Always forward, no dead ends, never backward.
live: actually being performed at time of viewing; alive; possessing life; abounding with life and energy
flows: to move or progress freely; continuous progression; to proceed smoothly and readily; to have a smooth continuity
In 2000 we founded Redline Networks, a company in the load balancing / networking / web acceleration space.
We developed the first product line that implemented the HTTP protocol more or less at switch speeds and were awarded a bunch of patents for novel web and internet networking technologies such as TCP connection management, our scalable web server architecture, as well as being the first to do HTTP multiplexing, and combining compression, SSL and multiplexing.
It earned a 9.5 out of 10, the highest score among 229 enterprise products reviewed by InfoWorld Magazine's Test Center during 2003. It was a fantastic product for real life, too: we sold the product to hundreds of customers such as ESPN, Orbitz, Travelocity, Chase, Disney, Microsoft, and many others.
A few minutes after installing the box, customers' web sites would be faster, and their servers would have much more capacity. Almost...magical.
But just as we would be done celebrating, very often the customer would look at us and ask "Great work! Now, is there anything you can do for our database server?" It was now a bottleneck. Sigh. And sadly, no amount of connection multiplexing could save the RDBMS from itself.
After Juniper Networks bought the company in 2005, we turned our attention to that database layer. What would a really big database look like? Could you scale a db to web-size? If so, what could you do with it? Personalization was always interesting, but what would web-scale personalization look like at the app level?
We read an NYT/ IHT article which talked about online news headlines, and how much editorial oversight was required to keep big stories around long enough to catch the infrequent users, but not so long that the site became boring to the super fans.
"Excuse me, but why can't everyone just get the news they haven't read yet? You know, the NEW stuff? It was obvious this problem was begging for personalization, but wasn't obvious how to tackle it.
GFS and Cassandra, Hadoop and Hbase are probably excellent at what they do. But ours is a completely independent approach that targets different workload. We've traded batch processing strength for greater flexibility, event-driven processing and real-time results. But since our approach is new, we're sure to experience some hiccups. Please bear with us when that happens.
The goal of Liveflows is to add value directly to websites, by providing a richer, easier experience for readers, through the use of advanced technologies not commonly found in publishing platforms. Users and publishers alike want more views, more consumption, and more fun.
We have a long way to go, and a lot of ideas to explore. But it's an exciting start, and with help from YOU, our beta testing users and beta testing publishers, we can continue to mature and enhance the product. So thank you.
Our small team is as distributed as our database model, but we'd love to hear
from you if you have any feedback, questions or ideas:
hello/at/liveflows/dot/com.