Fogbeam Labs The FogBlog

Dear Friends of Fogbeam Labs:

It's been a while since I had a chance to reach our to all of you with the latest news, and I wanted to take a quick moment and let you all know how things are going.

Since last we spoke, things have been very dynamic and exciting here. We have had a new co-founder join the team, we've made tremendous strides one one of our products from a development standpoint, we've added a new project and some exciting new capabilities to our portfolio, we've had one of our projects used as part of a research project by researchers from The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, and we are continuing to iterate through the Customer Development process.

First things first, I'd like to introduce our newest co-founder, Robert Fischer. (No, not the character from Inception!) Robert is a supremely skilled developer with tons of experience using Groovy and Grails (our chosen development environment) and has a strong AI / mathematics background. Robert also (literally) wrote the book[1] on persistence in Grails.

Needless to say, Robert's choosing to join us boosts our capacity tremendously, and he brings another great perspective and set of ideas to the team.

In other news, we have been hyper-focused on building out Quoddy, the enterprise social networking component of our suite. For those of you who don't know, Quoddy could be considered something like a "Facebook for the enterprise," but it's better. Much better. And it's also better than software from competitors like Yammer (now Microsoft) and Jive Software, as our vision is to deeply integrate the social aspect into actual business value creating activities... not to provide a superficially useful addition/replacement for email.

That brings me to one of our more exciting announcements. To support what we are referring to as "Business Event Subscriptions", we've created project Hatteras. Hatteras work with Quoddy and enables users to subscribe directly to relevant business events from their organization's ESB/SOA infrastructure. As we move forward with adding elements of machine learning and complex event processing to do event correlation and automatically link context to events, this becomes an amazingly powerful set of capabilities for organizations that are embracing the Digital Nervous System or "Zero Latency Enterprise" mindset.

Regarding the research at The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, one of their researchers contacted us some months ago, and asked if they could use Quoddy as one case study for a research project on scaling geographically distributed systems. We said "yes," and were happy to learn just this week that their research was fruitful, and that a paper which mentions Quoddy will be presented at the USENIX OSDI (Operating Systems Design & Implementation) conference in October of this year.

And, finally, I have been in Chicago for the past few months, consulting by day in order to pay the bills... and while I've been here, I've been beating the streets, networking, making new connections, friending people, and working to expand the circle of people that are part of our Customer Development process to include some representatives from Chicago area firms. That process is going well, and will help us gain some additional validated learning, from a new set of customers.

Thanks for reading this far, and feel free to ping us with any questions, comments, feedback or flames.

For myself, Sarah and Robert, until next time:

Cheers,

Phillip R.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Grails-Persistence-GORM-Robert-Fischer/dp/1430219262