Erlang Solutions News Feed

14 May 2012: Supporting ComputerAid through Pedal Power to Brussels

Erlang Solutions' Steve Roberts will be embarking on a gruelling 3 day bike ride from London to Brussels to raise money for his chosen charity, ComputerAid International.

ComputerAid take unwanted computers, refurbish them and give them to African non profit organisations such as schools and hospitals. Their work doesnt just stop there. They ensure that the organisations know how use the technology they are being given so they can learn for example how to use technology to improve crop growing.

The endurance session starts at 7.15am on Friday 18th May reaching Calais late in the evening on day 1. Day 2 is another 7.15am start reaching the beautiful town on Bruges late in the afternoon. Sunday is a lay-in with a start time of 7.45, arriving Brussels finish line, late afternoon.

Eurostar London to Brussels: 1 hour 57 minutes

Pedal power to Brussels: 3 days

Click here to sponsor Steve!

10 May 2012: Erlang Embedded with Raspberry Pi Video Tutorials

Sweet things are better shared, so we are pleased to announce our series of video tutorials on Erlang Embedded with Raspberry Pi. With two videos already released, popularity is growing by the minute. Follow us on Twitter to get regular updates, give Omer suggestions and see what he will be coming up with next.

What exactly is Raspberry Pi and why should we pay attention to it? It is essentially a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV. The design is based on Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes a 700MHz ARM11 processor, VideoCore IV GPU and 256 megabytes of RAM. It is a pretty powerful platform as far as embedded systems go, and with strong demand for these boards it seems like the R-Pi Foundation was caught off-guard; suppliers are now quoting July delivery dates for new orders.

01 April 2012: The Erlang Factory SF Bay Area, an a-list sell out conference!

This year’s Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2012 had an A-list sell-out line-up of speakers which included Erlang Inventors Mike Williams and Robert Virding discussing software approaches used in the industry and the unique features of the Erlang VM and a Keynote talk from Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation.

What people were saying about the conference:

@hungryblank - Sad to leave #erlangfactory early, amazing people, great knowledge and ideas, lots of fun. Thanks to the awesome team that made it happen

@momo13 - Last talk for me at #erlangfactory was the entertaining and interesting tutorial by @FrancescoC Great conference, thanks to the organizers!

@igorclark - amazing #erlangfactory talk by Rick Reed about scaling #erlang VM & #freebsd to hit ~2.8m simultaneous @WhatsApp connections. mind: blown.

@philtoland - Lots of cool people here. Some great hallway conversations. #erlangfactory

Anyone interested in massively concurrent and scalable systems who wanted to be ready to tackle the multi-core revolution and conquer the cloud knew that the Erlang Factory SF Bay Area was THE conference to be at in 2012. Companies that presented included AOL, The Boston Globe, Ericsson, HP, Nokia, GitHub, Heroku, OpsCode, Basho, CouchBase and WhatsApp which just goes to show how much the use of Erlang is growing year after year.

Growing to a 4 tracks per day Conference it would appear there is no stopping the growth of Erlang and the new ways it is being used as tracks included DevOps, Erlang in the Cloud and Erlang in Business.

For those wanting to gain more knowledge or just swot up attended 3 days of expert training prior to the conference where one of the courses was taught by Robert Virding, a co-inventor of Erlang. If 3 days of training and 3 days of exciting talks weren’t enough, people flocked to the Community Day which featured tutorials, a Hackathon, an Unconference and other community-related activities.

29 March 2012: Marcus Taylor Appointed as CEO for Feuerlabs

Erlang Solutions Limited, the world’s largest specialist Erlang services and support company, today announced that Marcus Taylor has been appointed Chief Executive Officer of Feuerlabs Inc. and will be leaving Erlang Solutions at the end of March 2012 after over seven years, during which time the company enjoyed rapid growth and, in 2011, completed the sale of a majority interest to Trifork A/S.

Feuerlabs was founded in 2011 to address the need for highly scalable embedded systems as the demand for more intelligent energy, transport and utility systems grows. Feuerlabs will focus on developing a product called Exosense that covers the entire value chain from sensor to backend server as a single system. The design of Exosense will enable seamless integration with customer supplied backend systems and provide configuration management with software distribution out of the box. Since its founding Feuerlabs has sold its system to a number of companies that (further details of which will be announced later in 2012). Erlang Solutions holds a significant minority stake in Feuerlabs.

For more information, please see the full press release.

20 March 2012: The Erlang User Conference returns 28 - 30 May 2012

Dates for Your Diary

The Erlang User Conference is returning again but this year, in the Swedish sunshine. The 2012 Erlang User Conference will take place 28-30 May 2012 with two days of fantastic talks and a day of enlightening tutorials.

Come along and rub shoulders with all 3 of the Erlang Inventors, Robert Virding, Joe Armstrong and Mike Williams as well as other great names.

With a brand new venue last year the conference was the most successful to date. We will be returning once again to the exciting, spacious building of the Münchenbryggeriet.

The Erlang User Conference brings together the best minds and names in Erlang programming from language inventors, implementers and maintainers to open-source committers, community leaders and Erlang authors.

Everyone who is anyone will be at the Erlang User Conference 2012!

20 February 2012: Roberto Aloi and Francesca Gangemi at this year's Codemotion!

Codemotion is in it's sixth year and is an event for the community, created by the community. Year after year the event has grown and evolved to become what it is today, a conference that is no longer just about Java, it is now also about other types of languages and technologies. Codemotion 2012 brings with it two big changes: a two-day event and concurrent events in Rome and Madrid.

Roberto and Francesca will give a talk "Why you should build your next application in Erlang".
Abstract: Social networks, cloud computing, messaging systems and multi-player gaming platforms, to mention but a few, share requirements such as distribution transparency, massive concurrency, scalability, hot-code upgrades and fault-tolerance. These are all peculiarities natively provided by Erlang/OTP. In this talk we will explain how Erlang/OTP can help you building applications for the next decade - Maya permitting -. A hands-on tutorial about Distributed Erlang will conclude the session.

For more information on the conference, check out their website.

27 January 2012: Erlang Solutions embarks on an Erlang Embedded KTP

Erlang Solutions is proud to announce that Erlang Solutions and the University of Kent has embarked on another KTP project together. Previously Erlang Solutions has successfully been involved in three KTP projects with the University of Kent with whom a strong partnership has been formed.

The aim of this project is to bring the benefits of concurrent systems development using Erlang to the field of embedded systems; through investigation, analysis, software development and evaluation.

A major aim of the project is to create a version of ESL’s development tools for designing and developing ARM based embedded systems, which will support a variety of hardware devices and be readily accessible for industrial users.

To find out more on the Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme click here.

19 December 2011: Giving to Kiva this Christmas!

Erlang Solutions would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We have again decided that instead of sending Christmas cards, we would donate the money to a worthwhile cause, after the success of last year we will be continuing with our projects at Kiva.

Kiva's mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining micro-finance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending. Lenders can choose which project they would like to donate to and can then track the progress of this project.

Over the next year we will track our projects and keep you all up to date with how they are going. You can find out more about Kiva and how you to can become a lender on their website.

Erlang Solutions wishes you happy holidays, a great rest, and we sincerely hope your software doesn't crash on you while you're gone (Well, if it is Erlang, it shouldn't)!! While we truly believe in the ideals of isolated processes under strict supervision, we nevertheless wish you holidays full of sharing and joy.

19 December 2011: Erlang Solutions launches Distro package for Erlang release R15B!

Today Erlang Solutions has launched a Distro package for the latest Erlang release R15B.

The Distro packages is designed to save you time by having all the sources you need already compiled into one package. The Erlang Solutions Distro is available for a wide range of operating systems and contains Erlang OTP applications, sources and documentation.

You can download the latest Distro here.

09 November 2011: Release Project Launch - Scaling Erlang to run on machines with hundreds of thousands of cores

While the Erlang User Conference might have been the big event last week, our Stockholm office hosted the kickoff of the Release project. This is a EU funded project whose aim is to scale Erlang to run on machines with hundreds of thousands of cores. The focus will be on the Erlang VM, tool sets and middle-ware needed to write software on these architectures. Erlang Solution's responsibility will include a scalable visualization infrastructure, the middle-ware needed for systems to scale up and down.

We are fortunate to be working with some of the best researchers in the field. The project is coordinated by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. They will also be looking at high level programming patterns. Simon Thompson is leading the team from the University of Kent in Canterbury. They are looking at the tool set needed to manage such systems. The OTP team at Ericsson will be working together with Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Athens) & Uppsala University and to extend the Erlang VM allowing it to run on such architectures. Finally, we have EDF who will be managing one of the case studies based on their Sim-Diasca simulation framework. They have access to a Blue Gene computer we will be porting Erlang to.

You can read more about the project on the official website.