Silicon Milkroundabout, 30.10.2010

Thank you

Many, many thanks to Ian, Pete, Anaïs and their SongKick team for Sunday’s Silicon Milkroundabout. A stupendous event, much enjoyed.

And thank you to everyone who came to banter with us at the spider.io gazebo. In particular, a white hat tip to some of the visiting challenge hackers: @tackers, @PeteSpider, @chrisdarby89, @alol and @spidery_tweet.

We’re looking forward to having many of you visit us at Spider Towers. As mentioned, we’ve put some details up here.

Our one-minute pitch on the day

For those who didn’t get to hear our one-minute pitch, this is what we had to say on the day:

At spider.io, we look to catch bad people doing very bad things.

We catch botnets, browser emulators, clickjackers, traffic launderers, bots that probe for weakness, bots that learn. At spider.io, our business is to distinguish legitimate human website visitors from nefarious automated traffic.

How do we do it?

It’s a hard engineering problem. It would be a hard problem at toy levels of traffic. We need reverse Turing tests. We need to analyse from the application layer to below the TCP layer. We need clever stateful classifiers, that classify information based on previously received information. And if this isn’t hard enough, imagine doing this across four times the number of messages each day than the number of tweets received by Twitter each day. This is where we’ll be before the year is out. And for us this is just the beginning.

If you’d like to work at the very edge of what is technically possible, come say, “Hi,” at the spider.io gazebo.

Arts and crafts in a gazebo… in a brewery

We had a lot of fun preparing for the day. Simon, who has a rather admirable building qualification from Cambridge, showed off his skills and built us some suitably excellent whiteboard stands. Ben, not to be outdone by the Cantabrigian, whipped up a rather fabulous stencil. And how best to show off their creations? Stick them in an all-weather gazebo, of course, in the Truman Brewery.