Startup Roundup: Hortonworks and Project Tripod

Hortonworks

Hortonworks is officially the first Hadoop company to file for an IPO. Hortonworks, the company that has based its name off of the popular Dr. Seuss charactiver from Horton Hears A Who, is the maker of Aphache Hadoop big data software. (For those of you who don’t know—and don’t worry, I didn’t know until this article either—Hadoop is an open-source software framework for distributed storage and distributed processing of Big Data on clusters of commodity hardware.)

Hortonworks sales are up $US10.9 million from the 2013 fiscal year. Its net loss, however, is up as well.  The company helps developers and enterprises build solutions for big data by storing and analysing manageable chunks of data. Hortonworks is one of the leading companies in the field, and has raised close to $US250 million since it spun out from Yahoo in 2011. The industry itself is impressive as well. IDC is predicting the big data market will become a $US100 billion industry by 2020, with Hadoop making up half of the industry’s value.

Project Tripod

Catherine Eibner believes her latest venture will change how people see the world. Project Tripod, the award-winning Australian tech startup, has invented a way to caption time-lapse photography without the need for a static hardware setup. The app allows users to compile a series of images of a particular subject over a period of time by combining specially designed 3D tilt technology with the positioning software built-in to your smartphone.

“Once you have sequential images, then you’re able to generate time lapse animations and multiple image blends that are only possible if the images are aligned perfectly,” Eibner said.

In a move that doesn’t happen very often, the app was released only to Windows Phones. Since its launch, Project Tripod has been downloaded 50,000 times and has won numerous awards. The company is planning on launching a beta iOS version in the next few weeks and an Android release will follow shortly thereafter.

Eibner believes that app can be used in many different ways: before and after shots, continuity in film, ecological tracking, and especially in the construction industry.

 “In researching the apps development, co-founder Jordan Knight unearthed some real challenges facing the construction industry, such as improving cost efficiencies, recording and sharing projects globally and reducing the burden of acquiring additional infrastructure,” Eibner said.

“The software affords the industry the opportunity to record the changing evolution of construction sites, provide comparison shots of projects or events, while making all of this content shareable and globally accessible online.”

Information sourced from Business Insider Australia.