Do you know of other companies that fit the description?
Follow up: Are they (you?) hiring?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/silicon-valleys-youth-problem.html
"For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken.
I am not going to name any specific startup, but I would like to ask the readers of Slashdot a question.
I know this is not how the world works, but I am still curious to know what kind of ideas would prosper if the primary aim of a startup was not to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. So, if your startup idea would be judged by the amount of good it would to mankind, what would it be?"
Since when did this become some sort of measure of the worth of a tech company?
Sounds like misguided hippy shit to me.
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't set out to change the world and "do something incredibly important for mankind", despite what the message might have become in later years. They all set out to do things they were interested in, pursuing technology for its own sake, as most people were back in the 1970's.
These days startups seem to need to feel that to justify their existence they need to be "changing the world" or "doing something important for mankind" or "giving back to the community". There's no need to justify the existence of a business. Do it for the cash, do it for fun, do it to scratch your sense of ambition, do it because you think it's a good idea, even if some pompous git stands on a high horse and looks to the sky and proclaims "this business is not changing mankind for the better, I am dismayed at the trivial nature of this endeavour, I deem it of little value".
But that doesn't need to be a bad thing. Paying lip service to "real" progress, especially when it concerns poverty/environment/democracy etc, may actually lead to actual progress down the road.
Too many companies making incremental BS apps or IT pipeline tech that delivers cat pictures 0.1 ms faster. And both groups ("we're bringing Utopia to Earth", "we'd mug you for cash") are still doin it cause it looks like it makes money, or people advise them they need to say these things to make money, or it'll get chicks / dudes, whatever - no matter what they say out loud. "Silicon Valley" is pretty spot on in that regard.
It's just a pendelum swing. In a little while we'll be back to "greed is good" while we help people 'connect' with high school friends they never actually liked.
I don't give a shit about how world-changing a business is, but I do care that companies should be driven for more than just making money. Most companies aim to be profitable, but if that's the only goal then they're primed for corruption (even on a minor scale). Who cares so long as profits keep growing, dog eat dog, right?
There's a difference between 'Can I do something?' and 'Should I do something?', I see no harm in wanting companies that consider the latter.
Any Musk startup - Tesla (electric vs. oil consumption), SpaceX (building space "colonies"), SolarCity (alternate energy), Paypal (payments).
You also have Uber (limiting cars on the street & oil consumption), AirBnb (better utilization of current buildings rather than building additional hotels). Even stuff like meerkat, etc could potentially be used in lieu of expensive meetings across country (further travel & ancillary costs).
I do agree that "change the world" is an overprevalent mission statement & too broad to be useful, but many are solving problems in a way that might not be obvious at first.
of which I am not affiliated with nor won't endorse here in any way. Sadly, in Germany at least, startups that aim for maximum positive impact and less so profit, are called 'social startups' which outside of Germany probably has a completely different connotation.
The news websites I usually frequent, are not very full of news; they are rather SV & VC company theory megaphones. Avoiding those websites sometimes leads one to people with a bit different entrepreneurial mindset.
This having said, would you work for such a company? And which compromises would you accept (on the ethics-, but also wage-scale)?
Ethics, that is harder. I guess if you look hard enough you can find problems with anything, but that's probably just the way the world is. If it does more good than harm, it's ok in my book.
There are countless startups which were perceived as having little value only to be praised and hugely successful years later, yet nothing changed– only people's perceptions.
I guess my point is that before asking a question like that, we would have to define what you constitute as "doing anything of real value to mankind". And who's to say your definition of value is the right one anyway?
- cure for cancer
- cure for malaria
- cure for aging
- cheap fossil fuel extraction from low-quality deposits
- safer nuclear fission
- nuclear fusion
- lower-cost space travel
- space elevator
- space colonisation
- intelligence augmentation
- safe artificial intelligence
- desktop nanofactories
- nano-machines
Databases:
- PipelineDB
- Snowflake (Computing)
Internet of Things / Communications:
- Helium
Robotics:
- Pneubotics
- Kuka, namely the research department
Autonomous Systems / "Self Driving Car" et al.:
- Kiva
- Anki
Computer-Vision / VR based:
- Jaunt
- Oculus VR (especially the 'research' department)
Agriculture:
- Blueriver http://www.bluerivert.com
(there are many more super-interesting companies in this area!)
Computing:
- Mill Computing; though quite dubious
- D-Wave
and than there is Microsoft Research working on super interesting stuff in programming languages, computer architecture (FPGAs).
Additionally, I believe really challenging problems will alwyas be coming from creative people, companies in that area; such as Pixar, architecture, and design (keywords, just to give a start: generative {design, art, ...}).
Hope this helps!
- Trimble
- Granular
- Farm Logs
- The Climate Corporation
We are hiring for a variety of positions you can check out here: http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=JobL...
If you (or anyone) is interested in a role on the remote sensing team (satellite/drone suff) or the Climatology team, you can reach out to me directly at skhalsa@climate.com
Palantir — and specifically its CEO — immediately disclaimed involvement or interest in both that plan, or anything of its general type.
How do you justify to yourself slandering a company by claiming nearly the exact opposite of what happened?
How would network protocols on mobile work if they were being designed from scratch today?
And that's what we've done. Results so far are pretty amazing (yes, we're out in production with private beta customers).
And oh... sorry but we're not hiring right now. We have a small, tight-knit team and we plan to hire very slowly with only the exact right fit of people.
In-protocol multiplexing must be pretty high up the list of necessary features, but how about transparent multi-network roaming? Not just over mobile operator networks, I'm talking about hopping between different transports.
In-protocol multiplexing must be pretty high up the list of necessary features
Yes :-)
but how about transparent multi-network roaming
Yes :-)
I'm talking about hopping between different transports.
Yes :-)
(I was thinking of writing a much more detailed answer to above, but it's so detailed that it would be far better as a blog post... I'll post the link here for a more inclusive discussion soon)
Now going back to your first question:
"what do you answer when the obvious comparison to (and lack of industry adoption of) SCTP is put forward?"
Oh... where to start.. OK. First off the comparison is not all that obvious. SCTP was never built for the mobile use case (4 way handshake??). There are some improvements over TCP (reliable, out-of-order message based delivery with multihoming are all good things), but there's a fatal flaw that prevents any serious use of this protocol. It's not TCP or UDP!! And there are umpteen middle-boxes on the internet who won't let it through. That's all you need to know to explain the lack of industry adoption of SCTP.
So we built our protocol on top of UDP (which we basically treat as a proxy for raw IP). Luckily for the mobile users, UDP based custom protocols are now well baked into various standard applications (DNS, VOIP etc.). A vast majority of middleboxes support it and the trend is in the right direction -- every new middle box has to support UDP passthrough/NAT by default barring exceptional circumstances.
Now, how do we expect our new protocol to get adoption. The answer is, we don't. We're not just building a protocol. We're building a turnkey service for mobile app developers. Our business case doesn't involve convincing anyone of the technical superiority of the protocol. We simply sell a superior user experience with minimal developer effort. And you'll learn as we get more open in the coming few weeks (wink, wink), it's not at all a hard-sell :-)
Feel free to connect with me directly or just continue the discussion here if you have more questions. I'm always happy to engage skeptical observers ;-)
The number of companies using this device to solve real problems is growing. Jeremy Howard just started an interesting one - http://www.enlitic.com
Even if you use the same language for both, the style of code & algorithms are very different.
Helion - has investment from ycombinator, attempting D-D/D-He3 fusion, which would produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation.
General Fusion - D-T fusion, but with a clever design that pretty much solves material issues caused by hard neutron radiation. Fusion happens in a spinning vat of molten lead, compressing plasmas with acoustic shock waves from steam-driven pistons. Jeff Bezos is an investor.
Tri-Alpha - the biggest of the fusion startups, quite secretive, with about 30 Ph.Ds, 150 employees, and over $150 million invested. Investors include Goldman Sachs and Paul Allen. Attempting boron fusion, which would produce less than 1% of its energy as neutron radiation.
LPP - the smallest, only about $4 million invested, but might not need more to complete its experiments. Also attempting boron fusion, from a reactor that fits in a small room. About to start a new round of experiments using a reactor core carved from solid tungsten, which they think will boost output dramatically by removing plasma impurities.
Those are the ones that I know have funding. EMC2, the polywell company, is looking for investors now that Navy funding has ended. Non-startups working on alternative fusion include:
Lockheed - this has gotten a lot of press
Sandia - repurposing the Z-machine to attempt net-gain fusion, after simulations showed they could hit breakeven with their existing machine, and 100x to 1000x gain with a 2-3x increase in input power. Very cheap since the Z-machine already existed, and things were going well last I heard.
UW's dynomak project - the most conventional of all these, similar to tokamak but does away with big external superconductors, which makes the reactor ten times smaller and cheaper. Needs $10 million to test whether the idea will scale.
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
I'll send you my bill in the mail.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...
https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/mag_fu...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a...
I think we'd like to think we're working on the ugly bits of infrastructure people don't care about.
This includes a distributed file system optimized for speed and storing machine state like Github, software defined networking for IP migration across metal, and other abstractions for making devops easier.
We're looking for people who want to think about hard computer science problems like managing stateful systems more intelligently (think auto-failure detection and recovery and less I/O intensive WAN replication strategies).
And yes, we're looking for the right data viz folks to help us harness all this performance and help data analysts make sense of it all.
Do elaborate...
(note: not saying he is, obviously. just making a point we should all be aware or when communicating with strangers online.)
Development is in Berlin, Germany, and we're hiring.
Possibly-interesting technical posts:
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker...
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-13-sandbox-security.h...
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-24-tinytinyrss-plus-s...
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-05-12-easy-port.html
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-ap...
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html
Sandstorm is not currently actively hiring. But it is an open source project if you're interested in contributing. See:
[0] https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-15-sandstorm-1.3M-see...
Tech looks good, company looks shaky.
The USA shouldn't have such a terrible health care system. Let's fix it. They are hiring all sorts of talent: https://www.hioscar.com/jobs
Fully cloud based, heavy aurora/mesos shop, kafka, hbase, redshift, mysql, python, flask, and an abundance of data analytics.
We are building a platform that enhances the workflow of clinical trials thus making it easier, faster and cheaper on drug companies and safer for the participants involved. We help the researchers using the data collected from the trial to adapt the future stages of the trial thus helping avoid serious adverse effects or making them known to researchers in real time if they are occurring at present.
Now here is the cool part, the above is just the surface. Our team is really passionate about data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence and its applications in real world. So we do something called adaptive clinical trials where we run analytical models on the data that comes in and can forecast when the trajectory of a trial needs to be altered. This means you can catch any serious reactions to drugs, faster.
All in all, to answer the main question, our solution helps keep the costs of clinical trials low and reduces error rate. Being able to run these trials fast and keeping the costs low, allows not only for drugs to get out to the market faster, but also helps reduce the costs of drugs(due to the reduction of costs to process).
I also only explained the application of our tech in clinical trials, but our software is so flexible that it can be applied to any industry such as Consumer Insights, Depression analysis studies, etc.
Not sure if I adequately answered your question.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/kryptnostic/
It's a shame Google isn't focused more on this, too. They should be having a Google X lab just for that, and invest at least as much as they currently invest in quantum computing. They have a lot to gain from it. Infringing on people's privacy is currently Google's biggest PR issue, and it's not going to go away. It will only become a bigger issue in the future. Without this, Google could perhaps return to being almost as liked as it used to be (there's still the issue of bullying others in the search engine, of course).
It's not just doing the computations in an untrusted cloud environment, although that's a big promise. I would say that an even bigger part will be the eventual ability to run computations on multi-party data sets. If you can provide a provably secure zero-knowledge service that still manages to compute results from multiple sources of opaque data, you will have every single financial institution and insurance giant banging on your door.
Yes, we are hiring: http://www.airware.com/careers
In the long run, it is a data tool that will eliminate the need for data warehouses.
It turns out the hard problem is not running the queries fast, but keeping the cache accurate and up-to-date. Our cache coherence service is probably the piece of code we're most proud of.
And, yes, we're hiring in SF. :) Reach out to me, harry@periscope.io
We will be hiring in a few months.
* Trifacta (http://www.trifacta.com/) are dealing with the very grungy problem of data transformation. Their approach is heavily UX-centric, with built-in predictive capabilities that learn what you are doing as you try to transform disparate data sets to meet your needs.
* Segment (http://www.segment.com) acts as a data router, allowing you to implement significantly less data plumbing in your application while allowing you to deliver your data to many different analytics tools.
* Jut (http://www.jut.io) is a full-stack approach to building a hub for streaming data. They take any operations data (logs, metrics, alerts, events) as inputs, manage storage and analysis, and have creating a framework for streaming visualizations as well. Technologies include an in-browser, retargetable compiler, a streaming analytics layer, storage (elastic search and cassandra), A d3-based visualization framework designed for 3rd party add-ons, and a simpler way to manage large-scale data called hybrid SaaS. (disclosure: I work here.)
* Databricks (http://www.databricks.com) has implemented apache Spark as a service.
Humans needs to switch 87% of our energy sources (~450 Quadrillion BTU/yr) from fossil fuels to other source in our lifetimes[1]. That's an unbelievably huge transition, and one of the current bottlenecks is energy data communication. Solar and energy efficiency companies can't communicate efficiently with utilities and vice versa because each utility has a unique, antiquated, manual system for handling energy data. We are trying to fix that by making a universal API that wraps utilities so energy innovation can happen efficiently on both sides of the meter.
Yes, we are hiring: https://angel.co/utilityapi/jobs
Most of our projects are free software, and yes, we are hiring.
1) Onu: A cloud computing framework based on GPUs. I have worked with both of their co-founders and have really high hope for this company in the future of cloud computing market. They are hiring top GPU programmers: http://anticipate.onu.io/
2)Tachyon Nexus: memory-centric distributed storage system. Just announced a couple of days ago by my friend Haoyuan Li from Berkeley AMP lab. http://www.tachyonnexus.com/
3) Mental Canvas: A spin-off from Yale professor Julie Dorsey, they are working on 3D reconstruction from 2D drawing. Very cool stuff and one of my friend is the early employee there: http://www.mentalcanvas.com/
Meteor touches all parts of an application stack (client-side templating[1], live database updates[2], a websocket-based sync protocol[3], an "all you need" build tool[4] that can build mobile and web apps, an in-house "transparent reactive programming" library[5], a cloud hosting environment[6] built on Docker and Kubernetes, and the list goes on -- all with a very very strong emphasis on great developer experience).
Learn more about Meteor's subprojects here: http://meteor.com/projects. Most of these projects are current edge new technology -- we develop new systems when the existing open source ones aren't good enough (either because of how they're implemented or because we can supply a better developer experience)
Moreover, almost all of our work is open source which means working here builds your GitHub profile -- always a good thing. Remote is OK. Learn more at http://https://www.meteor.com/jobs/, or happy to answer questions at avital@meteor.com.
[1] https://www.meteor.com/blaze
[2] https://www.meteor.com/livequery
[3] https://www.meteor.com/ddp
[4] https://www.meteor.com/isobuild
[5] https://www.meteor.com/tracker
[6] https://trello.com/c/FMdB7GAu/78-galaxy-managed-production-q...
(I'm not affiliated with 'em, just think they're pretty rad)
"our mission: build the next generation of A.I. algorithms"
"Know any #QT (C++) developers who want to help change the world from our Scottish HQ? Please ask them to get in touch: careers@maidsafe.net"
https://twitter.com/maidsafe/status/578961937981161472
Features of the SAFE Network:
- Self-authentication: users can create accounts and log in from any computer without the need or knowledge of third parties (http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/...).
- Farming: this self-regulating network lets users offer spare drive space and in return delivers anonymous, super-fast internet (http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/system_components/...).
- Examples of apps that can be used on the SAFE Network: cloud storage, encrypted messaging, websites, VoIP, social networks and any existing service that runs on the Internet (http://maidsafe.net/applications).
- Safecoin is the currency of the SAFE Network and a mechanism to incentivize and reward farmers and app developers as well as provide access to network services (http://systemdocs.maidsafe.net/content/en/how_it_works/safec...).
If you have any questions about the SAFE Network, please ask them on https://forum.safenetwork.io.
We have to make Large scale Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) easily computable across existing mobile devices to bring consumers hyper-precise (cm precision) geo-reference. This is actually super hard but also pretty awesome.
Yes we are hiring. Specifically CV experts.
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_m...
Probably the biggest effort we're making is on Cloud Foundry, an opensource PaaS. Developing scalable production-grade systems for managing and running 12 factor apps is hard. Superficially it looks easy. Once you do anything at scale, it stops being easy, which is where we come in.
We also have teams working on Hadoop, GemFire, antirez is on Redis and Disque, the Spring team works for us and I've kinda lost track of the rest.
I work for Pivotal Labs, the agile development wing founded in 1989 from which the whole company takes its name.
We're hiring across all divisions. Email me: jchester@pivotal.io.
And yes, we are hiring in LA, in those areas, as well as for full stack developers. Feel free to reach out at noel@secondspectrum.com or work@secondspectrum.com
I quite like it, there are lots of hard technical problems. I realised that since I joined ~1 year ago, I haven't worked on any CRUD apps at all yet.
Here are some positions: http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?nl=1&k=JobL...
Reach out if you have questions: skhalsa@climate.com
We see immense benefits to humanity - from medicine, to environmental science, crime prevention/monitoring....down to the trivial - search millions of your photos for your pet dog, look for all photos where you & Aunt Millie were together etc.
p.s : and yes we are hiring.
The founders went through Techstars London 2013 and moved to Austin right after. We raised 1.4M last fall from a mix of angels and VCs.
Just a week ago we released our 'distributed metronome', which lets musicians hear a synchronized metronome regardless of how much internet latency there might be.
Not saving the world but its still a fun challenge!
Hampton Creek http://www.hamptoncreek.com/
This one also looks promising: Endless Mobile https://endlessm.com
and they're also hiring! https://endlessm.com/jobs/
We were a spin-off of the MIT mind machine project. We were working on cognitive modeling with the long-term goal of modeling intention awareness, which is modeling cognition (knowledge and emotions) with a time component.
We were working on knowledge graph theory, blending over time, based on all written communication of an individual or population sub-group.
It proved to be too soon - probably about 10 years too early. We needed more data from individuals - email wasn't enough. We probably needed daily recording of all interactions to build a knowledge graph of an individual. But even working with email data it was too much information - we could barely process all of it especially when blending with a time vector.
Google glass was hopeful for acquiring enough interaction data for a person and their daily lives, but it proved inadequate (no one used it). The closest data set to what we needed was recordings of all interactions on the ISS.
This will be necessary to model a human personality AI at the beta level (copy of an individual based on observations of that person).
We've since moved off on to other projects.
I am looking for a co-founder.