Small Teams Big Impact

In this interview with Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding, two of the co-creators of the Erlang programming language, Duncan McGreggor, Sr. Engineering Manager at Rackspace gets a journey through Erlang’s background, look at its strengths, and ponder the future of computing in a distributed world.

How do you extend the Uber model to not just car rides but to local merchants? By creating ClubLocal, ReachLocal’s new space that makes it easy for anyone to schedule and book a local merchant for their needs all through their phone in less than a minute. Just like Uber, ClubLocal allows you to book a merchant on your phone, see the estimated time of arrival of the merchant, complete the task on hand, and close the transaction back on your phone with payment and ratings.

It’s hard to believe that SXSW Interactive starts this week in Austin. We’re still recovering from last year’s awesomeness.

At Rackspace http://www.rackspace.com we care deeply about where startups and the future is going, especially since so many of the technologies we use will require new kinds of cloud computing technologies.

Do you have a kick-butt startup, but can’t make it out to SXSW Interactive in Austin next month to spread the word? Here’s your chance to do it in a big way – without having to travel.

Data will always be important because it provides many answers to questions of inventory, conversion rates, and profitability. While charting data is not new, Chartio makes it easy for anyone whether you’re technical or not to understand their data in a powerful but lightweight dashboard. As companies become more data driven, it will be even more important to be able collect, analyze, interpret, and deploy the next decision based on the information provided.

The most solid way to understand your users is to understand the data that they can provide on both the web and mobile apps. By being able to measure visitor interaction and engagement, companies can learn what its visitors are doing and what keeps them on their page or app. While tracking how many people have visited your site is one metric, tracking how often or how much the page is revisited or used is even more useful. Suhail Doshi, Co-Founder of Mixpanel, explains hows Mixpanel can empower a content creator with tools to understand their user base by measuring specific metrics and improving upon it both on desktop and mobile platforms.

How do you talk with your Twitter following and not just at them? Nestivity provides the tools to transform your account into a community. For example, your incoming tweets can became an engaging discussion sparking more involvement with your followers.  When people reply or add comments, they’re essentially tweets in which they keep adding to the discussion. With Nestivity’s dashboard, you can ask questions, post ideas and even have a number of moderators to help curate the content with the administrative tools. This will be an invaluable tool for not just for individuals but for brands who want to have a better customer service experience or even start discussions with its products via Twitter.

Marketers can only reach their targeted audience if it is relevant, and AgilONE wants to ensure that by allowing marketers understand the customer by consolidating the customer’s data through various sources to provide a 360 degree view.

Marketers are always working on their next successful campaign and finding ways to increase their chances of reaching to their targeted market. Tellagance seeks to predict how information moves across social networks and see how people interact in context which will give marketers guidance to their next campaign. In order to predict a social phenomenon, Tellagence studies the past and current interaction to enable marketers to increase their brand visibility and ultimately gain better interactions from their campaigns.