
On Monday, I went to the Evening of Mobile Startups at the MIT Museum and talked to a bunch of early stage mobile startups. It was a pretty interesting event, giving a pretty good snapshot of “what is hot” in the mobile space. In the rest of the article I’ll discuss the things that I noticed and some of my own personal take on things.

With the massive amount of information to sort through, finding everything that you need becomes a difficult and tedious task, especially when that information is dispersed across several different places. Alongside the data mining project that we are currently working on, the problem of contact management has always intrigued us. With some of our customers having well over 25,000 contacts being managed by Constant Contact, and most likely even more information about these contacts and others spread out amongst several other mediums, there had to be a better way to do things, to easily extract valuable information out of that.

As we explore the scaling of Web applications in many dimensions (number of users, size of data, UI functionality, and more), there are various challenges, many subtle and surprising. Some of the thorniest arise from the high latency of communications over the Internet, which generally leads to designs supporting greater concurrency.
Learned new tools from my business.