Revealed: A few secrets about Hyperpublic
I’m always amazed when people who I meet for the first time come up to me and say “I really love Hyperpublic, it’s awesome.” I think to myself, “gee, that’s weird. Unless this person is a developer, I can’t imagine what they love about us.” I ask for a layer of detail and they pretend to appreciate the display application that we’ve pushed at Hyperpublic.com. I say “thanks very much, but there really isn’t a lot to do there, Hyperpublic,com is just meant to show engineers and developers what types of data we’re working with and making available through the HP API.” They sort of smile awkwardly, and that’s pretty much that.
In light of those types of interactions, I thought I’d uncover a little detail about what we’ve been up to at HP. Really, I’d prefer to stay under the radar, given the massive companies triangulating around our space, but recruiting an A+ team has become our number one priority and I want the top engineers in NYC and beyond to understand what we’re focused on and how interesting it is to be a part of the effort under way at HP.
Hyperpublic.com represents about 2% of our attention and bandwidth at HP, with the other 98% focused on the crawling, ingestion, normalization, organization, dissemination and surfacing of geocoded data. We see a world where consumers are starting to believe that they can navigate the physical world with the same ease and insight that they navigate the web. In order for that belief to become a reality, someone needs to build and organize an underlying geodata set that is incrementally specific to what is available within the tools consumers are most commonly using to effect local discovery on mobile devices today. At HP, we are building the infrastructure that will allow hundreds of thousands of location based and location aware applications to satisfy their users’ demands for more acute and deliberate movement through physical space. We are not a recommendation engine, we are not a reviews product, we are not a social network, we are a data platform. There is a killer application for the dataset we are working with, we have a pretty good sense of what it is, and if you like building Google scale consumer utilities, we are hiring PM/Mobile Dev/Back End Devs for our Apps team, but to date, our IP and accomplishments are squarely in the realm of “big data.”
The good news is, we’ve captured and organized hundreds of millions of local objects and metadata points and our asset is scaling very fast. The bad (and good if you are a masochist) news is there is effectively an infinite amount of data that exists in the physical world (hard to index infinity). If you are excited about working with large data sets, mashing up disparate data sources linked by a common lat/lon in order to deduce interesting signal and product, or generally excited about working with a team of deeply thoughtful engineers in New York City, we’d love to share some more secrets with you. Email: Jordan.cooper@gmail.com. I don’t care if you are looking for a job, or happy at your job, or whatever. Emailing me does not = applying for a job, it just means you want to understand WTF I’m talking about. For the right people, our effort will consume you. Oh, and we pay absurdly well, full healthcare, real equity, flexible schedule, wonderful people, yada yada yada.
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Ahh, I couldn’t figure out what you guys were up to from the website. At least this tells me that it’s not about the website. May send a guy interested in big data your way. He is more of a business/finance guy, but loves crunching large data sets.
Phil Michaelson
July 18, 2011
Phil M = the man. thanks pal
jordancooper
July 18, 2011