Invite Your Boss to the Business Track at MongoNYC

Meghan Gill
May 23, 2013 | Updated: May 22, 2015
#mongodb days

MongoDB Days have traditionally been focused on the developer community, with lots of technical talks on application design, deployment best practices, and ops war stories. MongoNYC will carry on the tradition of including many deep technical sessions, with talks from the 10gen staff on the latest features in 2.4, as well as presentations from MongoDB community members on their experiences deploying MongoDB in real-world scenarios.

But this year at MongoNYC, we’re introducing a new track aimed at IT managers, directors, and C-level executives who aren’t knee-deep in code. The business track will include case studies from 10gen customers with a focus on the business benefits of using MongoDB, such as reduced cost, new revenue streams and competitive advantaged. We’ll look at the steps enterprises take to adopt NoSQL and open-source technologies, and how you can learn from their experiences.

Here are some of the talks included on the business track at MongoDB NYC:

Telefonica explains how it reduced development time by over 80% from its previous Oracle implementation, building a rich, globally available user data management system.
ADP describes how it built a mobile app in just a few months to let customers view payroll and benefits information on their devices of choice, differentiating ADP from stale on-premise solutions.
Criteo shows how it supported 200,000% growth over five years and global expansion to 7 continents migrating away from SQL Server to MongoDB for its core business, improving online shopping by bringing the performance of search to display advertisers.
And more.

So if you’re a developer or DBA who loves MongoDB, but you’ve only been able to use it for small or side projects, consider inviting your boss to MongoNYC this year. Or, attend the business track and return to the office as an advocate for the business advantages of MongoDB in your enterprise.

For more information on MongoDB NYC or to register, please visit http://www.10gen.com/events/mongonyc-2013. Tomorrow is your last chance to register at the early bird rate, which is only $75. Looking forward to seeing you there.

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New Geo Features in MongoDB 2.4

Motivation Geometric processing as a field of study has many applications, and has resulted in lots of research, and powerful tools. Many modern web applications have location based components, and require a data storage engines capable of managing geometric information. Typically this requires the introduction of an additional storage engine into your infrastructure, which can be a time consuming and expensive operation. MongoDB has a set of geometric storage and search features . The MongoDB 2.4 release brought several improvements to MongoDB’s existing geo capabilities and the introduction of the 2dsphere index . The primary conceptual difference (though there are also many functional differences) between the 2d and 2dsphere indexes, is the type of coordinate system that they consider. Planar coordinate systems are useful for certain applications, and can serve as a simplifying approximation of spherical coordinates. As you consider larger geometries, or consider geometries near the meridians and poles however, the requirement to use proper spherical coordinates becomes important. In addition to this major conceptional difference, there are also significant functional differences, which are outlined in some depth in the Geospatial Indexes and Queries section of the MongoDB documentation. This post will discuss the new features that have been added in the 2.4 release. What’s New Storing non-point geometries Unlike the 2d index, which only allowed the storage of points, the 2dsphere index allows the storage and querying of points, lines, and polygons. To support the storage of different geometries, instead of introducing a proprietary format, MongoDB conforms to the GeoJSON standard. GeoJSON is a collaborative community project that produced a specification for encoding entities in JSON. It has garnered significant support, including the OpenLayers project , PostGIS , and has growing language support for python and ruby . Here are a few simple examples of GeoJSON embedded documents: A BSON Document with a GeoJSON Point embedded in the geo field: { geo: { type: “Point”, coordinates: [100.0, 0.0] } } A BSON Document with a GeoJSON LineString embedded in the geo field: { geo: { type: “LineString”, coordinates: [ [100.0, 0.0], [101.0, 1.0] ] } } A BSON Document with a GeoJSON Polygon embedded in the geo field: { geo: { type: “Polygon”, coordinates: [ [ [100.0, 0.0], [101.0, 0.0], [101.0, 1.0], [100.0, 1.0], [100.0, 0.0] ] ] } } Note: A GeoJSON Polygon’s coordinates are an array of arrays of point specifications. Each array of point specifications should have the same starting and ending point to form a closed loop. The first array of point specifications defines the polygon’s exterior geometry, and each subsequent array of point specifications defines a “hole” in the polygon. Polygons should be non self-intersecting, and holes should be fully contained by the polygon. Inclusion searches on a sphere The new $geoWithin operator, which takes a Polygon geometry as a specifier, returns any geometries of any type that are fully contained within the polygon. It will work well without any index, but must look at every document in the collection to do so. Intersecting geometries on a sphere The new $geoIntersects operator, which takes any geometry as a specifier, returns any geometries that have a non-empty intersection with the specifier. $geoIntersects also works well without an index, and must also look at each document in the collection. Better support for compound indexes The 2d index can only be used in a compound index if 1. it is the first field, 2. there are exactly two fields in the compound index, and 3. if the second field isn’t a 2d index. 2dsphere indexes aren’t limited in this way, which allows us to pre-filter based on a non-geo field - which is often more efficient. Consider the following queries: Find me Hot Dog Stands in New York state i.e. use a compound index: (business_type, location). Find me geometries in New York state that are Hot Dog stands i.e. use the compound index: (location, business_type) The first query will be much more efficient than the second, because business_type is a simple text field, and greatly reduces the set of geometries to search. Additionally, we can have multiple 2dsphere indexes in the same compound index. This allows queries like: “Find routes with a start location within 50 miles from JFK, and an end location within 100 miles of YYC”. How it Works Everything starts when you insert a geometry into a 2dsphere index. We use the open source s2 C++ library from google to select a minimal set of cells that fully cover a geometry. This set of grid cells is called a covering, and the size of the cells is dynamic (between 500m and 100km on a side) based upon the size of the polygon being covered. fig 3 - A very low granularity covering of the entire United Kingdom fig 4 - A fairly granular covering of the A4 around Trafalgar Square. Each cell in these coverings is now added to a standard B-tree index, with a key that is easily calculable by the location on surface of the sphere - more granular(smaller) cells will have the same prefix as a larger cell that occupies the same area of the surface of the sphere. Intersection & Within searches Finding geometries that may be intersecting or within a search polygon becomes as easy as generating a covering for the search specifier, and for each cell in that covering, query the B-tree for any geometries that interact with these cells. Once the list of possibly interacting geometries has been retrieved from the index, each geometry in checked in turn to see if it should be included in the result set. Near searches The near search provided by the $near operator is implemented by doing $within searches on concentrically growing donuts (circular polygons with with circular holes). We encourage user feedback and testing on these new Geo features and are excited to see what the community builds. Map images ⓒ OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license (CC-BY-SA). Map data ⓒ OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).

May 21, 2013

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Powered by MongoDB, Bliinx is Changing the Way Software is Sold

Regardless of the industry, sales organizations often struggle to determine the best way to identify potential customers. There are many schools of thought as to what the best approach is, and when the most opportune time a sales executive should reach out might be. One startup company aims to make that process as simple and efficient as possible. Bliinx , based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, was created to help revenue teams focus and act on the most qualified leads and accounts based on product usage, billing, firmographic and marketing engagement data. Bliinx’s mission is to “change the way we sell software.” We spoke with Bliinx co-founders Fred Melanson and John Espinoza about starting the company, their journey, and where they see Bliinx headed in the future. How did you decide to start Bliinx? Melanson: I realized that it’s hard to build quality relationships with a lot of people, especially people that you’re trying to get investments from. I would ask people a lot of questions, and those were around relationship building and the question became how do you manage your clients relationships? Everyone would answer that they do everything manually, across siloed channels, and it’s a pain to manage and scale. So I figured there must be something there, that was really the spark that we created Bliinx on. What does Bliinx do? Melanson: We are a lead prioritization platform for bottom-up B2B SaaS, so we help sales teams - mainly account executives - to know who the best leads are at the best accounts to reach out to, and also to identify when it’s the best time to reach out to them. And the way we do that is by finding signals and insights in their sales conversations, their marketing engagement, and product usage. Our tool will plug into your system and find insights that are worth engaging on and scoring your talents and your leads, so the sales reps are focused on the best customers at the best time, without having to use generic one size fits all automation, which can be great for top of funnel SDRs, but for CSMs, who are really about nurturing, closing, and expanding revenue, it has to be more thoughtful and and more human because it’s getting harder and harder to get people’s attention and retention is immensely valuable for SaaS companies, so our tool helps us just find the best people at the best time to grow revenue faster. What are some tools that Bliinx connects with? Melanson: The basic one will plug into your email and calendar, we also have LinkedIn integration, which is pretty unique to sync your LinkedIn messages and plug into your CRM. It also connects with Slack to receive notifications and right now we are building integrations with Segment, Intercom, Stripe, and Snowflake, so reps can have product insights. We are also building new integrations for LinkedIn and Twitter so that reps can also have content marketing engagement insights to act on. Where are you right now with Bliinx? How has the journey been, have you gone through accelerators and are you funded by VC’s? Melanson: I started working on the project about a year-and-a-half, two years ago, it was really an idea out of college. So after a lot of learning, we raised an angel round really quickly, and a couple of months later we got accepted to 500 Startups. From there we raised a pre seed round and we’ve been iterating on the product, trying to really find our positioning, and find the people that have the problem, and figure out what’s the best version of the problem that we can solve. How did getting accepted into 500 Startups shape Bliinx? Melanson: It’s a game changer. I don’t think we would have been here today if it wasn’t for 500 Startups. It was an amazing experience, you’re surrounded by so many smart people, and have such an expertise that you don’t normally have access to. You get what you take out of it, so I pushed it to the max, every time there was office hours, I would take it, every time there was an investor meeting open, I would take it. I would really, really push and it got us to great results, and it’s through 500 Startups that I’ve met our lead investor. Can you tell us about your tech stack? Espinoza: I want to keep it simple, this is the main rule of the company. We've built our system with microservices, use NodeJS and NoSQL for our back-end and have built a robust back-end infrastructure to build our proprietary engines for data orchestration. The rest of our platform is built on typescript and we use MongoDB to manage our databases. How did you decide to go with MongoDB? Espinoza: My first startup, we used MongoDB, and had a great experience. We use MongoDB, and I really love it. We don’t have to care about backups, or anything to do with the infrastructure. It’s plug and play, so what’s amazing for us is I come from the background where you have to build everything. So going with the NoSQL database is fantastic because you don’t have to maintain all the schema, which can be really messy. Like I said, we try to keep it simple. What excites you now about working with Bliinx? Melanson: With the rise of companies that are product-led or marketing-led, and the fact that people are working remotely, sales is changing, and I think it’s for the better. Tools on the market need to adjust, yes people want to try it out before they buy it, but they don’t want to go through a sales rep, they still want to meaningfully connect with people in sales. And sales reps are a big part of that journey, it’s just that you don’t reach out cold to sell, you have them try it, and then you’re more of a consultant, or the hand holder through that way. So it excites me about figuring out a way for people to build meaningful connections in business, with us being so remote. Espinoza: Everything that we build in here is new for me, and that’s what excites me. Working with a lot of data coming from everywhere, and building something valuable for you, let’s do something valuable with a lot of data. This is the magic box that we build in our building, this is a great opportunity. What advice would you give to someone starting up their own company? Melanson: 99% of people just don’t start, so my main advice is to just start. That’s really what the hurdle is, that’s the toughest part, people think it’s recruiting a technical co-founder, or raising money is the toughest part, but it’s starting. You can go so far validating your idea, without having a single line of code. Espinoza: Don’t start with titles. In the beginning, you’re just people with a project. The other is to go talk to people who are doing the same thing. Finding other people to bounce ideas off of, just to validate ideas, that is something that has helped me a lot. Interested in learning more about MongoDB for Startups? Learn more about us here .

January 26, 2022