Cloudspace

Everyone wants things to look good. Apple taught the tech industry about the value of design, and that you can charge a substantial premium for it. There are even studies that suggest that products can be made more usable simply by looking better, regardless of the actual ease-of-use, since people will spend more time exploring something that looks good.

The thing with analytics platforms is that they don’t fit into this category. No one uses analytics tools recreationally — they exist to solve a problem. And when you need to solve a problem, you care less about what the solution looks like as long as it works.

Yesterday was Tech Talk Thursday and our stupid-talented Graphic Designer, Keegan Berry, brought some intense HTML5 knowledge. He covered a pretty wide-range of HTML5 topics, including some sweet background info about W3C and WHATWG that illuminated how HTML5 developed to it’s current point, but focused mostly on the current state of HTML5 and some fun new semantic developments.

Want a peek at Keegan’s baller-ass training? We’ve compiled a handy TL;DR list for your knowledge hungry brains.

• There is a new Doctype! Much like fetch, XHTML 2 will never happen and it’s time to move on from XHTML’s Doctype.

To coincide with Cloudspace’s release of Rubberband Flamethrower, a benchmarking tool for ElasticSearch, here’s some more helpful info if you’re planning on building search into your app.

ElasticSearch is in the Lucene family, the same as Solr, but the two have different uses. If you’re working on a small app that needs to search less than a million documents and the database isn’t updated more than once every ~15 minutes, Solr is the choice, and a lot of projects fit inside these requirements.

That’s not to suggest that Solr is a junior option. Solr is really fast – faster than ElasticSearch. Solr is used in enterprise search. It’s a definite contender.

Congratulations to our friends over at Mashery: Scott Rafer, Kirsten Spoljaric, Oren Michels, and all the rest of the team. They’re the world’s best API management company, with clients like Coca Cola, Best Buy, and Intel. Their customers love them so much that this week, Intel actually decided to purchase the whole company! We’ve been friends with them ever since 2006 when they started operating, and this acquisition is even more confirmation of how great they are!

Both Mashery and Intel are understandably being quiet about the purchase price, but ReadWrite and TechCrunch are stating it’s in the range of $180 million! Regardless of the exact amount, our friends at Mashery are sure to be dancing in the streets.