The rise of Apache Kafka as a streaming data solution is something we've been watching for a while - as part of a collection of Big Data tools, it provides a 'TiVo for data' feature. We've begun to use it in client projects covering both search and log analysis...Continue reading
Category Archives: Meetups
Flax announces partnership with Apache Kafka creators Confluent
We're very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backb...Continue reading
Elasticsearch London Meetup – Exploring the Graph API & SearchKit UI components
This month's Elasticsearch Meetup was hosted by Argos at their Victoria Digital Hub with a relatively small crowd this time - I suspect quite a few who registered didn't actually turn up or release their tickets, which is a shame as there was a waiting list. Mark Harwood of Elastic was first with a talk about the new Graph API and visua...Continue reading
London Lucene/Solr Meetup – Learning to Rank and Hibernate Search
Back to the very impressive Bloomberg lecture theatre for this month's Lucene/Solr Meetup, with an good turnout (I'm guessing 60-70 people). Our first talk came from Diego Ceccarelli of Bloomberg on how his team have created a Solr implementation of Continue reading
London Text Analytics Meetup – Making sense of text with Lumi, Signal & Bloomberg
This month's London Text Analytics Meetup, hosted by Bloomberg in their spectacular Finsbury Square offices, was only the second such event this year, but crammed in three great talks and attracted a wide range of people from both academia and business. We started with Gabriella Kazai o...Continue reading
Elasticon London 2015 – more products, more scale, more users!
Last week Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, landed in London for one of their current series of one-day events. The £50 entrance fee has been put to good use, raising £16750 for AbilityNet who work on accessible IT - a very generous offer by Elastic. Shay Banon, creator of Elasticsearch, kicked off...Continue reading
Enterprise Search Europe 2015 review – day 1
This year's Enterprise Search Europe started early for me - I had been invited to give the opening keynote, so I made sure I arrived early enough to make sure my laptop would play nicely with the projector, always a worry! The keynote was well recieved and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to talk about Continue reading
Elasticsearch Meetup – Spark, postcodes and Couchbase
Three speakers for this month's Elasticsearch Meetup (slides now up), kindly hosted by JustEat's technical department. Neil Andrassy kicked us off with a talk about how TheFilter (which you may know counts Peter Gabriel as an investor) use Apache Spark to ...Continue reading
London Lucene/Solr Usergroup – website search and indexing the cloud
This week's London Lucene/Solr Meetup was hosted by asset management company BlackRock who also provided our first speakers. BlackRock manages an astonishing $4.7 trillion in assets (that's more than the GDP of Germany) and operates 90 different websites with around 250,000 content items, so a good and accurate website search engine is essenti...Continue reading
Open source search events roundup for late 2015
Although it's still high summer here in the UK (which means it's probably raining) we're already looking forward to the autumn and the events across the world we're attending. In early September we're running another free to attend London Lucene/Solr Usergroup Meetup, sponsored this time by Blackrock who are talking about using Solr for websites. At the end of Septem...Continue reading