[erlang-questions] We need a better marketing division :-)

[Michael Turner]

Torben: "... right now most Erlangers are busy trying to solve real world
problems in
order to make money so applying for this type of grants is not on the top of
the agenda."

And I'm reminded of the software company (name forgotten) who said he spent
a lot of time worrying about marketing until he figured out that his best
marketing move was always to keep making the product better.  When you've
got people characterizing you as "the best-kept secret" in a niche, your
marketing troubles are over -- everybody wants to know a best-kept secret,
and they *will* find out.

Torben again: "Right now Green IT - in particular Energy Management - seems
like an area
where Erlang would be a good tool and there are plenty of grants and public
funding floating around... just check various EU pages."

These do seem like good bets.  Erlang has some potential for making IT
greener simply because it can use a bunch of server hardware more
efficiently than the typical LAMP stack.  As for energy management, as power
use gets smarter, it starts to resemble telephony -- probably, within a
decade or so, many light switches in new buildings will contain low-power
sensors and smarts for detecting an approaching hand, so that they can send
a message to the intelligent grid like, "There's a 90% probability of
needing x more Watts about a half-second from now."  People don't realize
that instant-on electricity has systemic costs, but it does.

-michael turner

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Torben Hoffmann <torben.lehoff@REDACTED>wrote:

> <mail trail snipped>
>
> General observation on a fundamental difference between Scala and Erlang
> regarding the supporting organisations (as I see it, YMMV):
>
>   - Scala was born out of an academic environment where there is a strong
>   tradition for applying for grants to support research.
>   - Erlang was born in a private company trying to solve a problem they had
>   and was only later released as open source.
>
> And right now most Erlangers are busy trying to solve real world problems
> in
> order to make money so applying for this type of grants is not on the top
> of
> the agenda.
>
> I am - and would suggest to other to do the same - looking at areas where
> Erlang could be used to solve a fundamental problem in that domain and
> there
> are in fact a lot of grants and/or public funding hanging around.
>
> Right now Green IT - in particular Energy Management - seems like an area
> where Erlang would be a good tool and there are plenty of grants and public
> funding floating around... just check various EU pages.
>
> Cheers,
> Torben
> --
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/torbenhoffmann
>