Monkey Analytics Blog » Startup stories

More fun monkey graphics

Francesca — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:21:00 +0000

Everyone loves monkeys, right? That’s the theory at any rate. And we think they’re even more lovable when they are acting geeky. Without further ado – here are some new graphics we created for our User stories page:

You know the kind - two monitors aren't enough for the kind of analysis these monkeys do

These monkeys won't stop until they've pounded learnin' into your brain. (Bring bananas, not apples to class)

MathWorks has to compete with Free. Can they?

Francesca — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:39:22 +0000

We were reading Jinesh’s parallel computing with Matlab post at the Amazon Web Services Blog and some of the user comments got us thinking about Chris Anderson’s book Free. Justin and Eric both commented that the concept is cool (parallel Matlab instances on EC2) but quite pricey given MathWork’s per-CPU business model. This is true – Amazon’s cloud opens doors, but old school business models are trying to keep them shut. (Here’s a hint – if you need to login or contact a sales rep for software pricing, you are old school and friction-ful, and new school friction free business models will leave you behind).

Monkey Analytics is based on open source software (ie, free) and so we can offer our subscribers inexpensive scaling for their Matlab, Python, and R computational needs. Each additional CPU is not an additional pricey MathWorks license, it is just another incremental CPU hour for the subscriber.

Our value add is not in the licenses themselves (those open source software projects all exist in their own right) but in the way that we package these systems for our users and subscribers to enjoy. MathWorks has to do everything and charge for it – their 2007 revenue was $400M. We plan to be a “$0 billion dollar business” – imploding these license fees as we make computational analysis far more affordable to more people. Stay tuned to see how we do!

Update: the article notes that a MathWorks representative is willing to discuss use cases with people who wish to do something like this. At least they’re thinking about it, but the core point remains – they are still competing in a world of free. (And on this note – we would happily resell Matlab as a Monkey Analytics engine if the pricing was usage based and reasonable).

What do you want? More RAM, and R support.

Francesca — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:44:56 +0000

We’ve had great feedback from early visitors and users regarding the site. We love that you all *get* it immediately – it seems as if you’ve been waiting for a service such as this.

It is also clear that there are 2 big feature requests – (1) support for large-memory computations, and (2) support for the R language.

Given that we are running our computations on Amazon machines, it is somewhat trivial to offer high memory / CPU instances (on 64 bit machines), though we’ll have to figure out the subscription / price implications of this. No worries – we’ll sort this out and add the functionality shortly – stay tuned!

As far as R support goes, honestly none of us have used it before, but that’s never stopped us . It will come in the near term as well provided we don’t hit any show stoppers with our overall architecture.

It is far more rewarding to build features users have explicitly requested than it is to labor away in secret while you build the v1 functionality you need for a launch. We love being launched, and we love all your enthusiasm for the company. Keep talking to us, and we’ll keep improving!

Our very first product review!

Francesca — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:13:38 +0000

Hans Gilde just posted a review of our service, in case you’re wondering what other people think. We particularly liked his representation of our grander vision:

This is a really creative idea – the interactive session is very nice, much better than running a remote script. Plus the session persists over time, so you can use it from multiple computers (home, work, the web terminal at your boring vacation resort)

We also identify with his noted deficiencies – particularly the (currently basic) script editor. We have big plans across the board, we are proud of our v1 effort but know that we need to continually improve.

Thanks for noticing us Hans!

Back on track (and feature creep)

Francesca — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:22:01 +0000

I’ve got this 2nd child thing approximately figured out, and back to very productive coding in the mornings and evenings while my husband watches the kids. So where are does Monkey Analytics stand?

The core functionality and user interfaces are complete – so exciting! We’re ready to start sharing what we’re up to: the basic plan is to deliver Matlab compatible computation environment with a much nicer interface that takes advantage of cloud computing opportunities. And it’s almost ready to go! (We just need some marketing pages pulled together, and PayPal payment integration).

However I think I’m forcing some feature creep on myself – as I read around the web, I am starting to get concerned that Matlab, while still present, is ceding territory to Python (SciPy and Matplotlib – great add-ons) and other truly open alternatives. These would still benefit from the concept of Monkey Analytics, but I think at this point I don’t want to launch until I’ve integrated an additional ‘engine’.

/me goes off to build some more. Stay tuned

The cloud delivers for startups

Francesca — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:04:40 +0000

The title says it all – we are running this business entirely out of the cloud. It is incredible to see how capable the cloud has become over the past few years – my husband’s startup in 2006 didn’t have the options we have today – Google Sites, Presently, and a much better Spreadsheet product. Amazon’s S3 had just launched then, but not yet EC2, and certainly not Google’s competing offering. Wordpress was around but is much better now, and Disqus adds a much-needed commenting/forums power-up. We are able to scale slowly and efficiently on a variable cost (or zero cost) basis due to these incredible systems.

Beyond the cost side of the equation, the ability to easily collaborate with our distributed team is incredible – our private Google Site contains all planning, documentation, and business information related to MonkeyAnalytics. James can see at a glance what I’ve recently changed; all of our documents are searchable by any member of the team.

It’s fun to be part of this new world, even more fun to know we’re building and contributing to it in our own way. We can’t wait to see how our cloud offering changes its market and business behaviors.

Startups and legal documents

Francesca — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:11:23 +0000

Terms of service, privacy policies, and bears, oh my! For a bootstrapping startup such as ourselves, these can be scary. We can’t yet afford a lawyer, so how do we navigate these very important issues? Our approach has been simple – look to the leaders of the pack! Google, Yahoo, and others are way ahead of us on thinking through these issues. So we have based our policies on theirs, and built our research on top of what we’ve learned from reading and understanding their policies.

What this means to you, our users, is that our policies are modeled on best practices in the industry. We have also erred on your side in areas we weren’t certain we agreed with the leaders (for instance, we want you to know quite clearly that you own your data, and we merely hold a license to display it to you, and anyone you choose to share it with).