Groovy Says It's As "Real Time" As It Gets -- Is It Real?
For a 12-person startup, San Mateo-based Groovy Corp. is causing a fair bit of controversy in Silicon Valley. The reason? Groovy claims to have developed the capacity to do what has eluded all others -- truly real-time data relay through its proprietary in-memory relational database management system, called the SQL Switch. Truly real-time? Aren't startups like Twitter doing that already? Actually, no, says Groovy’s CEO, Joe Ward. “If you go to Ticketmaster, do you see the tickets disappearing as they are sold? You don't know if you've won or lost an auction on eBay until you've refreshed your page. Even on Twitter, you are seconds behind real time,” he says, calling it a “computer science problem that no one has really been able to solve.”
