Four short links: 25 June 2010

More NoSQL, Data Medicine, Startups to Government, and Cake-and-eat-it Open Source

  1. Membasean open-source (Apache 2.0 license) distributed, key-value database management system optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. These applications must service many concurrent users; creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data in real-time. Supporting these requirements, membase processes data operations with quasi-deterministic low latency and high sustained throughput. (via Hacker News)
  2. Sergey’s Search (Wired) — Sergey Brin, one of the Google founders, learned he had a gene allele that gave him much higher odds of getting Parkinson’s. His response has been to help medical research, both with money and through 23andme. Langston decided to see whether the 23andMe Research Initiative might be able to shed some insight on the correlation, so he rang up 23andMe’s Eriksson, and asked him to run a search. In a few minutes, Eriksson was able to identify 350 people who had the mutation responsible for Gaucher’s. A few clicks more and he was able to calculate that they were five times more likely to have Parkinson’s disease, a result practically identical to the NEJM study. All told, it took about 20 minutes. “It would’ve taken years to learn that in traditional epidemiology,” Langston says. “Even though we’re in the Wright brothers early days with this stuff, to get a result so strongly and so quickly is remarkable.”
  3. Startup.gov (YouTube) — Anil Dash talk at Personal Democracy Forum on applying insights from startups to government. I hope the more people say this, the greater the odds it’ll be acted on.
  4. Open Core Software — Marten Mickos (ex-MySQL) talks up “open core” (open source base, proprietary extensions) as a way to resolve the conflict of “change the world with open source” and “make money”. Brian Aker disagrees: There has been no successful launch of an open core company that has reached any significant size, especially of the size that Marten hints at in the article. My take: there are three reasons for open source (freedoms, price, and development scale) and if you close the source to part of your product then the whole product loses those benefits. If you open source enough that the open source bit has massive momentum, then you probably don’t have enough left proprietary to gain huge financial benefit.
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