Feb
03
2021
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TouchCast raises $55M to grow its mixed reality-based virtual event platform

Events — when they haven’t been cancelled altogether in the last 12 months due to the global health pandemic — have gone virtual and online, and a wave of startups that are helping people create and participate in those experiences are seeing a surge of attention — and funding.

In the latest development, New York video startup TouchCast — which has developed a platform aimed at companies to produce lifelike, virtual conferences and other events without much technical heavy-lifting — has picked up funding of $55 million, money that co-founder and CEO Edo Segal said the startup will use to build out its services and teams after being “overrun by demand” in the wake of COVID-19.

The funding is being led by a strategic investor, Accenture Ventures — the investment arm of the systems integrator and consultancy behemoth — with Alexander Capital Ventures, Saatchi Invest, Ronald Lauder and other unnamed investors also participating. The startup up to now has been largely self-funded, and while Segal isn’t disclosing the valuation, he said it was definitely in the nine-figures (that is, somewhere in the large region of hundreds of millions of dollars).

Accenture has been using TouchCast’s technology for its own events, but that is likely just one part of its interest: Accenture also has a lot of corporate customers that tap it to build and implement interactive services, so potentially this could lead to more customers in TouchCast’s pipeline.

(Case in point: My interview with Segal, over Zoom, found me speaking to him in the middle of a vast aircraft hangar, with a 747 from one of the big airlines of the world — I won’t say which — parked behind him. He said he’d just come from a business pitch with the airline in question.)

A lot of what we have seen in virtual events, and in particular conferences, has to date been, effectively, a managed version of a group call on one of the established videoconferencing platforms like Zoom, Google’s Hangout, Microsoft’s Teams, Webex and so on.

You get a screen with participants’ individual video streams presented to you in a grid more reminiscent of the opening credits of the Brady Bunch or Hollywood Squares than an actual stage or venue.

There are some, of course, that are taking a much different route. Witness Apple’s online events in the last year, productions that have elevated what a virtual event can mean, with more detail and information, and less awkwardness, than an actual live event.

The problem is that not every company is Apple, unable to afford much less execute Hollywood-level presentations.

The essence of what TouchCast has built, as Segal describes it, is a platform that combines computer vision, video streaming technology and natural language processing to let other organizations create experiences that are closer to that of the iPhone giant’s than they are to a game show.

“We have created a platform so that all companies can create events like Apple’s,” Segal said. “We’re taking them on a journey beyond people sitting in their home offices.”

Yet “home office” remains the operative phrase. With TouchCast, people (the organizers and the onstage participants) still use basic videoconferencing solutions like Zoom and Teams — in their homes, even — to produce the action. But behind the scenes, TouchCast is taking those videos, using computer vision to trim out the people and place them into virtual “venues” so that they appear as if they are on stage in an actual conference.

These venues come from a selection of templates, or the organiser can arrange for a specific venue to be shot and used. And in addition to the actual event, TouchCast then also provides tools for audience members to participate with questions and to chat to each other. As the event is progressing, TouchCast also produces transcriptions and summaries of the key points for those who want them.

Segal said that TouchCast is not planning to make this a consumer-focused product, not even on the B2B2C side, but it’s preparing a feature so that when business conference organisers do want to hold a music segment with a special guest, those can be incorporated, too. (In all honesty, it seems like a small leap to use this for more consumer-focused events, too.)

TouchCast’s growth into a startup serving an audience of hungry and anxious event planners has been an interesting pivot that is a reminder to founders (and investors) that the right opportunities might not be the ones you think they are.

You might recall that the company first came out of stealth back in 2013, with former TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld one of the co-founders.

Back then, the company’s concept was to supercharge online video, by making it easier for creators to bring in interactive elements and media widgets into their work, to essentially make videos closer to the kind of interactivity and busy media mix that we find on web pages themselves.

All that might have been too clever by half. Or, it was simply not the right time for that technology. The service never made many waves, and one of my colleagues even assumed it had deadpooled at some point.

Not at all, it turns out. Segal (a serial entrepreneur who also used to work at AOL as VP of emerging platforms — AOL being the company that acquired TechCrunch and eventually became a part of Verizon) notes that the technology that TouchCast is using for its conferencing solution is essentially the same as what it built for its original video product.

After launching an earlier, less feature-rich version of what it has on the market today, it took the company about six months to retool it, adding in more mixed reality customization via the use of Unreal Engine, to make it what it is now, and to meet the demand it started to see from customers, who approached the startup for their own events after attending conferences held by others using TouchCast.

“It took us eight years to get to our overnight success story,” Segal joked.

Figures from Grand View Research cited by TouchCast estimate that virtual events will be a $400 billion business by 2027, and that has made for a pretty large array of companies building out experiences that will make those events worth attending, and putting on.

They include the likes of Hopin and Bizzabo — both of which have recently also raised big rounds — but also more enhanced services from the big, established players in videoconferencing like Zoom, Google, Microsoft, Cisco and more.

It’s no surprise to see Accenture throwing its hat into that ring as a backer of what it has decided is one of the more interesting technology players in that mix.

The reason is because many understand and now accept that — similar to working life in general — it’s very likely that even when we do return to “live” events, the virtual component, and the expectation that it will work well and be compelling enough to watch, is here to stay.

“Digital disruption, distributed workforces, and customer experience are the driving forces behind the need for companies to transform how they do business and move toward the future of work,” said Tom Lounibos, managing director, Accenture Ventures, in a statement. “For organizations to harness the power of virtual experiences to deliver business impact, the pandemic has shown that quality interactions and insights are needed. Our investment in Touchcast demonstrates our commitment to identifying the latest technologies that help address our clients’ critical business needs.”

Jul
09
2018
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Percona Live Europe 2018 Call for Papers is Now Open

Percona Live Europe Open Source Database Conference PLE 2018

Percona Live Europe Open Source Database Conference PLE 2018Announcing the opening of the Percona Live Europe Open Source Database Conference 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany call for papers. It will be open from now until August 10, 2018.

Our theme this year is
Connect. Accelerate. Innovate.

As a speaker at Percona Live Europe, you’ll have the opportunity to CONNECT with your peers—open source database experts and enthusiasts who share your commitment to improving knowledge and exchanging ideas. ACCELERATE your projects and career by presenting at the premier open source database event, a great way to build your personal and company brands. And influence the evolution of the open source software movement by demonstrating how you INNOVATE!

Community initiatives remain core to the open source ethos, and we are proud of the contribution we make with Percona Live Europe in showcasing thought leading practices in the open source database world.

With a nod to innovation, for the first time, this year we are introducing a business track to benefit those business leaders who are exploring the use of open source and are interested in learning more about its costs and benefits.

Speaking Opportunities

The Percona Live Europe Open Source Database Conference 2018 Call for Papers is open until August 10, 2018. We invite you to submit your speaking proposal for breakout, tutorial or lightning talk sessions. Classes and talks are invited for Foundation (either entry level or of general interest to all), Core (intermediate) and Masterclass (advanced) levels.

If selected, you will receive a complimentary full conference pass.

  • Breakout Session. Broadly cover a technology area using specific examples. Sessions should be either 25 minutes or 50 minutes in length (including Q&A).
  • Tutorial Session. Present a technical session that aims for a level between a training class and a conference breakout session. We encourage attendees to bring and use laptops for working on detailed and hands-on presentations. Tutorials will be three or six hours in length (including Q&A).
  • Lightning Talk. Give a five-minute presentation focusing on one key point that interests the open source community: technical, lighthearted or entertaining talks on new ideas, a successful project, a cautionary story, a quick tip or demonstration.

Topics and Tracks

We want proposals that cover the many aspects of application development using all open source databases, as well as new and interesting ways to monitor and manage database environments. Did you just embrace open source databases this year? What are the technical and business values of moving to or using open source databases? How did you convince your company to make the move? Was there tangible ROI?

Best practices and current trends, including design, application development, performance optimization, HA and clustering, cloud, containers and new technologies, as well as new and interesting ways to monitor and manage database environments—what’s holding your focus? Share your case studies, experiences and technical knowledge with an engaged audience of open source peers.

In the submission entry you will be asked to indicate which of these tracks your proposal best fits: tutorial, business needs; case studies/use cases; operations; or developer.

A few ideas

The conference committee is looking for proposals that cover the many aspects of using, deploying and managing open source databases, including:

  • Open source – Describe the technical and business values of moving to or using open source databases. How did you convince your company to make the move? Was there tangible ROI?
  • Security – All of us have experienced security challenges. Whether they are initiated by legislature (GDPR), bugs (Meltdown/Spectre), experience (external attacks) or due diligence (planning for the worst), when do you have ‘enough’ security? Are you finding that security requirements are preventing your ability to be agile?
  • Serverless, Cloud or On-Premise – The technology landscape is no longer a simple one, and mixing infrastructures has almost become the norm. Are you designing data architectures for the new landscape, and eager to share your experience? Have microservices become an important part of your plans?
  • MySQL – Do you have an opinion on what is new and exciting in MySQL? With the release of MySQL 8.0, are you using the latest features? How and why? Are they helping you solve any business issues, or making deployment of applications and websites easier, faster or more efficient? Did the new release get you to change to MySQL? What do you see as the biggest impact of the MySQL 8.0 release? Do you use MySQL in conjunction with other databases in your environment?
  • MongoDB – How has the 3.6 release improved your experience in application development or time-to-market? How are the new features making your database environment better? What is it about MongoDB 4.0 that excites you? What are your experiences with Atlas? Have you moved to it, and has it lived up to its promises? Do you use MongoDB in conjunction with other databases in your environment?
  • PostgreSQL – Why do you use PostgreSQL as opposed to other SQL options? Have you done a comparison or benchmark of PostgreSQL vs. other types of databases related to your tasks? Why and what were the results? How does PostgreSQL help you with application performance or deployment? How do you use PostgreSQL in conjunction with other databases in your environment?
  • SQL, NewSQL, NoSQL – It’s become a perennial question without an easy answer. How do databases compare, how do you choose the right technology for the job, how do you trade off between features and their benefits in comparing databases? If you have ever tried a hybrid database approach in a single application, how did that work out? How nicely does MongoDB play with MySQL in the real world? Do you have anything to say about using SQL with NoSQL databases?
  • High Availability – What choices are you making to ensure high availability? How do you find the balance between redundancy and cost? Are you using hot backups, and if so, what happened when you needed to rollback on them?
  • Scalability – When did you recognize you needed to address data scale? Did your data growth take you by surprise or were you always in control? Did it take a degradation in performance to get your management to sit up and take notice? How do you plan for scale if you can’t predict demand?
  • What the Future Holds – What do you see as the “next big thing”? What new and exciting features are going to be released? What’s in your next release? What new technologies will affect the database landscape? AI? Machine learning? Blockchain databases? Let us know about innovations you see on the way.

How to respond to the call for papers

For information on how to submit your proposal visit our call for papers page. The conference web pages will be updated throughout the next few weeks and bios, synopsis and slides will be published on those pages after the event.

Sponsorship

If you would like to obtain a sponsor pack for Percona Live Europe Open Source Database Conference 2018, you will find more information including a prospectus on our sponsorship page. You are welcome to contact me, Bronwyn Campbell, directly.

The post Percona Live Europe 2018 Call for Papers is Now Open appeared first on Percona Database Performance Blog.

Nov
22
2012
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Get Me Some Query Logs!

One of my favorite tools in the Percona Toolkit is pt-query-digest.  This tool is indispensable for identifying your top SQL queries, and analyzing which queries are accounting for your database load.

But the report you get from pt-query-digest is only as good as the log of queries you give it as input.  You need a large enough sample of query logs, collected over a period of time when you have representative traffic on your database.

You also need the log to include all the queries, not just those that take more than N seconds.  The reason is that some queries are individually quick, and would not be logged if you set the long_query_time configuration variable to 1 or more seconds.  You want that threshold to be 0 seconds while you’re collecting logs.

However, activating such high-volume query log collection can be costly.  Every statement executed on your  database will cause file I/O, even when the query itself was served out of your buffer pool memory.  That’s a lot of overhead, so we need to be careful about how and when we collect logs, and for how long we leave that running.

I’ve put together a simple shell script to help automate this.  I have given it the functional but unimaginative name full-slow-log.

The script configures full logging, then sleeps for a number of seconds to allow queries to be collected in the logs.  After it finishes sleeping, or if you interrupt the script, the script restores log configuration back to the values they started with.

$ full-slow-log [ -v ] [ -s seconds ] [ -c config ]
  • -v is for verbose output.
  • -s seconds allows you to specify the number of seconds to sleep.  The default is 5 seconds, which is probably too short for most sites, but the value is chosen to be as low impact as possible if you forget to give another value.
  • -c config allows you to specify a MySQL config file other than $HOME/.my.cnf, so you can store host, user, and password.

Here’s an example of running it with verbose output:

$ full-slow-log -v
Discovering slow_query_log=1
Discovering slow_query_log_file=mysql-slow.log
Discovering long_query_time=60.000000
Setting long_query_time=0
Setting slow_query_log_file=mysql-slow.log-full-20121122112413
Setting slow_query_log=1
Flushing slow query log
Sleeping 5 seconds... done.
Restoring slow_query_log_file=mysql-slow.log
Restoring long_query_time=60.000000
Restoring slow_query_log=1
Flushing logs during restore

Notice that the script also redirects the slow query log to a new file, with a filename based on the timestamp.  This is so you have a distinct file that contains only the specific time range of logs you collected.

The restoration of settings is in a “trap” which is a shell scripting feature that serves as both an exit handler and signal handler.  So if you interrupt the script before it’s done, you have some assurance that it will do the right thing to restore settings anyway.

My full-slow-log script is now available on a Github project (along with a few other experimental scripts I have written).  See https://github.com/billkarwin/bk-tools

I hope you find this script a useful complement to my upcoming talks at the Percona Live  MySQL Conference in London, UK on December 3-4 2012:

If you can make it to London in December, we’d love to see you there!  If not, look for future Percona Live conferences.

Tweet the link to this blog for a chance to win a free full conference pass. Make sure to use hashtag #perconalive! Winner will be chosen at the end of the day. 

Jan
31
2011
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MySQL & Friends Meetup @ FOSDEM

Kris Buytaert organized a MySQL Meetup at FOSDEM last year, and because of the success we’ll be doing it again this year, in the same restaurant: Sogno d’Italia.

Everybody is invited to come to the dinner. Just register on http://mysqlandfriendsfosdem2011.eventbrite.com/ so we have an idea how many reservations we should make. The maximum capacity is about 40 people.

We’ll plan to meet at 19:00 on Saturday, under the big tree in front of the AW building. Then we’ll walk to the restaurant, which is about 5 minutes walking distance.

 

Jan
12
2011
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Percona Live Keynote Speaker: Mark Callaghan

Mark Callaghan has graciously accepted to be the closing keynote speaker for Percona Live: San Francisco!

Mark is best known for his work behind MySQL @ Facebook, where he and his team maintain one of the largest MySQL installations around.  They also contribute back to the community with a publicly available branch of enhancements, improved diagnostic tools, and bug reports which help make MySQL better.

Mark’s keynote will be on “High-value Transaction Processing”.  I assure you, this is a presentation not to be missed.

Jan
05
2011
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Announcing Percona Live: San Francisco February 16th

Today we’re announcing Percona Live – a one day event to be held at the Bently Reserve on February 16th in San Francisco.  Live is our way of showcasing some of the awesome work that has been going into MySQL recently – and the theme of this event is Beyond MySQL 5.1.

Our first guest speaker is none other than Jeremy Zawodny.  Jeremy is well known in the MySQL community having been the original author of High Performance MySQL 1st Ed.  He will be presenting on how Craigslist has already upgraded to MySQL 5.5 – and are running on Fusion-io SSDs in production.

Tickets are available for early bird registration at $50.  To signup, or for more information please visit the percona website.


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Oct
06
2010
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Percona at WebConf Riga 2010

WebConf LogoMy colleague Aleksandr Kuzminsky will be speaking at WebConf Riga 2010 next month on XtraBackup: Hot Backups and More and Recovery of Lost or Corrupted InnoDB Tables.

WebConf is the first big conference of its kind in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and we are very happy to be participating.

In addition to Aleksandr’s talks, we will also be offering our training courses. You can find out more from the conference website (they will be publishing more information in the next two days).


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Oct
05
2010
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Talks in Moscow, Minsk, Samara

I have my schedule pretty busy during a trip to Russia this year. In addition to giving a master class and Sphinx Conference I’m going to speak at HighLoad++. I’ll also have a user meeting presentations in Samara on October 17 and Minsk on October 22 This looks like it is going to be a lot of fun :)


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Sep
10
2010
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First Sphinx Conference is Announced

The First ever Sphinx Users Conference is announced to take place in Moscow, Russia on October 24th,
which is the Sunday before Highload.ru conference, so if you’re attending that you may just drop by to this event too.
this is going to be free technically focused event, close in spirit to Percona Performance Conference, we organized back in 2009

I’m going to be giving a talk on this conference focused on using Sphinx Together and instead of MySQL. There are going to be number of talks which describe Sphinx deployment alongside with MySQL so
this conference should be interested to a lot of MySQL users.

This is going to be predominately Russian speaking event. Sphinx Founder – Andrew Aksyonoff speaks Russian and so do I. At the same time we expect some talks from English speakers as well.
Call for papers is still open and if you have something to say about Sphinx we welcome you to submit the talk !


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Aug
19
2010
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Percona talks at OpenSQL Camp this weekend

Four Perconians (perconites?) will be at OpenSQL Camp in Sankt Augustin, Germany this weekend presenting talks on:

  • Recovery of Lost or Corrupted InnoDB Tables
  • Keep your MySQL backend online no matter what
  • XtraDB — InnoDB on steroids
  • Xtrabackup for MySQL

If you would like to stop by and say hello, we are Aleksandr, Istvan, Morgan and Aurimas (pictures here).

If you can make the (approximate) location, but not the date, we also have training in Frankfurt in three weeks time.


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