The CrowdProcess Blog

The following post is the 4th of a series of five posts called «Our Five Ws: Why, Where, When, What and Who». We’ve already kind of told you what we do. Kind of. But let’s go deeper on the matter: What is it that we do?

We make 43 hours of computing in 7 minutes (under far from optimal circumstances) by using a small amount of processing power of website visitors. We will also pay websites better than ads (eventually).

CrowdProcess is a distributed computing platform that runs on web-browsers. Everyone’s web-browsers. Your web-browser (unless you’re one of those people that is making the internet slow by not updating your browser to the latest version). 

Everytime you’re browsing one of our partner websites you’re supplying the CrowdProcess platform with computing power. There’s a tiny bit of code, a simple HTML <iframe> or <script>, that loads a CrowdProcess Web Worker on your browser while you’re browsing the website (i.e. unl.pt, wave.cat or this blog! - you can press F12 and search for “crowdprocess.com” to check the code).

A Web Worker is an HTML5 API that allows us to run a javascript script in the background independently of other user-interface scripts that may also be executed from the same page. It was made to do computing tasks on a browser without disrupting the user experience.

After the creation of the Web Worker in the browser, it then sends a message saying “Hey, you! CrowdProcess Servers! I’m over here! Send me something to process!”. Our platform then sends whatever’s running at the moment to the Web Worker. The Web Worker sends the results back to the platform and moves on to the next process until the viewer gets tired of the cat pictures and leaves the website.

We can then use that processing power to solve all kind of problems: genome sequencing, wind tunnel simulations, traffic flow prediction, cancer terapy research, alternative energy sources prospection, weather forecast …basically all the big computationally-heavy problems.

And this is all very nice and beatiful but have we mentioned that we will pay websites better than ads? Imagine that running CrowdProcess is like running an ad. An ad that no one can see but always sells the product it advertises. And it doesn’t depend on the time a viewer needs to see the ad. A single Web Worker can run multiple tasks while you enjoy those cat pictures.

The following post is the 3rd of a series of five posts called «Our Five Ws: Why, Where, When, What and Who». This is the story of a faster supercomputing platform. And in order to tell you how “fast” fast goes we must tell you when “fast” started. So… When?

João Jerónimo (JJ), now the CTO of CrowdProcess, started to tinker with javascript, web workers, node.js and whatnot, trying to prove that it was possible to build a distributed computing platform powered by browsers about 2 or 3 years ago, in 2010.

Back then node.js was something really new (version 0.2.6). “Server-side javascript” even seemed like something a bit stupid (still does to some folks). It’s also the perfect language to build a platform where the barrier between “client-side” and “server-side” becomes a bit fuzzy. CrowdProcess is powered by browsers that are visiting websites. Our platform is based on everyone’s typical client-side thingy.

In early November of 2012 the team gets into Startup Lisboa, a portuguese incubator, and in the same month we won an invite to the London-based Seedcamp incubator, during an event in Lisbon, to join their ranks.

A few months later the team grows. We are now at 8 awesome people. (More on the “who is who” of CrowdProcess in the next posts on this blog - you can follow @CrowdProcess on twitter if you want to know who we are right now.)

To tell you how fast is “fast” we need to tell you something about our platform’s performance: as of this morning we had 596 browsers connected to our platform. The average browser has 0.59 GFLOPS (that’s 590 million floating point operations per second in each browser).

Using the platform at full capacity he have 127 GFLOPS.

That’s an average speedup of 223 times. That’s parallel processing 223 times faster than your laptop.

If your laptop did a heavy computational task [i.e. running a forest fire simulation ;) ] it would take (roughly) 37 minutes. Our platform does that in 10 seconds.

And that’s what we do now. Our platform is still growing and this is only the beginning…

The following post is the second of a series of five posts called «Our Five Ws: Why, Where, When, What and Who». This is the story of a distributed computing startup. And in order to tell you the meaning of the word “distributed” we must answer a question… Where?

When we first started to think about setting up a distributed computing service that was powered by the browsers of website visitors (that’s what we do!) we contacted a few friends that had websites with a fair amount of visits to start developing the thing. We knew that Portugal was a great testing ground to do this because our average internet connection speed is quite good (even by european and US standards). The proliferation of fairly new devices bought, and web traffic generated, by the portuguese technophile population is also a plus.

Portugal also has other unique features: an entire generation of highly qualified young people with high expectations about the future and that will be totally underemployed (or unemployed, even) if they don’t risk doing their own thing. We have no problem in saying this because we are all members of that generation. And we love a good challenge. Also the ability to disentanglement (“desenrascanço”, pulling a MacGyver) and to “unfuck yourself” (“desamerda-te”) that we are so famous for gives us an advantage that no one else in the world has. ;)

That’s why we think this thing we’re trying to do could’ve only come from people like us in this very interesting moment that we are living. This doesn’t mean that we have to be in Portugal to do it. In fact we have founded CrowdProcess Inc. in the US because the tech startup ecosystem there is a perfect fit for us and also to be closer to our biggest clients. And, like other portuguese knew in the 15th and 16th centuries, limiting ourselves to a specific geographic market would be dumb. Especially when you don’t have to. As the saying goes in the startup world, incorporate where your clients are, keep your team where the talent is.

And we have a really funny and ironic story about the incorporation process to tell you… we were waiting for the final papers to finish the US incorporation process and we got them in our e-mail, during our Seedcamp US trip, on a visit to Foursquare HQ. So we asked someone there to print the papers, we signed them, scanned them and sent them back to our lawyers. What better place for a distributed startup than that? CrowdProcess totally checked-in @ Foursquare.  

So, we always thought of this as a global business. We currently have computing power suppliers from 6 countries and 2 continents. We have office space in Portugal, the UK and the US. The team can work from wherever it wants to or wherever it needs to. And, although we are still developing our product, our users can come from anywhere.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the people that helped us make this “distributed office space” culture possible: Startup Lisboa, Seedcamp in London, and nestGSV in the US.

If that seems weird to you… what do you think a distributed computing startup, that is powered by computing power from browsers across the globe and makes them act as one single entity, should be like?

This is the true meaning of “distributed”. Everywhere.
And that’s where we do it.

We don’t talk much about our computing power suppliers. Except wave.cat, which is from a friend of ours that we are huge fans of, we like to keep that information private and let our suppliers tell their viewers they’re providing computing power for CrowdProcess in their own terms. Especially while we are still testing what we can and can’t do with the platform’s architecture and raw parallel computing power.

We currently have something like 60 suppliers, with a huge difference in traffic volume in between them and with significant traffic disparities depending on the time of day.

We like that diversity. It allows us to test for differences in connection speed, timezones, etc. 

Our supplier base is mostly portuguese (in quantity) and we now have a few medium-sized websites from the UK, Brasil, USA, Czech Republic, Russia and Germany.

The web has no geography but it’s very interesting to see the face of excitement  about our idea from people of so different cultures.

The differences in nature of the supplier websites is just plain funny. We have personal blogs, fashion blogs, technology websites, desktop weather widgets and even a wedding planner website.

With the computing power coming from these sources we are currently able to have a distributed computing platform that runs, in average, 120 times faster than the laptop where this text is being written.

And this laptop is not very slow. ;)

Last week we had a “launch” party. It wasn’t exactly the introduction of a new feature or other kind of change in the product. We just wanted to celebrate all the good things that are happening to us and to make a warm-up party in Startup Lisboa and in Seedcamp in London.

What were we celebrating exactly?
- We joined Startup Lisboa!
- We joined Seedcamp!
- We have a ton of new websites supplying our platform!
- …and that means we have more processing power! (70x faster than the computer where this is being written. On a good day.)

- João Menano and Tiago dos Santos Carlos are now working on CrowdProcess in fulltime.
- Pedro Fonseca and João Jerónimo are on a US trip along with the rest of Seedcamp.
- And, last but not least, we now have Flavio Sousa and Igor Soarez in our awesome, and now even awesomer, development team! Yeah! \o/

Thank you for coming to our party and thanks everyone else for the support!

And now for some really embarassing pictures…
(don’t ask us about Kate Upton, please.)

(Sorry to all the awesome english-speaking folks who follow our blog but this post is going to be in portuguese. You can ask us what this is all about if you don’t get it.)

Há um rumor a correr por aí…

(…façamos uma pequena pausa para imaginar um rumor a correr…)

…e nós gostaríamos muito de o confirmar.

Gostaríamos de convidar-vos a todos para o evento de lançamento da versão beta da nossa plataforma!

Quando?  Sexta-Feira, 15 de Fevereiro, 18h (depois da euforia do Carnaval e da depressão - ou não - do dia dos Namorados).

Onde? Startup Lisboa, Rua da Prata nº 80, Lisboa, Portugal.

Porque é que têm que vir cá?

- Cerveja grátis. (oferta limitada ao stock existente)

- Estreia internacional do Epic Disco - um projecto do Laboratório da Espectacularidade Incrível da CrowdProcess.

- “Será um Startup ou um Pókemon?” - testa a tua cultura sobre o ecossistema de startups nacionais e séries de animação japonesa!

- Uma demonstração da plataforma de computação distribuída mais incrível de sempre! 

…e mais! (se não chegar, claro)

Your mission today, should you choose to accept it:

1) Go to wave.cat.

2) If you feel like it, play some music.

3) If you don’t feel like it, don’t. 

4) Leave that tab open on your browser between 9:40 and 12:00 (GMT), today.

5) Share this instructions with your friends.

Why?

Because wave.cat is one of the amazing websites that is feeding CrowdProcess with computing power.

Today we’re going to make a live demo in an event that will occur in SeedCamp (London) and we need to have a lot of computing power between 9:40 and 12:00.

And by leaving that website open on your browser you are giving us the computing power we need to make our demo really awesome!

Thank you! You are amazing!

PS: If you take a print screen or some other kind of evidence that you were on wave.cat this morning and send it to hello@crowdprocess.com we will buy you a beer.

You probably have heard about it, or maybe not, but we won a few awards the other day in Arrisca C, an entrepreneurship competition in Portugal, organized by Coimbra’s University - one of the oldest and most pretige college campus in the world.

We couldn’t go to the awards ceremony ourselves because some of us were in London or somewhere in Germany and the ones that were in Lisbon had previously appointed meetings. So we tried to find a friend that could go there for us. And that’s where the funny part of this story begins.

Hélio Imaginário (“Imaginary Helium” it’s his name’s literal translation) is a longtime friend of ours. So we asked him to go there. Why? Because he could. And who better  to represent CrowdProcess than a guy that had a million YouTube video views in a week? We did the math and if that single video ran CrowdProcess that would probably amount to …a lot of computing power.

Anyway, we would like to thank Arrisca C’s organization and the award sponsors for the 3 awards (Fundação PT Award for Best Business Innovation Idea in Health and Information Technology, DC Ventures Award for Best Tech Project and Critical Software Award for Best Software and IT Project)
…and a special shout out to Hélio for representing us at the ceremony! Epic! 

 

The following post is the first of a series of five posts called «Our Five Ws: Why, Where, When, What and Who». This is the story of a startup with a purpose. And in order to have purpose we must start with… Why?

It starts with an idea. This thing in the back of your mind that you cannot stop thinking about. This quiet roar that you are always thinking of. This thought that emerges every time you are not thinking about anything in particular.

Then you tell it to someone. A friend. A colleague. And they start to build upon it. Taking your idea like it’s theirs and commencing a lot of sentences with “what if…”. By then you are already “that guy that had a really cool idea”.

You start building it. It looks good. It does good. Some of the “what if” people start helping. People with skills you’ve never even heard of or you didn’t think you needed until they showed you what they could do. By then it’s not just an idea. It’s a project.

One day you all realize this “cool project” would change a lot of things if it was big enough. You take it to the next level and start thinking about it as a business instead of just a project.

People start to take notice. All of a sudden it makes an impact. People start using it. They change the way they did things. They take your “cool thing” to add value to their own lives and the lives of others.

You added value. You made a positive change in the world.

This is the story of a startup. And this is why we do it.

A lot of hype is made about Silicon Valley. Legend has it that you can just walk up to people and start talking to them about startups. That bright young entrepreneurs who have never seen you before will go out of their way to help you. That almost anyone, even the guy behind the counter at Burger King, is just biding his time until his startup takes off, and he can start changing the world. Overused, romanticized cliches. Or so we thought. Turns out, actually, it is quite true. 

Firstly, what we found to be the Golden Rule in our short stay in Silicon Valley: Don’t pitch. This sounds anathema, but makes sense, when you consider that every single person in the room will probably believe (as you do) that their idea is the most exciting thing since the dawn of man. So common courtesy is to be extremely interested in what the other person is doing, and then, ONLY when asked, explain your own startup. Makes sense, come to think of it.    

The second fascinating thing we found is the local currency. The currency seems to be how useful you can be to someone else. If you can be useful, do so. If you have no idea what it’s in it for you, do so. You will then (in an pleasingly non-deterministic manner) be part of the ecosystem, which will give you the greatest return on your tiny investment of calling “that guy who might find this interesting” and handing over your phone for 5 minutes. 

Then there is the language. One would assume that web-based distributed supercomputing would be an intimidating starter, but (and by now this seems to be a recurring theme), this is something we should try mentioning next time we ask for a bagel and a ridiculously over-sized coffee. For many people it seems to be the answer to the nagging toothache they have been feeling for slightly too long. For others it is something that solves the problem of someone they have known for years. And for some others it is something “this guy should probably know about”. There is a lot to say about London, Boston, and New York. But one thing is abundantly clear. In Palo Alto, CrowdProcess feels at home. 

There are a number of reasons to believe this. Firstly, the spirit itself. CrowdProcess is based on the idea that everyone can contribute to solving massive problems, and that collaborative spirit seems core to Silicon Valley’s way of thinking. More pragmatically, there are a large number of startups who are potential clients. Additionally, a large number of content based startups who are potential providers. Investors’ reported thirst for B2D startups doesn’t hurt.  

So now, back in Europe, with a proper portuguese coffee in our cozy Lisbon downtown office, it is hard not to think longingly of the insanity and high paced life back in California. There is no coming back after being there, and it is abundantly clear that it is only a matter of time before at least one of us shall call Palo Alto home, and have CrowdProcess where it belongs. And, if we can figure out how to send coffee and Portuguese fish in the mail, get the best of both worlds.