I’ve written about photo-tagging startups in the past that attempt to add multimedia to points on images on the web, but Pict, a new company announcing funding on Thursday, has a particular focus on integrating catalog information into a retailer’s photos, and when viewed in Facebook’s timeline the photos will be totally interactive without the consumer having to leave Facebook.

The company went through Angelpad as a company called Dropt in 2012. Dropt let designers create digital lookbooks that could be shared more easily than the traditional paper or PDF versions, but the founders realized there was an even greater opportunity when it comes to digital fashion sales. Fashion designer Steven Alan became one of the company’s first outside investors when it prepared to relaunch as Pict.

As Pict is announcing $1.4 million in funding and opening up its registration more widely this week (although you still have to request an invite.) The company works to let companies from large retailers down to individual Etsy sellers can tag and share photos of their products across the web.

“It’s really similar to tagging photos on Facebook,” CEO Brent Locks explained. “You can snap a photo on your phone, type in the names of products in the phone, and we pull in all of the relevant metadata from your uploaded catalog.”

While there are a good number of startups that allow you to tag images to re-direct back to the seller, Pict is unique in that it just focuses on product details — not adding maps and videos and tweets on top of a photo — and it has a mobile app, which allows sellers to take photos from a smartphone and post to social media on the go.

“It doesn’t require any kind of learning curve,” Locks said. “That’s the key that really differentiates us.”

The company has brought in $1.4 million in funding so far, and while it’s not a huge amount of money in the realm of startups, the company does have notable investors like Kirsten Green’s Forerunner Ventures, a successful e-commerce investor who put money in companies like Birchbox, Hotel Tonight, Threadflip, Wanelo, Warby Parker and others. Other Pict investors include Lowercase Capital, Opus Capital, Angelpad, 500 Startups, Gary Vaynerchuk, Scott Belsky, Steven Alan, Seth Berman, and others.

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Putting small energy data in perspective

Barry Fischer, head writer at the data blog from Opower, the company that crunches data for utility companies servicing almost half of all households in the United States, passed around sample bills that chart consumers’ year-to-year energy use and show how consumers compare with their neighbors. Besides the information for bills, Opower also provides alerts if consumers are on track to get a high energy bill and a Facebook app for consumers to compare their energy use with that of their friends. The data Opower collects — consumption figures from utilities, preferences from users and third-party weather, housing and demographic statistics — also enable Fischer and other company bloggers to present simple and consumer-friendly correlations, such as the fact that Yahoo Mail users typically pay $110 more per year in energy bills than those who use Google Mail. Taken together, Opower’s uses of data show how millions of people can benefit from contributing their own individual data.

In January, GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher named Opower one of her 13 energy data startups to watch in 2013.

Etsy bakes a Funnel Cake

In another session, three data engineers from Etsy revealed how they use Hadoop to detect issues with various functions on the website, and they talked about building a program other employees use to optimize the parts of the site that generate the most revenue. At Etsy, already a big Hadoop user — at one point, engineers ran 5,000 Hadoop jobs for a variety of purposes in a single month — a popular term is the attribution funnel, or the process customers take as they buy products on the site. The data engineers wanted other employees to be able to identify the steps where customers get caught up before purchasing, such as email address verification to establish new accounts. So they built a program called Funnel Cake, which scales better and deliver real-time information faster than Hadoop, said engineer Wil Stuckey. Running Funnel Cake, employees can streamline the process and increase the percentage of site visitors who end up buying products. Beyond that, they can see which kinds of pages lead to the most sales and focus more or less attention on browsing and searching functions or storefronts from product makers.

Vending machines, advertisements and babies

Other use cases on display at the conference spanned from vending machines to babies. One company has installed sensors on its vending machines and now monitors the resulting data in real time to spot theft and cut down on purchasing new machines to replace stolen ones. An internet advertising company now uses highly scalable software based on Hadoop MapReduce, Apache Nutch and Apache Solr to detect traffic sources for advertisements, bringing new revenue. And a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit has implemented a visualization tool for real-time health statistics that shows signs of “baby crashing” and thereby can reduce mortality rates.

Executives from Aetna, Williams-Sonoma, Facebook and other companies will discuss big data use cases at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference in New York on March 20-21.

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The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular web sites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready — not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment or some variation on that theme and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. So while it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.

There’s no good time for downtime in an always-on world

The rationale for doing these sorts of continuous deployments vary, but most fall into four categories. The first is that there really is no good time for downtime anymore, but if you break it, wouldn’t you rather have happy and awake staff on the clock ready to fix it? Jesse Robbins, the chief community officer of Opscode points out that even good times for downtime can vary across customers.

“One of Opscode’s earliest customers is a popular dating website, and their peak traffic is on Friday night when people are exchanging phone numbers to go on dates… the exact opposite of peak time for a CRM,” says Robbins.

Plus, as Robert Treat, COO of OmniTI, a consulting firm that helps web sites scale out their business points out, sometimes deploying at off hours means little because the site won’t actually break until it experiences peak loads. For many of these sites using continuous code deployments scaling its users is what caused the need for new code in the first place. Until the site experiences that load they don’t know if the fixes worked or not.

Just in time code-deployment

The second category is economic. When you wait to deploy your code in these massive quarterly installs, you’re deciding to avoid the efficiencies that the new code could bring to the site today. This thinking is more common to companies who view their web operations as a fundamental cost of doing business as opposed to some sort of cost center that keeps email up and running.

“Code that has been written but not yet deployed is very similar to inventory,” says Mark Imbriaco of Github. “You’ve paid the cost to develop the software, but are not yet getting any of the benefit from it. Shipping that code to production sooner means that you and your customers can benefit from it much faster. This is a pretty serious competitive advantage for companies that deliver features faster than their competitors.”

Routine code deployments makes for happy developers

Thinking of code deployment as a Big Fat Hairy Deal adds layers of stress and process to getting it into production, but if it’s a routine part of the job, developers can try things out and deploy code and move on with their lives. This reduces stress around the deployment, but it also frees their minds up for new problems and jobs, notes Johns Allspaw of Etsy. Plus he says, “Fast and frequent feedback is what allows for developers to be productive. Developers hate being bored.”

Punishing your site makes it stronger

(L to R) Alexei Rodriguez – VP of Operations, Evernote Corporation; Adrian Cockcroft – Director, Architecture, Netflix ; Aditya Agarwal – VP Engineering, Dropbox
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

The third school of thought is popularized by Netflix and is basically an invitation to break things because a system that is so fragile that one code upgrade brings it down, clearly isn’t resilient enough. In many ways Netflix takes the idea of building out an architecture that’s dependent on a genius IT professional and his version of delicate pieces and crazy glue and flips it on its head. Instead of a fragile model car Netflix is building the Tonka trucks of IT –ready to take a few glitches and keeping on serving up videos.

“Systems that contain and absorb many small failures without breaking and get more resilient over time are “antifragile” as described in [Nassim] Taleb’s latest book,” explains Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix. “We run chaos monkeys and actively try to break our systems regularly so we find the weak spots. Most of the time our end users don’t notice the breakage we induce, and as a result we tend to survive large-scale outages better than more fragile services.”

That’s the rationale behind those software updates that might cause a momentary web service outage or two. As the devops movement spreads, more businesses will likely find reasons to move toward continuous code deployment. Plus, as Allspaw of Etsy points out, the tools to test code and instantly monitor the effects of new deployments are getting better and faster. That means if you accidentally break a site, the dev teams notices it faster and fixes it. So maybe there are more outages, but they shouldn’t last as long.

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Speaking at a Q&A in New York this week, editor-in-chief Alison Feldmann explained that the main goal of the blog is not to attract new customers but instead to boost engagement with Etsy’s existing fans. It appears to be working. Feldmann said many blogs posts attract more than 100 comments, nearly all of them friendly and positive (if only it were the same for those who write in the tech trenches).

The Etsy blog posts themselves, which offer pretty pictures and tales from artisans (not to be confused with Regretsy), do indeed drive sales but it’s hard to say how many. Feldmann says Etsy has only anecdotal evidence at the moment will soon use data to quantify the relationship between the store and the blog. But even without data, it’s fair to say Etsy has created a virtuous loop between content and buying — one that will hold up on mobile devices, which Feldmann says account for one fifth of sales.

Etsy’s success with content, and that of other retail sites like Birchbox and Thrillist, may tempt more retailers to hire editors of their own. For those who do, Feldmann has some advice.

“Identify what the brand stands for and build out that tone,” she said. “No one wants to read too much about [your brand] … The goal is to take it to a more human level.”

Unfortunately, it may not be that easy. Craft sites like Etsy may be outliers because they offer myriad unique products, most of which come with a personal story that the buyer wants to hear about. Most merchants aren’t in the same position since they offer more commoditized, corporate-produced goods. Event host Erin Griffith of Pando Daily warned that using content can even backfire for some brands — leading them to end up on the Condescending Corporate Brand Page.

Feldmann spoke at Content Conversations, an ongoing series hosted by content discovery platform, Outbrain.

(Image by Karen Nicol via Etsy)

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Click to enlarge the graphic

Vimeo, the New York-based video hosting site that benefited from the growing maker and creator movements, is launching new ways for video makers to make money. The first tool is called  Tip Jar, and it allows viewers to contribute money and support creators of video, who then get 85 percent of the amount donated. It can be activated by members of Vimeo Plus and Vimeo Pro, Vimeo’s paid services. (I wrote about Vimeo’s resurgence yesterday.)

Vimeo is also planning to launch a new pay-to-view service that will let content creators put their work behind a paywall. A beta version will launch with limited set of feature films, and it will be made available to Vimeo Pro subscribers in early 2013. This is a smart move for the company, which has recently broken into the top 10 of web video destinations. It is a good way for the company to keep attracting independent video content creators.

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And under the covers at Etsy is a lot of Supermicro gear. According to blog post author Laurie Denness, a single class of Supermicro 2U, 4-node chassis powers powers a high number of workloads including memcached and web serving. Like many large web companies, including eBay, Etsy tries to stick with a limited hardware stack that’s versatile enough to handle multiple workloads.

With that in mind, Denness wrote, “A general configuration for these would be 2x 8 core Intel E5620 CPUs (@ 2.40ghz), 12GB-96GB of RAM, and either a 600GB 7200pm hard disk or an Intel 160GB SSD.”

He also notes the lack of RAID in this sytem, which could have a negative effect on redundancy. However, because Etsy uses Chef, and another tool called Cobbler, to quickly rebuild failed nodes, Etsy doesn’t think wasting power on RAID is necessary: “In our view, why power two drives when our datacenter staff can replace the drive and rebuild the machine and have it back in production in under 20 minutes?”

Etsy beefs up this same general-purpose chassis for its search engine, replacing the 8-core processors with 16-core Sandy Bridge processors and adding a boatload of solid-state storage:

[This setup] gives us machines that can handle over 4 times the workload of the generic nodes above, whilst using the same density configuration and not that much more power. … The nodes have 96GB of RAM and a single 800GB SSD for the indexes. This follows the same pattern of not bothering with RAID; The SSD is perfectly fast enough on it’s own, and we have BitTorrent index distribution which means getting the indexes to the machine is super fast.

Etsy’s Hadoop nodes

Supermicro is the name of the game for Hadoop and backup at Etsy as well. Although the post doesn’t disclose how big Etsy’s Hadoop cluster is, Denness notes that the company crams 96 cores, 384GB RAM and 24TB per 2U of rack space. For backup, it’s a 4U Supermicro box packing 36 2TB hard drives that deliver “a blistering 1.2 gigabytes/second sequential write throughput and a total of 60TB of usable disk space across two RAID6 volumes.”

HP also gets a little love at Etsy, powering both its MySQL database and a handful of special jobs, such as its Hadoop NameNodes “that don’t need much horsepower, but we deem important enough to have RAID,” Denness wrote.

Etsy’s hardware choices aren’t earth-shattering news by any means, but this type of openness is critical as a great number of businesses make their home on the web. Speaking openly about this stuff (hint, hint, Twitter) helps give other companies ideas about how to improve their systems, while also providing the opportunity to learn from suggestions from others (a la profiting from code contribution in open source software). It also helps advance the idea of a crowdsourced model for performance benchmarking, where everyone can see setups and performance data from in-the-wild systems that haven’t been tuned to the nth degree by vendors.

In a webscale world where software reins supreme, a floating hardware tide floats all boats.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user MilousSK.

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Cascading is an open source Java framework that acts as an intermediary between users and Hadoop. Users create data workflows using Cascading’s Java-compatible APIs (rather than writing Hadoop MapReduce jobs), and it handles the task of making Hadoop process the data. Cascading is backed by a commercial entity called Concurrent (see disclosure), which is headed up by creator Chris Wensel, and is the foundation of several variations including Cascalog (a Clojure-based query language for Hadoop) and Scalding (Twitter’s Scala API for Hadoop).

Elastic MapReduce is AWS’s on-demand service that gives users access to cloud computing resources, rather than a collection of physical servers, for running Hadoop workloads. Writing MapReduce jobs is both difficult and limiting in terms of functionality, and Hadoop cluster management is notoriously difficult, so it’s no surprise that Cascading and Elastic MapReduce are an appealing combination.

They’re hardly the only options for simplifying the Hadoop process, though. Infochimps, for example, offers a service that features tools for automating configuration and creating dataflows using Ruby. Mortar Data has created a managed service that runs atop AWS and lets users process data using Python scripts. And, of course, there are numerous Elastic MapReduce competitors on the market, including offerings from Microsoft, IBM and Sungard.

To read more about how Etsy and the Climate Corporation are using Hadoop, check these posts on Etsy’s Hadoop-powered recommendation engine and Climate Corp.’s 5,000-core weather simulations.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user JTP.

Disclosure: Concurrent is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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In an interview with tech site Geekwire, Myhrvold said, “I think we do a whole lot more good for the world than GigaOm does. How big is their malaria research project? How much effort do they put into polio?”

He goes on to suggest that companies, and Silicon Valley in particular, spend too much effort on making new gadgets for people who don’t need really them. We should focus instead, he says, on developing technology for the world’s poor and points to Intellectual Venture’s “laser device that shoots mosquitos out of the sky.”

What to make of all this? Well, the sentiment is certainly a noble one. The problem, though, is that Myhrvold is utterly unfit to espouse it. As we’ve stated before, no amount of philanthropy can undo the incredible ruin his company has unleashed on innovation through unfettered patent trolling. Lest you doubt, consider the following:

New research shows that Intellectual Ventures is tied to at least 1,300 shell companies whose sole purpose is to coerce real companies into buying patent license that they don’t want or need. Those who resist the “patent trolls” are dragged into nightmarish lawsuits.

Think about what this means in practice. It means thousands of entrepreneurs must divert revenue from development and technology to pay Mr. Myhrvold’s licensing tax or else brace for millions in legal fees. Worse, patent trolls are targeting some of the most promising young start-ups in the country like hand-craft site Etsy. Now, instead of hiring workers and bolstering the economy, Etsy and others must put aside money to pay the likes of Mr. Myhrvold instead.

And for what? Intellectual Ventures styles itself as a hotbed of inventive wizardry but precious few devices have come out of its lab and into the world. (Just when is that mosquito-zapping marvel going into production by the way?) The most tangible thing Mr. Myhrvold has done to date is to offer a new way to cook a hamburger. And even though it has siphoned billions from productive companies, Intellectual Ventures has even proved a rotten deal for its own reluctant investors.

To be clear, GigaOM commends Intellectual Ventures for any efforts it undertakes to fight malaria and polio. Our complaint is instead with its decision to game the country’s dysfunctional patent system. The company’s lawsuits are smothering technology development of all sorts (not just gadgets) and until Intellectual Ventures calls a halt to this, its “VP of Global Good” is no more than the feel-good face of a parasitic empire.

(Image by Henrik Larrson via Shutterstock)

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