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)
Not the sexiest of features, but quite important. We weren’t handling errors generated by user computations properly – and this lead to some annoying debugging by you, our users. We are sorry – we know how frustrating that is! You may now rest assured that if your scripts or commands are generating errors you will now see them.
We asked this question earlier in regards to Matlab in the Cloud; now that we have launched support for R, we’re asking again in the context of R in the cloud. – third result is a neat post detailing running R on EC2 servers. Neat, but as we stated before, we believe that many of you will prefer to get down to computational brass tacks and not futz about with system administration.
Update: Robert Grossman’s original article offers more detail on running R on EC2, and has some interesting discussion as well.
Agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments.
Now that we have actual users (and therefore actual testimonials and actual user stories) we’ve updated our website accordingly, and retired our original “testimonials” (which were obviously self-generated). For posterity, we’re posting the old “testimonials” here:
Best web computation software available!
Of course, I’ve never used any such software, and don’t know what to do with it. But I do know how excited this team is to have built this tool, and I may be a bit biased too.
~Mother of company founder
Ook, ook, uk, ooga
Before Monkey Analytics, I was just another monkey in the cage at the zoo, free (well, not really) and happy. But now they make me perform math computations all day long, and have restricted my diet of bananas to force me to work harder. As a protest I return all my answers as 42.
~Disgruntled monkey
This has been a long time coming
I’ve always wondered why fantastic tools such as Matlab didn’t focus more on the usability aspects of their products. That left a hole wide open for a company such as Monkey Analytics to fill. Of course, Matlab could never replicate their shrink wrap license revenues as a service company, so perhaps it is best that Monkey Analytics is around to provide this service affordably.
~Random engineer
If you have been watching, you know we have been busy! We recently added support for The R Project to our system, we added common Octave packages, and behind the scenes we have also implemented an improved security model. But you may want to know what we’re working on next – ie what is the roadmap (and is your feature request in it?)
Currently, we are working on (1) general improvements*, (2) support for high memory / cpu 64 bit sessions, and (3) support for hardcore subscribers to install packages themselves.
If your feature isn’t here, please let us know – happy to talk about when it will show up.
* If you’re interested in behind the scenes detail – these include better Octave, Python, and R error handling and better figure generation support. A dirty little secret is that we haven’t actually implemented our disk quotas yet, so we need to do that too 
You asked and we listened. Preliminary support for sessions running The R Project code just went live. And sorry, no we do not yet support CRAN installs - see our earlier post on the matter – but we will install whatever packages you request!
Monkey Analytics has achieved the trifecta – running the Matlab M language, Python, and The R Project all in the cloud. Pretty darn cool toolbox if we do say so ourselves!
More to come later , but we wanted to get this early functionality out for you to play with and critique. Enjoy!
At another user’s request, we have installed the Octave-Forge packages. We know many of you would like the ability to install packages yourself, but we don’t have a secure system to allow this yet (sorry – more details in our FAQ here).
In the interim, we will install packages for all users to use as part of our base computing package. If your favorite package isn’t there, let us know and we’ll work to add it.
Keep hitting us up with the feature requests – and we’ll keep coming up with solutions so that you can compute away!
We launched a new feature last night – you can now upload your data files to the system. Have a favorite .wav file you’re crunching on? An image to process? Signed in users will notice a new link in the data section titled “Upload data”. Upload away!
We also have a ‘process’ for larger data sets – contact us and we’ll work to ftp / scp larger data sets directly into your Monkey Analytics user data area. (Longer term plans should automate this, but at the current startup-stage, this solution works).
A few bug fixes too – not worth mentioning details, but we know some of you noticed glitches – we did too – and have worked to improve the product.
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!