Four short links: 4 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

Data, climate change, and location:

1. Details on Yahoo's Distributed Database (Greg Linden) -- summary of Yahoo!'s PNUTS, "a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Yahoo!'s web applications." Greg keeps up with the papers from the search engine companies, and the insights he offers are great. For example, "Second, as figures 3 and 4 show, the average latency of requests to their database seems quite high, roughly 100 ms. This is high enough that web applications probably would incur too much total latency if they made a few requests serially (e.g. ask for some data, then, depending on what the data looks like, ask for some other data). That seems like a problem.".
2. Google Latitude -- app and service for mobile phones (G1, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian) and desktops, where your location is tracked and displayed on a map which you can share with your friends. Interesting use of the map to get some Dodgeball-like functionality, but without programmatic access it's less functional than FireEagle. I'm still not sure I really understand the use cases for this, and assume that over time it will evolve into something more practical.
3. Without Hot Air -- the full text of an excellent book on global warming is available. Well written and well thought. I look forward to the inevitable flood of foot-stamping carbon polluters harrumphing about flawed science and the inevitable final triumph of the flat earth geocentric cosmology.
4. Is Big Data at a Tipping Point? -- Tim pointed me to this a while ago, but I don't think he's blogged about it. Thesis is that as more and more open data gets out there, it'll eventually be cross-related into something big and useful. The author asks how close we are to that. If the premise is true (and I'm not sure I buy the phase change metaphor), I think we're definitely not going to be saying within 12 months "remember when we didn't have enough useful plentiful accurate mashable data? thank goodness those days are past!".

O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Invests in Amee

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 6

I'm pleased to announce that on Wednesday, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, our VC affiliate, closed an investment in UK-based Amee, which bills itself as "the world's energy meter." Here's their description of what they do:

AMEE’s aim is to map, measure and track all the energy data on Earth. This includes aggregating every emission factor and methodology related to CO2 and Energy Assessments (individuals, businesses, buildings, products, supply chains, countries, etc.), and all the consumption data (fuel, water, waste, quantitative and qualitative factors).

It is a web-service (API) that combines measurement, calculation, profiling and transactional systems. Its algorithmic engine applies conversion factors from energy into CO2 emissions, and represents data from 150 countries.

AMEE aids the development of businesses and other initiatives - by providing common benchmarks for measurement, tracking, conversion, collaboration and reporting.

If you've been following my talks in which I urge software developers and entrepreneurs to "work on stuff that matters," you know that I consider getting a handle on carbon accounting is the first step in putting a stop to global warming. (If you're a warming skeptic, I consider global warming as a modern example of Pascal's wager: if we're wrong, and global warming is not human caused, the steps we'll take to address it are still worthwhile. We get off foreign oil, improve our energy security, build new industries, improve the environment.)

Even apart from the contribution to a critical world issue, Amee is interesting because it shows that the future of web services will involve a much broader range of data services than most people imagine. I've long argued that the subsystems of the emerging internet operating system are data subsystems. Some of those, like location and identity, are obvious, and thus hotly contested. Others, like carbon data, are sorely needed, and not yet built out. There's huge opportunity in finding and populating key databases, and then turning them into ubiquitous web services.

By the way, if you use dopplr, you've already seen Amee at work: it provides the data for dopplr's carbon calculator tab.

Union Square Ventures is also an investor in this round. Partner Albert Wenger gives his take on the investment on their blog.