Korea’s venture space has been filled with various apps and services since the second explosion of startup companies in recent years. We’ve seen every type of social, music, messaging and imaging app possible, so it’s always nice when a company that is doing something a little different comes along. NFLabs is a startup that is focused on big data, and the company recently graduated from Silicon Valley-inspired accelerator program SparkLabs as it gears up to target the overseas markets.
The company was founded by Sejun Ra and Moon Soo Lee in 2011 in response to the difficulty that most people have in dealing with the extremely high volumes of data in today’s world. The pair both had experience in the field, Ra having worked over 10 years at Akamai Technologies and Lee having had experience in dealing with petabyte level data storage and management.
“The more we spoke, the more we realized the need for a simpler and easier way to take data from source to insight. So our vision was simple. Simplify big data so any one in any company can collect, store, explore, and analyze data fast.”
NFLabs’ flagship service goes by the name ‘Peloton’ and it is through this tool that the company hopes to make anyone an “expert” on big data. For example, marketers will be able to analyze how their SNS initiative is doing without having to hire developers, DB admins, data analysts or buy into any extra infrastructure. With Peloton, the marketer can easily collect and store data in either their own data center, or in the cloud, and analyze the collected data immediately.
One of the key features of Peloton is a SQL-based analytics technology that enables users to query data in real-time. This allows an interactive approach to data analysis in Hadoop that was not possible before. This technology is integrated with a visualization, and pluggable algorithm feature set enabling a full, end-to-end analytical platform for everyone from non-engineers to hard core data scientists.
Simply put, Peloton simplifies the overall data life cycle so taking data from source to insight is faster and easier than ever. Ra says that these days there is a major push to create more data scientists as there is currently a shortage.
“I don’t disagree that we need more data scientists, but instead of building infrastructure, educational programs, and pouring billions to educate and graduate more data scientists, I think we simply need to create tools that will enable everyone to become data scientists. Not in years through some graduate program, but now.”
NFLabs is now looking to overseas markets including the US and Europe, and has already had contact with enterprises in the US. Despite the constant change in technologies in such a young industry, Ra says that they are excited to be “part of the tsunami that is big data” and wants to contribute to how big data shapes the world, both now and in the future.
“The big data revolution is still an early one. And as with any relatively new technology, there will be cycles of new business models and market ‘solutions’. So we’re also evolving, and we’ll continue to have a flexible mind set to evolve our product offering to meet our client’s needs.”
NFLabs currently offers a free personal edition for download via its website and an enterprise edition is also available for commercial use. Find out more about NFLabs and Peloton through the company’s website or follow them on Twitter.
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