In some of my “Technology Is Useless” posts, I have mentioned Groupon quite a few times. A big part of this is that until recently I lived in Chicago. I knew quite a few of the people who were at Groupon, and joined from a firm called Obtiva.
Obtiva was a consulting firm that Groupon bought. They pretty much built Groupon. By the time Groupon bought them, Groupon was about half of Obtiva’s business. Most of them joined Groupon. That was about two years ago or so. I know of at least one person who decided to go off on his own rather than go to Groupon. He makes iPhone apps, which may be a subject of a later post.
From what I have been able to infer, a lot of them are now leaving Groupon. The rats are leaving the ship.
Since I keep kicking all these guys around, I should be fair and point out that at least one guy is making technology that is causing the patented Technology Uselessness Meter go a little in the positive direction, and actually play a role in a lot of the issues that I think technology should be used for.
One of them joind a firm called TempoDB. It is a time series database. I thought you could just analyze time series data with a regular database, but I guess there are cases where you need something customized for the task. So I learned at least one new thing this week.
There is nothing to stop this stuff from being used by the useless startups that I have been yacking about. But (as I am writing this) the first two customers on their list deal with energy: Wattvision and sMeasure.
I have to concede I have never heard of a time series database. It looks like it might be a new category of NoSQL, in addition to the document, graph, key-value and object databases. According to their Jobs page they use HBase and Hadoop under the hood. I think Hadoop is kind of in its own category in NoSQL.
If all that NoSQL stuff is meaningless to you, don’t worry about it. I just felt that instead of only pointing out all the bad and dumb stuff I see, I should also point out something that I think is good.