Flickr Photo by noahwesley

Man it’s cold here in Boston, spending the week at the Demo conference in Palm Desert, CA would have been fun but there’s too much work to do at Lookery for any time in the sun.

Visible Measures (VMC), a company I’m an advisor to, launched their Video Audience Measurement product this week at Demo 08.

The Audience Measurement product works by having video publishers instrument their video players with a VMC measurement plugin, think Google Analytics for Video. VMC’s measurement plugin is then able to collect behavioral data such as how long users watch and how much attention is spent on every video played with thier player.

VMC also allows video publishers to combine third-party data sources such as demographic and geographic overlays with each video’s usage data. Tying in Lookery Demographic data here would be a natural fit and something I need to follow-up with Brian and Rishi on.

You can imagine that capturing every video event (fast-forward, play/pause, forward to a friend, rewind, etc) could lead to a huge scaling problem both from a capture and analysis standpoint. When Brian asked me if I knew anyone in Boston that really understood how to design BIG ASS™ data services I immediately thought of Chris Gillett. Chris G. was my Chief Software Architect at Compete for over 5 years where he designed a lot of our large-scale data processing systems. Chris G. joins a great technical team that includes Chris Paul, John Saitta and Peter Winer.

VMC also announced this week the closing of $13.5 million Series B round led by Mohr David Ventures and General Catalyst.

Sonian Networks, a company that I am an advisor to, is publically launching their Sonian Archive (SA2) product this week.

Sonian is Greg Arnette’s latest creation. I met Greg at a Ruby on Rails workshop back in 2006. Greg had just sold his company Intellireach to Infocrossing and was thinking about his next big idea, specifically how to take advantage of new on-demand infrastructure services to build highly efficient IT services.

Sonian’s first product, Sonian Archive (SA2), is an on-demand message archiving service. Put simply SA2 plugs into your exisiting messaging (email++) infrastructure (MS Exchange, Google Apps, Zimbra, Lotus Notes, etc) and automatically archives all of your organization’s mailboxes offsite.

Now this isn’t simple on-demand email backup software, SA2 scales as your mail volume grows, uses U.S. Defense Department level encryption, provides compliance management tools and doesn’t move any of your data offline, all data is fully searchable at all times.

SA2’s compliance tool allows administrators (with proper permissions) to open a new investigation and search an employees email. All investigations are logged to provide an audit trail everytime anyone’s email is searched or viewed.

I love Sonian’s architecture stack. All but one monitoring machine is hosted on Amazon’s EC2 web service with all permanent storage running on Amazon’s S3 web service (just like us at Lookery). Sonian’s software stack includes Ruby, C++, Nginx (my favorite web server/proxy), MySQL, Lucene and Ruby on Rails. I prefer Python but that is still a tasty stack.

Congratulations Team Sonian!!

Free trial accounts are available this week.

Flickr Photo by clicks_1000

This afternoon Matt Conway and George Grey sent me a note telling me about a cool Rails plugin they developed at Mobicious . Their rails plugin is called Rubber and is similar to the very popular EC2 on Rails project with one very big difference, Rubber is focused on making large multi-instance Rails EC2 deployments simple.

I haven’t had a chance to play with Rubber yet but from reading the docs and source it looks very interesting. If I were still working with Rails I’d be all over it but I haven’t touched Rails since I coded Bzzster! last spring.

These days I spend most of my time using Python and PHP without any frameworks although Web.py and Django continue to tempt me everyday. Now that we’re off of OpenAds maybe I’ll go back to Django since it proved so much fun to work with at Compete although straight PHP is so damn simple to work with and PHP coders are so damn easy to find.

We’ll see if we keep PHP in the stack as I am a Pythonista at heart…