When Facebook launched its Open Graph protocol back 2011, they called it “frictionless sharing”. Those who knew better said “secret surveillance” instead! Online privacy is a topic for another day but the way things stand currently, you need to have your social app leverage these graph technologies.
A simple primer on development – an app is made up of code, code needs data to do its work and data resides on databases. The most common database, a relational database, cannot perform “Big Data” analysis in real-time or at a large scale. Graph databases are at the core of social networks and search engines as they are highly suited for such complex data crunching but most businesses are not staffed to handle graph integration with their existing data.
Graph Story is a Graph Database as a Service (GDaaS) provider and will handle the operational and maintenance side of the graph database so you can focus on making your app awesome!
About the Founders
Greg Jordan, founder and CEO, has been working with graph databases for over four years and is the author of Practical Neo4j (it is the most popular open source graph database and the one used by Graph Story).
Jeremy Kendall is the CTO and creator of several open-source PHP libraries that he developed over 10 years of being active in the field.
Jason Wood is VP of Professional Support Services and has a decade worth of experience in business intelligence and data analytics.
About the Startup
Developers are a busy bunch. They don’t have the time to deal with the learning curve and ongoing maintenance involved with new technologies. But more importantly, they don’t want to be distracted from working on the core features of the app and be asked to do peripheral, boilerplate and operational fine-tuning.
Graph Story offers to take care of the DevOps and provides custom APIs to build graph-backed web and mobile apps that can scale on demand and with minimal setup.
“Our main competitor is the status quo”, says Greg since relational databases are what most businesses and their developers have known and been using for decades. “We have to demonstrate that our service compliments existing relational databases and, where appropriate, can even be an alternative.”
About their Plans
Graph Story recently offered an add-on for the popular cloud hosting platform Heroku which traditionally uses PostgreSQL database. They plan to integrate with other key platforms like Engine Yard in the near future.
“Developers are the key influencers of technology decisions and the direct users of our service”, says Greg on the target audience of Graph Story. “But from a broader perspective, anyone can benefit from graph technology. Retailers can benefit by adding more intelligent recommendation systems to suggest products. Healthcare organizations can better understand the relationships of how their treatment programs improve patient health. IT organizations can get a better handle on resource management and have a 360 view of data operations.”
The service is offered on a monthly subscription basis and prices vary depending on the needs of the application. You can sign up for a free developer account and try out Graph Story. Visit: http://www.graphstory.com/