggles, gusto, and gagging, but I definitely met lots of cool people while handing them out.  I mean, what other piece of swag is still talked about weeks after the event?

I'd say that my idea, hatched on an IM session a little over a week before the event, was a glowing success.  So, Sterling, I think you're just wrong in this case.  And Julie, you look GREAT in that labcoat, but I look even better.

BTW, sorry for the late respond, but I gots me pneumonia from that launch.

Advantages of Kosmix's KFS vs. HDFS

I was excited to learn last week that my friends at Kosmix have decided to open source a project long in the works: the Kosmix Distributed File System, or KFS  (see the offical blog post).  A number of people have commented on this release including Ethan Stock of zVents, who plans to use KFS along with their HyperTable clone of BigTable, and Rich Skrenta, who gives an excellent list of features of KFS.

Now, as a dumb product manager, my biggest questions were about KFS vs. HDFS, which is the distributed file system built by the Hadoop project.  Powerset already makes extensive use of the Hadoop stack, including HDFS.  So, I asked Sriram Rao, the lead engineer of KFS if he could explain to me what the different is between HDFS and KFS.  Here are some of his answers, which I think give more insight into why Kosmix chose to build KFS.

• So why did Kosmix build KFS instead of using HDFS?  Apparently, KFS/HDFS were done in parallel.  The implementation was done from 2006-2007 and now Kosmix feels it's in a releasable state.  One of the reasons to stick with KFS over HDFS is that HDFS is written in Java and Kosmix's back-end is written in C++ and they were worried about the speed of the JNI interface.
• File writing -  HDFS writes to a file once and read many times.  But, when writing to a file, you have to write from the start to the end and that is it.  Conversely, in KFS you can write to a file as many times as you want and write anywhere in the file (i.e., seek and write) and append to an existing file.  I've heard that Yahoo is working to fix this problem in HDFS, but it still isn't implemented.
• Data integrity - Currently, with HDFS, after you write to a file, the data becomes “visible” to other apps only when the application closes the file. So, if the process were to crash before closing, the data written is lost.  With KFS, the data becomes visible when it gets pushed out to the chunkservers.  For performance, clients cache data; when the cache is full or when the applicatiohn choses, data gets flushed out.
• Data rebalancing - KFS has rudimentary support for automatic rebalancing.  When you add new nodes/there is a change in space utilization amongst nodes, the system may migrate chunks from over-utilized nodes to under-utilized nodes.  HDFS doesn’t have such support now.

Hopefully I transcribed these accurately!  Definitely check out the KFS project, as the more people contributing, the better.  Powerset will be evaluating KFS in the coming weeks to see if it has any features that can propel us ahead of using HDFS.

tags technorati : kfs distributedfilesystem kosmix hdfs