Orchestrate all the Things

From a consumer-oriented application, Foursquare has evolved to a data and product provider for enterprises. The next steps in its evolution will be powered by the Foursquare Graph

If the name Foursquare rings a bell, it means you were around in the 2010s. Your only resort to plausible deniability would be if you are a data professional - although that's not an either/or proposition.

In the 2010s, Foursquare was a consumer-oriented mobile application. The premise was simple: people would check in at different locations and get gamified rewards. Their location data would be shared with Foursquare and used for services such as recommendations.

Facebook and Yelp got the lion's share of that market, but Foursquare is still around. In addition to having 9 billion-plus visits monthly from 500 million unique devices, Foursquare's data is used to power the likes of Apple, Uber and Coca-Cola.

Today the company announced Foursquare Graph, what it dubs the industry’s first application of graph technology to geospatial data.

I caught up with Vikram Gundeti, Distinguished Engineer at Foursquare, to learn more about what kind of data Foursquare deals with, what it does with that data, and how using graph is going to help.

Article published on Orchestrate all the Things

On AI-generated content, writing, new, old, and broken media, platforms, models, audiences, and body parts.

An update from the host on launching the Orchestrate All The Things Newsletter, and some insights on Technology, Data, Media, AI, Writing, and Content.

A new type of podcast episode: AI-generated article narrations.

Article published on Orchestrate All The Things.

Is incremental change a bad thing? The answer, as with most things in life, is "it depends". In the world of technology specifically, the balance between innovation and tried and true concepts and solutions seems to have tipped in favor of the former. Or at least, that's the impression reading the headlines gives. Good thing there's more to life than headlines.

The ScyllaDB team is one of those who work with their garage doors up and are not necessarily after making headlines. They believe that incremental change is nothing to shun if it leads to steady progress.

Compared to the release of ScyllaDB 5.0 in ScyllaDB Summit 2022, what ScyllaDB Summit 2023 brought could be labeled “incremental change.” But this is just the tip of the iceberg, as there's more than meets the eye here.

We caught up with ScyllaDB CEO and co-founder Dor Laor to discuss what kept the team busy in 2022, how people are using ScyllaDB, as well as trends and tradeoffs in the world of high performance compute and storage.

Article published on The New Stack

The last couple of years have been an AI model arms race.

The assumption is that the larger the model the better it will perform. But that may not always be the case.

FAR AI Research Scientist Ian McKenzie is a key member of the team organizing the Inverse Scaling Challenge, an initiative set up to investigate scaling laws. We discuss:

• Large Language Models and how they are trained
• The scaling laws and how they are being revised as research and development progresses
• The Inverse Scaling Challenge and its findings

Article published on Orchestrate all the Things.

Can technology, and real-time technology in particular, help companies achieve savings during economic hardship? Alok Pareek thinks it can.

Pareek is the Co-founder and EVP of products of Striim, a vendor whose goal and motto is to "help companies make data useful the instant it’s born".

Depending on which angle you look at it, you could say that Pareek is either biased or in the know. Either way, it was not so long ago that real-time data, or streaming data as this market is also called, was estimated to be worth billions.

But then again, as the recent wave of layoffs and market capitalization losses goes to show, many projections around technology are off the mark.

Could real-time data be different? Where does cloud modernization come into play and how does Striim's offering relate to that? As Striim today announced the availability of its fully managed Striim Cloud service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we connected with Pareek to discuss.

Retail is big business. But like many other sectors it's undergoing a transformation, largely affected by the shift of consumer behavior from physical to digital. Many retailers are looking to analytics and AI to help them cope with the challenges.

Andrew Ng, among the most prominent figures in AI, is now turning his sights to doing precisely that with his new venture Netail

Founded in 2022 as part of Landing AI, Netail, a technology that enables retailers to auto-identify competitors across the internet and track their assortments, availability and optimize prices in real-time, today announced the closing of $5M in seed funding.

We connected with retail veteran Mark Chrystal who is Netail's CEO to discuss the changing landscape in retail and Netail's offering.

Quantum computing could be a disruptive technology. It's founded on exotic-sounding physics and it bears the promise of solving certain classes of problems with unprecedented speed and efficiency. The problem, however, is that to this day there's been too much promise and not enough delivery.

D-Wave is the company that pioneered quantum computing. In this exclusive interview, D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz talks about about quantum computing fundamentals and how this is related to the market’s current state, real-world clients and use cases, and what the future holds for this space.

Article published on VentureBeat

Graph database Neo4j has just released version 5, which promises better ease of use and performance through improvements in its query language and engine, as well as automated scale-out and convergence across deployments.

We caught up with Jim Webber, Chief Scientist at Neo4j, to discuss Neo4j 5 as well as the bigger picture in the graph market.

Article published on VentureBeat

AIOps is what you get when you combine big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination. At least, that's how Gartner defines AIOps.

Based on this definition, as well as coverage of vendors that have products they label with the AIOps moniker, you'd be inclined to think that AIOps is mostly about anomaly detection and remediation. But what about provisioning, configuration, deployment and orchestration?

These are all essential parts of IT operations which have not received as much AIOps attention. They also happen to be at the core of Ansible, Red Hat's open source IT automation tool. 

Now Red Hat is embarking on a new direction for Ansible with Project Wisdom, aiming to take automation to the next level in collaboration with IBM Research.

Red Hat refers to Project Wisdom as the first community project to create an intelligent, natural language processing capability for Ansible and the IT automation industry.

We connected with Red Hat Vice President & General Manager for the Ansible Business Unit Tom Anderson to discuss Project Wisdom's premises, status and trajectory. 

Article published on VentureBeat

Shining light on AI research and applications in a conversation with the curators of the most comprehensive report on all things AI.

If you think AI is moving at a breakneck speed and it's almost impossible to keep up, you are not alone. Even if being on top of all things AI is part of your job, it's getting increasingly hard to do that. Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth know this all too well, yet somehow they manage.

Benaich and Hogarth have solid backgrounds in AI as well as tons of experience and involvement in research, community- and market-driven initiatives. AI is their both their job and their passion and being on top of all things AI comes with the territory.

Nathan Benaich is the General Partner of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in Al-first technology and life science companies. lan Hogarth is a co-founder at Plural, an investment platform for experienced founders to help the most ambitious European startups.

Since 2018 Benaich and Hogarth have been publishing their yearly State of AI report, aiming to summarize and share their knowledge with the world. This ever-growing and evolving work covers all the latest and greatest across industry, research and politics. Over time, new sections are added, with this year featuring AI Safety for the first time.

Traditionally, Benaich and Hogarth have also been venturing on predictions, with remarkable success. Equally traditionally, we have been connecting with them to discuss their findings every year upon release of the report. This year was no exception, so buckle up and let the ride begin.

Article published on VentureBeat.