Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Severalnines makes the Top-33 Hottest Tech Companies List in Sweden


Sweden is a country with a strong culture of innovation, and is at the forefront of technological development. There are many great examples, for instance that small piece of software that many people use to make free internet calls, or that cool little web service that many use to listen to music. Perhaps not surprising, since the Swedes are some of the world’s fastest people at adapting to new trends and ideas.


So it was with great pleasure that Severalnines was selected in the ‘33-listan’, a list of the top 33 young tech companies in Sweden. It was organized by Ny Teknik, Sweden’s leading technology newspaper. Companies on the list were from different areas, including high-tech, clean-tech and bio-tech. The organizers put together a great event in central Stockholm that had about 500 attendees.

Congratulations and lots of success to everybody who made the list.
As a young company ourselves, we know it takes a lot of hard work to build a tech company.
But boy ain’t we all passionate about changing things, making things better?

As Thomas Edison put it: There’s a way to do it better – find it.


Friday, February 3, 2012

Game Over for NoSQL? Discussing Databases in Online Social Gaming

According to VentureBeat*, games companies raised a record-breaking $1.54 billion in funding last year and social gaming accounted for over half of that. No wonder everyone wants to have a piece of that pie!

With the arrival of social network platforms, the gaming industry has seen an explosion in casual and social gaming. The social gamer represents a massive audience that cuts across all age, gender and demographic boundaries. Online social games are some of the most demanding applications in the world, with millions of users, stringent response times, complex simulation models and billing requirements. Games take years to develop for a reason ...

Online social games are data-driven applications, and databases are central to these applications. However, there is no single database architecture that will fit the different types of data that the application needs to store. A data management architecture needs to account for the diversity of data, and optimize for some of the differences in the datatypes. E.g. it is ok to lose leaderboard data during a game as it can be reconstituted, whereas billing data needs to be 100% ACID.

Therefore, with the generous contribution of Joshua Butcher, we just published a whitepaper that discusses the different types of data stored for various functions in social gaming. We will see that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to database architecture, and suggest a sharding strategy based on schema partitioning.

With our new whitepaper, we’re also starting a discussion on what the database of choice might be for anyone wanting to develop online social games. With so many NoSQL databases now available, one might wonder why MySQL would be a good database choice for the gaming industry. To find out, download our whitepaper today!

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this blog below or reach out to us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter or directly via these contact details.

* http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/06/deanbeat-game-companies-raised-a-record-breaking-1-55b-in-2011/