Brett Jones said that walking the halls of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and seeing the history, the signatures on the walls, and the companies that have been through there was an incredible experience.
Jones and members from Calgary-based BigGeo were part of a contingent of three companies chosen through a global startup challenge sponsored by data giant Snowflake and the NYSE to help ring the closing bell at the historic stock exchange on Oct. 14.
“Just to be a part of that journey was really, really unique and really cool,” said Jones, president of BigGeo.
“It kind of gives you that spark of, we’ll be back here in a few years and do it ourselves and make it for real.”
They were awarded the honour after going through a rigorous process that involved 940 companies from 104 countries. After continuing on when it was whittled down to 700, then 400, then 100, Jones said. Finally, after reaching the top ten, then the top three, they presented down in San Francisco, where they were one of the runners-up, Jones said.
“It was incredible for our personal story, and the types of contacts and customers and relationships that come out of that,” said Jones.
“For the technology out of Calgary to be included in that elite group is awesome for Calgary. It’s awesome for Calgary tech and we’re definitely proud to be waving that flag for our city and our province.”
The three finalists got a series of awards, including being featured on certain marketing channels, being able to present and the Snowflake Summit, meet with the CEO of Snowflake, mentorship from an NYSE-listed biz leader, a potential $250K investment and, of course, the chance to ring the NYSE bell.
Who is BigGeo?
All that data that gets processed… yes, ALL that data from phones, computers, businesses robotics and even autonomous vehicles… it takes a great deal of resources and energy to do.
BigGeo makes it easier and more efficient through proprietary technology developed at the University of Calgary by Dr. Faramarz Samavati, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. It’s work that’s attracted some of the top global mathematicians, geospatial experts and GIS professionals for the past 15 years.
Dr. Samavati is also a lead scientist at BigGeo. When the Snowflake finalists were first announced and BigGeo faces were posted to a billboard in New York’s Times Square, Samavati said it was unexpected.
“It was surprising, I didn’t expect it,” he told UCalgary media relations, in a blog posted to their news site back in June.
Dr. Samavati’s tech has been in the works for more than a decade, and it efficiently indexes data queries to help manage massive amounts of geospatial data. Geospatial data is the information that’s used to describe the features, objects, and events that happen on earth, pinpointed to their location.
“It’s historically been very difficult and very expensive to process and manage at scale, and this global architecture that Dr. Faramarz and his team architected over that decade and a half has now been proven to be a world-class solution to be able to handle that,” said Jones.
It’s only been the past 30 months that they’ve begun to commercialize the use of this technology. Now, Snowflake is using the BigGeo technology to index its geospatial data.
Jones said, however, that the big win is in the data centre electricity reduction. They’ve shown that BigGeo’s system can reduce electricity consumption by up to 90 per cent for geospatial workloads.
“Not only are we the fastest in distributing data at speed and scale for all industries, but we’ve also proven that because we’re so fast in being able to serve that data, we can actually reduce the energy impact on the data center to be able to serve that data,” he said.
Jones said 80 per cent of the world’s data has geospatial attributes, meaning the sky’s the limit for the application of their technology. That’s the goal, too. They want their architecture to process data for companies of all sizes.
“I want to know where my data is, where my assets are, where my packages are going, last-mile delivery drone passing, everything is geospatial,” Jones said.
“If you can be the most advanced architecture to serve that data at speed while reducing the impact on the electrical grid by reducing the consumption by the data center for managing that data, you win.”
