Startups on the Cloud

CloudCamp, organised by ACM Bangalore on 29th of March at NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore, was a great place to be at to see how young and much bigger companies alike are all harnessing the power of cloud computing. The day started with a set of lightning talks and use cases of how companies such as Rediff (uses cloud for delivering their Maps application), SnappyFingers (uses it for its Q&A Search engine), Amar Chitra Katha (uses it for Multi-player online games), 8k Miles (uses Clouds for delivering their remote application development platform services) etc. uses Clouds to deliver cost effective, quality of service aware, and massively scalable applications.

Dave Nielsen of CloudCamp moderated the lightning talks and later on an unpanel where people from the audience were invited to form a panel on the fly and take questions from the audience. The post lunch sessions were mostly detailed use case studies and various aspects of clouds such as security, storage, etc.

I noticed a few startups doing really good work – SnappyFingers, 8k Miles and Amar Chitra Katha’s online gaming team are doing exciting applications and Sanovi and VMLogix are providers of critical infrastructure required to manage cloud based applications. We are going to cover all five companies here.

Chirayu Patel of SnappyFingers showed how he himself implemented SnappyFingers which is actually a very well performing Q&A Search engine. So, what it does is let users ask questions which it produces answers to by searching for various sites that provides Q&A sections and help forums. Kosmix also uses SnappyFingers and I think there is a good business model that can be built around answering people’s questions. It does solve a very pressing problem people have with rummaging through endless questions in help forums to find appropriate answers. SnappyFingers uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) extensively and here is the technical presentation followed by a couple of more pictures from CloudCamp.